The Obscure Duchess of Godwin Hall_A Historical Regency Romance Novel

by Hanna Hamilton

  Rebecca wondered now whether those inquiries had been born of a malicious impatience for the poison to do its fearful work or a sudden burst of regret that had caused Caroline to hope that her revenge had not been effective after all.

  She did not know. Now, she would never know, for Caroline was being taken away, and there seemed little prospect of her speaking a rational word to anyone, now or in the foreseeable future.

  As for Lord Peregrine, he made a great show of feigning horror that the wrong person had been imprisoned for Charles’ murder, and seemed to think that the way that he could best disguise his own wrongdoing was to hurry about issuing loud and obnoxious instructions on how the matter of Caroline’s imprisonment ought best be dealt with.

  At least, that was what he did until Grandmamma Horatia told him in no uncertain terms that he was to leave the house immediately and never darken the doorway again for as long as she was alive.

  With a great deal of wheedling and scraping, cursing and muttering, the unpleasant and amoral lord left, not bothering to bid goodbye even to the Earl of Sheffield.

  The latter was effusive in his greeting for Andrew when he and Rebecca arrived back at the house, both rain-soaked and almost disorientated in their joy and relief.

  “My son-in-law! Innocent! God bless you, my dearest Duke!”

  He had hurried out to Andrew and embraced him warmly, presumably to demonstrate that his devotion to the aristocracy far outweighed his prejudice against men who had been imprisoned for murder.

  Rebecca saw it all and thought that it was despicable, but she kept her opinion to herself.

  Perhaps Rebecca should have foreseen the way her father was going to react to Andrew’s return, but even if she had, it would not have made it feel any less sharply ironic. It was fortunate, therefore, that she was far too occupied with her joy at being reunited with her fiancé to concern herself much with her father’s prattlings.

  The Earl of Sheffield was practically tripping over himself to shake Andrew’s hand and embrace him warmly. Andrew responded with great courtesy, but not even the slightest hint of warmth. Rebecca could see that he would not soon forget the fact that her father had not troubled himself with the question of whether or not Andrew was innocent, caring only that Rebecca married a duke.

  In truth, she knew that she would not soon forget it either and felt sorrowful.

  It strikes me, Becca, as one of the strangest and hardest things in all of life that one is not able to choose one’s own family.

  Chapter 45

  “You did it, Becca,” Andrew said. His voice was low with astonishment, love, and admiration. The force of these emotions washed over Rebecca in a wave that threatened to overwhelm her, so that she could do little but focus on the sensation of her hand in his.

  Finally, they were alone again. The rain had cleared, and they were able to talk in a way that they had not been able to do previously when so much had been going on and they had been so much distracted by the miracle that they were both safe and together.

  Grandmamma Horatia had suggested that the three of them take a little walk, smiling at the Earl and telling him that she would oversee the ‘young lovers’.

  “Did I not tell you,” she said as they strolled, “that I believed that all would come right for the two of you?”

  She did not add but not in the way that you thought. She did not need to. Neither of them could have predicted that their happiness together would come at the cost of Charles’ life and both were caught between happiness and guilt.

  After only a few minutes, however, she had announced herself tired and sat down on a stone bench. “Do have the goodness to continue by yourselves,” she said, with a twinkle in her eye. “I should hate for my old bones to prevent you from enjoying an evening stroll together.”

  She had turned her face to fix her gaze serenely on the house, choosing not to see how Andrew immediately took Rebecca’s hand in his, nor noticing how they disappeared off behind a little copse of trees so that they might speak together in the privacy that the two of them had craved for so long.

  “Your grandmother always knows exactly what she is doing,” Rebecca observed.

  Andrew smiled. “We are very fortunate to have a soul like hers always on our side,” he said, glancing back in the direction of his grandmother for a moment, then quickly returning his gaze to Rebecca’s face as if he could not bear to be deprived of the sight of her for even a moment.

  “But it was you,” Andrew continued. “you who believed in me when everyone else was already moving on to scheming how they might best benefit from my trial and execution. You who used your cool thinking and rational mind to establish the cause of Charles’ death, when everyone else was more concerned with pointing fingers and leaping to easy conclusions.”

  He turned to look at her, his face full of loving admiration. “What an exquisite piece of good fortune for me that a woman such as you would do me the honor of being my wife.” He paused for a minute, then added teasingly. “That is, of course, I assume that you still wish to marry me.”

  Rebecca paused, pretending to consider the matter.

  “Well, you see,” she began, “I have had to resist so many men who wish to marry me and make me the Duchess of Leinster, that perhaps I might be put off the notion of marrying any duke at all!”

  Andrew’s face clouded over for a moment, and he stopped walking to take her by both hands and look her in the eye.

  “Rebecca, I am so sorry,” he said. “The way that you have been treated in the midst of all this is almost as terrible to me as the fact of my brother’s murder.”

  “I am not the only one who has suffered,” Rebecca replied. “After all, you were the one who was imprisoned, the one who faced the prospect of their own death.”

  “I was,” Andrew agreed gravely. “And it was the first time in all my life that I have been entirely deprived of my liberty when I had to submit to the will of everyone else and was not permitted to be the master of my own fate. The first time that I was teased and misused by people who cared only to exert their power over me.”

  He placed a hand under her chin and raised her face so that she would look at him. “Yet, the one of us whom people constantly attempt to order around and control, the one who is constantly deprived of their freedom, has always been you. Whether it was your father or Charles or Lord Peregrine, men have constantly tried to make you a pawn in their game and force their will onto you.”

  “I am no pawn,” Rebecca responded, lifting her chin away from Andrew’s hand as if to demonstrate that she did not need even that small bit of support. “I told my father that I would prefer to live alone in the world as a pauper than to be bullied by him into marrying Lord Peregrine.”

  “And I believe it well!” Andrew exclaimed warmly.

  “I know you to be the boldest and most fearless woman in all the world. That is why I want to promise you,” — at this, he drew her closer, one arm around her waist and the other in his hair, “That if you take me as your husband, I will never attempt to bully or domineer over you. I will never claim my judgement to be superior to yours, nor will I dismiss you because you are a woman and I am a man.”

  “I believe you,” Rebecca replied. She did not need to speak above a whisper, for their faces were so close. “For the first time in my life, I know that I can live without the fear of being forced into a life I do not want.”

  “I will make it my task in life,” Andrew said, his hand moving from her hair to gently stroke her cheek, “To ensure that the brightness of your fearlessness and freedom is never dimmed.”

  “You know,” he said, as they walked toward the house together, "Most couples, when they marry, have no idea at all how well they will weather the storms of life.”

  “That is true,” she agreed, “Most young people at the start of their marriages have met only a few times, perhaps in the rarefied circumstances of a ball or party, when both are acting as part of a performance. They have no idea
how the other will be when the path of life becomes rocky.”

  “Not so with us,” Andrew said, lifting her hand to his lips to kiss it.

  “Not with us,” she agreed. “It is possible that I know you better than I know myself.”

  “Certainly I love you better than I love my own life,” Andrew said.

  At this, their faces drew closer still, and for the third time in their lives — the second time in their free lives — they shared a kiss.

  * * *

  Someone was sent to the Earl of Sheffield’s house to recover Caroline’s love letters to Charles. There were hundreds of them. One written every day, just as Caroline had said. They were all tied up into bundles with red ribbons, and among them were a great number of pressed flowers, perfumed handkerchieves, and other little tokens of romance.

  A romance, it seemed, that was conducted entirely by one person.

  I never realized how extraordinarily lonely she was, Rebecca thought, with no small measure of regret.

  They were not the sort of letters that would have convinced anyone of their author’s sanity. They consisted primarily of long, rambling scenarios that envisaged Caroline and Charles’ lives together — a life so idealized and perfect that it could not have ever become a reality for anyone.

  The letters cursed Rebecca for her complacency and her beauty and praised Charles for his gentlemanliness and magnanimity.

  They were, in short, the imaginings of a woman who lived entirely in a world of her own.

  “Hysterical,” Doctor Boxer said, shaking his head sadly as he came out of the room where Caroline was being kept. “Quite a tragic case, I should say. She lives in a world of such delusion that I cannot say in good conscience that she is fit to stand trial.”

  Delusion. The word struck Rebecca with the force of a hammer.

  She could not conceive of it. Of how delusional Caroline must indeed have been to believe that, by poisoning Rebecca, she might somehow have had a chance of marrying Charles herself.

  But there was something even more frightening than the delusion at the core of it all. To Rebecca, that consisted of the way that Caroline had lied to her, had acted the part of the quiet and devoted friend with aplomb, all the while plotting Rebecca’s own murder in a chilling and remorseless fashion.

  Rebecca was starting to realize that there were a great many people whom she had known all her life, whom she had thought of as her family, who she really did not know at all.

  However, there was also the family that she had chosen for herself. The family that consisted of Andrew and Grandmamma Horatia. This family would never forsake her. She knew that as well as she knew her own name and knew also that she could cling to it as an article of faith for the rest of her married life, even if everything else seemed to crumble into dust in her hands.

  Seeing Caroline being taken away to the asylum was the most distressing sight that Rebecca had ever witnessed in all her life.

  The men who came for her endeavored to be as gentle as they could, which gave Rebecca some small hope that the place where Caroline was going would not be one of the fearsomely cruel madhouses that she had read about.

  Some small hope. But not a great deal.

  At first, Caroline screamed and shrieked, fought and kicked, twisted and bit, and generally did everything that one might expect a person being dragged off to an insane asylum to do, whether they were a lunatic or not.

  But eventually the word ‘Charles’ slipped from her lips, and she fell abruptly into silence, submitting to being manhandled and making no further noise beyond a series of small whimpers.

  “At least it is not the scaffold,” Andrew said, coming up behind Rebecca where she was standing on the terrace and voicing the words that she was doing her best to comfort herself, albeit to little avail.

  “It is not,” Rebecca agreed halfheartedly. “But I must confess that that thought comforts me very little.”

  The carriage door closed on Caroline’s small, slumped figure, and Rebecca silently bade goodbye to the closest friend she had ever known, who had betrayed her so terribly, and whom she nonetheless knew she would always, somehow, miss.

  * * *

  They were to be married by special license in the drawing room at Godwin Hall. Given all the heady and dramatic spectacles that had taken place over the recent weeks, a small and intimate occasion seemed like a welcome relief to both of them.

  “What is the point of being a duke, with all this power and influence,” Andrew said with a small smile, as the two of them sat up in front of the dying embers of the fire and made their plans, while Grandmamma Horatia slumbered gently in a nearby armchair, “if I cannot use it to ensure that our marriage can take place precisely as we would like it?”

  However, they quietly agreed that the wedding would not take place for some months so that they could observe a proper mourning period for Charles. In all the chaos of the murder, Andrew felt that he had had very little time to mourn his brother, or even to realize that he was gone forever.

  Neither of them liked the idea of waiting any longer to start their married life, but both agreed that it was necessary. It was the first of many decisions that they would take together under what they both wanted and needed.

  Besides, after the frantic pace of life recently, slowing down and waiting was not such a bad thing.

  “It gives me plenty of opportunity to do what needs to be done?” Rebecca said, with a wry little smile. “There are all kinds of preparations to be made.”

  “What sort of preparations?” Andrew teased. “Dresses?”

  His tone was lighthearted. Rebecca could see that he needed to laugh with her, now that the dust had settled and the reality of all his losses had started to sink in.

  “Gowns to be made up,” she agreed, with a smile, “Bonnets to be embellished. Flowers to be arranged. You know. The sort of things that really matter in a marriage.”

  At this, they both laughed. It felt so good to share a few moments of innocent laughter. Since that moment that Rebecca had found the little glass bottle in Caroline’s possession and all the terrible facts had fallen into place, she had feared that she would never again view the world as a fundamentally good place.

  But being with Andrew gave her fresh hope. Now that he was a free man he seemed to have taken on deeper energy and love for life, and attacked every challenge with the vigor of a man hungry for life, and taking the deepest pleasure in every little thing.

  Nothing more, of course, than the pleasure he clearly took in Rebecca’s company. He never seemed to tire of looking at her, paused often to take her hand and kiss her as if he feared that it would be the last kiss they ever had and told her repeatedly that she was the wisest, most charming and most beautiful woman he had ever known.

  In short, he was a young man in the greatest bloom of love, and even the darkness that had invaded their lives could not hinder his joy.

  “We promised ourselves to each other in a bare gaol cell, in the most desperate moment of our lives,” Andrew said, placing a kiss on her forehead. “I think if it came to it, we could manage a wedding without some fearsome array of gowns and bonnets and flowers.”

  “I think perhaps you are right,” Rebecca agreed. “Although, if we are to get on in this married life of ours, I would advise you to never again refer to any gown or bonnet of mine as fearsome.”

  “Never again indeed,” Andrew promised soberly. “Anything of yours is perfection because you are perfection.”

  “Indeed, I am not,” Rebecca responded firmly, and with perhaps more seriousness than his teasing remark had warranted.

  “I am not perfect, and I would never have you think me so. The sort of people who believe their loves to be perfect run the risk of thinking like Caroline did. They idealize the one they love and then when their ideal is destroyed, so are they. I never want it to be like that between us.”

  “No more could it ever be,” Andrew cried in reply, “when you are so wise and so sensible, a
nd will always keep us on the right track. I have no fear of disaster as long as we are together.”

  “We have had enough disaster already,” Rebecca observed, with quiet regret.

  “We have,” Andrew agreed.

  And then, almost as if acting on a single instinct, the two of them turned together to gaze into the last glowing remains of the fire.

  They sat there for a while in the half-light their faces lit up only by that orange glow, stealing glances at one another with a thrilling mixture of anticipation and shyness. It was that they could not wait to begin their lives together and scarcely dared to believe that they had been fortunate enough to be allowed to be together.

  As the fire went out, the remnants of their old lives seemed to disappear with it. No longer was Andrew a second son, an inferior substitute for his brother. No more too was Rebecca the daughter of an Earl, a young woman whose place in life would be defined by her marriage.