Ravishing the Heiress

by Sherry Thomas

  What could he do? What could anyone do?

  “Just—leave me alone for now.”

  “All right. You have ten minutes.”

  Ten minutes.

  Fitz buried his face in his hands. How could he pull himself together, when his entire life had fallen apart? Not in ten minutes, that was for certain. Not in a hundred and ten years.

  Miraculously the groom’s party arrived before the bride’s party, but only by mere seconds. Hastings tried to get Fitz to run into the church, so that he wouldn’t be seen still outside when the bridal carriage drew up. But Fitz could not have broken into a sprint had someone held a knife at his back.

  He pushed away Hastings’s hand. “I’m here. What more do they want?”

  The church was only ten minutes by carriage from his new town house. He should have been at the church at least an hour ago, cooling his heels in the vestry until it was time to stand before the altar.

  And he would have been, God, he would have been, were he marrying Isabelle. He’d have risen with the sun and made ready before any of the ushers. He’d have been the one knocking on their doors to make sure they got up on time and dressed properly. And had there been loose women at the party to commemorate the end of his bachelorhood, he’d have steered them to his classmates—it was not for him to sully his body the night before his wedding.

  But here he was, sullied, ill groomed, and late—and for all that, more than good enough for the ceremony that would seal the sale of his name and, eventually, his person.

  A relentlessly bright sun made his head pound harder. The air in London was nearly perpetually dirty—sometimes one could taste the grit. But all the torrential rains from his dreary final week of freedom had washed it clean. The sky was a wide-open, cloudless blue, stupidly lovely, perfect for any wedding except his own.

  Miles of white organza had been jammed into the interior of the church. Thousands of lilies of the valley, too, their smell thick as incense. His still-fragile stomach shuddered.

  The pews were seated to capacity. As he started down the aisle, a sea of faces turned toward him, accompanied by a roar of whispers—no doubt comments on his almost unforgivable tardiness.

  Yet as he progressed toward the altar, row by row, they fell silent. What did they see on his face? Revulsion? Grief? Wretchedness?

  He could see nothing before him.

  Then all he could see was Isabelle, rising from her seat in the pews and turning toward him.

  He stopped and stared. Her eyes were red and puffy, her cheeks sharp, her skin pale as ice—and she was beautiful beyond measure.

  She gazed back at him. Her lips parted and formed the words Run away with me.

  Why not? Let Henley Park rot. Let his creditors stew. And let the Graveses find someone else to shackle to their daughter. This was his life. And he would live it as he pleased.

  All he had to do was stretch out his hand. They’d find their own place and forge their own destiny, take life by the horns and wrestle it to the ground.

  He lifted his hand an inch, then another. Forget honor, forget duty, forget everything he’d been brought up to be. All they needed was love.

  Love would make a pariah of her. She would lose her family, her friends, and all her prospects. And should something happen to him before they both came of age—he’d have condemned her for life.

  He dropped his hand.

  Hastings gripped his arm. He yanked free. He was the man he had been brought up to be. He needed no one else to drag him to the altar.

  His eyes still locked on Isabelle, he mouthed, I love you.

  Then, head held high, he marched the rest of the way to his doom.

  Not once did Millie look at her bridegroom during the wedding ceremony.

  At appropriate times she would turn her face toward him, but behind the veil, she stared only at the hem of her wildly extravagant gown—the beading as heavy as her heart. And when he lifted the veil to kiss her chastely on the cheek, she concentrated on his waistcoat, mist grey with the subtlest weaving of checks.

  Now they were man and wife, and would be for as long as they both drew breath.

  The congregation rose as they began their walk toward the church door. None of the groom’s friends extended a congratulatory hand to him. No one even smiled at the new couple. A clump of ladies, their heads bent together, whispered and pointed.

  Suddenly Millie saw her, Miss Isabelle Pelham, wan, defeated, yet at the same time almost majestic in her pride and stillness. With infinite slowness and clarity, a teardrop rolled down her face.

  Shock whipped Millie. Such a public display of emotion was alien to her—wanton, almost.

  She could not stop herself: She looked at Lord Fitzhugh. He did not shed any tears. But in everything else—his ashen complexion, his dimmed eyes, his despair of a soldier who’d lost the war—he and Miss Pelham were exact matches, their beauty only made more so by their anguish.

  It didn’t matter that Millie had no say in the matter; it did not matter that the devil’s own claws were in her heart. She read the verdict on the guests’ faces: She was the usurper here. The Graveses, with their vulgar fortune and even more vulgar ambition, had rent asunder a perfect, passionate pair of lovers, and destroyed any possibility either had at happiness in life.

  She did not need guilt in addition to her misery. But guilt, all the same, wedged itself hard into her soul.

  Mrs. Graves attended to Millie’s toilette herself, lifting the leaden wedding gown and laying it aside. Millie felt no lighter; the weight on her heart could not be dislodged.

  Her body moved obediently, pushing her arms through the sleeves of a white blouse, stepping into a navy blue skirt of worsted wool. Mrs. Graves held out the matching jacket; she put that on, too.

  “You should have a garden, my dear,” said her mother as she unfastened the circlet of orange blossoms from Millie’s hair. “A garden and a bench.”

  What for? A prettier place in which to relive the ignominy of her wedding? The wedding breakfast, marked by Miss Pelham’s conspicuous absence, had been no better. And now, instead of changing into her traveling clothes at her new home, she was back in the Graves residence because her husband had claimed that his town house was too dilapidated to host a refined young lady such as herself.

  “A garden makes everything better,” said Mrs. Graves softly. “And it will keep you busy, when you need something to do. You’ll be glad of it, Millie.”

  Millie kept her head bent. Would a garden make her forget that her husband loved another? Or that she’d fallen in love with the last man who would love her in return?

  Mrs. Graves had advocated for a honeymoon in Rome, but Lord Fitzhugh, at the engagement dinner given by his sister, had asked, “Aren’t the marshes around Rome a malarial hazard in summer?” The Lake District, where there was never the risk of malaria, was chosen instead.

  Millie met her new husband at the rail station. He was quiet, impassive, but unfailingly civil. With one last hug from her mother, she was entrusted into the care of this boy who had yet to come of age himself.

  The rail journey took most of the rest of the day. Millie brought two books to read. The earl stared out of the window. She studiously turned the pages every three minutes, but in the end, she could not have said whether she’d read a chronicle of the Napoleonic Wars or a handbook on housekeeping.

  They arrived at their destination late in the evening.

  “Lady Fitzhugh will take her supper in her room,” Lord Fitzhugh instructed the innkeeper.

  It was what Millie would have asked for: a quick meal in complete privacy. But she sensed that he hadn’t made the request out of consideration for her fatigue, but only to have her out of his way.

  “And you, my lord?” asked the innkeeper.

  “The same—and a bottle of your best whisky.”

  She looked sharply at him—his deathly pallor, had it been the result of too much drink? He stared flatly back at her. She glanced away in haste.<
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  Her supper, she barely touched. She rang for the tray to be taken away and undressed herself—she’d given her maid a holiday coinciding with the duration of the Lake District sojourn, so as not to leak the truth of the “honeymoon.”

  In her nightgown, she sat down before the vanity to brush her hair. Her face in the mirror gazed unhappily back at her. Not that she was unsightly: With the right dress and the right coiffure, she passed for pretty. But it was a bland, unmemorable prettiness. Some of her mother’s acquaintances kept forgetting that they’d already met her; even within the family the more elderly aunts routinely mistook her for her various cousins.

  Nor did she possess the kind of forceful personality that could animate otherwise unremarkable features and make them compelling. No, she was a quiet, sensible, self-contained girl who would rather die than shed tears in public. How could she ever compete with Miss Pelham’s magnetic passions?

  She turned off the lamps in the room. With the dark came a profound quiet. She listened for sounds from Lord Fitzhugh’s room, but could detect nothing, no footsteps, no creaking of bed, no whisky bottle scudding across the surface of a table.

  Her window overlooked the inn’s garden, beds and clumps of shadows in the night. A match flared, illuminating a man standing against a sundial: Lord Fitzhugh. He lit a cigarette and tossed the match aside. She did not realize, until several minutes later, when the moon emerged from behind the clouds, that he had not been smoking, but only holding the cigarette loosely between the index and middle fingers of his right hand.

  When the cigarette had turned to ashes, he lit another.

  And that, too, burned by itself.

  She was awake for a long time. When she finally drifted into a troubled slumber, it seemed she’d slept for only a minute before bolting up straight in bed. An eerie silence greeted her. But she could swear that she’d been startled by a loud crash.

  It came again, an awful racket of glass on glass.

  She scrambled off the bed, pulled on her dressing gown, and flung open the connecting door. In the dim light, porcelain shards and food scraps were strewn all over the floor—the earl’s supper. The mirror on the wall had cracked hideously, as if Medusa had stood before it. A whisky bottle, now in pieces, lay beneath the mirror frame.

  Lord Fitzhugh stood in the middle of the wreckage, his back to her, still in his travel clothes.

  “Go back to bed,” he ordered, before she could say anything.

  She bit her lip and did as he asked.

  In the morning the connecting door was locked from his side. She tried the door that led to the passage, and that, too, was locked. She picked at her breakfast, then spent a fitful two hours sitting in the garden, pretending to read.

  Eventually his window opened. She could not see him. After a few minutes, the window closed again.

  To her surprise, he appeared when she was halfway through her luncheon.

  He looked awful, rumpled and unshaven. Unhappily she realized that as unwell as he’d appeared at the wedding, he—or someone else, most likely—had gone to some effort to make him presentable. No such effort had been made today.

  “My lord,” she said—and didn’t know what else to say.

  “My lady,” he said, sitting down across from her, his face utterly expressionless. “You needn’t worry about the state of my room. I’ve already settled it with the innkeeper.”

  “I see.”

  She was glad he had taken responsibility for it; she’d have found the occasion too humiliating. What did one say? I am terribly sorry, but it appears that my husband has destroyed part of your property?

  “I have also arranged to remove to an establishment twenty miles north where I will have more privacy.”

  He would have more privacy. What of her?

  “I will be execrable company,” he continued, his gaze focused somewhere behind her. “I’m sure you will enjoy yourself better here.”

  One day married and already he couldn’t wait to be rid of her. “I will come with you.”

  “You don’t need to do such wifely things. We have an agreement in place.”

  “I am not doing anything wifely,” she said, finding that it required great effort to keep her voice low and even. “If I stay here, after my husband demolished his room and left, I dare say I will not enjoy the pity and idle curiosity from the inn’s owners and staff.”

  He looked at her a minute, his otherwise beautiful blue eyes entirely bloodshot. “Suit yourself, then. I leave in half an hour.”

  The place twenty miles north was beautiful. They were halfway up a steep, densely wooded slope that overlooked a mirror-bright lake. The colors of the hills changed constantly, grey and misty in morning, a brilliant blue-green at noon, almost violet at sunset.

  But an establishment it was not. Millie had expected a country estate of some description. Or, failing that, a hunting lodge. What she found was a cottage little larger than a cabin and only two steps removed from primitiveness.

  The nearest village was six miles away. They had no carriages, no maids, and no cook. The earl expected them to survive on bread, butter, potted meat, and fruits that were delivered every three days. Or rather, he expected her to live on those. He himself needed only whisky, which came in crates.

  Nightly he retired with several bottles. Nightly he brutalized something in his room: plates on the wall, the washstand, the solid oak desk. She cowered in her bed during his bursts of violence. Even though he’d never said a harsh word to her—or even so much as looked at her—every crash shattered her.

  Sometimes she left her bed, put on her heaviest coat, and went outside, as far away as she dared in the pitch dark, to look at the stars. To remind herself that she was but a speck of dust mote in this vast universe—and her heartache just as insignificant. Then he would destroy something else, fracturing the silence of the night, and her entire universe would again shrink to a singular point of despair.

  He slept during the day. She walked for hours in the hills, not returning until she was exhausted. She missed her mother, her kind, wise, and unwaveringly loving mother. She missed the peace and tranquility of her old house, where no one drank himself into a stupor day after day. She even missed the relentless piano practices—she had nothing to do, no goals to achieve, no standard of excellence to which she could aspire.

  She rarely saw him. One day, after the washbasin in his room had departed for the rubbish bin in fragments, she came upon him bathing in the stream behind the cottage, stripped to the waist. He’d lost a shocking amount of weight, his entire torso but skin over skeleton.

  Another time, he hissed as she lit the oil lamp in the parlor. He was sprawled on the long sofa, his arm thrown over his face. She extinguished the lamp with an apology and left to her room. On the way she passed his: The wardrobe had been overturned, the chair was now firewood, and, over everything else, razor-sharp shards of God knew how many whisky bottles.

  She couldn’t breathe. His misery rose all about her, a dark tide full of undertows of rage. She hated him then: Nothing and no one had ever made her feel so wrong, as if her entire existence served only to tear apart soul mates and turn perfectly promising young men into destructive shadows of their former selves.

  All the same, her heart broke for him, into a thousand pieces.

  The isolation of the cabin, no doubt excellent for keeping private pains private, was unhelpful in every other respect. Lord Fitzhugh had no duties to perform, no obligations that required him to adhere to a proper schedule, and no friends or family before whom he needed to keep up an appearance of sobriety and normalcy.

  There was nothing left to smash in his room—having axed his bedstead to kindling the previous week, he now slept on a pallet on the floor. Millie feared he’d start on the parlor. Instead, he plunged into a deep lethargy. The whisky, at first only a nocturnal friend, was now his constant companion.

  Millie was inexperienced in such darker aspects of life. But she had no doubt that he was
sliding faster and faster down a dangerous path. He needed help, badly—and soon. Yet when she sat down to compose an appeal, she had no idea to whom she ought to address the letter.

  Could Mrs. Townsend persuade her brother to stop drinking? Could Colonel Clements? Certainly no one in the Graves family could be of any assistance. And even if Millie were to swallow what remained of her pride and beg Miss Pelham for help, would Miss Pelham’s family allow her to become involved again in the earl’s affairs?

  Via Mrs. Graves’s pragmatic advice, Millie had been equipped to deal with a remote husband, disdainful servants, and a Society wary of yet another heiress breaching its defenses. No one, however, had ever thought to teach her what to do when her husband was determined to shove his youth and vitality down the throat of a whisky bottle and throw it all away.

  She abandoned her letter and grabbed her hat. The swollen clouds that blanketed the sky promised rain, but she didn’t care. She had to get out of the cabin. And if she returned a drowned rat, developed pneumonia, and expired before the end of the month, well, so much the better for—

  She stopped dead.

  Her husband, who had not been outside in days, sat on the front steps of the cabin, staring into the barrel of a rifle.

  “What—what are you doing?” she heard herself ask, her voice high and reedy.

  “Nothing,” he said, without turning around, even as his hand caressed the barrel.

  Slowly, not daring to make a sound, she shrank back into the cabin. And there, for the first time in her life, she clutched her heart. Her throat closed; her head spun.

  He was contemplating suicide.

  Fitz had lost track of time and he minded not at all. The past was infinitely preferable to the present, or the future. And even better when the boundary of reality and fantasy blurred.

  He was no longer anywhere near the Lake District, but at the Pelham home, engaged in an animated conversation with Isabelle, while her mother embroidered at the far end of the room.