Midnight Bride

by Marlene Suson

  “Comb the grounds.” Jerome looked around for his brother. “Where the hell is Morgan?”

  His brother’s voice called urgently from Sophia’s office, “Jerome, come here. You must see this.”

  He ran into the room. Sophia’s body, covered with a blanket, was still lying on the floor. His brother stood by her French writing table.

  “Look.” Morgan pointed to a sheet of paper partially written upon. A pen lay beside it. “It is what Sophia must have been doing when our arrival interrupted her.”

  Jerome picked up the note that mimicked his wife’s handwriting to perfection. As his eyes skimmed the words, he saw that Sophia had been composing a “suicide” note, to which she had undoubtedly planned to sign Rachel’s name. The forged note blamed Jerome’s treatment of his wife and his repudiation of their child for driving her to take her own life.

  He sank down in the chair beside the table, fighting back the waves of nausea that washed over him. Sophia had been diabolical. Had Griffin not discovered the truth about her, Jerome might well have believed this terrible note.

  He glanced with loathing at the covered body on the floor.

  “The poison works very quickly,” Morgan observed grimly. “Sophia was dead within minutes.”

  “If she were not, I would kill her now with my bare hands,” Jerome said fervently, giving voice to the helpless fury and grief that consumed him.

  Morgan shuddered. “It was damn near you instead of her. If she had managed to scratch you with that dagger...”

  He thrust a small leatherbound book toward Jerome. It was open to a page filled with spidery handwriting. “You must read this. It is Sophia’s diary, and this entry is particularly illuminating. She was truly insane.”

  Jerome read with growing horror. Sophia, in her worsening madness, had intended him to be her next husband—as if he would ever have had anything to do with her. But she believed that once she had done away with Rachel and Alfred, she would have him and become a duchess. To achieve this end, she was slowly poisoning her husband.

  Morgan said, “Alfred is exceedingly lucky that we came when we did.”

  If only Rachel had been so lucky.

  Morgan showed Jerome other pages of the diary:

  Much earlier entries recorded Sophia’s hatred for Stephen because he had tried to stop his uncle from marrying her.

  Determined on vengeance, she hit upon hiring ruffians to seize Stephen in Dover. They were instructed to turn him over to a press gang, telling it that Stephen was a petty thief pretending to be Lord Arlington to hoodwink shopkeepers, eager for an earl’s custom, into giving him credit. That was why the press gang did not believe Stephen’s protestations of his real identity

  Sophia knew that Stephen would have virtually no hope of surviving impressment and returning to England alive. She knew, too, that he would suffer hideously from the brutal treatment he would receive, before he eventually died. That was what the wicked female wanted.

  Another entry revealed that she had been violently jealous of Rachel’s beauty and popularity When Sophia belatedly discovered that if Stephen were dead, his sister, not George, might own Wingate Hall, she had her brother hire a killer to dispose of Rachel. He had been instructed first to visit the local tavern to try to plant the impression that he was working for George.

  The very day the assassin’s shot had missed Rachel, Lord Felix had contacted Alfred about marrying his niece. The greedy Sophia, seeing a way to turn a handsome profit, postponed her murderous plans for Rachel until after she could collect the bounty Felix would pay her for arranging the marriage he wanted.

  But Rachel ruined her aunt’s scheme by marrying Jerome, the man for whom Sophia lusted. Enraged, she tried to poison Rachel with the milk that killed the kittens. When that failed, she ordered her brother to hire another killer, this one a better marksman. He was sent to Royal Elms with instructions to make it appear again that George was the one trying to slay Rachel.

  When Jerome foiled the assassin and the Westleighs went off to London, Sophia produced the forged letters to Denton and had her brother offer to sell them to Jerome. She was certain that the duke would be so angered by them that he would send Rachel away. Sophia reasoned that her niece would have nowhere to go but Wingate Hall. Once Rachel arrived, Sophia would dispose of her as she had her husbands, leaving the forged suicide note.

  Who would question that the distraught young duchess, repudiated by her husband and supposedly pregnant with another man’s child, would take her own life?

  Shuddering, Jerome dropped the small volume on the writing table and hurried out on the terrace where Rachel had last been seen. He snatched a flambeaux from its holder by the door, rushing from the terrace, and began a frantic, frenzied search of Wingate Hall’s darkened grounds for his wife.

  He shouted her name over and over, but only silence answered him. If she were dead, he did not think that he could bear to go on living, knowing it was he who had unwittingly driven her to her death.

  He was dimly aware that others—George, Morgan, Ferris, and servants weeping for Rachel—had joined the search, too.

  There was no sign of her, but their efforts were hampered by the blackness of the night.

  Jerome did not know how many hours he had been looking when Morgan approached him. In the light of the torch he carried, he saw that his brother’s eyes glistened, and he knew that Morgan believed Rachel was dead.

  “It is futile, Jerome, to continue the search in the darkness. You have to face the fact that the best we can hope for now is to find Rachel’s body.”

  But Jerome, reeling with misery and guilt, would not face it. He stubbornly refused to admit that his wife was truly dead until they found her body and he could deny it no longer. As a drowning man clings to a rope that can pull him to shore, he clung to the faint, foolish hope that by some miracle of miracles she was still alive.

  “I cannot give up.” His voice was raw with grief. “I will not, until I find her.”

  The others gave up the search, knowing it to be hopeless, but he continued. After more hours of futile looking—the night had become an eternity in which time had no meaning—he knew despair deeper and blacker than ever before in his life.

  He went to the stable where he quietly saddled a mount and rode into the night toward the lodge her grandfather had built. When Jerome reached the dark, silent structure, a lump the size of an ostrich’s egg rose in his throat as he remembered how Rachel had “abducted” him there. How furious he had been when he had awakened to find himself bound to the bed.

  Now he would give everything he owned to be in that position again.

  Hellsfire, what a fool he had been. Too late, he appreciated the precious treasure he had let slip through his fingers. His heart felt as though it had been ground into dust.

  The lodge door was not locked, and he stepped inside, groping for the candlestick on the table in the entry. Finding it, he pulled out his flint to light the candle.

  By its light, he strode to the bedroom where he had made Rachel his own. As he approached the bed, he thought of that ecstatic night he had spent with Rachel and of awaking the next morning to see her lovely, sleeping face upon the pillow.

  He looked down and nearly dropped the candle at the sight of her face in that very spot, her shining ebony hair fanning out about her in luxurious waves. For an instant, he thought it was a trick of his imagination.

  But it was not. It was truly Rachel in the flesh.

  And miraculously, she was breathing in the deep, even rhythm of sleep.

  For a moment, he could only stare at her in joyous incredulity. Then he set the candlestick on the table and swept her into his arms. He uttered a prayer of fervent thanks as he crushed her living warmth against him and breathed deeply of her lavender and roses scent.

  Her lovely eyes fluttered open, and he drank in their beauty as she looked at him with sleepy blankness.

  Jerome knew the instant she came fully awake— and remembered
all that had passed between them. Her eyes frosted. She stiffened in his arms and tried to pull away from him, but he would not release her.

  “Let me go,” she cried, fighting him with such determination that he reluctantly relinquished his grasp on her. Holding her against her will was hardly the way to win her forgiveness.

  His heart constricted at the look she gave him as she scooted across the bed to get as far away from him as she could.

  She pulled the covers up about her neck. “I will have nothing to do with a man who repudiates his own child!”

  Jerome reached a placating hand out to her. “Please—”

  “Do not touch me!” Her voice was as cold as winter snow.

  It sent icy shivers of dismay through Jerome. He saw the angry disillusionment in her eyes, and a black hole of terrible loss engulfed him.

  The tables had been turned. Now he knew what it had been like for her, what she had felt, the pain she had suffered when he had rejected her.

  “Listen to me,” he pleaded. “We were both the victims of Sophia’s diabolical plot to drive us apart. Do not let her succeed.”

  “Sophia?” Rachel blurted in shock.

  “She forged the letters to Denton in her insane determination to destroy you and our marriage. Sophia was behind it all: the attempts on your life, Stephen’s disappearance, the forged document that gave your uncle control of Wingate Hall.”

  Jerome told Rachel about Sophia’s past and her skill as a forger.

  His wife shuddered. “What an awful talent she had. I could not tell the handwriting from my own.”

  “Nor, obviously, could I, but I should have known better.” Jerome reached out and tried to take Rachel’s hand in his, but she yanked it away. “I was an incredible fool to doubt you.”

  “Yes, you were,” she said coldly.

  “Thank God you did not drink the glass of poisoned milk that Sophia gave you.”

  Rachel’s eyes widened. So her awful suspicion had been right. She shivered. “I was afraid it might be.”

  “What made you suspect?”

  She frowned, trying to give voice to the nebulous misgivings that had swirled in her mind. “Aunt Sophia was being so nice to me—and so sympathetic. When I arrived, she did not seem surprised to see me. I cannot explain it, but it was as though she expected me. She was so unlike herself, especially bringing me a glass of warm milk with her own hand instead of having a servant do so.”

  “So you decided against drinking it?”

  “I came within a hairsbreadth of obliging her.” Rachel shuddered at how close to her lips she had brought the glass before the prickling, nagging unease over what Benjy had said to her about the kittens had halted her hand. She had not truly believed the milk was poisoned, but after the inexplicable things that had been happening to her—the shots, the fake letters in her handwriting—she had decided to err for once on the side of caution.

  “A stable hand told me about the dead kittens and the empty milk pitcher beside them.” Rachel looked at Jerome sharply. “Why did you not tell me they were poisoned?”

  Her husband ran his hand through his already dishevelled golden hair. Rachel had told herself that she would never forgive him for denying their child was his, yet he looked so distressed that she had to fight down a subversive urge to smooth the wayward locks from his forehead.

  “You do not know how many times I have cursed myself the past day for failing to tell you, but I knew how much you cared for those kittens. I was trying to spare you the pain of knowing that they were dead and why.” Jerome looked at Rachel with loving concern. “I was afraid you might blame yourself for giving them the milk.”

  She did. Her husband understood her better than she thought. In that moment, Rachel finally divined why Jerome had acted the way he had that day he had taken her from Wingate Hall. “You found the dead kittens. That is why you burst into my room and carried me off.”

  “Yes. I loved you then, but I could not admit it even to myself. I only knew that I had to get you away from that house before whoever was trying to kill you succeeded.” He swallowed hard and reached out to touch her.

  Rachel recoiled from him. He had hurt her too much when he had rejected paternity of their child.

  He flinched at her silent rejection. “What—what did you do with the milk that Sophia gave you tonight?”

  “I poured it on the ground by the edge of the terrace. I was afraid that if I left it and it were poisoned, someone else might accidentally drink it.” Rachel looked down at the quilt covering her. “Then I came here to hide until I could think of somewhere else I could go.”

  “Sophia will never trouble us again. She is dead.”

  Rachel’s head snapped up. “What! How?”

  “She attacked me with a dagger that she had dipped in poison. In the struggle, she scratched herself with the point. It killed her.”

  “Sweet heaven,” Rachel exclaimed faintly. She had been certain that she had closed her heart against her husband for disavowing their child, but the way it constricted at learning Sophia might have killed him told her that she had not entirely succeeded.

  “Do not look so sad, the world is better off without her,” Jerome said, dearly misinterpreting the reason for Rachel’s stricken expression. “I do have some good news for you about Stephen. You may be right about his still being alive.”

  Rachel gave a gasp of joy at learning that her prayers for her brother’s safety might actually have been answered.

  When Jerome told her what the sailor had said about the passing ship plucking Stephen from the ocean, she exclaimed exuberantly, “I know he is alive. I know it.”

  “Do not get your hopes too high, my love. If he was indeed rescued and is still alive, he should have come home by now.” Jerome tried again to take Rachel’s hand, but she pushed it away. “Unfortunately, we know nothing about the ship that picked him up, other than it flew a British flag.”

  “I know he is still alive!”

  “If he is, my love, we will find him. We will not give up the search for him, I promise.” Jerome smiled at her. “I have another piece of good news for you. George has returned. Those puzzling letters you thought he wrote you were actually Sophia’s handiwork.”

  Rachel, her face jubilant, jumped up. “Why did you not tell me before? I cannot wait to see him.”

  When Jerome and Rachel reached Wingate Hall, she ran up the steps, threw open the big door with a bang, and dashed inside. The dimly lit hall was empty but her noisy arrival brought George from the library. He stopped abruptly when he saw Rachel and stared at her as though she were an apparition.

  She flung herself exuberantly at him. For a moment, her brother stood frozen, then he returned her embrace fiercely, as though he feared she might vanish if he did not hang on to her tightly.

  George, his voice choked, said, “Dear God, Rachel, we thought you were dead.”

  Her husband silently watched the reunion. It was clear that George loved his sister every bit as much as she did him.

  Jerome could not help but be a little envious of the way Rachel clung to her brother. She had not let her husband touch her since he had discovered her at the lodge.

  For the next half hour brother and sister, sitting side by side on a settee, talked as though they were the only two in the room. Even when Jerome spoke, Rachel did not look at him.

  When Rachel hid a yawn behind her hand, George said, “You must go to bed. It has been a terrible day for us all, and for you especially. You need your rest.” He grinned at her. “Your husband tells me that you and he are making me an uncle.”

  At the mention of their baby, she cast Jerome a seething glance that sent his heart plummeting. He had hoped that after Rachel learned of Sophia’s treachery, she would pardon him for having doubted her. But now he knew himself to be unforgiven.

  After that look, Jerome did not try to accompany his wife upstairs. She and George left the drawing room, and Jerome waited twenty more endless minutes. Then, w
hen he was certain that she was in bed, he picked up a silver candlestick and, with a heart as heavy as a granite boulder, went up to her chamber.

  When he opened the door, the room was dark. He stepped inside and gently closed the door behind him. As he crossed to her bed by the light of the candle he carried, his wife sat up and glared at him. “Get out of here.”

  “It pains me to deny you anything you want, my love, but in this instance I must.” He sat down on the bed beside her, fear clutching at his heart. Had he wounded her too deeply for her to forgive him? Had he lost her forever? What would he do if he could not win her back? He could not even stand to consider that possibility His life without her love was unthinkable.

  Somehow Jerome had to persuade her that he was worthy of it, that her heart was safe with him, that he would treasure and cherish it all the rest of his days. He would move heaven and earth to have her back, soft and yielding, in his arms.

  He held them out to her. “Please, my darling love, let me hold you.”

  She jerked back from him. The anger in her violet eyes scorched him with its heat and shrivelled his hope.

  “Do not ever call me that!” Her voice was as hard as his demeanour had been to her that day in London when he had sent her away. “I am neither your darling nor your love, and you well know it.”

  Jerome flinched at having the cruel words he had uttered in London flung back at him, but he would not accept defeat. “Yes, you are, and I intend to spend the rest of our lives proving it to you.”

  “Eternity would not be long enough for you to succeed!”

  She might be right, he thought in despair, given the implacable way she was glaring at him.

  “I told you in my note that I would never live with you again, and I meant it.”

  The cold resolve in her voice flayed his heart. If he could not persuade her to forgive him, his own life would not be worth living.

  Jerome reached out, but Rachel avoided the contact once again. After all, this was the man who had repudiated their child! She could not forgive him that.