The Duke's Perfect Wife

by Jennifer Ashley

  Hart sank into a chair as he leafed through them. He saw that she’d even kept his first stiff missive, sent to her the day after he’d contrived his initial meeting with her:

  Lord Hart Mackenzie requests the pleasure of Lady Eleanor Ramsay’s company for a boating party and picnic on August 20th, below the grounds of Kilmorgan Castle. Please respond to my messenger, but don’t give him a tip, because he’s already gouged me extra for carrying this to you, as well as using it as an excuse to visit his mother.

  Your servant,

  Hart Mackenzie

  He remembered clearly every word of her written reply.

  To my mere acquaintance, Lord Hart Mackenzie:

  A gentleman does not write to a lady to whom he is not related or betrothed. Kissing me at the ball is hardly the same thing. I think that our shocking enjoyment of said kiss should not be repeated on the riverbank below Kilmorgan, no matter how idyllic the setting, as I believe there is a rather public view of it from the house. Add to that, a gentleman should not invite a lady to a boating party himself. A maiden aunt or some such should pen the letter for him and assure the young lady that said maiden aunt will be there to chaperone. I will instead invite you to take tea here at Glenarden; however, by the same rules, I cannot properly ask an unrelated gentleman to take tea with me, so I will have my father write you a letter. Do not be alarmed if this invitation wanders off into the medicinal properties of blue fungus or whatever has taken his interest by then. That is his way, and I will endeavor to keep him to the point.

  Hart had laughed loudly over the charming letter, and responded.

  A lady does not write to a gentleman either, bold minx. Bring your father to the boating party, if you please, and he can root around in all the fungi he wants. My brothers will be there, along with neighbors, which include a pack of society matrons, so your virtue will be well guarded from me. I promise I have no intention of kissing you on the riverbank—I will take you deeper into the woods for that.

  Your servant and much more than mere acquaintance,

  Hart Mackenzie

  Hart folded the letter, remembering the joy of the boating party. Eleanor had come with Earl Ramsay, and then driven Hart insane by planting herself in the middle of the matrons, flirting with Mac and Cameron, and daring Hart to try to get anywhere near her.

  She’d carefully not let him corner her until she’d gone back to the boathouse to fetch an elderly woman’s forgotten walking stick. Being kind had been her downfall, because Hart had caught her alone in the boathouse.

  Eleanor had given him a wide smile and said, “Not fair. This isn’t the woods,” before Hart had kissed her.

  The walking stick had fallen from Eleanor’s hands as her head went back, her eyes drifted closed, and Hart opened her lips. He’d tasted every corner of her mouth, let his hand rove until it cupped her breast through the thick fabric of her bodice.

  When she’d tried to step away in weak protest, Hart had given her a wicked smile and told her he would leave her the second she told him to. Forever, if she wished it.

  Eleanor had met his gaze with her very blue eyes and said, “You’re right, I am a bold minx,” and pulled him down for another kiss.

  Hart had lifted her onto a workman’s bench and hooked one arm under her knee, showing her how to twine her leg around his. As Eleanor had stared up at him, he’d seen it dawn on her that whatever relations she had with Hart Mackenzie would not be conventional. He saw her desire ignite, saw her decide that she would allow herself to enjoy whatever he intended to show her.

  That tiny moment of surrender had made his heart—and other parts of him—swell. Hart had thought, at that moment, that he’d caught her, but he’d been a fool.

  The next letter was full of teasing by Hart about their brief moment in the boating house, with some inane innuendo about the walking stick. Eleanor had written him a saucy letter back, which had heated Hart’s blood and made him wild to see her again.

  He found the letter he’d written after she’d accepted his proposal, made in the summerhouse at Kilmorgan.

  Seeing you bare in the sunshine, with the Scottish wind in your hair, sent all my tactics for winning you to the devil. I knew that if I asked you then, your answer would be final. No going back. I knew I should leave it alone, but I went ahead and asked the foolish question anyway. Lucky man that I am, you gave me the answer I longed to hear. And so, as promised, you will have everything you ever wanted.

  Young and arrogant, Hart had thought that if he offered Eleanor riches on a silver platter, she would fall at his feet and be his forever. He’d read her very wrong.

  The next letter, written after Hart had taken Eleanor to meet Ian when Ian had been living at the asylum, was evidence that Eleanor was nothing less than extraordinary.

  I bless you a thousand times over, Eleanor Ramsay. I do not know what you did, but Ian responded to you. Sometimes he doesn’t speak at all, not for days or weeks. On some of my visits to him, he’s only stared out the window or worked on blasted mathematics equations without looking at me, no matter how much I try to get him to acknowledge that I’m there. He’s locked in that world of his, in a place where I can’t go. I long to open the door and let him out, and I do not know how.

  But Ian looked at you, El, he talked to you, and he asked me, when I went back to see him today, when you and I would marry. Ian said that he wanted us to marry, because once I am safe with you, he can stop worrying about me.

  He broke my heart. I pretend to be a strong man, my love, but when I’m with Ian, I know how very weak I am.

  Subdued, Hart leafed through the remaining letters. There were not many, because once his engagement with Eleanor had been made official, she and he had been together quite a lot. The few letters written when he’d been detained in London or Paris or Edinburgh without her were filled with praises to her beauty and to her body, her laughter and her warmth. He found the letter he’d written her telling her with eagerness that he’d come to Glenarden when he was finished with business in Edinburgh, the fateful visit when Eleanor had waited for him in the garden and given him back the ring.

  The last two letters had been written several years after the engagement ended. Hart opened them, numbly surprised that Eleanor had kept them at all. He read them out of order, the first telling Eleanor of Ian’s return to the family after their father’s death:

  He is still Ian, and he isn’t. He sits in silence, not answering when we speak to him, not even looking around when we address him. He is somewhere inside, trapped by years of pain, frustration, and out-and-out torture. I do not know if he resents me for not helping him sooner, or if he is grateful to me for bringing him home—or if he even knows he’s home. Curry, Ian’s valet, says he behaves no differently here as he had there. Ian eats, dresses, and sleeps without prodding and without help, but it’s as though he’s an automaton taught the motions of living as a human being, with no real knowledge of it.

  I try to reach him, I truly try. And I can’t. I’ve brought home a shell of my brother, and it’s killing me.

  Hart folded that letter and opened the last with slow fingers. This one was dated 1874, a month or so before the letter about Ian. The pages were still crisp, the ink black, and he knew every word of it by heart.

  My dearest El,

  My father is dead. You will have heard of his death already, but the rest of it I must confess or go mad. You are the only one I can think to tell, the only one I can trust to keep my secrets.

  I will deliver this by my most trusted messenger into your hands alone. I urge you to burn it after reading—that is if your unshakable curiosity makes you open a letter from the hated Hart at all, instead of putting it straight into the fire.

  I shot him, El.

  I had to. He was going to kill Ian.

  You once asked me why I let Ian live in that asylum, where doctors paraded him like a trained dog or used him for their strange experiments. I let him stay because, in spite of it all, he was safe
r there than he could be anywhere. Safe from my father. Whatever they did to him at the asylum is nothing compared to what my father could have done. I’ve long known that if I managed to talk Father into taking Ian out of it, Ian would only end up in a worse place, perhaps entirely out of my reach and at my father’s mercy.

  Thank God the Kilmorgan servants are more loyal to me than they were to Father. Our majordomo approached me one day with what a housemaid had told him—that she’d overheard my father whispering to a man that he would pay him to slip into the asylum and kill Ian, by whatever quiet method the man chose.

  As I listened to the majordomo report this horror, I realized that I could no longer wait to act.

  I believed the truth of what the housemaid had overheard, because I knew that my father was capable of such a thing. It was nothing to do with Ian’s madness. You see, Ian witnessed my father commit a crime.

  Ian told me about it in bits and pieces over the years, until I finally put together the entire truth. What Ian saw was my father killing my mother.

  The way Ian described the incident, I don’t believe Father intended to kill her, but his violence certainly caused her death. He grabbed my mother and shook her by her neck, until that neck snapped.

  Father found Ian crouched behind the desk and knew he’d seen it all. The next day Ian was hauled to London to sit before a commission for lunacy. Ian had always been half mad, but facing the commission was beyond him, and of course, they declared him insane. The action saved my father—if Ian were declared mad by a commission, then whatever story Ian told about my mother’s death would likely not be believed.

  At the time, I had no idea of any of this, but I fought my father’s decision. In vain—Ian was taken straight to the asylum, where my father had prepared a place for him in advance by paying them an obscene amount of money. I wasn’t yet old enough or experienced enough to know how to defeat him. I simply did all I could to make Ian comfortable where he was, as did Mac and Cam.

  Of late, for some reason, Father began to believe that Ian was going to expose him. Perhaps Ian had grown more coherent about the incident, perhaps one of the doctors reported to my father that Ian was talking about his mother’s death—I never learned. In the end, I assume that my father feared someone at last believing Ian’s words and investigating. So he set his plan in motion.

  I stopped that plan; I stopped it dead in its tracks. I found the men in my father’s pay, and I paid them to go far away. I sent my own people to guard Ian and had all missives from the asylum waylaid and passed to me.

  My father found out and raged at me, but I knew he would try again. And again. My father was a ruthless man, as you know, selfish to the point of madness. I started proceedings to release Ian from the asylum into my guardianship, but the process was slow, and I feared my father would find a way around me before Ian was safe.

  I knew I had to confront my father, to stop him for good.

  One evening, two weeks ago, I went to his study at Kilmorgan. Father was well drunk, which was nothing unusual for that time of day. I told him that Ian had confided the story of our mother’s death to me and that I believed it. I told him that I was perfectly willing to testify to the truth of it, and I told him that I had put plans in motion to get Ian’s commission of lunacy reversed.

  My father listened as one stunned, then he tried to attack me. But I am no longer a terrified little boy or a fearful youth, he was drunk, and I easily bested him.

  He was surprised when I punched him full in the face. He’d trained me to be his obedient slave, to let him beat me any time he wished and to not shed a tear over the pain. He said he’d done it to make me strong. He’d made me strong all right, and now he was understanding how strong.

  At the same time I started proceedings to have Ian’s commission reversed, I’d had my man of business draw up documents for a trust, one that divided the current wealth of the dukedom and the Mackenzie family into four equal pieces, one for each son, Ian included. The documents also give me custody of Ian, making Ian’s fate mine to decide.

  Father railed against me, of course, but my man of business had done a thorough job. With one stroke of a pen, my brothers would be free, and Father’s money would be given to the sons he despised.

  He shouted at me and told me he’d kill me, told me he’d kill my brothers and see us in hell. I had to threaten him with violence, and I do not want to tell you about what I had to do. It is enough to say that, in the end, he signed the document and regarded me in stark fear. I’d become a monster, in his eyes, but I am only the monster he created.

  I gave the papers at once to my man of business’s courier, who was waiting outside. He took one copy to Edinburgh and one copy to London, and there they both reside.

  My father raged until he fell into a stupor and was put to bed. The next day, he strode out with his shotgun, saying he was going after a buck. He took the ghillie along, but I didn’t trust him not to double back, get himself and the shotgun onto a horse, and ride across country to the asylum where Ian still resided.

  My father must have known I would come after him, because he sent our ghillie ahead and waited for me in an isolated spot. Sure enough, the moment I caught up to him, Father had that shotgun in my face, his finger on the trigger.

  I fought him. It was a mad struggle for the gun there in the woods. The barrel seemed to be pointed at me forever, and I knew that if I died this day, my brothers wouldn’t have a chance against him, even with the documents he’d signed. He’d find a way to annul the agreement and make their lives an even greater misery than he had before. And Ian would be dead.

  I finally got the shotgun turned around, and now the barrel faced him.

  I can lie and tell myself that it was an accident. That I was fighting for the gun and it went off. But I had it in my hands, El. I saw in my mind’s eye, in the split second before I pulled the trigger, the years of terror we’d have to endure if he went on living. Our father was a devious and insane man, and God help us, we inherited our bits of insanity from him. I saw that Ian would never be safe from him, no matter how diligent I was, if I did nothing.

  I ended that hell in the woods. I pulled the trigger and shot him in the face.

  The ghillie came running, of course. I was holding the gun by the barrel, looking horrified. It had jammed, I said. Backfired when it had gone off.

  The ghillie knew, I know he did, but he said that, aye, His Grace must have failed to check that the barrel was clear before he fired at a stray bird. Accidents happened.

  And so, the thirteenth Duke of Kilmorgan is gone. My brothers suspect the truth, just as the ghillie did, but they have said nothing, and I have not enlightened them. I vowed in that woods that they would never have to pay for what I’ve done.

  Tonight, I confess my sins to you, Eleanor, and to you alone. Tomorrow, Ian comes home. Perhaps the Mackenzies can find some peace, though I doubt it, dear El, because we are so very bad at peace!

  Thank you for listening. I can almost hear you saying, in that clearheaded way of yours: “You did what you have done. Let that be an end to it.”

  I wish I could hear you say it, in your voice like a soothing stream, but do not worry. I will not rush to Glenarden and throw myself at your feet. You deserve peace as well.

  God bless you.

  Hart heard a faint sound. He looked up from the letter, tears in his eyes, to see Eleanor standing in the doorway, prim and proper in a dress buttoned to her chin, her lips parted as she stared back at him.

  Chapter 11

  “You were supposed to burn this,” Hart said. He couldn’t get up, could not move, drained from what he’d just read.

  Eleanor closed the door and came to the table littered with the letters. “I couldn’t, somehow.”

  He noticed that she did not need to ask which letter he meant. “Why not?”

  “I don’t know, really. I suppose, because, of all the people you could have told, you chose to tell me.”

  “There
was no other person,” Hart said. “No one in the world.”

  It hung there. Hart closed the book and stood up, his feet heavy. He needed to touch her. She watched him come to her, said not a word when he cupped her face in his hands and leaned to kiss her.

  She tasted of sunshine. Hart didn’t pause to wonder why she’d come upstairs, whether Isabella expected her to rush right back down. Hart only cared that Eleanor was here, that he had the warmth of her under his hands, the woman who knew his direst secrets and had never told a soul.

  He felt strong again in her embrace, his hurts flowing away under Eleanor’s caress. He waited for dark needs to grip him, to ruin this moment, but they didn’t come.

  He feathered kisses across her cheek, catching the freckles that he held so dear. “El…”

  “Shh.” Eleanor pulled him all the way into her arms and rested her head on his shoulder. “Say nothing. There’s nothing to be said.”