“There are two answers to that question, child. The first is that, no matter how angry the Duke is with his son -— and believe me, the Duke is extremely angry — he could never stand to send his only child to the scaffold. The deaths of Mary Warwick and her son Freddie would be a hanging matter, and no father could ever hang his child.”
Charity was a little surprised at these words — surprised, in particular, by the feeling with which they were spoken. It was the closest thing she had ever seen to her father expressing forceful paternal affection.
“The second, more concrete reason is that there is very little evidence in the matter,” the Reverend said, polishing his spectacles with the aid of his handkerchief. “Little evidence to prove Mr. Harding’s guilt, but little to prove his innocence. It could not be resolved in a court of law, not to anyone’s satisfaction. It is therefore not a question of the law, but of reputation.”
“Then why should the Duke be so convinced of Mr. Harding’s guilt?” Charity cried, aghast.
“The Duke has his reasons,” the Reverend replied evasively.
“They must be good reasons, indeed, if they are to cause him to doubt the good character of his own son.”
“There was an eyewitness to the event,” the Reverend said simply. “A servant, I believe, or someone involved in the household. I cannot recall who it was, but I know only that they were somebody the Duke trusted implicitly.”
“Trusted more than his own son?”
“I suppose that must have been the case, yes.”
“But why? Why should Mr. Harding do such a thing?”
Charity’s mind searched for any reason that could possibly excuse the thing for which Mr. Harding was accused and found none. If the man was indeed a killer — of a woman and a child, no less — then he was the most black-hearted man on God’s earth, and banishment and disinheritance were the least that he deserved.
“I can only assume that he was driven by some inexplicable passion,” Reverend Miller said quietly. “But what that passion could have been, I know not.”
Charity thought of Mr. Harding’s elegant brow. She could not imagine it contorted in violence, though it was conceivable to her that Mr. Harding might have a temper. She thought he seemed like the sort of man who might be moved to anger if his sense of justice was being violated.
But she could not, for the life of her, imagine how such rage could be provoked by a woman and child.
It simply made no sense to her. If there had been an eyewitness to the crime whose tale had been convincing enough to persuade the Duke himself, then why was it that Mrs. Warwick had seemed so assured of Mr. Harding’s innocence?
She could only assume that Mrs. Warwick was operating on instinct, just as she was herself, in implicitly believing Mr. Harding’s side of the story. It seemed foolish to value instinct over the evidence of what appeared, on the surface, to be cold hard facts.
Yet still, she did not know the full story.
Charity went away from her father’s study, desperately searching for some sense that might be extracted from the whole matter, and finding none.
There is a piece of the puzzle that I am missing, she thought to herself, going out of the door and crossing the garden to look up at the grove where she had walked that morning.
All her life, Charity had gazed at the big house on the hill where the Duke and his son lived and thought to herself how remarkable it was that such great and fine people lived so very close, yet their lives were so different.
In the little village, there was just no space for secrets. Everybody knew the business of everybody else and there was no space or silence for rage or passionate motives to brew.
Yet, it seemed that in the house on the hill, everything was different. In that strange, great house, there was enough space and enough wealth for all sorts of peculiar anger and cruelty to come to life.
But still, Charity could not reconcile all this with the young man that she had spoken to that very morning, the young man who looked her in the eye and made her feel as though she mattered. The young man whose own eyes seemed like the window into a different world.
Chapter 10
Adam would have very much liked to linger in the grove all day, being distracted from his troubles by pleasant daydreams about Miss Miller’s sweet countenance.
However, there was much to attend to. Given that his father was indisposed, there were a great many matters of the estate that still needed to be attended to.
The Duke might have been intending to disinherit Adam from the Dukedom, but that did not change the fact that Adam was his only son and his only living kin. As such, Adam had legal duties toward his father that could not be discharged.
Therefore, Adam was forced to take a few breaths to steel himself from what he knew would be a taxing few hours, before sitting down with his father’s solicitor in the library to go over a large number of ledgers, contracts, and legal documents.
Mr. Barrow, the Duke’s solicitor, was a tall and thin man, who had always reminded Adam of a dead tree, with wooden-looking features and face that seemed organic and yet devoid of all life.
They talked for over an hour about small matters to do with the estate. Adam was disturbed to realize that his father had let a large number of matters fall into inattention and disrepair in the year that he had been gone.
He did not know whether the lapse was the result of grief, loneliness, or simply the fact of his father’s advancing age. Whatever it was, it distressed him to see that a previously vigorous man had grown so feeble so quickly.
The sun was beginning to set over Lawley Park, and Adam was hoping that the interview with Mr. Barrow might be over at long last when the attorney said something that caused Adam to jolt into full attention.
“And what would you have me do about the lease on the cottage, sir?” the attorney asked, in the same lugubrious tone in which he said everything.
“The lease on the cottage?” Adam repeated, frowning. “To which cottage are you referring?”
“The cottage on Farmer Roberts’ land, sir,” the attorney said, pointing at a figure in one of the columns in the book as if that explained everything. “The cottage has been standing empty for a year, sir, and if it is to be profitable, then it really ought to be let out again. I am certain that a suitable tenant could be found.”
“Why is it empty?” Adam asked. Though he was not a natural businessman, he had always been dutiful in ensuring that he was up to date with the matters of the estate, and he knew enough about his father’s way of doing things to know that this was an anomaly.
“I do not know, sir,” the lawyer said, his face a mask of impassiveness.
Adam frowned to himself. Though his father had never been the shrewdest of landowners, he had always employed the very best men to take care of his affairs. If a perfectly good cottage was standing empty and had been so for the last year, then there must have been something amiss.
He made a mental note to investigate the matter further and decided that he would ride out to the cottage by himself later in the week. Perhaps there would be something there that would explain why there was currently no tenant without having to trouble his father on the matter.
“Thank you, Barrow,” he said, knowing that he would not be able to concentrate any further. “I believe that we have done enough for today.”
“Indeed, sir.” Barrow nodded vigorously. “Perhaps we can return to these affairs tomorrow.”
The suggestion did not thrill Adam, but nonetheless, he nodded.
After leaving Barrow, he set out for another walk.
He seemed to find himself walking these days endlessly. It was the only way that he felt able to let out his energy; he could not sit still long enough to read without being plagued with thoughts of his father and the rift between them. Nor could he play the piano without being struck by the memory of Mary Warwick sitting at the instrument and showing him where to place his hands on the keys.
Setting of
f across the park, he briefly entertained the idea of calling at the vicarage, but quickly thought better of it. The Reverend Miller had met with him briefly as a favor, but he knew that his reputation was far too disgraced to be seen often calling at the home of respectable people.
Besides, he could not imagine that sitting with Miss Miller in her father’s parlor, nodding at one another politely over cups of tea, would have anything near the same heady effect as their morning meeting in the grove.
He knew, and yet he longed to see her face, just to catch a glimpse of her, just for an instant.
He did not trust himself to stay away from the vicarage if he walked in the direction of the village, and so he changed course and set off toward the lake.
The lake of Lawley Hall had been one of his favorite spots while he grew up. It was a large, serene lake, surrounded by trees and had always created the sense of total solitude. Adam had always found that solitude comforting, until now.
As the lake grew nearer, Adam was reminded of that dreadful day. The sight of the two bodies laid out on the side of the water — one adult-sized and the other very small.
He stood for a while, staring at the spot where the corpses of Mary Warwick and her child had lain. Before his eyes, their forms seemed to reappear, their eyes opening and their faces turning toward Adam in supplication.
What happened to us? Why is it that we are dead?
“I do not know,” Adam said aloud, but those two marble-white, innocent faces would not disappear from his mind’s eye. Distressed as Adam was by the false accusations against him, it seemed almost worse that he did not know who was really responsible for the deaths of Mary Warwick and her little boy.
Adam sighed aloud and tore his eyes away from the spot where the bodies had lain to look across the lake.
There, standing on the other side, was a young woman.
For a moment, he thought for some irrational reason that it might have been Miss Miller, or perhaps he had been thinking about Miss Miller so much that he had actually started to hallucinate her presence. But a second glance told him that this was not the case.
He could not make out the woman’s features except to discern that he did not know the girl. She was fair-haired and short of stature, whereas Miss Miller was tall and dark.
An apparition? Adam wondered. Was it Mary Warwick herself, returned from the grave to reprimand him for all that she had suffered? Perhaps even Mary had believed in his guilt, even from beyond the grave.
But Adam’s wiser and more rational side dismissed this foolishness at once. He was not a man given to fear of any kind, and it would take much more than the sight of a young woman standing by a lake in the light of dusk to frighten him.
He lifted a hand as if to hail the lady. He could not see the expression on her face. Noticing he had seen her, she seemed to start and disappear back into the woods behind her.
Adam stood there for a long time, staring at the place where the figure of the woman had disappeared.
It was not so strange, he told himself. People walked in Lawley Park all the time. His father had always encouraged it, saying that the grounds were far too beautiful to be reserved for his admiration alone.
It was perfectly reasonable to assume that the figure was some young girl from the village, who had taken a walk up to the lake, then taken fright at the sight of one of the owners of the house and fled in embarrassment.
Adam believed that the most straighforward explanations were always the most likely.
And yet...
Adam stood there for a long time, staring at the spot as if he expected her to reemerge and reveal her secrets to him. The future seemed so clouded to him now, so impossible to penetrate, and to add yet another matter of uncertainty, even though it was only the identity of a young woman on an evening walk, felt like a heavy burden indeed.
Nor could he deny how fiercely his heart had leapt when he had thought, momentarily, that the figure was Miss Miller. Adam had met a great many beautiful young women in his life, and he was far from naive. Perhaps it was that very experience of knowing what a mere infatuation was which was helping him to realize that what he felt for Miss Miller was a great deal more.
Chapter 11
“My father said that there was an eyewitness,” Charity relayed.
She had not wanted to discuss the matter with Esther within the confines of the vicarage, and so, the two had decided to take a walk together through the village. During that time Charity had already unburdened much of what was troubling her, though the heaviness of what remained unsaid — namely, how she felt about Mr. Harding — weighed upon her very strongly.
“And what do you believe?” Esther probed.
Charity sighed, stopping on the path as if she could walk no further without tackling the question that kept her tossing and turning through the night.
“I do not know who I should believe,” she said. “Everything I have ever been told would order me to take my father’s word for it, and only a very foolish person would believe someone she had only spoken to for a few minutes over her own father.
“Perhaps,” she continued, beginning to walk now but very slowly, “Perhaps I would even go so far as to say that I do not believe my father out of principle. That I have been so engaged in rebelling against him for so long that my immediate impulse is always to disagree with him, rather than examining the facts.”
She turned to Esther to see her friend smiling back at her.
“What is it?” Charity asked. “Why do you smile at me so?”
Esther laughed and took her friend by the arm. “My dear Charity,” she said, “Only you would question yourself so rigorously. I have always admired your self-knowledge greatly.”
Charity smiled back, touched to receive such a compliment from her friend. “You are very kind,” she replied, “although I suspect that my self-reflection is merely the result of having ruminated over the matter so extensively trying to examine it from every angle.”
“Well, it is admirable nevertheless,” Esther laughed. “And to what you were saying, I would answer this. That I do not believe that it is merely the strength of Mr. Harding’s argument that causes you to believe him. It is your own instinct, and I have always known you to have very good instincts about others. If you believe that Mr. Harding is innocent, then I think it very likely that you are right.”
“But my father,” Charity said, her voice cracking beneath the weight of its own impatience and confusion. “My father says that there was an eyewitness and he would not lie to me.”
“Perhaps your father was misinformed,” Esther suggested.
“It must seem to you at present that either your father or Mr. Harding must be lying, but I would point out that that is not necessarily the case. Perhaps there has been some terrible misunderstanding that has led to all this, and there have not been any lies. Is it not possible, after all, that the deaths of Mary Warwick and her son were nothing more than a horrible accident?”
Charity paused, contemplating Esther’s suggestion. Esther had always been the sort of sweet-natured creature who was loath to believe a bad word about anyone, so it was very like her to suggest that somehow both the Reverend Miller and Mr. Harding might both be honest. But Charity had some misgivings about her friend’s perspective.
She felt that in trying to see the best in everyone, Esther was too prone to ignoring the elements of other’s behavior that was the most telling as to their character, in favor of the characteristics that she found more pleasing.
“But none of this gets to the heart of the matter, Charity,” Esther continued. “The question that I most want to ask you, and that you must answer for yourself, is why it is so important to you that Mr. Harding is innocent?”
While lying in bed the previous night, Charity had assembled for herself a range of compelling excuses for why she cared about Mr. Harding’s innocence as much as she did.
She could not bear to think of a father and son estranged. It would be
very bad for the whole area if the lord of the manor were disinherited, and some distant cousin came in to take the place of the Duke. Like her namesake, she felt a concern for Mr. Harding that was merely charitable.
But she could not lie, particularly not to Esther.
“I do not know,” she said frankly. “I know only that I am most struck by Mr. Harding. That although I have not spent much time in his company, the conversations that we have had together have taken on a heightened quality that has rendered them very important to me.”
“That sounds to me like a euphemistic way of saying that you are in love with him,” Esther said gently.
The word ‘love’ caused a shock like fire to run through Charity’s veins; she could feel her cheeks growing hot at her friend’s words. Her first instinct was to brush off what her friend was saying and insist that it was not so, that she felt nothing more than friendliness for Mr. Harding — the concern that one childhood playmate might feel for another when they were both grown up.
Charity Falls for the Rejected Duke: A Historical Regency Romance Novel Page 6