I spent the next eight years trying to capture his attention.
I tried everything. Perhaps you heard of some of my antics? Flamingos on the lawn of my first house party. Gowns adorned in a thousand tiny silver bells. Acrobats and lilies. Whispers of public ruin.
But the Earl of Apthorp is a good man, and a serious one. He values comportment, discipline, manners, and integrity. Which is to say, my antics did not charm him.
Quite the opposite, I’m afraid.
And so, dear readers, I did something rash. Something I will regret until my dying day.
I set out to ruin him.
I paid an actress and a rogue to go around town telling tales about his supposed weakness for a whipping house. I wrote a cruel poem about his alleged perversities and placed it in my circular, where I knew it would get out. And you, of course, know the rest, because you’re still singing about him in the alleys outside public houses late at night. (You should really stop calling him Lord Arsethorp. It makes him cross.)
The rumors were not true, but they were wickedly effective. They raised questions about his character and ethics. They toppled his political support, ruined his pending legislation, scuffled his prospects for a decent marriage, and destroyed him financially.
Exactly as I planned.
For you see, I knew that when my scheme worked, he would be desperate.
And I would be his last resort.
I would offer him my influence, my dowry, the power of my family name. He would have no choice but to marry me to save his tenants and family from ruin.
I thought I was so clever.
That is, until it worked.
The more I have come to know the Earl of Apthorp, the more I have come to realize that my tricks could not have victimized a more honorable man. He is not simply handsome and charming—the object of my girlhood fancy. He is strong-willed, empathetic, and passionate. Deeply committed to his family, his country, and his dependents. The kind of man who deserves true love. Not marriage to a woman he can never trust.
I hereby confess that it was all my fault, as most things usually are.
I confess to being reckless with his future and his family and his heart.
And most of all I confess to discovering I care about him far too much to consign him to a life with a woman he cannot forgive.
Signed,
Lady Constance Stonewell
P.S.: One last word of warning to the marriageable ladies from Princess Cosima: Lord Harlan Stoke is a ruiner of innocents, a liar, and a violent man. Some rich woman should do us all a favor and send him to the colonies.
Chapter 20
As rain fell, Apthorp’s family hunkered in Westmead’s carriage, reading and rereading the confession, puzzling over where Constance might have gone and what to do about it.
He barely paid attention.
He felt like he was turning into dust. Like if he stood in the rain, parts of him would slough off in the muck.
And not because he’d been abandoned in London’s most prestigious church, surrounded by members of Parliament he’d spent the better part of a decade trying to win over.
Not because he was once again the subject of gossip.
Not because he’d proved himself incapable of even getting married properly.
But because he finally, truly understood.
Love is a system of behavior.
He understood exactly why she’d done this and why she’d felt she had to.
Because she believed he could not forgive her. Because he’d proved it.
And even then, she’d still sacrificed her own happiness in order to protect him.
Because she loved him.
She’d never declared it. She’d simply proved it.
And so he stumbled out of the carriage and into the blinding rain and staggered over the sludge in the gutter and parted the throng teeming from the church and the newsmen hawking word of his latest ruin until he found the nearest livery stable with a horse to rent to a man who needed to get somewhere fast and rode breakneck through the rain to Grub Street.
Henry Evesham was sitting in a solemn, windowless garret, his desk a mess of papers.
“Lord Apthorp,” he said, jumping in surprise at the sudden disturbance to his peace.
“Agree to drop this matter with Charlotte Street and I’ll give you the story of your bloody life.”
Evesham steepled his hands around his mouth. “It would have to be quite a story, my Lord.”
“Give me a sheet of paper and a quill,” he said, tearing off his coat.
He scribbled down what he needed to say, threw it on Evesham’s desk, and watched the man grow pale. When he finished reading, Evesham stretched out his hand to seal the bargain.
“You have my word. And may God forgive you.”
Apthorp strode back outside and into the rain and to his rented horse and rode hard and alone due southeast, never mind the wretched weather and the fact that he felt faint.
He rode for hours and hours, past the outskirts of town and down the carriage road, past the stately piles of Surrey and the ancient ruins of Canterbury. He rode until the horse was in a lather and stopped at a coaching inn for a piss and a fresh horse and a pint of good, dark ale to fend off the cold that was looming in his bones from the rain and wind, and still he rode until finally he saw it, the brown chop of the ocean, the stark, white ascendant line of Dover’s jagged cliffs.
He rode to the port, where a packet sloop was docked, and prayed that her conveyance had taken longer than his horse, for she would have trunks and servants with her, and would have been delayed by the flooded road at Maidstone, and therefore would not, could not, have sailed.
Stay. He pleaded in his mind, chanting a percussive wail in his head. Stay. Stay.
“Can I help you, sir?” a man shouted as Apthorp jumped off his horse and went running toward the sloop.
The tide was high. Likely he had minutes before the ship sailed.
“That packet,” he shouted, though it came out as a rasp, for his throat was hot and painful. “Is a woman on it? Blond?”
The man looked up and yelled to a crewman on the deck. “Brooks, someone here for a lady. Wait.”
Apthorp leapt over the railing onto the ship.
If she wasn’t here, by God he’d cross to Calais and keep going toward Genoa until he found her.
He staggered down the stairs, wet breeches clinging to soaked legs, panting, clutching at the rails, for his shins had turned to jelly from the cold wet ride and the unsteady rhythm of the choppy sea below him. And the fever that seemed to want to slake him from within.
He looked wildly, from a pair of young gentlemen setting off on a continental tour to a group of merchants speaking French and finally to the back where, all alone, a woman sat in an emerald-colored cloak that revealed nothing of her face or figure save for one single strand of hair that had come loose, no doubt, in the whipping wind at port.
A singular shade of blond.
So colorless and luminous it might be platinum or silver.
Hair like from a fairy tale.
And beside her, a caramel-colored spaniel, snoring.
Constance, he gasped out.
She turned.
And when she saw him, her face went white and her eyes went wide and whether they were filled with shock or love, he could not say, because, finally, his legs failed him.
He’d come after her.
He’d come after her.
But why?
“Constance,” he gasped again. And then he sank into a puddle on the floor.
“Julian!” she cried, rushing across the cabin. He collapsed before she could reach him. Crumpled on his knees, he caught himself by his hands and looked up at her.
His eyes were wild and unfocused.
Oh God, she’d killed him.
She bent to cradle his head. His hair was soaked to his scalp, and his skin was burning to the touch beneath the raindrops dripping from his hair.
; “He’s ill,” she called frantically. “Please don’t leave the harbor. We must get this man to shore and find him a physician.”
“We have a fair wind, miss,” the captain said apologetically. “If we don’t leave now, we could be delayed for days.”
She’d been warned this might be the last passenger ship to cross the Channel for months, given the increasing tumult between England and France. If she didn’t leave today, she could be stuck here. Stuck to face the family she’d betrayed. This man she’d hurt.
She had to sail. She had no choice. But she could not leave him like this.
“Please, please help him up,” she cried, not knowing what to do.
Two shipmen helped Apthorp to his feet and wedged him between their shoulders, hauling him unsteadily to the stairs leading out of the hold. Constance crawled up after him while a burly shipman lifted him over the railing to the dock. A sailor leaned him against a pillar. His eyes fluttered.
“You can’t just leave him in the rain!” she cried. “He’s ill.”
“We must sail, miss!” the captain shouted.
She dashed across the gangway to the dock and knelt before him, putting a hand against his skin. It was fiery with fever. She pulled her cloak from around her shoulders and draped it over him to block the cold rain driving nearly sideways in the strong wind off the Channel.
“Someone get a doctor,” she cried, to anyone, no one, for the dock was a flurry of creaking ropes and shipmen preparing to push the sloop into the sea.
Over the wind and the knocking of the waves against the ship, she heard him rasp something. She leaned her ear closer to his mouth. “What is it, Julian?”
“Stay. I love you. Stay.”
His gaze locked on her face. His amber eyes were sharp with fever. He put a hand over his heart. “Stay.”
He sank back against the pillars and closed his eyes. Raindrops fell from the planes of his cheekbones and dripped onto his lips.
She used her fingers to wipe the moisture from his face.
Such a remarkable face.
“Miss, we have the current,” the captain called to her. “We must embark.”
Julian’s skin was hot beneath the drops of rain. He was so ill.
He won’t remember this. You’ve betrayed him. Deliberately and publicly. He’ll be furious when he recovers his right mind, and you’ll be trapped.
“Raise the anchor,” the captain called. “Miss, you must climb aboard.”
Love is a system of behaviors. He came after you. You did all that, and he came after you.
She looked from the man who had been her past to the ship that represented her future and closed her eyes and chose to risk her poor, bedraggled heart one final time.
“I’m not leaving. Unload my trunks.”
“There isn’t time,” the captain shouted.
“Then give me my dog,” she said. “And my valise.”
A crewman handed Shrimpy over the rail, along with the travelling case with her money and her jewels. The pup whined, annoyed to have been wrested from his cozy basket and moved into the rain.
Julian’s eyes fluttered open. “Stay,” he said again.
She kissed his forehead and prayed he would remember that he’d wanted this.
“Julian, don’t worry. I will fix this.”
She found a sailor who knew a man with a cart who could carry Julian’s drenched body to an inn, despite the pouring rain. She found a boy and paid him a shilling to go looking for a doctor in the weather. She coaxed the innkeeper, whose lodge was full, to make a room available—bribing its previous occupant to share a room at the pub down the road.
Through it all she held Julian’s hand as he went in and out of consciousness, wiping sweat and rain from his eyes and repeating the same words to him over and over. I will fix this. Please live and I will fix it.
When she finally secured the room she’d paid for, she spread her sopping cloak over the filthy ticking mattress and had the innkeeper lift Julian onto the bed. She sent the man’s daughter to fetch hot water and clean linens and lemon and ginger in hot broth.
She’d never nursed anyone in her life, but by God, she would learn to save a life by simply doing it.
She tugged and pulled Julian’s sodden, frigid clothing off his body.
For once, she did not stop to admire the beauty of his form but only to run her hands over his cold, puckered skin, trying to abrade warmth into it, trying to infuse him with the force of her own life, her own heat.
She murmured to him as she worked, telling him how foolish he was, for it was she who was supposed to defy all sense with grand, possibly deadly gestures. What would become of them if they both started acting foolish and impulsively?
She wasn’t sure if he was listening, for his eyes only fluttered when she spoke, so she told him of all the tears she’d cried as she’d fled in her rented coach along the muddy roads, contemplating never seeing him again after she’d humiliated him like this—and how all those tears were wasted, because now she would have to cry again at his funeral since he’d gone and frozen himself to death.
When, finally, the doctor arrived, the day had turned to night and the rain had turned to howling wind and she was half-mad with worry.
“Please,” she said to the physician, “save him.”
She stepped out of the room to give the doctor space and saw the assembled residents of the inn—the proprietor, his daughter, the cook, assorted guests and sailors—all staring at her disheveled form.
Their faces were locked in grim anticipation. They were waiting for her to announce his death.
Well, they could wait.
Didn’t they know she’d never met a problem she could not fix?
Apthorp’s body was composed entirely of pain.
Fatigue and rain and ague and heartbreak.
He was neither living nor dead, awake nor asleep. His only thought was misery.
Except when, through the fog and the pain and the thirst, there was Constance.
Constance whispering to him. Constance’s hands on his brow, his chest, his back.
Constance putting damp cloths to his forehead, putting liquids in his mouth.
Her voice played in his mind, inseparable from fever dreams, spinning fairy tales that meandered with his half-formed memories.
She whispered of an estate in good repair, attended by a well-trained staff. The dairy made sweet milk and the garden bloomed with tender lettuce in the summer. The mines were in working order, for a foreman had been hired to improve the yield of salt, and the waterway had broken ground and might be finished earlier than expected, given all his careful planning.
There was money in the bank—enough to pay off all the creditors and warm the hearths with coal and thatch the roofs to keep the heat inside.
Margaret and Anne wore fine dresses and spent their days reading stories and frolicking in the fields and waiting for the gentle politician who adored them to return home from London. His mother rested comfortably in the dower house, content.
And he and Constance made their home on the Strand, which was filled with art and people and the laughter of two little blond-haired children. A daughter who could not be coaxed to stand still or pay attention and a son who was well-mannered and looked after her. Sometimes they made mischief, but no matter what they did, they never thought to question where their place was, because they knew from the time they were small that they were cherished.
And beside him in bed there was a wife who loved him so much it sometimes scared her. A wife who still presided over London society, but whose favorite nights were the ones she spent with him comparing notes on how they would conquer the world together, bit by bit. And then he took her hand and led her up to bed and brought her to such heights she sometimes wondered how she’d ever come back down to earth. But she did come down, because beside him was her home now. The only home she’d every truly had. The one she’d never known how much she wanted.
He shook and sweated
and ached and raved and still this vision unfurled in the space inside his consciousness.
This will be our life, the whisper said. This will be our future.
Together, we can fix it.
Just come back to me.
Just open your eyes.
Stay.
He opened them.
Julian stared at her. Wan, scarcely awake. Alive.
“Constance,” he said.
His voice was ragged from fever. His skin looked like watery cream gone slightly off. His lips were chapped, the skin peeling off in whorls. His beard had grown out and his hair was matted to his head.
He had never looked so good to her in his entire resplendently beautiful life.
“Oh, Julian.” She rushed to him, burying her head on his chest. “I was so worried I had lost you—”
He forced himself up on his pillows and dragged a hand through her hair.
“You thought attempting to cross the English Channel in a squall would be enough to throw me off?”
A great pressure lifted from her chest. She could barely speak.
“You remember?”
“Oh, Constance. A man does not forget it when his heart breaks.”
A tearless sob of pure relief escaped from her throat. “Oh Julian, I’m so sorry.
He wrapped his arms around her. “Hush. I’m the one who’s sorry. So damnably sorry. Let me hold you.”
She settled into the crook of his arms. But she did not hush. She had many things she needed to say.
“I thought if I went through with the marriage, I’d make you miserable. I still think I will very likely make you miserable, at least from time to time. But now that I have saved your life, perhaps you owe me a bit of forbearance.”
“You were right to leave,” he said, stroking her hair. “I’m glad you left.”
“But why? I thought you’d hate me for it.”
“No, sweet girl. I could never hate you. Constance, I am such a bloody fool that only losing you made me certain. Standing there alone, I realized nothing in the world mattered except the fact that you were not there with me. Nothing.”
The Earl I Ruined Page 25
