Quite rudely, Charlotte interrupted Annette out of eagerness and disbelief. “The duke?”
“No, Miss, just a Lord Paul Hareden.”
Stupefied, Charlotte looked at Father, who appeared as perplexed as she felt. She didn’t know how Paul would have found her parents’ home. Or why he would have come to it.
“Should I show him in, Mr. Masbeck?”
As a general rule, Annette, a thin woman with curly dark hair who was clearly rather nervous in this situation, had not really interacted with the aristocracy during her time working there. Or at all before then, possibly. The maid had only been hired within the last eighteen months, so Charlotte did not actually know much about her background or references.
Annette was shuffling from foot to foot, and Charlotte didn’t think she noticed it. Lord Wenwood might have been the only aristocrat who’d called upon them at home, and he only ever did so rarely.
“Yes, of course, Annette.” When she’d gone, he asked Charlotte, “The duke’s brother, I take it?”
“Yes.”
“Are you acquainted?”
“We are,” said Charlotte. “I still cannot think of why he would come here.”
At least the parlor was well in order. Father recently had the chairs reupholstered in a warm umber color and both of her parents were generally tidy people who did not let things fall into disorder. Paul wouldn’t judge negatively even if they had, but Father was house-proud and it would have galled him to receive any stranger if the room was not impeccable.
Paul entered the room with a somber expression, and Charlotte knew instantly that he could not have come with good news.
*
Jeremy knew he was in trouble when he awoke in his bedroom with Miss Masbeck and Paul at either side of his bed. What in blazes were both of them doing here? Was he dreaming? Miss Masbeck sat calmly with a book, but Paul was pacing on the antique rug so fervently that Jeremy feared for its lifespan. It had come from some part of the Ottoman Empire, if his grandfather were to be believed.
Paul did not miss the small movement of Jeremy’s head on his pillow. “Ah, you lived. Lovely. I wasn’t ready to manage the estate, you know.”
Damn it. “I wasn’t trying to…” He was so hoarse. Blast everything. “Can I have some water? I wasn’t trying to hurt myself. That said, I don’t know how I got here.”
Paul did not budge to pour him a glass, but Miss Masbeck did. She brought it to his hand carefully, leaving her book behind in the chair. “The physician said all we could do was wait for you to come around,” she said.
“What happened?”
“You must have taken too much laudanum,” said Paul. His words were curt and clipped. “Don’t bother lying to me. I know you’ve been dipping back into the stuff again. And don’t worry, I kept the bottle. Took it from your pocket. No one knows but us. Well, and Higgins, who found you unconscious in the library. I believe he saw the bottle.”
Higgins would not tell a soul, Jeremy knew.
“What does everyone else think, then?” Jeremy struggled to remember what had happened. He dimly recalled drinking in conjunction with… oh, hell. That must have done him in. If spirits and opiates had been enough to get him through an amputation, then certainly it could make him pass out. As he looked at Miss Masbeck’s face, normally so vibrant, with its currently white cast, he determined it would be the final time he dabbled with the stuff. He tried to muster a smile for her. He’d gotten through weaning himself off, once. He could do it again.
“I’ve told them you’ve just taken ill. Isabel might have worked out the truth, but as for the servants, they’re just worried for you, Jeremy.”
“Isabel is actually in the manor?” What a rare thing. “Ah, and you interrupted Miss Masbeck’s visit home?”
“I can arrange something else in the future,” said Miss Masbeck. “This was…” she looked to Paul helplessly, but he did not come to her aid by elaborating. He was far too worked up. Jeremy was glad to see her, at any rate. “I am pleased to be here.”
Paul was livid. He was just barely able to control his fury enough to talk with civility. “How can you have gone back on your word? You promised.”
Jeremy remained silent.
“Will I have to stay with you, again, while it works its way out? While the poison filters away?” Brimming with restless movement, Paul drummed his fingers on the footboard.
“I don’t think so.”
“How do you not know? How much of it have you been taking—apart from today?”
“Not much. Not much at all. Enough to calm me down—”
“So the potential is there for it to be difficult for you to stop simply by virtue of how frequently you’ve been—”
“Oh, come on, man, it is not nearly as much as I was taking when I returned!”
“That’s not the point. You shouldn’t have lied—you should have spoken to me. I knew you were unhappy, particularly recently, but I thought you had the sense not to lapse.”
Indignant, Jeremy raised his voice. “Are you going to lecture me about sense, then? Lady Rosin’s father ever catch up with you, eh? What about her brother?”
It was Miss Masbeck who spoke next. She looked first at Paul, then at Jeremy. “Arguing isn’t productive, and at this volume, everyone will hear. I believe, your grace, that you didn’t mean to hurt yourself.” Triumphantly, Jeremy started to shoot his brother an I told you so glance. “But, it does worry me that you felt the need to return to something so obviously harmful.”
It may have made him simple or in denial, but he did not quite see it the same way they did. He was not abusing it as badly as they believed, but it was his bad fortune to mix just a little too enthusiastically, he supposed. It must have been the excess wine. He could dimly remember taking a carafe to the library. And it was one thing to imbibe so much when one was in the throes of abject pain or fear, but another when one was going about one’s daily life.
“You really had no intention of harming yourself?” Paul asked.
“None.” Jeremy let shame at having worried them wash through him, then promptly moved forward without expressing it. “Did Higgins summon you? What time is it?”
“Evening,” said Miss Masbeck. “But only just.”
“He sent around a man to the Albany. Of course, he called in the physician from Aldbury first to ascertain you were in no danger.”
Good man, was Higgins. He could probably intuit that Jeremy would not want anyone but Paul so involved. Paul, and Miss Masbeck. He wanted to ask his brother if he knew what had transpired between them, or if he just assumed that Jeremy was done for and Miss Masbeck was the only one for him. I should be embarrassed that she’s seeing me like this.
But he found that he could not be, because he was too calmed and cheered by her simply being there.
“I didn’t mean to worry you or cause a fuss, Paul. Really, I’ll be fine.” They were not hollow words, but they probably would not quite combat the horrible scenes Paul had witnessed a little over two years ago. To Jeremy’s credit, he had not thought he’d become addicted, but it became very apparent when he tried to cease using the opiates that he had been. Some men willingly took too much, he knew, but he hadn’t used anything recreationally. He’d always taken it to sleep—the nightmares in those days were horrendous and kept him up; he often kept reliving his amputation—or to get rid of pain or nerves.
Intentions apparently didn’t matter as much as the substance did. Or more to the point, the substance did not care why someone ingested it.
It had taken weeks of hell, quite simply, to stop needing, and even longer than that to stop thinking he still needed.
Evidently that didn’t matter to him when he sought succor from the stuff again more recently. He supposed he was lucky that he had forgotten, or as was more accurate, not thought about it for ages.
Christ above, maybe he had been abusing it. He couldn’t say with certainty, any more, that he had not been trying to find something th
rough mild but constant intoxication.
“I know you will.”
“You do?”
“I’m not leaving you to your own devices until I’m convinced that you are.”
“Oh, that won’t look at all suspicious,” said Jeremy. He finished his glass of water and leaned over to put it on his nightstand.
“I often visit. I don’t know what would be considered suspicious about that.” Paul threw his hands in the air and added, “I shall inform everyone who needs to know that you are awake and fine.”
Once they were alone, Miss Masbeck turned to him and broke her silence. She was sitting in the chair once more. “I should not be in your bedroom, your grace.”
Still, she did not get up. Her graceful hands were folded in her lap, and her dress matched the green tones of the ducal apartment. Jeremy hadn’t chosen the green; his father had. Until now, he had not cared much for it either way. But seeing Miss Masbeck’s eyes mirror the celadon, her gray catching the milky green, set him to thinking that he could learn to enjoy it.
“The sticklers would say my secretary probably shouldn’t be here, at all, unless it is to help draft a will.”
She scowled. “No one is dying today, thank God. Though if I am asked, I will say that is what I was doing.”
With a chuckle, Jeremy thought of how deeply he appreciated this woman. How much he wanted them to be partners in every way. “How did Paul find you in London?”
“I think he could find anybody that he set his mind to, but in the end, he asked Lord Wenwood where his steward lived.”
“And he just somehow assumed you would want to be at my side?”
“Or that you would want me here,” she countered. Even in the setting sun’s ember-like light, he could see her cheeks shifting into pink.
“He would not be wrong.”
“I should not have gone in the carriage. I am sure someone saw us.” She reflexively smoothed her gown.
“If they did, the gossipmongers will be on him and not you. I hate to say it, Miss Masbeck, but you’re an unknown,” he replied, smiling, teasing. “And anyway, it would not be the first time such a thing has been said or written about him. I do believe there was actually a caricature once, about, oh, a year ago.”
She went from smiling to somber. “Has there ever been one of you?” She brought her right hand to her mouth in horror. “Oh, what a thing to ask. Heavens, just forget I said it.”
“No, I don’t believe anyone would go after me in the same way they might imagine they are able to go after him. Still, I was surprised someone tried.”
There was so much he wanted to say to her, so much that was trapped in his mouth behind his closed lips. He feared it would sound trite, that she would dismiss him as being changeable, but he had to explain somehow that it had taken meeting her to understand how very wrong he’d been in constructing so much of his life.
He’d thought he was being deliberate, but his thoughtfulness was merely a way to insulate himself from great disappointment and loss.
“I… Lord Hareden, there was an instant when I did think you were in peril,” she said. “Before your brother explained what Higgins had told him. He gave me such a fright,” she said with a low, reluctant laugh. “I thought only the most urgent… I thought only a terrible thing could have brought him to our door. I was terrified. Things can happen so quickly, can they not?”
“Yes, they can,” said Jeremy, as he sat up in the bed. Someone had undressed him and put him in looser-fitting, older clothes, a white cotton shirt with no adornments and dark blue pants. He was not under all the bedclothes, but they’d also put a light, white quilt over him. “Miss Masbeck, I beg you to call me Jeremy. I know my brother has beaten me to shedding the formalities, but he often does.”
“You—you know what, precisely?”
Sitting up straight against the pillows and his headboard, he said, “That he has given you permission to use his Christian name, and that you are too decorous to use it when you are not alone.”
Stunned, Miss Masbeck seemed to take this in and think about the implications. “You must know, too, that he and I are not at all—”
“Oh, no, I do know that,” said Jeremy, grinning. He would not tell her that he had actually overheard some of the conversation within which the permission had been granted, and allow her to think that he’d just somehow deduced the information himself. “It was Paul who first surmised that I had feelings for you. He’d never dare, and anyway, you aren’t really his type. Too quiet. Probably not buxom enough.” Damn it, you arse, what are you saying to her? “No offense meant.”
“Feelings?”
“Oh yes.” Relieved she was not appalled that he’d referenced her bosom, which he wanted dearly to see under her delicate, white fichu, he nodded.
“But you are married.”
“I know. I hope to amend that state,” he said, softly.
The dying sun’s rays struck her face at such an angle to make her appear radiant, almost angelic. “For me?”
“For you, and for myself. Until we met, I did not understand how hollow I was. But you, you changed everything for me.”
Chapter Thirteen
Things felt dreamlike, though as a rule, Charlotte never recalled her dreams. But this was better, she thought, than any natural dream. The more the duke spoke, the more convinced she was that he would be all right. Everyone had vices, and she’d meant it when she said she believed he did not mean to hurt himself. She hoped that this unfortunate accident would be a reminder of why he had stopped in the first instance, and had faith that if anyone could manage the self-discipline necessary for abstaining, it was him. She had a feeling that his good sense would prevail.
Until he pressed on to the current topic—his feelings—she hadn’t considered that his mind was, perhaps, addled. She could not quite bring herself to call him Jeremy, either, no matter how much she wanted to. The last person she’d kissed who had suggested she be so familiar had, not to put too fine a point on things, used her.
If she had been more important, a higher mark, he could have truly ruined her.
“What did I change for you?” she wanted to know.
Yet all she could keep thinking about was the consuming, cold fear that had swamped her as soon as she saw Paul in the comforting space of her childhood home, appearing like the god of war, or death, in the doorway. If she’d thought that she could do without Lord Hareden, that would have been the moment to convince her otherwise. Never in her life had she felt so acutely for another human being.
Her mind had immediately jumped to the dreadful assumption that Paul was there because something ghastly had happened to his brother. It was all she could think, because lords did not usually summon their elder brother’s female secretaries without giving any notice. Not that there were any other situations like hers that she knew of.
Then, in a carriage marked with the Hareden family crest, crimson on sable, Paul explained that the duke had been found unconscious in the library. Paul wanted Charlotte to come back to the manor with him mostly for company and added morale. There was no reason, he’d said, to suspect anything too dire. He should have started with that.
Charlotte could see from the second he introduced himself to her father that Paul was frightened. Being stalwart and unable to decline a friend in need—even a friend whose world was so different from hers—she’d followed him out of the house without delay. She should not have for the sake of maintaining good appearances, it was true. A woman did not go in a man’s carriage unaccompanied unless that man was a husband or relative. She couldn’t help it.
In that moment of assuming the duke was in dire trouble, her heart had made up her mind: she did love him. That might not mean they had a future together, but she would not shy away from that love by rationalizing it into the background.
“You woke me from slumber,” Lord Hareden said, sounding dreamy himself. “I was sleeping my way through life.” He considered, then added, “My marriage,
predominately. And that isn’t fair to either myself or Lady Hareden. I want more out of a partnership.”
“It is the way of the world, is it not? Marriages are very often unfair.” The way he was speaking would have made her swoon, except she felt that of the two of them, she needed to untangle what exactly he was proposing. She didn’t know if he was entirely aware.
“Yes, but that doesn’t mean the world cannot change. If I am to be on the vanguard, then that is the way of it.”
“Think of what you are saying,” said Charlotte, all but pleading. She stared at him, trying not to be too distracted by his muscular form. Even though he was prone and half of him was under a quilt, she was inordinately taken by the shape of his legs. “What it means! For your reputation, your aspirations…” He had to have considered the absolute murder it would be on him.
“I have,” he responded. “Better and more thoroughly than other men who might have thought about it, I would wager.”
“What of your son?” That was the first thing she said that made a shadow cross Lord Hareden’s face.
“No matter what might happen, I will still treat him as my own. If it transpires that his titles are taken from him…”
And his ability to inherit! thought Charlotte.
“Which would, naturally, be a consequence, then I suppose that I am thankful for the fact that he is still very young. He has not had much time to get used to things as they are.”
That could indeed be a mercy. Although at some point in the future, the child would become a boy who wondered why some of the ton treated him differently. Then all of the truth would come out whether or not Lord Hareden wanted it to. She gaped at him, half-disbelieving that they were even having this conversation at all.
“It will take time,” she said.
What a stupid thing to say. Of course he knew it would take time. It would take time whether or not it ended in his favor at all. Nothing was promised, and Charlotte considered just how long the distance between now and then could be stretched. Her soul decided it did not matter, that she would happily walk it. Had she not always been an inveterate rambler?
Duke of Disgrace (Dukes of Destiny Book 3) Page 23
