Chapter 15
It was his worst nightmare. He bent a knee to the bed, reached for Jane and turned her over, his eyes welling with tears, his heart pounding so hard, he was dizzy. “Jane, love, do not die. Please, Jane –wake up.” She was so pale and one glance told him she was bleeding heavily, her very life flowing from her before his eyes. He couldn’t bear it. Petting her hair, he begged her to live, prayed to God to save her. “The doctor is coming, love.” How long would it take?
He noticed Miss Bella then, standing beside the bed, holding a Bible, reading in a loud monotone. “What have you done to Jane?” She didn’t look at him, but continued to read. Leaping from the bed, he grabbed the Bible, closed it with a snap and dropped it to the floor before grasping her shoulders and shaking her. “What have you done to Jane?”
She drew herself up and said importantly, “It is the will of God, and I am his handmaiden. She is evil, a wanton harlot unworthy of the ducal title, unfit to be your duchess. You must face your responsibilities now, Your Grace. We must marry and I will give birth to the next Duke of Blixford. I will raise him up to be a holy, shining example to all England of the nobility of this ancient peerage. The shame brought upon it by your mad father and his whore of a wife must be undone. She had to die, to ensure the sin of her loins, begat in her wicked unfaithfulness, was never allowed to be born.”
“How? How did my mother die?”
Her wild eyes turned toward Jane. “With a babe in her belly, put there by the seed of a man not her husband, by the horrible devil in his breeches.” She looked up at him and smiled the smile of one completely off balance. “My own mother was to be the duchess, but your father was tricked into marrying a whore of no honor, who lay with the devil and would bear his bastard to further degrade the ducal title. To save her soul, to save the title from blemish, it was my mother’s duty to kill the child, his harlot mother, and the devil who betrayed the duke.”
Could it be that the vicar’s wife had killed his mother and the old Viscount Radcliffe? It was so outlandish, he couldn’t believe it. Miss Bella was insane, making her own reality. His hands were still against her shoulders and he squeezed hard, his fingers digging into her thick flesh. “How could you know this? You were but a child.”
“All of my life, until her death, my mother told me it was my duty to succeed where she had failed, that I would become the duchess, and renew the honor and dignity of the title.”
Honor and dignity through the murder of innocents and the babes they carried. Michael was breathless with the realization, cold with deadly fury and heart stopping fear. Jane was so still, the blood was so much. How could she survive? He fought himself to keep from strangling the life from Bella Pool.
“Say you will marry me, that you’ll respect the title and bring honor upon it by taking to wife one who is pure, who knows the face of God, hears his divine voice in the dark of night when my father pierces me with his holiness. It is I, Bella, who understands the purity of God’s plan for a man and a woman.” She shot a disgusted look at Jane. “She understands only carnal knowledge and cannot fathom what it is to find God within her body.”
Michael felt ill, even while he was consumed with rage. Bella’s words could mean only one thing –she had been molested by her father, the pious vicar. In another time, another place, he’d have felt sorry for her plight. But his Jane was dying by this woman’s hand, and he couldn’t find sympathy anywhere in his soul for her.
“You will leave now, so that I may take care of my wife.”
“No! She must die. She will die. You will marry me!”
He modulated his voice, hoping his even tone would calm her. “I don’t wish for my duchess to die. I love her very much and it will cause me great pain and sorrow if she’s gone from me.”
Jerking away from his hands, she withdrew a small knife from her reticule and held it up for him to see. “You cannot save her. She must die so that we may be married and become as one, as it says in the Bible, as I am with my father. I must bear your child, the next duke.”
He saw her intent even before she lunged toward Jane, and caught her, but she was possessed of unnatural strength and he struggled to wrest the knife from her.
“I see now that you are no better than your father, tempted by the sins of the flesh, by a harlot’s body, blind to her evil. If you’ll not seek God’s truth with me, you shall go to the devil and live there in Hell.”
He was startled when he felt the blade slice through his coat sleeve, into his arm, and loosened his hold upon her just long enough for her to twist about and raise the knife, ready to plunge it into his heart.