The Three Evesham Daughters: Books 1-3: A Regency Romance Trilogy

by Audrey Ashwood

  Surprised, Lady Blankhurst raised her eyebrows. “I would have thought that the exact opposite was the case,” she elaborated. “In all that confusion after Annabelle’s discovery, you two could have bolted very easily, to put it bluntly.”

  Felicity nodded and set down her cup on the small side table beside her chair. “That’s what I thought, too, even though I feel terribly ashamed to admit it today. I would have left Annabelle behind and exposed her to our parent’s outrage.” She blushed. “But Rupert, I mean, Viscount Greywood, did not wait by the stables for me, as he had promised he would. Instead, he led my father straight to Annabelle, whom he must have assumed was me. It sounds very confusing and a lot of it only started to make sense afterwards, but Rupert’s plan all along, had been to catch Marcus St. John and me in a precarious situation. In his plan, once we were publicly discovered, Marcus would have had no other choice but to marry me.”

  “And what role did you play in this perfidious plan, dear?”

  “I was supposed to spy on Marcus… and get him to trust me. It was Rupert’s intention to kill him, but when they found Marcus with Annabelle instead of me, the trick was obviously ruined. Rupert… did not need me anymore, and he made sure I knew it.”

  That was very much an understatement. Felicity had been completely enamoured of him, his appeal, his smile, his slightly dark charm, and the nonchalance with which Rupert seemed to live every single day. She would not only have followed him to Gretna Green, she would have done anything for him. When he turned his back on her, she felt as if the sun had disappeared from the sky.

  “He died during the summer, under mysterious circumstances, did he not?” Lady Blankhurst’s face had not changed. “And shortly afterwards, the Countess of York also passed away. It is rumoured that she chose to end her own life, because she was so grief-stricken at the loss of her charge, a young girl. Are these two deaths somehow related to each other?”

  Felicity leaned as far back into her chair as the back of it would allow her. She pushed her fingers into the folds of her dress to hide her shaking hands.

  “There is no reason why you should be ashamed or even anxious, my child,” Lady Blankhurst told her in a calming voice. “Your mother is like a sister to me, but even if that were not the case, I would never judge you for something you did purely out of love. Also, I will never tell anybody a word of what you tell me in confidence.”

  “But it was not love I felt for Rupert. I have finally come to realise that.” Felicity dared to correct the older woman. The relief she felt, at Lady Blankhurst’s holding back from demanding an answer to the questions surrounding the death of the Countess of York, made her knees turn to jelly. That was yet another chapter of her life that she would prefer to forget, even though she had slept through most of the deadly altercation between the countess and her sister, Annabelle.

  “Then you are much wiser than I was, when I was your age, and it means you are already on your way to healing,” Lady Blankhurst said determinedly, as she smiled a strange and sad smile.

  “Of course, I do not want to pressure you further, if you do not want to tell me more about what happened back then. However, should you ever need someone to listen to… well, I am always here for you, my child.”

  “Thank you,” Felicity replied with tears in her eyes. “I do not deserve so much kindness. After all, it is my fault that Rupert is dead!”

  Her mother’s friend sighed and took Felicity’s hands in both of hers. “Believe me, when a man is so rotten inside, as you describe Viscount Greywood, then I am certain that everything he did before he met you, ultimately led to his death. Maybe you were just the initiator, or maybe not at all, but the reason for his violent death is to be found in his own actions.”

  Felicity remembered all too well... the room in the run-down pub in the depths of Whitechapel, where he had ordered her to meet him. She had taken the poison from the gardener’s cabinet with the intention of ending her own life right before his eyes. She had put the poison into a glass of wine, fully prepared to drink it herself and to step before her maker. But then, and for the first time, she had seen his ugly face, which he had been hiding niftily behind a charming appearance, and she had fled the room without thinking of the poisoned wine a minute longer. Greywood must have emptied both goblets, because the following morning he had been found dead, which had thrown her into a depressing melancholy – one that still held her in its grasp firmly today.

  The two women sat silently side by side for a little while longer. For the first time in months, Felicity began to feel as though some of the burden she had felt because of Rupert’s death had lifted somewhat. Revealing what had happened to her out loud and describing what she had done, did not make it undone or less true, but it did make it easier to bear.

  “You might be wondering why I offered to take you under my wing for a little while,” Lady Blankhurst said at some point. Felicity noticed that the fire had almost burned out, but her hostess did not make any attempts to have it relit. Before Felicity could answer her, Lady Blankhurst continued, “I am a very strong believer in the notion that people express who they truly are, much more by their actions than their words. When I saw how much you were suffering with your guilt, I thought that it would be a good idea to introduce you to an activity that will almost certainly distract you from your pain.”

  She stared into the dying fire and then shook her head, as if to push aside an unpleasant memory. “You might already know that I like to go to the extremely poor quarters of the city and try to help those people by providing a little relief from their misery. I think that it will help you, to offer me support with this, at least for a little while.”

  “I… do not really know if I will be able to do that,” Felicity gently objected. She remembered the filth of the tavern, where Rupert had arranged to meet her, as well as all the malnourished faces of the children on the streets. She remembered the women who sold their bodies, and all the men who made no bones about it. Back then, she had thought of it as some big adventure, switching her dress with that of her maid, and then walking around Whitechapel as if nobody and nothing would be able to harm her.

  “Well, if you do not know how to do it, then you will learn,” Lady Blankhurst replied. “We shall start tomorrow morning. I have an engagement to meet with Father O’Donnell in the afternoon. He will visit one of the living quarters with us, which his church has built in Whitechapel, and we will discuss how we may be of help to him.” Her rounded face, which Felicity had always perceived as slightly plain-looking, suddenly had a warm glow to it, which shone from the inside out. It seemed as if a new woman had stepped from behind the greyish-blonde-haired lady, with her old-fashioned coiffure and her dress, which was much too revealing for her age. And that woman was someone Felicity knew she could trust.

  Perhaps this was Felicity’s chance for redemption – the opportunity to repent that she had longed for all these weeks.

  Whitechapel it was!

  Chapter 3

  “My son,” the Duke of Somerset croaked, lifting his shaking hand to greet Luke.

  His father’s bedroom felt insanely hot, and Luke’s fingers immediately shot up to his much too tight and stiffly starched collar. He quickly lowered his hand again. After all, he had to get used to this type of elegant clothing. He knew it was appropriate for his status, but right now, it felt more like a damned prison.

  “Father,” Luke replied, unsure if he should be angry with him or not. Next to the bed, he found an untouched bowl of broth and two untouched slices of bread. The fire crackled in the open fireplace, the heavy curtains were drawn, and the Duke of Somerset had his thick eiderdown pulled up all the way to his chin.

  If there had not been a tray with leftover partridge partially shoved underneath the bed and the unmistakable aroma of the second-best Bordeaux hovering in the room, one might have assumed that the Duke of Somerset was lying on his death bed. Luke wondered how long his father would keep up this farce. Reluctantly, he ha
d to admit that the sight of his father’s apparently exhausted face did cause him to feel sentimental. He suppressed this affectionate feeling, as well as the urge to applaud the duke’s exceptional acting skills, and instead he sat down carefully on the edge of the bed.

  “Can I get you anything? Shall I call for Doctor Smothon?” Luke purposefully looked at his father’s carefully coiffured grey hair so as to not give away his amusement, were he to look him directly in the eye. He knew his father well enough to be aware of the duke’s skill at reading his son’s face and to know exactly what was going on inside of him.

  “Dammit, what has given it away?” the Duke of Somerset grunted and sat up straight. Luke laughed and leaned forward to pull the old man into an exceedingly rare embrace. “I am very relieved to see that you are not too angry with me,” the duke then added and returned the embrace with as powerful a hug himself.

  “It was a little too much of everything,” Luke answered his question. “In addition to that, the tray underneath your bed shows that you do not suffer from an unhealthy appetite, and no, I am not particularly angry. At least, not about your attempt to bring me to heel rather than simply ordering me to do what you would like me to do.” The gaze of the man in the bed sharpened. In moments such as these, Luke caught a glimpse of his own future and what he would be like at that age. Sometimes, in such moments, it felt as if he was not so much gazing into a magic mirror, which would age him, as looking into the polished surface of some secret apparatus, which enabled him to simply travel into the future.

  “A man who does not learn from his mistakes is a fool,” Luke replied and pulled out the white-coloured wig that had been stuffed underneath the pillows. Current fashion trends had long left artificial wigs behind, but within his own four walls, the duke still insisted on wearing it. The fake hair with its pigtail was not so much a remnant from his youth, as an expression of his former lifestyle at the royal court, which he still mourned. With the progressively advancing mental illness of George III, whom he had served for a long time, certain formalities, which the duke regarded highly, had simply vanished. At least, that was what he claimed. Luke had his doubts that everything really had been better and more beautiful in the times when his father was still a young man, but as long as the duke kept his eccentric habits inside his own four walls, Luke did not have a problem with it.

  “I made a mistake when I tried to force you into marriage with the eldest daughter of the Duke of Evesham. I am sorry, my son.” His father folded his hands on top of the blanket. Luke might almost have believed him, if there had not been a sly expression on the old fox’s face.

  “Escaping a marriage with Lady Annabelle was not the reason behind my decision to join the navy, Father. If it had been only that” – He shrugged his shoulders – “then the lady and I would have certainly come to some arrangement.”

  After all, she had been intelligent enough to make a pleasant wife, and yet was sufficiently modest to not make excessive demands on his attention. She would not have challenged him and would have left him in peace. Exactly what one should expect from a good wife, if one had been forced into the marriage. However, now he was able to answer his sense of duty, which he had regained during the war, and would still be able to remain free and unmarried. Annabelle’s younger sister, Lady Felicity, was of a completely different calibre.

  His father looked at him surprised. “So why did you leave?”

  “Because I had had enough of being Lord Layton. I wanted more from my day than parading around Hyde Park on a horse, or having drinks with my so-called friends in the club and discussing laws that pertain to people whose lives none of us would ever be able to understand. I wanted… more.”

  The only good thing about my old life was the boxing, Luke thought. The fist fights satisfied a side of him that was not related to women or his comparatively rather tame debaucheries with his friends. There was something incredibly freeing about a fight, man to man, relying solely on your own strength and abilities. It was not that he missed the cheers of the spectators, screaming and yelling for him, a stranger, dressed almost completely in black – apart from a white collar. Nor was it about the yearning expressions from the few women who dared to attend the illegal fights. No, it was the fact that he was completely on his own when he entered the ring.

  Not long after his first victories, they had dubbed him ‘the priest.’ If Luke was honest, he appreciated that respectful name more than his damned title from the peerage. A title he had had to do nothing for, other than being born at the right time and in the right bed.

  “Please tell me that you haven’t turned into a damned frog-eater since you left?” The duke’s blue eyes sparked full of anger. This very degrading description summed up everything the duke’s generation had learned to fear, which was the overthrow of the French aristocracy through the power of the peasants and the subsequent rise of Napoleon, the French emperor. “Or did the Americans make you lose your mind? What did they do to you when you were imprisoned, my son?”

  “Father” – Luke held up his hand to relax the situation – “please calm down. Nobody has done anything to me. First of all, I was not imprisoned for very long, for which I have you to thank.” He was unable to keep the bitterness out of his voice when he thought about the comrades he had had to leave behind. “And second of all, no – I have not since become a friend of the French, and also no revolutionary or anti-monarchist. I am simply a man who wants something else from his life. You, of all people, should understand this.”

  “I did what I did, because I wanted to secure your future,” the duke yelled, now seriously enraged. “I know that your mother has never forgiven me for leaving her alone for so long, but when has a Somerset ever neglected their duties to the crown? I did not want to be the one who would begin to do so.” This was an eternal topic between them, which more often than not, they tried to avoid. Luke’s mother had died from melancholia, which was the official term for the type of death she suffered. The truth was that she had lost her joy for life after receiving a false message, which told her that her husband had died. It had thrown her into a downward spiral that led straight to her death.

  When the duke returned half a year later, healthy and happy, from one of his excursions into enemy territory, it had already been too late. Maybe it had been a lucky thing, as her husband had brought home a young boy of eight years old whom he said was an orphan. However, this so-called orphan was the spitting image of the duke himself, and by the time the prince regent had promoted the young man to lesser nobility, there was no longer any doubt about his true identity.

  The existence of John Langleigh, who was now officially the Baron of Clundington Hall, had never been a problem for Luke. Quite the opposite. The boys had grown up together, until the day the duke had shipped his bastard son off to Scotland to live with distant relatives, the Langleighs, who had adopted him instead. The Duke of Somerset had never explained the reason why he had sent John away, and Luke had never asked. Back then, Luke had been pretty much preoccupied with other things.

  Luke got up. “I know, Father, and I am not blaming you for anything. I would just like to explain to you that I do not really care much for my life as Lord Layton, and that I am not planning on following in your footsteps when the time comes. All this snooping around and secrecy is not for me.” He turned towards the door.

  “You cannot simply deny who you are or your God-given birthright,” his father called after him. Luke did not react. Only when the door had almost fallen shut, did he hear the duke’s voice, which was suddenly much quieter and significantly less agitated, calling him by his name. “Luke, I am sorry.” He heard him say, and he stopped in his tracks. “Let us have a fresh start. Maybe we will be able to find a solution together, which will satisfy each one of us.”

  Was this even possible?

  “I will not dictate whom you should marry anymore,” the duke continued. A smile flashed across Luke’s face. “The most important thing to me is that you
get a son. And…” For a moment, there was silence, “… and that you will not go so far away again, my son.”

  Luke closed his eyes. He hesitated, but then he turned around and re-entered his father’s room. The relief on the old man’s face was clearly visible.

  “All right. I will marry and carry on the name.” Before his father regained too much of his old smug self-satisfaction, Luke continued, “I know that I will not be able to prevent you from introducing me to some young ladies you would prefer me to meet – only as long as we are clear that the final decision will be mine. Will you acknowledge that?” He wanted to add that the duke was a much better matchmaker than most of the mothers of those eligible young ladies, but Luke refrained from going overboard. He and his father had both made mistakes in the past.

  It was time for a new beginning.

  It was early in the afternoon, when Felicity and Lady Blankhurst, accompanied by a servant, went on their way to meet Pater O’Donnell. Lady Blankhurst had advised Felicity to forego wearing anything that would appear ornamental or bejewelled in any way, so as to not provoke the people living in poverty in that part of the city. Felicity had intended on doing so anyway, even though she doubted that even her most simple dress and least pompous bonnet would go unnoticed. Mud splatters would not immediately show on this particular travelling dress, which was grey with brown trimmings and a reinforced mud-coloured seam; if she and Lady Blankhurst were to travel more often to Whitechapel or Seven Dials, then it would probably be sufficient to just brush off the dress thoroughly, after each visit. She had asked Charlotte, who was Lady Blankhurst’s maid, to remove any redundant ornamentation from the grey-striped bonnet, and she was amazed at how small the head covering seemed without all the decoration that had been attached to it. When she noticed how longingly Charlotte had stroked the shiny ribbons and flowers, Felicity had given her the embellishments, and was incredibly happy to see the almost childlike joy beaming from the young woman’s face. Sometimes, only very little was needed to make another person happy.