When You Wish Upon a Duke

by Isabella Bradford

  “He’s reason enough for it, I suppose,” Brecon said. “You Wylders were always a cheerful family. I know you lost your father at an early age, my dear, but surely you recall the love your parents shared?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said, smiling as she remembered that long-ago happiness. “They loved each other and us, too, very much. Mama misses Father still, and it’s been years and years. That is what I wish to have with March: that happiness, that trust, and that passion.”

  “But you see, you have the memory of your parents to guide you, that knowledge of how a marriage should be,” Brecon said with an understanding that surprised her. “March does not.”

  “But his parents—”

  “His parents were not like yours,” he said firmly. “That is all I’ll say of them. March must tell you the rest himself, Charlotte, when he is ready. As his wife, you must know his past before you can make your shared future. I can see no other way.”

  Charlotte listened thoughtfully. When she wondered what haunted March, she’d never once thought of his parents. Why would she, when her own parents had only shown her love and the fondest indulgence?

  Brecon leaned across the aisle toward her. “Go to him, Charlotte,” he said. “You need to be together, not apart. Go to him at Greenwood.”

  “To Greenwood?” She gave her head an anxious little shake. “I can’t, Brecon. I can’t. What if I go to him and he leaves me again?”

  “He won’t,” Brecon said firmly. “I know him well enough to give you my word on that. If you go to him, he’ll stay with you.”

  She tried to smile, but failed. “I do not know if I’m that certain. Or that brave.”

  “If you’re brave enough to climb that tree as nimbly as a cat, then you’ve the courage to go to Greenwood after your husband.” He smiled and reached out to cover her hand with his own. “Go to March, Charlotte. Talk, and listen, and hear whatever he tells you. Above all, love him. Love him, and the rest will mend itself.”

  Washed, shaved, and dressed to meet the new day, March sat at his breakfast table with the London papers spread before him and tried very hard to pretend that he’d slept in his bed instead of slumped awkwardly to one side in an armchair, and only an hour or so at that. His humor was foul and his neck was stiff, and his eyes felt as if sand had been rubbed beneath his lids.

  Yet in that short, restless sleep, he had dreamed of Charlotte, and she had been the first thing he’d thought of when he’d awakened as well. Charlotte, safe in London and safe from him. How fine to dream and think of what he could not have, he thought as he irritably sawed his knife across his toast, damning the very crust that would confound him this day.

  “The midsummer rents will fall due at the end of the week, sir,” Carter was saying, cradling in his arms yet another gloomy account book with all the fondness of a mother for her firstborn. “When you have returned from your survey of the north fields later this morning, sir, I might suggest that we review the accountings together, as is your usual practice.”

  But for once, March wasn’t listening. Instead he was leaning back in his armchair, the better to see the hired cart that was drawing before the front door. No one called at Greenwood at this hour of the morning, especially not in a cart with London markings on the side. Curiosity overcame propriety, and he left his napkin beside his plate and went striding into the front hall to see for himself. Two men were carrying in a large, flat package, wrapped and tied in brown paper, while his butler hovered beside the open door.

  “What the devil is this?” March demanded. “I’ve ordered nothing from London, and if it’s meant for below stairs, then it should be brought to the back, not to the front hall.”

  “It appears to be a gift for you, sir,” his butler said apologetically. “These men are from the workshop of the painter Sir Lucas Rowell.”

  “Aye, Y’Grace.” The first man balanced his share of the parcel’s weight against his hip and carefully drew a letter for March from inside his waistcoat. “This be for you, Y’Grace. From Her Grace the Duchess o’ Marchbourne.”

  Swiftly March glanced from the sealed letter to the parcel, regarding it now with considerably more interest. He felt a fool for how fast his heart had begun to beat, simply because his wife had sent him some manner of gift.

  From Charlotte, from Charlotte, beat his heart. From Charlotte.

  “Bring it to the back parlor,” he said gruffly. “You may set it against the bench in there.”

  He followed the men and the package, Charlotte’s unread letter clutched in his hand. With care the man unwrapped the parcel, setting it gently on the bench to lean against the wall, and then stepped away.

  March stared, speechless. How in blazes had Charlotte persuaded Sir Lucas to make such a beautiful portrait of her in so little time? There was an immediacy to the drawing that March had never seen in more finished paintings. To see Charlotte smiling at him, her face so full of eager longing and hope, tore at his heart, and when he began to realize other things about the picture—his ruby-studded shirt buckle in her open hand, how the pose mimicked his favorite portrait of the first duchess—he was overwhelmed. People did things for him because he ordered them or paid for them, or because he was a duke.

  But only Charlotte acted from love.

  Without looking away from the picture, he sent Sir Lucas’s men to the kitchen to fortify themselves for the journey back to London, and he dismissed Carter, too. Finally he was alone, and at last he opened Charlotte’s letter.

  My own dearest darling March,

  Please might this TOKEN remind you of me & demonstrate the regard I have for my place in your heart & as the FOURTH duchess, tho’ not so far removed from the FIRST. O my dearest husband, pray return! There can be nothing in that infernal country to compare to the LOVE I have waiting for you if only you would come back to

  Yr. most loving wife in ALL WAYS,

  Charlotte

  He read it again, and again after that, hearing each breathless word in her voice. It was as if she were here with him, tormenting and comforting him at the same time, and he wondered if she’d any notion of what a blessed torture that would be. No matter that it was morning, he poured himself a glass of brandy and squared his chair before the picture. The rest of his day could wait. He must sit here now, before Charlotte. Her love for him—and his for her—had so much power that he’d no choice.

  From his first glimpse of her, high in the tree above him, he’d known she was a brave woman. But for her to let Sir Lucas capture her like this, with every emotion plain on her lovely face, took a rare kind of courage. She’d offered her love as completely as a woman could, and she didn’t care who knew it.

  And what had he done for her? He’d taken her innocence and her trust and her love, and then he’d left her. Once again he’d behaved exactly like Father. No matter how he tried to be a better man, he couldn’t escape the past.

  He stared at her portrait now, struggling to think only of her, yet still the old nightmares of his loveless, bitter childhood returned. The longer he sat there, the hours slipping by, the darker and more oppressive his thoughts became. He ignored the polite knocks at the door, doubtless from Carter and from servants. He didn’t hear the carriage in the drive, or the exclamations in the front hall that marked an arrival. All that existed for him was Charlotte’s portrait and the mire of his own thoughts.

  “Do you like the picture, then?”

  He turned quickly in his chair, certain he’d imagined her voice behind him.

  “Do you like it, March?” She was standing near the door, unhooking her traveling cloak in the most ordinary way imaginable. She was like sunshine itself, so beautiful that it hurt him to look at her.

  “Damnation,” he muttered. “Are you real?”

  “Am I real?” she repeated, perplexed. “La, what manner of welcome is that?”

  She tossed her cloak on a chair and came to him. Swiftly she bent and kissed him, her lips brushing sweetly across his. He was too shocked
to kiss her back, and she frowned, her gaze searching his face.

  “You look dreadful, March,” she said with concern. “Are you ill? Should I send for a doctor? What is wrong?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “Everything.”

  “Goodness,” she said. “How am I to answer that?”

  He shook his head, rubbing his hand across his forehead. He was making no sense and he knew it, which meant that he wasn’t as mad as he feared. Not quite.

  He looked from her back to the picture. “Tell me, Charlotte,” he said. “How did your father die?”

  “My father?” She pulled a chair close to his and sank into it. “It was long ago, and because I was so young, I only knew what they told me.”

  “Tell me now,” he said. “Tell me what they said.”

  “Very well.” She smiled sadly. “It was a butterfly that killed him, they said. A white butterfly. It flew out from the mulberry bushes near the stable gate and startled his horse, and Father fell and landed on his neck. The friends who were with him told Mama that he was laughing and jesting one moment, and the next he was silent and dead, it happened that fast.”

  “A white butterfly,” he said, stunned by the ordinariness of it, and the purity of it, too.

  She nodded. “I was terrified of butterflies for years afterward,” she confessed. “I still don’t like them, not at all. Strange how things like that linger, isn’t it?”

  He rose quickly, seizing her hand to raise her to her feet as well. It was time for this, past time, and he couldn’t put it off any longer.

  “Come with me,” he said, pulling her after him. “I’ll show you.”

  “Show me what, March?” she asked breathlessly as he led her from the room and up the stairs. “What will I see?”

  But he didn’t answer, not until they were in the distant parlor to which he’d banished his father. The portrait of the third Duke of Marchbourne was very grand, almost regal, with him in his ducal robes and the old-fashioned long wig of a generation before. But not even all that red velvet could mask his father’s nature, the innate cruelty in his heavy-lidded eyes and the dismissive sneer that passed for a smile.

  “There,” he said, staring up at the portrait. He hadn’t been in this room for years, yet the impact of Father’s painted face struck him like a blow, so hard that he had to force himself to stand before it. “That’s my father, Charlotte.”

  “Goodness,” she said. “He’s very … very regal, isn’t he?”

  March laughed bitterly. “He’d be proud to hear you say that. Father never forgot his royal blood, or how it made him superior to everyone else. Can you tell how he died?”

  She shook her head. “How could I tell that?”

  “It’s there, Charlotte, it’s there,” he assured her. “This was painted only months before he died. You can see the pox that killed him, eating away at his flesh and his mind until he went mad from it. No pretty butterflies here, are there?”

  The artist had been kind and flattering. There were no signs of the sores his father had tried vainly to cover with black plasters and patches, none of the pallor that hinted of the grave. The artist hadn’t showed how most of Father’s teeth were gone, how ghastly his smile had become, or how his eyes had grown cloudy as blindness stole his sight.

  But March couldn’t look at his father’s once handsome face, so much like his own, and not see how the pox had destroyed his soul as surely as it had destroyed his flesh.

  “I’m sorry, March,” Charlotte said softly. “I’m sorry.”

  “Save your grief,” he said curtly, still confronting his father’s painted self. “His death was his own doing, as surely as if he’d taken a knife to his own throat.”

  “But he couldn’t always have been a monster,” she said slowly. “Before he was sick, he must have been a better man, else my father never would have agreed to a match between us.”

  “I have heard it said that my father was more of a gentleman as a young man,” March said, though he didn’t believe it himself, and never had. “I can only judge what I know of him from my own memory.”

  “But my father—”

  “Charlotte, I know your father was a paragon, but he was also only an earl,” he said wearily. “Of course he would have agreed to a match if my father proposed it. To wed one’s daughter to a duke: what father would refuse that?”

  Charlotte didn’t answer, clearly not believing her perfect father could be so mercenary. Well, so be it, thought March, and though he tried to be cynical, he couldn’t help but envy her a bit, too.

  “Was the picture painted in Italy?” she asked tentatively. “The setting looks the same as the picture of you as a boy that’s in my rooms.”

  “Rome,” he said. “That’s where we were. I hadn’t wanted to go with Father, but he insisted, taking me from school in the middle of the term. A last grand tour, he’d called it, a voyage with his only son and heir.”

  Gently her fingers moved against his. “That must have been quite an adventure. You weren’t very old.”

  “Eleven,” he said. “But because I was tall for my age, the whores all judged me older.”

  “The whores?” she asked.

  “With Father there were always whores,” he said, bitterness filling his mouth like bile. “Our lodgings stank of their perfume and their bodies. He didn’t care. No matter how cruelly he used them, there were always more to be bought.”

  “But you were a child, March,” she said. “What could you have known of your father’s sins?”

  He closed his eyes, unable to meet Father’s gaze any longer.

  “I knew because I saw them,” he said. “Father made me watch. To be a man, he said. He wanted me to be a man. He made me watch him with the women, and he bid them touch me and—and handle me, and though I knew it was wrong and sinful, I would let them because it pleased Father to share his debauchery. But I hated it, and I hated the women, but mostly I hated Father for making me part of his wickedness.”

  He remembered their touch, the coaxing cleverness in their fingers, and how little it had taken to destroy his innocence. He’d been ashamed of himself, especially when they’d used their mouths as well, and Father had laughed and called it the best sport a man could know. But it hadn’t felt like sport to him, not at all, and he’d lived in a sick dread that others would discover his secret. There was no one he could turn to, no one who could help him, not when it was his father’s idea and his father was a duke.

  “It wasn’t your fault, March,” Charlotte said, her voice soft. “You were still a child, no matter what your father said.”

  “Mother knew it, too,” he insisted. “She saw it in my eyes as soon as we returned to England. She said I was no better than Father. She said that my soul was poisoned by sin and that my blood was black with it, just like Father’s. She wanted nothing to do with me after that. She said that Father had broken her heart, but that I had trod upon the pieces.”

  Still in his traveling clothes, he had stood between his parents in the drawing room as they raged at each other over his head, using words and accusations that no child should hear parents say. By then he’d understood that he was only a tiny part of the anger and loathing they bore toward each other, yet even his insignificance had wounded him. He hadn’t taken either side, but stood with his shoulders straight and his gaze focused on his mother’s chinoiserie cabinet. Only later, when at last he was alone, had he seen how he’d bloodied his own palms, neat rows of semicircles where he’d clenched his hands so tightly his nails had cut the skin.

  “But your mother must have loved you, March,” Charlotte insisted. “There’s the portrait of you in the bedchamber, where she could see it first thing in the morning and last thing at night, the way I do now.”

  Slowly he opened his eyes and once again met the scornful painted gaze of his father, looking down at him as he always had.

  “That picture of me was painted when we first reached Rome,” he said, turning away from him and back towa
rd her. “Before everything else. Before I changed. She wouldn’t have kept it otherwise.”

  “I don’t believe that,” Charlotte said, appalled. “How could any mother feel like that about her only child?”

  “Because she was my mother, not yours,” he said evenly, a truth not even she could deny. “She was right about me, too. I am my father’s son. No matter how I’ve tried to be the gentlemanly husband you deserve, I always sink back to his wickedness.”

  “Whatever are you saying, March?” Charlotte asked. “You’re the most gentlemanly gentleman I have ever met. There’s not one scrap of wickedness in you anywhere.”

  He groaned and shook his head, glancing back over his shoulder at Father’s portrait.

  “Consider how I’ve treated you, Charlotte,” he said. “I have, and to my endless shame, too. Think of that last night in my bed, of all the reprehensible things I did to you—”

  “But you didn’t, March, not for a moment!” She reached up and cradled his face in her palms, forcing him to look directly at her. “What we did was make love, March. We did what we’re meant to do, which is to give each other pleasure as husband and wife. Without love, I suppose our actions might be the same as those of your father and those—those vile women, but the joy would not be there. It’s love that makes it special, my dearest, dearest husband, love and love alone.”

  How desperately he wanted to believe her! “What you ask of me, Charlotte, what you ask,” he said, still bowed beneath the weight of his parents’ history. “I can’t deny the past.”

  “Nor am I asking you to,” she said, the pearl earrings swinging against her cheeks. “I won’t ever tell you to ignore your past or to forget your parents. For better or for worse, they’re part of you.”

  He did not need her to remind him of that. “Charlotte, please—”

  “Hear me, March, I beg you,” she pleaded, her eyes wide and blue as the sky. “Your parents are part of you, yes, but I’m part of you now, too, as our children will be. I know you cannot change the past, but you can make your future as bright as ever you could. Our future, March.”