Marriage Made in Hope(4)

‘Then tell us. Let us help you understand it instead of beating yourself up with the consequences.’

Francis shook his head, but he could not halt the words that came. ‘Stevenage is wrong. I killed Seth with my own stupidity.’

‘How?’

‘It was greed. He wanted to leave after the first lucky strike, but I persuaded him to stay.’

‘For how long?’

‘A month or more.’

‘Thirty days?’ Lucien stood now and walked to the window. ‘Enough time for him to have changed his mind if he had wanted to. How long did you have to think about jumping into that river today?’

Francis frowned, not quite catching his drift, and Lucien went on.

‘Two seconds, five seconds, ten?’

‘Two, probably.’ He gave the answer quietly.

‘Did you think about changing your mind in those seconds?’

‘No.’

‘Well, Seth Greenwood had millions and millions of those same seconds, Francis, and neither did he. Would it have been our fault if you had jumped today and never resurfaced? Should we have languished in guilt forever because of your decision to try and rescue Lady Sephora Connaught? Are one man’s actions another man’s cross to bear for eternity if things don’t quite turn out as they should?’

Gabriel began to laugh and brought the bottle of brandy over to refill their glasses.

‘You should have taken to the law, Luce, and you to the ministry, Francis. Arguments and guilt have their own ways of tangling a man’s mind and no doubt about it. But here’s to friendship. And to all the life that’s left,’ he added as their glasses clicked together in the fading dimness of the library.

‘Thank you.’ Francis felt immeasurably better, lightened by a logic he had long since lost a hold of. He’d been mired in his guilt, it was true, stuck in the darkness like a man who had run out of hope and could not go on.

He had to move forward. He had to live again and believe that all he had lost could be found. Happiness. Joy. The energy to be true to himself.

He’d heard a voice, too, before he had jumped, from above or in his head he knew not which. A voice he knew and loved; a voice instructing him to save the girl in order to save himself and to be whole again.

God, was he going mad? Was this insanity the result of excessive introspection and guilt? Raising his glass, he drank of it deeply and thought that he had only told his friends the good half of a long and damn sordid story because the other part was too painful for anyone to ever have to listen to.





Chapter Three

Five days later his butler came into his library with a heavy frown upon his face.

‘There is a gentleman to see you, Lord Douglas. From Hastings, my lord. He has given me this.’

Walsh passed over a card and Francis looked down. Mr Ignatius Wiggins, Lawyer. ‘Show him in, Walsh.’

The man was small and dressed in unfashionable clothes of brown. He looked nervous as he fidgeted with a catch on the leather case that he held before him like a shield.

‘I am the appointed counsel of Mr Clive Sherborne, my lord, and I have come to tell you that he has been murdered, sir, in Hastings a week ago. It was quick by all accounts, a severed throat and a knife to the kidney.

Good Lord, Francis thought. He stood to digest the brutality of such an ending and thought of the deceased. He had met him only once for he’d come to the Douglas town house with his wife, a garish but handsome-looking woman of low character and poor speech. They had come with the express purpose of informing his uncle about the birth of a baby whom they insisted was his by-blow. Wiggins had accompanied them.

Lynton St Cartmail had been furious and wanted nothing to do with such a hoax. Blackmail, he’d called it, Francis remembered, as he had ordered them summarily gone.

Clive Sherborne, however, had taken the child they had brought with them in his arms, a crying-reddened baby with dark lank hair and pale skin, even as he promised that he would instruct a lawyer to call on the fourth Earl of Douglas. His voice had been gentle and sad, a man who had not looked like the type to be murdered so heinously years later and Francis wondered what had happened in the interim to make it thus.

‘Mr Sherborne had asked me to inform you of any significant events in his household, my lord, and so I am—informing you, I mean, about his death. A significant event by anyone’s standards.’

‘Indeed it is, Mr Wiggins.’ Francis wondered briefly whether the mother, Sherborne’s wife, was still alive and what had become of the girl child. He wondered why Wiggins had come back, too, given the amount of years that had passed since last being here.

‘The deceased had given me a letter, sir, in better times, you understand, a missive that was to be delivered into your hands only in the circumstances of his death, for he wanted to make certain that Anna Sherborne was...catered for. He was most adamant that I should give you this last correspondence personally, my lord, and that I should allow no other to take my stead...’

Francis remembered Wiggins distinctly, for his physical countenance looked much the same as it had. Last time he had gesticulated wildly at the screaming bundle of the unwanted newly born baby, but this time his hands were clasped tightly together, dark eyes showing an ill-disguised puzzlement mixed with fear.

‘I shall not be a party to the lies any longer, Lord Douglas. Your uncle, the fourth Earl of Douglas, Lynton St Cartmail, paid me well to keep my silence about his illegitimate daughter and I have regretted it ever since.’

‘He paid you?’

‘From his own private funds, my lord, and they were substantial. The receipts are all here.’

The horror of the lie congealed in Francis’s throat. The thought of a child, who was in effect his cousin, lost under his uncle’s profligate womanising, was so shocking he felt the hair rise along his arms. Lynton had laughed off the charade of her birth as an obscene pretension by a misguided harlot to gain money from the coffers of the Douglas estate and at twenty-two Francis had had no cause to think the old earl was being anything but truthful. He could barely believe the dreadful falsehood and struggled to listen as the lawyer went on.

‘This is the end of it, you understand, and I won’t be held responsible for the consequences. I am elderly, my lord, and trying to make my peace with the Almighty and this deception has played heavily upon my conscience for years.’

Opening his bag, he found a thick wad of documents, which he laid down on the desk. ‘This is the missive Mr Sherborne left in my care. It outlines the Douglas monies accorded to him for seeing to the child’s upbringing and also any extra amounts sent. I should like to also say that although gold can buy certain things, sir, happiness is not one of them. Unfortunately. Miss Anna Sherborne is now largely at the mercy of the borough and one who has no idea of the true circumstances of her family connections and elevation.’

‘Where is she now?’

‘It is all there, my lord, all written down in the letter, but...’

‘But?’

‘The child has been brought up without proper rule of law and although Clive Sherborne was born a gentleman he most certainly did not have the actions of one. His wife, God rest her soul, was even less upstanding than her husband. To put it succinctly, the young girl is a hoyden, unbridled and angry, and she may well need a lot more from you than the promise of some sort of temporary and transitory home.’

Francis’s head reeled, though he made an effort to think logically. ‘Then I thank you for your confidentiality and for your service, Mr Wiggins, and sincerely hope you will bring the girl here to London in the next few days for the Douglas birthright should be her own.’ He said the words quietly, the tremble of his hand the only thing belying complete and utter fury at his uncle as he paid the man off for his troubles and watched him depart.

Lynton St Cartmail’s foolish and ongoing lack of responsibility had now landed firmly on his shoulders and the covering letter the lawyer had given him felt heavy as he ripped open the seal and looked down.

Anna Sherborne was almost twelve years old. He stopped, trying to remember himself at the same age. Arrogant. Cocksure. His parents had died together a few years prior in an accident so that could have been a factor in his belligerence, but Anna Sherborne’s life had not been an easy one either and by the accounts of the lawyer she sounded...damaged.

The Damaged Douglas. That echo made him stand and walk to the window. What the hell was he to do with an almost-twelve-year-old girl? How did one handle a female of that particular age with any degree of success? God, no one had done so thus far in her life by all accounts and he did not wish to impair her further by his ignorance of the issues. His uncle must have known what would happen when he had turned his unsuitable lover and their offspring away with a good deal of financial support and an express intention never to see them again.

Well, she was his responsibility now. He’d need a governess, of course, some female relative with a firm and respectable hand to temper out all the knots and bumps expected in a wayward and abandoned child. He’d need patience, too, and honesty. And luck, he added, catching his reflection in the window.

Sephora Connaught’s nail-marks had settled somewhat on his right cheek, though they were still easily seen in the glass, three reddened lashes running from the corner of his eye.