The Obscure Duchess of Godwin Hall: A Historical Regency Romance Novel

by Hamilton, Hanna

  “That is so like you, Rebecca! To say that you never wished to be a duchess.”

  Caroline had started to snatch at her knot of black hair as if she was tired of its tidy arrangement and the deceptive appearance that all was in order.

  "Only someone like you, someone with no concern that they would not have enough money to buy a new pair of gloves for the season, someone who has never gone to a ball without her dance card filling up, someone who has never had to seriously entertain what it might be like to be a poor and unloved woman in a world that despises such persons, and casts them aside!”

  “I would never have cast you aside,” Rebecca replied, her voice heavy with misery. With a father like mine, I have had to make my own family. I always thought that you were my sister in every way that mattered.

  “You cast me aside every day!” Caroline responded. “You cast me aside whenever it suits you, whenever there is someone else you would prefer to talk to. You assume that I will always be there waiting for you when you wish to be with me again, but you have never asked me how I felt about waiting!

  “You got the only thing I ever wanted, and then you treated it as though it were nothing.”

  “I am sorry,” Rebecca said, her voice shaking. She was not sure how she had found herself apologizing to a murderess, but the fact was that she was sorry.

  Caroline appeared to be unmoved by her apology, her tears, her distress. On the contrary, they merely seemed to make her angrier.

  “Perhaps I ought to kill you now, while I have the chance,” Caroline said. All at once, she seemed to spring toward the mantlepiece and then wheeled around with a paper knife in her hand.

  It could not have been very sharp, and Rebecca was confident that she would be able to overpower Caroline if it came to a physical reckoning. Nonetheless, the sight of the young woman with the silver knife in her hand, her cheeks flushed in deranged fury, and her hair coming loose from her bun, made the fear leap in Rebecca’s veins like quicksilver.

  Never in her life had she found herself in such an acute physical danger before.

  But then the tension in the room was broken by the sudden interruption of a familiar voice.

  “That is enough,” came a voice from the doorway. A feeling of relief flooded through Rebecca’s whole body. She looked to the doorway to see Grandmamma Horatia standing there, leaning upon her stick.

  “Enough,” she said again. She turned to Caroline, and her composed face flickered for a second with a combination of grief and fury. “We have heard your confession and will be acting accordingly.”

  “Confess?” Caroline sprang away from Grandmamma Horatia. “I confess to nothing.”

  “Now come, my dear.” For a moment Grandmamma Horatia’s voice dropped into its habitual gentleness, and Rebecca marveled at her ability to find compassion for everyone, even for the woman who had been responsible for the death of her grandson. “No one will believe your word against mine and Rebecca’s.”

  “You vile old woman,” Caroline said, her voice shaking with hysterical anger. “What you mean to say is that because you two are rich and I am poor, you will be believed and I will not.”

  “That is not what I mean to say, although perhaps what you observe is true. And I concede that that is not fair,” Grandmamma Horatia said, shaking her head as if in rueful agreement. But when she spoke again, her voice shook with a wave of anger all of its own. “But what is also not just is the fact that my grandson is dead because of you.”

  Caroline did not argue with this, nor did she appear to have any wish to do so. At Grandmamma Horatia’s words her eyes began to swim thickly with tears, and when she spoke her voice trembled.

  “I never wanted Charles to die. I loved him so.”

  “Yes,” Grandmamma Horatia said, walking slowly into the room. “I have heard enough of your speechifying to believe that you really did. Or that you really believed yourself to have been in love with him, although you did not know him at all.”

  “I knew him in every way that mattered…”

  “Enough,” Grandmamma Horatia said again, holding up one knotted and diamond-studded hand. “I suppose a small part of me is actually glad that there was someone who loved Charles. He was not an easy boy to love.”

  Then her normally warm blue eyes turned to steel.

  “The love you speak of, however, is not real love.” She turned to Rebecca. “Real love is the sort that you have displayed for Andrew. The sort that is characterized by self-sacrifice and dedication. The love that has given you the strength to resist the crueler forces around you and focus on what really matters.”

  She reached out and patted Rebecca’s hand. “Love is patient, love is kind, my dear. I think you know that better than anyone.”

  “Do not lecture me on what love is!” Caroline interrupted.

  “I do not believe you to be a cunning criminal,” Grandmamma Horatia said, after a pause. When she proceeded, she seemed to be choosing her words very carefully. “A madwoman, perhaps. Not fit to stand trial. I do not believe that you were in your right mind when you attempted to poison Rebecca.”

  Rebeca struggled for a moment to understand what Grandmamma Horatia was saying. If Caroline were to stand trial for the murder of a duke and found guilty, as she likely will be, then she would be hanged for murder.

  Rebecca realized that Grandmamma Horatia, even in this desperate and unhappy hour, was far too humane in her treatment of others to consider sending a young woman to the scaffold.

  Although the other possibility was scarcely any better…

  “You are trying to call me mad!” Caroline half-shrieked and at that moment it did not seem like a particularly inaccurate characterization. “You would prefer that I was mad than admit the truth — that Charles and I were destined to be together, and that only the cruelty of society and the stupidity of Rebecca kept us apart!”

  “If there was anything that kept you apart,” Grandmamma Horatia said, “it was the fact that you poisoned him with arsenic. No amount of love can conquer that, you foolish girl.”

  She shook her head sadly.

  “Truly, I am sorry,” she said. “It breaks my heart to think of how wretched your life must have been and how warped your perceptions are to believe that there was any meaningful relationship between you and my grandson.”

  “He asked me to dance!” Caroline shot back.

  “He felt sorry for you,” Grandmamma Horatia replied heavily. “As do I, at present. You are a truly wretched creature, which is why I do not wish to see you face the hangman’s noose. But I can speak to you no more, nor can I even bear to look at the face of the one responsible for the death of my grandson. Please take her away.”

  At this utterance, two footmen appeared in the doorway.

  “Treat her very gently,” Grandmamma Horatia said. “If any harm should come to a single hair on her head then you will have to answer to me for it.”

  The two footmen seemed to take Grandmamma Horatia’s words to heart and advanced on Caroline with great caution.

  Caroline looked around, wild-eyed as if she was hoping for some means of escape to miraculously appear. Then her eyes fixed upon the window, and she made a sudden lurch.

  “Stop her!” Rebecca called out, the words leaping from her mouth almost involuntarily.

  The men made a grab for Caroline as she lunged to open the window and seized her just as she managed to get one leg out onto the windowsill.

  “Get off me! Unhand me!” she shrieked. She managed to evade their grip and threw herself away from them, into a corner of the room where she lay prostrate on the floor, sobbing and rocking herself back and forth, with her arms wrapped around her as if to provide herself with a few shreds of comfort.

  “Take her away,” Grandmamma Horatia said again very quietly, turning her face as if she could not bear to take in the pitiful sight of the woman in a heap on the floor. “Treat her kindly and make sure that all the windows in the room are locked.”

&nbs
p; The footmen picked up the weeping Caroline between them and bore her out of the room, leaving Rebecca and Grandmamma Horatia alone.

  Grandmamma Horatia heaved a great sigh and leaned on her stick. At that moment she seemed to age at least ten years, and she passed a shaking hand over her face as if to brush away a tear.

  When she looked at Rebecca, however, it was with her usually bright eyes.

  “Well, my dear,” she said, “we have an urgent matter to attend to. We must take the necessary steps to secure Andrew’s freedom at once.” She gave a sweet, apple-cheeked smile. “I do not think that there is anyone in the world who wants that as much as you do.”

  * * *

  Mr. Langham was sent for and came in a flurry of apologies and assurances that he had already made arrangements for Andrew’s release.

  “Can we not go to meet him?” Rebecca asked. She supposed that she probably sounded too eager, but she did not care. She felt that if anyone was paying attention to her behavior, when there was murder, intrigue, scheming and shameless social climbing happening all around her, then whoever would judge her harshly clearly had woefully poor priorities.

  “Better not, my lady, better not,” Mr. Langham said hastily, shaking his head with a slightly distracting vigor. “Ah, I believe that a horse has already been sent for him. He can make it back here far more swiftly on horseback than if you go to fetch him in the carriage. Ah, be patient, my lady, be patient. The duke will be here soon enough.”

  But it could hardly be soon enough for Rebecca. She felt as if every nerve in her body was straining towards his arrival, as a plant grows to strain towards scraps of sunlight.

  She knew rationally that they were both safe now and yet until she had laid eyes on Andrew there was no way that she could fully believe it.

  She paced anxiously in front of the window, then could bear it no longer and set off across the Park to where she knew Andrew would ride toward the house. Rain had started to fall, and before very long she was soaked to her very skin, her hair unfurling from its arrangement to curl damply around her face.

  Perhaps I will catch a cold. The idea almost made her laugh — that in a world of such dizzying events, one could still be struck down by something as prosaic as a cold.

  She walked as far as the brow of the hill where she and Andrew had ridden out, the same place where they had teased each other about running away to a place where no one would be able to find them.

  They hadn’t even said the word ‘marriage’ then. They had just taken it on unspoken understanding that neither of them would want a future that did not involve each other.

  Chapter 43

  Andrew had perhaps never ridden so fast in his life, yet neither had he ever felt that his steed was moving so slowly. Each beat of the hoof seemed to have slowed down into a strange half-tempo, each second seemed to progress with agonizing slowness to the next.

  I need to get to her.

  While his body trailed behind, his heart seemed to fly ahead, all the way to Godwin Hall to find Rebecca, where it could rest in her waiting hands.

  When the rain started to fall, it felt to Andrew as if all of the misery and fear of the recent days was being washed away and only hope remained.

  A sheen of sweat was falling on his horse’s flanks as Andrew urged him onward. It was not so long before they entered the vast grounds of Godwin Park.

  Any moment now, Andrew told himself, I will be within sight of the hall. Any moment now I will be within sight of the place where she is. Any moment now I will believe that everything I longed for is true.

  So lost was he in these thoughts that when he spotted her figure standing on the brow of the hill, he thought he was dreaming. At the first moment that he saw her, he did not know what to do.

  She looked up at him and he at her, and for a second their moment of pure recognition overwhelmed every other sensation — the feeling of the rain beating down, the exhaustion that accumulates in a body that has spent nights sleeping on hard planks, the joy and sorrow that the miserable business of Charles’ murder had been resolved, however imperfectly.

  He had no wish to proceed onward to the Hall and speak to the constable. He had no wish to do anything apart from taking her in his arms and finding somewhere warm and dry for them to sit together and revel in one another’s company.

  At first, he did not speak. He simply removed the cloak from his shoulders and wrapped it around her. She was drenched to the skin, and when he reached out to touch her cheek, it was as cold as ice.

  “I could not wait a minute longer,” she said. Her voice seemed clear and pure as a bell against the background noise of the falling rain. The drops that clung to her face and hair seemed to throw her features into sharper focus, somehow rendering her real.

  This was a relief. He had carried her portrait in his heart and his mind’s eye while he was in prison, summoning it to mind so often that it was very difficult now for him to believe that she really stood before him, that she was safe and he was free.

  “I had to walk out to meet you.”

  “You should have waited for me,” he said. “I fear that you will fall sick.”

  She did not respond in words, but with a little laugh that suggested to him that sickness seemed like an absurdity, given their present situation.

  I have never seen anything so beautiful in my life as her face when she gave that little laugh.

  “You are safe,” she said. “Safe and here. I can scarcely believe it.”

  “No more can I,” he replied. “I feared for my life almost as much as I feared for yours.”

  “It was Caroline, Andrew,” she said, looking him in the eye. At that moment, tears spilled out of her eyes and began to mingle with the rain. “If it had not been for her then none of this would have happened. Your brother would still be alive. I am so sorry, Andrew.”

  Andrew sighed.

  “I do not know how I ought to feel,” he said honestly. “I fear that for the rest of my life I shall be living with a paradox. That paradox is that I will miss my brother and mourn him forever, but if it had not been for Charles’ death, we would never have been able to unite. I feel somewhat ashamed of my joy, yet I am indeed joyful.”

  “As am I,” she said, looking up at him through rain-soaked eyelashes, her voice very low. “I cannot account for it except to say that you are the only thing in my life that I can make any sense of.”

  “I know how you feel,” Andrew said. He gave a little laugh — not because anything was funny, but from the sheer relief that he was alive — that they were both alive and they were together.

  It seemed to occur to them both at the same time that there were no bars between them, that they were permitted to embrace and so they did freely.

  The kiss that followed was nothing like the kiss that they had shared in the gaol cell. It was a kiss of joy and celebration, a kiss of mutual sadness that the world was as broken as it was, a kiss of acknowledgment that they were going to have to fight against it together.

  It seemed to go on forever, and they only stopped when a crack of thunder sounded as if to summon them home.

  He pulled away from her and sighed.

  “I suppose we had better go,” he said. “There is a great deal of mess that still needs to be cleared up. Which I am only prepared to deal with, he added silently, on the basis that the sooner I have fulfilled my duties as master of Godwin Hall, the sooner we can be together.

  She slipped her hand into his, the gesture telling him louder than words ever could that whatever mess there was, she would stand by his side throughout.

  Chapter 44

  The evening dragged on forever and then abruptly turned into night, while the events of the day darted past at such a speed that one could scarcely keep track of what was going on.

  An array of lawyers, doctors, and constables seemed to come and go all evening, and Rebecca was starting to lose track of which portentous man of middle-age was offering his expert opinion on which matter.<
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  The fundamental point, however, was that no one was any longer in any doubt of what had happened.

  Caroline’s confession had been written down by the constable, and she had been locked in one of the bedrooms until the men from the asylum arrived to take her away. She seemed to have discarded any pretense that she was not guilty and instead bragged at how close she had come to murdering the great Lady Rebecca Winterson.

  She must be more frightened than she has ever been in her life, was all that Rebecca could think. I cannot imagine any other reason why she should behave in this way.

  She recalled how, on that terrible night, Caroline had several times asked her with apparent concern if she was feeling quite well.