by Lara Blunte
It was the first time he let the words trail. She could not squeeze his hand, but she was weeping now, and he heard it in her voice when she said, "There are things we cannot help. I couldn't help loving John. I was at fault for marrying you while knowing it."
There was a moment of silence, and she looked into his face, to see if he were still there.
"I understand," he said softly. "I could not love Bess, no matter how much she tried – and I think she did love me, and it was not only the money. It is the greatest tragedy of life, to love and not be loved..."
She thought about Hester, cold and white in her coffin. "Yes..."
Hugh drew a long, labored breath, "And the greatest happiness," he continued, "is to love and be loved. I hope you will now be happy, Georgiana, now that I can no longer see it and feel jealousy."
Georgiana did not say anything. She knew that her husband was dying, and that he had brought her here not so much to be forgiven, as to give her his blessing, though he did not mention John again.
Hugh died in the morning, and Georgiana wept at his wasted life as his body was covered by a shroud. There would be a funeral almost immediately because of the danger of contagion, but first she needed to see Ned.
She arrived by his bedside by six o'clock, and could not help a small tearful laugh as she took his hand, "Oh, but you are not doing badly at all!"
Ned smiled, his face covered with pustules but none near his eyes. His hand was able to grasp hers gratefully. "What joy it is to see you, Giana. I thought you a goner for a while," he said with the artless sincerity of a boy.
Georgiana smiled through her tears, "No, Ned, I am still here."
"The world is better for it, I swear!" he said. "Poor Hugh, but it was bad form of him to leave you!"
She caressed Ned's hair. "It's all right, Ned. People do not mean the worst things they do."
"Don't they?" he wondered.
She took over the sick room, because he was not as far gone as his brother, and she did for him everything that John and Dr. Hopkins had done for her. She opened windows, cooled his fever with cold cloths and, when he was better, she sat dabbing honey at his sores.
Hugh had been buried in the meantime, and she had been at the funeral alone, as there was no other family to be there with her, and friends and acquaintances wanted to stay far away from any signs of the disease.
Though Georgiana did not want to wear black by Ned's bedside, he did not seem to mind. He got better under her care, and within a week she was feeding him beef broth.
"Giana," he said, having long before adopted the nickname her younger sisters had for her. "You are an angel, you know."
She laughed at the way he said it, almost with nonchalance.
"Those things only live in heaven," she teased him.
"No, you are one. And now that poor Hugh is gone, I can be friends with Jack."
She put the spoon down and smiled at him. "Have you always wanted to be his friend?"
"Oh, yes, I miss him mountains – but he was so angry that I hardly wanted to be beaten by going to him, or screamed at by Hugh for trying. But now you can go between us, and tell him so, and he can help me too.”
Georgiana wondered at this boy, who was opening his mouth and expecting more broth, which she fed to him. When he had finished eating, and the tray was taken away he added, "John will have the money from the inheritance. Papa wanted him to, and it will not make me very poor. Besides, you have had such a passion for him, and you will be able to be together and not starve."
"Oh, Ned," Georgiana said, tears in her eyes. "It is two years too late, and yet it is welcome."
"Don't cry, Giana!" the boy said. "I am Earl and head of the family now, and everything will be all right. Well, whatever I can help, anyway!"
Ned did not mind when Georgiana, seeing that he was out of danger, asked to return to John; he understood it. He was able to get up and shuffle to Hugh's room, where he looked through a drawer in his desk and found a sealed letter. It was from John's father to him. Ned held it up, "You must take it to John. Again, he will be angry – the temper on him! But tell him I could hardly help the things Hugh used to do. Make sure you tell him that I miss him!"
Georgiana put the letter in her reticule, kissed Ned, and gave strict instructions to the servants as to the next steps in his recovery, though with youthful resilience he told her she was exaggerating. Then, in her mourning dress, she went outside to find a carriage waiting for her.
"You must drive towards Woodbridge," she instructed the coachman. "I shall tell you where to turn."
On the way Georgiana managed not to think of all the people who had died in the last two years, of all the sorrow. She managed, with a heart full of hope, to think of the future, and to see brightness in it, for she believed that there had been so much grief that there could be no more.
When, hours later, she saw the fields that belonged to John she knocked on the ceiling of the carriage for the coachman to stop, flung the door open and jumped down with the swiftness of a girl.
She began running towards John, because the day was blue and fine, and she had the same generosity in accepting good things as in desiring them for others. She remembered her wish, months ago, that she could be rid of everything, that she could just go to him. She took his father's letter out of her reticule, which she dropped, and put it inside her stays. As she kept running, she started to take off the bracelets that were always on her wrists, and her rings. She took off her wedding ring, her fur cloak, her hair pins.
With her locks falling down her back she ran and ran, and she removed her black dress too, because she did not want mourning anywhere near them anymore. She ran in her stays, her white under gown and petticoats, and when she saw the light in John's window she started to laugh, and to run faster.
Epilogue: Summer 1762
Halford -- April 4th, 1760
My dearest son,
I write these three words meaning every one of them: you are mine, you are so very dear, and you are my son.
As I write, I hope with a father's heart that you are safe. Your mother, with that fearless spirit of hers, says she knows you are, and that you will soon return. I hope also you have been spared the worst that a man can see in a war.
John, I told you that you were my true born son, because you were born out of love, and not out of a marriage of duty. I would like to think you are true born also because you can choose your destiny.
I do not know what exact part birth plays in a man's character: certainly there are bad people born high and low alike. But I have seen in my life that the existence of a nobleman is a constrained thing: it seems that all is set and decided for us, before we are even on Earth.
Why did I marry, at twenty-three, a woman with whom I had nothing in common, and hardly knew? Why did I meet the woman I would love to this day three years later, and was not able to marry her?
We are like prize animals, kept in cages and well fed, who must yet perform as needed, and show ourselves to have the necessary pedigree. The license and abuse with which the high-born at times conduct themselves probably come from a material ease, an excess of things, but also from an impatient need to express something other than this constraint.
You are true born because you may write your life, and this terrible thing that I did, to have a son and not give him the privilege of the law or of my name, may yet prove to be the key to your freedom -- though it may anger you to read this, and you may only see the injury of it now.
Of all the men in the world who might have freedom, I wish it for you, because you are kind and honorable, and you will use it well.
There is a girl, John, who comes to see me often. She reads me your letters to her, and sometimes stops quite short, and blushes, skips paragraphs and turns the page, and you cannot know how much she makes me smile, and how I love the affection that exists between the two of you.
Again with a father's heart I wish you and this girl to be together in the light of day
, without shame, as your mother and I ought to have been.
I am leaving you 20,000 pounds. You will think it too great a sum, though I think it not enough, but it will set you up in whatever you want to do and be. Above all, John, it's a sum that will allow you to protect this girl.
When I was younger I wished for a daughter, as they are such comfort to fathers, and bring such joy -- but the life of a woman is a perilous and precarious thing. This girl does not yet know how poor her poor father is. I feel for Mr. Blake, who realizes there is only himself between his girls and utter destitution.
You are proud and may think of refusing the money, and making your own way, but I beg you to accept it for the sake of this girl and her sisters. You will be able to do much good, and put the fears of two fathers to rest, and I know you will want to do this.
Above all, my dear, I know you will want this girl to know nothing but happiness in her life, and her happiness lies with you. She will be happy if she can marry you, and be safe, and her sisters too.
I would never want to see that little face and that loving soul marred by any sorrow, and neither would you, so accept your inheritance, and marry her.
If the two of you know half the love that your mother and I have known, you will be happy indeed, but something tells me that when you marry Georgiana you will know double our happiness, and this fills me with happiness too.
May every second, every minute, every hour, every day of your lives be blessed and filled with joy, my darling boy!
Your papa
John folded the letter carefully, kissed it, and put it inside the drawer of his desk. He did not today reflect, as he had done when he had read it months before, with what love and wisdom his father had tried to keep him and Georgiana together, and away from harm. He had had a knot in his throat upon reading the letter for the first time, not only because it had brought a father whom he missed back to life, but also because he had realized how much pain, sadness, and danger would have been averted if he had been given his inheritance two years before.
Yet he knew that there was no need to look back, or wish anything different, as he heard Dotty's voice outside calling him, "John! John! Come and see!"
He ran down the stairs and outside. In the distance he saw their new house being built, with the recommendations of all that Cecily and Dotty thought would be amusing and comfortable, even a secret passage and a room for dancing. Upon his remonstration that they would soon be married and have their own houses, they had protested that they had had enough talk of marriage for a while, and would not go away until they had quite exhausted the happiness of being together. John had smiled, thinking they were nowhere near that time, and had given in to almost all their whims.
The three sisters were amidst the golden fields of wheat in their summer dresses and their straw hats. They saw him at the gate and started running towards him, Dotty with a yellow chick in her hand to show him, all of them laughing.
But his wife, Georgiana, wanted to get to him first, and she untied the ribbon beneath her chin so that her hat would fly off and not hold her back.
"You are cheating!" Cecily called after her.
Georgiana did not care, for she did get to John first.
And in her fine dark eyes he saw nothing but joy, and that was all he ever longed to see.
THE END
The saga of the Halford title continues in The Last Earl, set in 1856, available now in Amazon.
The third title of the trilogy, This Hell of Mine, which takes place in 1947, will also be available in Amazon by January 2016.
