The Dissolute Duke(10)

‘Loneliness might be one of them.’

‘Aye, it might. But better than being tied to a man she loathes, I’d be thinking, and if we play it right he will be gone and she can get on with a new sort of life. These awkward alliances happen all the time, but with good management they can be manipulated to appear to be nothing like they actually are.’

‘Successful?’ Sarcasm dripped from the word.

‘I was thinking more along the lines of moderately satisfactory to both parties concerned. Lucinda gets her freedom and Alderworth his money. At least it is a way past ruin.’





Chapter Six


Hands kept shaking her awake, insistent and unrelenting.

‘Come, Lucy, we need to be up and about, for Asher wants us out of London by daybreak.’

‘Why?’

Taking a quick look at the clock on her bedside table, Lucinda determined it to be very early in the morning. The birds had not even called yet and Emerald looked in a hurry.

‘Alderworth is rescinding his promise to leave. He seems to think you will be accompanying him north to his estate.’

Sitting up, Lucinda pushed the covers back, the bruises on her legs dark against the whiteness of the sheets.

‘He wants that of me?’

Her sister-in-law shrugged her shoulders. ‘Given his character he probably wishes to haul you off to Alderworth and keep you there.’

‘Like a prisoner?’ Tremors of fear made her feel ill.

‘Of course not. But it might behove us to make certain that he understands exactly what you do want.’

‘Nothing. I wish for nothing between us.’

The wedding dress stared at her from its hanger across the wardrobe door, the white, pristine silk more than she could bear. Getting up, she threw the thing into the cupboard, the veil of gauzy lace joining it.

One day when she was ninety and her brother’s children’s children asked her about her life, she might tell them that the worst moment of all was the one where she had caught sight of herself in the mirror in her bedroom the morning after her nuptials. And when they asked her why, she would say because that was the moment she realised there would never be another chance of happiness for her.

‘I will have the housekeeper dispose of the gown, Lucinda, so that you do not need to see the garment again.’ Emerald’s eyes were a stormy turquoise, but tenderness lay in the hand that came to fall over hers. ‘We shall get through this together as a family, for your brothers have ways to right all the wrongs.’

‘Divorce is not an easy passage …’

‘Annulment, then? That could be an option.’

‘I rather think that might have come too late, considering my returning memories and society’s talk. I should never have married him at all.’

‘Then we just need some time to think about it, some quiet time away from the pressures of London. A solution is always available to any problem and this one will be no different.’

‘What if Alderworth comes to find me at Falder and demands my return?’

The silence told her that there was some other thing afoot.

‘We are not going to Falder?’

‘No. We are making for Beaconsfield and then to a house on the south coast. You can live there with a stipend if you cannot stay close to town.’

‘Away from the Duke of Alderworth?’

‘He is a dangerous adversary, Lucy. Until we can formulate a plan to keep you safe, it is better to keep you apart. I think such a man would insist on his marital rights.’

The blood simply drained from her face as she contemplated that truth. Would the Dissolute Duke want to take her to his bed? Again? Her imagination ran wild. If she was already pregnant from her ignominious ruin, how would this change things? The very thought of it had her reaching for her thick night-wrap.

‘I do not want to see him, Emmie. Asher is right. I wish for some distance between us so that I can indeed think.’

Tay sat in his study with the curtains open and a quarter-moon outside in the heavens struggling to find clear sky through banks of high-billowed cloud.

She had left. Lucinda Wellingham had gone with her family from London, running in the early dawn to a place that was not Falder. He had found out this little information from a stable hand he waylaid on the way home from their town house, though the boy had no inkling of their true destination.

His bride had, however, left a note, the words written in his memory like some morbid poem of rebuttal.

I hope that you will allow me a few weeks to recover from the accident and to consider my options.

Please do not come after me. I will not receive you.

If you need to contact me, Cristo will forward any communication and I will answer as I see fit.



The missive was signed formally. Lady Lucinda Wellingham. She had not even used his name.

Lifting a glass of brandy to his lips, he upended it, the quiet tonight a pressing and heavy one. The purse of the Wellinghams sat on the desk in front of him, a considerable sum representing a new life, somewhere far from England, perhaps? The Americas beckoned and so did the East Indies. Here he was struggling to keep ahead of the many and mounting debts his father had left him, every pound he made subtracted twice over by the ones he owed. Another few years at this rate and it would all be gone. Alderworth, the extensive land and buildings around it and the London town house, disappeared into the gloom of history.

A new life summoned—a refurbishment of the soul and one with a beguiling promise. The choice was simple. Stay here and fight the power of the Wellinghams for a wife who did not want him, or leave on a new tide and chance his hand at something different. He had never travelled away from the shores of England before, the duties of being the caretaker of Alderworth taking all his attention. If he left half of the Wellingham money here in an account to be drip-fed into the estate just to keep it afloat, perhaps he could build other possibilities?

Flat blue eyes came to mind, the anger in them directed only at him. Lucinda wanted neither his name nor his title and, as tiredness settled, it took too much will to quarrel.

His parents had frittered away their lives together in acrimonious exchanges and he did not wish to do the same. No, far better to welcome change and simply vanish.

His eyes strayed to the band on the third finger of his left hand. To have and to hold from this day forth, his wife had promised as she had placed it there …

Dragging the gold across his knuckles, he threw it into a drawer in the desk. A relationship that had begun in untruth and blossomed under duress was now ended in deceit. He would journey to a far-off corner of the world which laid no claim to the stifling conventions of a society immured in manners.

And then he would be free.

The journey south was hurried and long and as the carriage swayed against a wind from the sea, Lucinda thought that her life from now on might be exactly like this flight into obscurity.

She could not go back and she could not go forwards, the worry of seeing Taylen Ellesmere again precluding any early return to London. Emerald and Asher both looked as tired as she did, the last weeks resting on their faces, worn down by worry. At least the beginning of her menses had come that morning and there was some relief to know she would not be bound to Alderworth by a child. But even that relief was tempered by sadness as she faced the possibility that she might never ever be a mother.

‘The air here is so much better than in London, Ashe.’ Emerald’s observation was falsely cheerful, just words to fill in the heavy silence.

Lucinda nodded and tried to smile, though she doubted that her brother would be fooled by such a forced joviality. With a cursory glance at the sky, Asher brought the subject back to the problem they were all thinking about.

‘In a month you can come back to Falder, Lucinda. I will employ guards to make certain Alderworth comes nowhere near you and at least it will be a more familiar setting. I doubt, however, that London will be a destination available to you for a good long while yet. Society has a great need to feed off scandal and this one …’ He left the sentence unfinished.

She nodded to please him, but the ache in her breast threatened to explode into an anger she did not recognise. She wished with all her heart that she had not been persuaded to go to a house of such ill repute in the first place, for all that had followed was the result of one injudicious decision.

‘Visiting Alderworth was more than foolish,’ she muttered and Asher looked up, the pity in his eyes almost her undoing.

‘I have left word to have Alderworth followed so any movements that alarm us will be monitored. Let us hope he has the sense to retire to that estate of his and never again leave it.’

‘You think he will stay in England?’ As Emerald asked the question something passed between Asher and her—a warning, were Lucinda to name it. A quiet notice of caution with an undercurrent of intent.

Goodness, had her brothers shanghaied her husband already and thrown him on to a ship sailing far from Britain before disgorging him on to some unknown foreign shore? Her mind ran all the possible injuries that Taylen Ellesmere might sustain.

‘If you have hurt him …’ she began and stopped, dread making her question what it was she was going to say. Ellesmere should mean nothing to her. She should be glad that he would disappear for ever, yet concern lingered.

‘He is at liberty to go where he wants. There was no duress in it.’