“That all sounds very fine, Your Grace,” the man replied, grinning insolently. “But I have heard from the others in employment here that you’ve been treating the men here as your own private messenger service. Why should I believe that there’s really anything of consequence in this here note of yours?”
“What?” Andrew blinked, scarcely able to believe the evidence of his own ears. Could it really be that something as precious as Rebecca’s very life was being put at further risk by the petty quibbling of a power-crazed guard?
“Now listen, my good man,” Andrew said, doing his best to maintain his calm. After all, he needed to keep a clear head if he was going to be able to help Rebecca. Aside from that, nothing else really mattered. “I beg your pardon if I have offended you in any way, but I really must emphasize to you that this matter is the gravest of emergencies.”
“Everyone in here thinks that their affairs are an emergency,” said the gaoler, gesturing expansively at the row of cells, which emitted their usual range of yells, shrieks, and supplications in response. “Everyone thinks that their life is more important than anyone else’s.”
He grinned. “Look here, Your Grace. You are at the mercy of the law, same as the rest of these poor fools. I would suggest that you stop carrying on as if you were any better than the rest of ‘em.”
“I do not hold myself to be superior to any man on earth,” Andrew said, managing to hold his composure, despite the fact that he would have liked nothing more than to seize the grinning fool by the collar and bang his head against the stone wall. “It is not for myself that I beg your help, but for the safety and wellbeing of a lady — an innocent lady, a kind and loving lady.”
“Ah yes, the lady.” The man grinned again. “The same lady who visited you here in your cell, I suppose?” His smirk broadened. “Must be a fine sort of lady to lower herself to visit a man in prison. We’ve all seen the comings and goings, Your Grace. We can draw our own conclusions.”
“If you are suggesting some slight upon the lady’s honor, then you shall have me to contend with,” Andrew barked, his fury getting the better of him at last.
“A very grave prospect, Your Grace,” the man said, eying the bars of the cell. “But I meant no harm, sir. Just a joke, you see. Rough men like the likes of me make rough jokes all the time. We mean no harm by it, sir.”
“Prove it,” Andrew said, managing to get his tone back under control. “Look here, sir, it will not be very long before I am free of this cell? How do I know this? Because I know who committed the crime for which I am imprisoned and if you help me, then you too will be part of bringing this person to justice. Therefore I ask you, as a gentleman, to do me the service of sending this note as quickly as you can.”
The man was still looking at him sideways. Clearly, he was considering it, but he was also enjoying the temporary power over a duke far too much to relinquish easily.
“You will be paid for your service,” Andrew said wearily. “Handsomely. But I cannot pay you a penny until I am sprung from this gaol and for that reason you need to help me.”
The man stood still for a while. Clearly, the prospect of money — even if it was merely a hypothetical prospect — was far too tempting for him to simply walk away from. Yet he clearly did not want to relinquish his position of power.
At length, however, he seemed to relent. Perhaps it was Andrew’s beseeching face.
Although more likely it is the thought of the guineas in my pocket-book, Andrew thought with grim fury.
“I’ll get this note to Godwin Hall,” the man said at last.
“As quickly as possible?” Andrew said eagerly. “It is a matter of life and death.”
“As quickly as possible,” the man conceded, with the same insolent smile. “Your Grace.”
Chapter 41
Grandmamma Horatia had not been expecting the note. She rarely received correspondence, and in her experience, it was usually such bad news that she preferred not to receive anything at all. Anyone she had ever cared about had always been near enough to her that she had never needed to write to them.
And now most of the people she cared about were dead.
When the maid practically ran into her private sitting room with her cheeks flushed and her cap askew, telling her that she had an ‘urgent note from Mr. Andrew’, it was all that Grandmamma Horatia could do to calm the girl down and do her best to understand what was happening.
When she unfolded the paper, it was with shaking fingers - partly from her age, but mostly from her fear. After all, it had been a very long time since she had received anything that might properly have been called ‘good news’.
And this was hardly good news.
She read the words twice, certain at first that she could not have properly understood their meaning.
Then, once it had sunk in, she stood up so fast that her skirts knocked over a small table.
She left the note lying on the floor. At that moment, Grandmamma Horatia forgot her age. She forgot that she was old and frail and a woman. All she could think was that her precious girl — the granddaughter she had never had and always longed for — was in danger.
With all the speed that she had remaining in her old and tired bones, she rose to her feet and hurried out of the room.
Grandmamma -
Caroline Swanson poisoned Charles. She was trying to kill Rebecca and administered arsenic to Charles by accident.
You need to keep Rebecca safe from her.
Andrew.
Chapter 42
Caroline was standing in the threshold of the little sitting room, wearing a facial expression that Rebecca had never seen on her before. It was the expression of someone who knew that the game was up, but was not yet sure whether they had won or lost.
“Forgotten about me, had you?” Caroline remarked in a strangely blank tone. “That is hardly surprising. You always do forget everything that doesn’t directly concern you.”
“Forgotten about you?” Rebecca glanced distractedly from the little bottle in her hand to her friend standing in the doorway. The rational part of her mind understood perfectly well how these two things were connected, but the loyalty in her heart, her faith in Caroline, refused to admit the connection.
I am sure that there is a perfectly innocent explanation. There has to be…
“My dear Caroline, if I have been distracted over the past days, you must not take it as a slight. It is nothing personal…”
“…It never is!” Caroline burst out, and all at once her composure was shattered, her face displaying a fit of anger that Rebecca had not seen since they were both young girls. She stepped inside the room and closed the door behind her.
The two young ladies were quite alone, as they had been a thousand times before. Yet for some reason that consisted primarily of animal instinct, Rebecca realized with a jolt that she was afraid.
“What is it that you mean…?” She wanted to end the question with the affectionate address of ‘my dear friend’ but that same animal instinct forbade her to use those words, so the question merely tailed off into silence.
This strange Caroline, this woman whom Rebecca had never encountered before, would surely not react well to the friendly address.
“I mean that you are always able to find time for everything,” Caroline said. “Everything apart from me. I am a poor despised creature in this world, and no one has done more to make me feel despised than you have.”
Tears filled Rebecca’s eyes at the accusation. She had always been keenly aware of her relative privilege over Caroline and had done her best to ensure that her friend did not feel neglected or inferior.
Yet clearly, I have failed.
Caroline, who had always seemed so stoical, had always accepted her fate and done her best to support Rebecca, was now throwing these cruel accusations at her. They were all the more cruel for the fact that Rebecca knew, deep down, that there was some grain of truth to them.
She had been occupied
since the death of Charles’ father — occupied with the awful prospect of her marriage, occupied with Charles’ death, occupied with her passion and fear for Andrew.
And, in the midst of all this, perhaps it was true that Caroline had been ignored.
Yet, try as she might, she could not understand how this unkindness had led to the little glass bottle in her hand.
“Caroline, this is rat poison.”
To be precise, it was arsenic, and they both knew it. Yet Rebecca could not bring herself to say the word. If she allowed her lips to form the word ‘arsenic’ then it would turn into an accusation that would be impossible to retract, and her friendship would be broken beyond any possibility of repair.
“Yes, it is rat poison.” Caroline’s lip curled. “I wished to kill a rat.”
“What is it that you mean?” Rebecca hated how foolish she sounded, but she could not make sense of this new version of Caroline. The woman that she thought she knew would never have spoken in this way, nor would her eyes ever have gleamed with this strange and manic fire.
“Oh, do not pretend to be so naive, Rebecca,” Caroline replied coldly. “It is very tiresome for those around you. It is true that you are not very clever, but nor are you as stupid as you sometimes pretend to be.”
Caroline’s words felt like a series of hard slaps to the face. Here was Caroline, who would always far sooner hold her tongue than speak an unkind word about anyone. Caroline, who so often had reprimanded Rebecca for her sharpness in her dealings with others.
Caroline, who was now looking at Rebecca with such an expression of icy coldness that her entire body felt frozen by it.
“What is the meaning of this, Caroline?” Rebecca asked. Her voice was attempting to sound imperious, demanding, but she could not prevent a hint of childlike desperation from creeping in.
“The meaning of all this, Rebecca,” Caroline replied, with a dreamy, slightly manic expression beginning to creep over her features, “Was that I loved Charles. I loved him fully, wholeheartedly, desperately. The way that you would never be able to love anyone. It was the kind of love that can only be experienced by someone with nothing else to lose.”
“You loved Charles?” Rebecca echoed.
All at once, a series of incidents began to fall into place.
She has been different, unlike herself, for a long time.
She thought back to the evening of a ball the previous year. The way that she herself had been doing her best to avoid Charles all evening, and then seeing from a distance, Caroline smiling at Charles as they bowed to each other in the opening chords of a dance.
The way that, that same night, Caroline had been smiling and coy, quite different to how she had been at other balls on other nights. She had been happy, flushed as if she was nursing a precious secret. Rebecca had seen that expression on the faces of enough young girls to have vaguely discerned that Caroline had developed an infatuation for someone.
But she had been tight-lipped. Unusually so. And Rebecca had not persisted for very long in trying to find out who had elicited such a reaction from her friend.
And then there was her strange pallor and peculiar response when Rebecca had told her that she had been promised to Charles. I probably ought to have suspected such a thing…For what it is worth, I also wish that it had been Andrew who was chosen as your husband.
Not to mention, of course, her variously distant and inconsolable behavior since Charles’ death.
Had Rebecca been paying proper attention, she felt that she should have been able to collate all this strange behavior into the realization of what her friend was going through. But she had not been looking for it, and so had not seen it.
“I wrote to him,” Caroline said. “I never sent them, of course, but I wrote to him every day nonetheless. I imagined what our life would be like together.
“I have never known such a terrible blow in all my life as when I discovered that you were engaged to Charles. It was a double blow, firstly the pain of knowing that he would never be mine, and secondly the pain of realizing that he would be married to a creature who would never care for him the way I would. A cruel and indifferent creature. You.”
Rebecca felt like she was being attacked by a barrage of arrows on all sides. The accusations rained down on her. That she was foolish. Complacent. A bad friend and an unkind person.
She almost became submerged in these feelings until she remembered what the real heart of the matter was, and from that realization she found the strength to ask the question that was threatening to drift out of sight. The question which happened to be the only one that really mattered.
“But if you loved Charles so much, Caroline, why in heaven’s name did you kill him?”
“Kill him?” Caroline gave a laugh that sounded more like a shriek. “Why should I have ever wished to kill the one who is the only thing that ever brought me any happiness? No, Rebecca, it was not Charles whom I wished to kill.”
Fear flooded Rebecca. Her eyes darted around on instinct to assure herself where the doors were. “What exactly is it that you mean?”
“Why could you not simply have drunk the glass of punch that was offered to you that night?” Caroline’s hair was starting to come undone from its arrangement, and her cheeks were marble white. She looked quite possessed. “Why could you not just have died and saved us all from the misery of losing Charles?”
“So you mean to say…” Rebecca felt as though her heart might collapse. The friendship that she had relied upon for so many years, that she had believed in implicitly, was proving itself to be a nightmarish sham. “That the target with the poisoning… that was me?”
“Of course it was you!” Caroline looked utterly enraged that it had taken Rebecca so long to reach this conclusion. “Why should I ever have wished to kill Charles? I loved him more dearly than anything else in this unkind, indifferent world.”
“You… you did?” Rebecca said. She still could not believe that it was not all some dreadful, poor-taste joke. Perhaps Charles had been in on the whole thing and he would shortly appear to laugh at Rebecca for thinking that he was dead.
“What?” Caroline snapped. “You think that because you did not want him yourself that it is impossible that anyone else should have cared for him? Are you so incapable of seeing anything beyond yourself, Rebecca?”
“It was not intended as a slight on you in any way that I did not like him…”
“Do you not think,” Caroline hissed, “that I have not spent enough of my life as your chaperone, your companion? Do you not think that I tire of conducting my existence entirely within the circle of your orbit?”
“Caroline, I never had any notion before that you felt this way,” Rebecca said. Now that Caroline was saying all these things the realizations were hitting her as rapidly and as hard as a succession of waves in a stormy sea. “Truly, had I known…”
“Had you known you would have what?” Caroline’s voice rose so high that she started to sound a little deranged. “You would have patronized me further? Given me one of your old gowns that you did not want anymore? Pawn off a man whom you did not wish to dance with on me?”
Rebecca’s eyes drifted down to the diamond brooch on the floor, the one she had given to Caroline. Certainly, there was a grain of truth to all that Caroline was saying, but she simply could not understand how these things had been so warped in Caroline’s mind that they had led her to commit murder.
“Charles is dead,” Caroline said. Tears were pouring down her face. “Charles is dead, and Andrew is as good as dead, and still, somehow, you are going to be a duchess. That horrible Lord Peregrine wants to marry you, and I think you deserve one another. Has there ever been a creature in the world as smug and complacent as you are? Had you any thought of what would happen to me after you were married?”
“I thought we had agreed that you would come with me,” Rebecca said. All at once tears were starting to come. She had never felt so betrayed in all her life. “I thoug
ht that we would remain together.”
“You assumed!” Caroline replied. “You assumed that I would be content to follow you around for the rest of your life. You assumed that I had no wish for a home or a husband for myself. You assumed that I should be content to see you parade around the country as a duchess.”
“I never wanted to be a duchess,” Rebecca whispered, the tears now dripping down her cheeks. “I only ever wanted to have a husband that loved me and to have my dearest friend by my side.”
Perhaps part of me still hopes that this is a joke. I want my friend back.
The Obscure Duchess of Godwin Hall: A Historical Regency Romance Novel Page 24
