The Importance of Being Wicked

by Miranda Neville

  “I think I’m dead,” she said, and knew no more.

  Blessed unconsciousness didn’t last. She woke to find herself in bed with no cessation of her agony. But she was no longer alone. She had a cool damp cloth wiping her brow, a hand to squeeze when the pains stabbed her, a strong male voice to comfort her through each crashing wave. “I’m here, sweetheart. I’m here.”

  Sometimes she thought it was Robert, home from the gaming tables at last. Once he wasn’t there. It was like last time. She started to weep. Then the hand was back and the voice. “I’m here.”

  “Thomas?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t leave me alone.”

  “I won’t. The doctor is here. We’ll look after you.” She heard another, more distant, male voice.

  When the pain mounted to its peak, she dug her nails in and screamed.

  “It’s coming out now,” said the strange voice. She felt an added heat below, then the agonizing waves subsided. The worst was over.

  “Why?” she asked, when she found herself carried upstairs against a broad male chest. Undoubtedly Thomas. She’d come to her senses enough to know that Robert was long dead.

  He dropped a kiss on her hair that clung damply about her forehead. “I’m taking you up to a clean bed.”

  The sheets were fresh and cool, and she wore a crisp nightgown. Someone had washed away the blood. He tucked her in.

  She started to cry again, weighed down by devastating grief. “I lost a child, didn’t I?”

  “Don’t think about it now. Get some sleep.”

  “Don’t leave me alone.”

  “I’ll be here.” She sank into oblivion, with his reassuring weight next to her.

  Chapter 27

  “I’m worried about her,” Thomas told the doctor. “Her spirits are so low. Is it normal two weeks after a miscarriage? Even so early in the pregnancy, when she wasn’t aware she was carrying a child?”

  “Every woman is different. But I would say something is preying on her mind.”

  “She blames herself for the fall from the horse that day.”

  The doctor shook his head. “I’ve told her, as I’ve told you, that we cannot be certain what caused the sad event. The fact that she bled a week earlier is significant and often a presage of miscarriage.”

  Thomas didn’t mention his own culpability. The moment when he’d flung her aside and she’d landed on the floor haunted him. The doctor would doubtless offer him the same soothing generalities, but he couldn’t bring himself to confess his own guilt and receive the comfort of absolution, not when Caro was so unhappy.

  “I recommend country air,” the doctor said. “She’s strong enough now for a half day’s travel as long as you take it slowly in a well-sprung carriage.”

  So he went to Caro, now back in their own bedchamber, and told her he was taking her to Castleton. “What about the duchess?” she said. Her pallor and listlessness twisted his gut. “Won’t she mind?”

  As it happened, he’d received word that his mother and sisters had moved to their new house. Nevertheless, he decided to be truthful. He knew Caro’s secret, and it was time for her to learn his, one far greater than a concealed painting. If his suspicion of her fidelity contributed to her illness, he could dispel it. He accepted now that his own fears had made him distrust her. Through the long, terrible hours when he’d feared losing her, she’d called for Robert, and sometimes for him, but never for Marcus Lithgow or any other man. With complete openness, there might be a way ahead for them.

  “It was my wish not to share a house with my mother, not hers.”

  “Because of me?” Her face pinched with distress.

  Dolt that he was! He’d upset her. “No! Nothing to do with you. Because of her.” He took a deep breath. “She played my father false.”

  “Are you sure?” she asked, as well she might, given his capacity for jumping to conclusions.

  “Quite sure. She admitted it to me. My younger sisters, the twins, were not sired by the duke.”

  “Goodness.”

  “He knew it, and he refused to dower them. I have to find the money out of my income. They may not have been his daughters,” he said, though she hadn’t argued, “but they are my sisters and my duty to care for.”

  She started to weep, as happened often these days. “Poor Thomas. You’re such a good man. You’re so good to me.”

  “I am not.” He’d rather have her railing at him if it meant she was her old contrary self. “I mistrusted you with little cause because I fear being treated like my father.”

  “You have no money, and you married me instead of Anne,” she wailed. “And I bought lots of new gowns and these expensive curtains.”

  “I do have money, and I like the curtains.”

  But she refused to be consoled. “I’m a terrible wife. You should never have married me.”

  He couldn’t congratulate himself on the success of that strategy. He hadn’t lifted her spirits at all. But he pressed ahead with his plans to leave for Castleton. He wished he had as much faith in country air as the doctor. When he came to her room—it was her room now, he slept upstairs so as not to disturb her rest—to inform her of their travel plans, she acquiesced without enthusiasm.

  “Just as long as Tish comes with us.” The ginger cat, asleep on the bed, seemed less than thrilled to be gathered into her arms and objected violently to being clutched to her bosom.

  For himself, he envied the beast.

  The furnishings in the duchess’s private sitting room reflected Caro’s mood. The old house appeared not to have been given much care in a century. No, that wasn’t true. The rooms were clean, the woodwork well polished, and the hangings and upholstery in good repair. But the place had an odor of neglect about it. This room was probably more cheerful before her mother-in-law’s departure. With books, ornaments, and other personal effects, it could be a comfortable chamber. Dark rectangles on the brocade-covered walls testified to the recent removal of some pictures. Caro hoped their subject matter had been more elevating than the gloomy, badly executed portraits of Tudor- and Stuart-era forebears that remained.

  Looking at the Dowager Duchess sitting opposite, Caro didn’t count on it. Her predecessor must once have been a blond beauty. Now she seemed cast down by life. Her politeness was not to be faulted. When she and her daughters arrived from the Grange, the day after Caro and Thomas arrived at Castleton, her words of welcome had been impeccable. Caro detected no disapproval, merely a lack of enthusiasm that she guessed extended to every aspect of life. It was hard to believe this faded doll of a woman had ever cast respectability aside to engage in an adulterous affair.

  Thomas had brought his mother and almost identical sisters up to see her and left once introductions had been performed. Caro was pleased to see his affectionate smile for the latter.

  “I apologize for receiving you like this, Duchess,” Caro said, from the sofa where she sat with her legs covered by a shawl. “I should have risen, but the doctor has ordered complete rest, and the duke enforces his orders.” She felt very formal and well behaved. Grief and exhaustion had turned her into the kind of creature her mother had always wished her to be.

  “I understand perfectly, Duchess,” her mother-in-law replied. “I’m sorry for your illness and loss.”

  One of the twins, Sarah, she thought, contributed a murmured assent. They were pretty, dark girls but very shy. Caro couldn’t help looking for a resemblance to Thomas and could find none, nor to their mother. But that meant nothing. Family members often looked nothing alike. Someone should do something for those girls, she thought for a moment. Buy them fashionable gowns, have their hair cut. Make sure they found affectionate husbands. She couldn’t imagine ever having enough strength to undertake a task that might, she supposed, be hers. At cozy Conduit Street, she hadn’t given much thought to her future role as duchess. Becoming mistress of this huge mansion filled her with lassitude and dread.

  A scratching noise drew the
attention of the ladies, Tish doing his level best to destroy the crewel-work cover on a footstool. The Dowager Duchess opened her mouth to protest, then thought better of it and pursed her lips. The atmosphere must have affected the cat, usually a well-behaved animal. Caro couldn’t be bothered to correct him. Besides, the stool was hideous.

  The call didn’t last long. The ladies departed, and Caro started crying. She couldn’t stop these days. Guilt for the death of the child she’d never even known by anticipation, the infant she’d killed by her willful stupidity. And her tears fell for that other child, the little boy who’d lived long enough for her to see him emerge from her body and had promptly expired, a sad, pale corpse.

  Nothing Thomas could do seemed to improve her spirits. She assured him she felt better, no longer in pain, and the intermittent bleeding had stopped at last. He tried everything he could to amuse her: card games, walks, gentle drives around the park. He even disinterred a racy French novel from the library. Judging by the date of publication, it had been bought by one of his parents—he preferred not to speculate which. The old Caro would have loved being read to about the various amours that had taken place on a certain sofa. But now they barely raised a smile and succeeded only in leaving him red in the face and painfully aroused.

  “What can I do?” he finally came out and asked her. She was seated by the window, looking out at a park drenched by rain. “I’ve tried everything, and nothing works.”

  “I’m sorry.” Her eyes filled with tears.

  He was a complete failure as a husband. He thought of their brief, happy time together: brawling back-to-back at the Pantheon, sitting in the kitchen at Little Tidmarsh, sharing the intimate quarters of Conduit Street. Her laughter and teasing and their joyful lovemaking. Marcus Lithgow had never been his rival. He knew only too well that the memory of Robert Townsend was what kept her from loving him. He’d been a jealous fool, and his unwarranted anger and violent mistrust had quite likely caused her miscarriage.

  He tried to embrace her, but she was unyielding in his arms. Her tears fell, and he would gladly have shared her grief, but it was contained and private and excluded him. “Get some rest,” he said, as he had a hundred times in the last month. “Let me help you to the chaise, and I’ll order tea.”

  “No. I’ll stay here for a while. I like seeing the rain.”

  At the door, he turned for one last look. Her ineffable sadness rang a chord in his memory. Of his mother sitting in this very spot, on a similar gray day. He searched the recollection and came up with a very small Thomas, before he had any sisters. If his mother had always been this sad, what had caused it? Was he following in his father’s footsteps again?

  He strode through the park, ignoring the water dripping from the brim of his hat and seeping down his neck.

  “Good Lord, Thomas,” his mother said, when he came in and found her alone. “Your hair is wet.”

  “I’m sorry to present myself like this, ma’am.”

  “I don’t mind.” Her momentary liveliness faded. “I trust you won’t catch cold. What brings you here so urgently. What brings you here at all? Is the duchess well?”

  “Why?” he asked. “I want to know why?”

  She blanched and averted her gaze. “It’s not your affair.”

  “No, it’s yours, as I’m well aware. But I want to know what made you do it. Did you hate my father so much?”

  “Hate? No. But neither did I love him. He wasn’t a lovable man.”

  “Why did you marry him?”

  “Do you think I would have been allowed to turn down the heir to a dukedom? For a reason I never understood, he fancied himself in love and asked for me. My father ordered me to accept, and I was a dutiful daughter.”

  Unlike Caro. Caro had defied her mother and ended up in a happy marriage.

  “Did you try to love him?”

  The duchess’s pale lips stretched into a humorous grimace. “I tried to do my duty, but his kindness lasted as long as his love. A year or two, perhaps. You never saw the worst of him, Thomas. You were the heir and his pride and joy. I was nothing but a disappointment. He blamed me for not giving him another son. He scolded me for extravagance and taunted me for my meager dowry. That was my worst sin, I think. He blamed me for enticing him with my beauty and causing him to forget the Fitzcharles duty to marry a fortune.”

  Thomas thought about his father, the stern disciplinarian. To Thomas he’d been fair, if strict, but he could imagine he hadn’t been so with others. Others who weren’t his prized son. “I’m sorry, Mama. It must have been hard for you.”

  “And you did the same thing. I hope you’ll be kinder to your bride. Caro reminds me of myself. So quiet and sad.”

  Caro quiet? Anyone else who knew her would hear the description and laugh. But sad? He knew the underlying melancholy in her that she fought with her natural gaiety. He gripped his palms as he made a silent oath. He would restore the Caro he loved and dispel her sadness if it was the last thing he ever did.

  “I’m sorry I made you move out of Castleton, Mama. I had no right to drive you from your home.”

  His mother laughed. The sound was so unfamiliar he tried to remember when he’d last heard it and couldn’t.

  “I thank you for it, my son. I love my small, cozy house, so easy to keep warm and clean. I like my meals hot because they haven’t had to travel cold passages to reach the dining room. And I’ve chosen my furnishings and decorations. At Castleton, your father never let me change anything. Having my things about me in the house, not just in my own quarters, cheers me up.”

  “There’s much to be said for a small house,” he agreed. “I have to go to London, but when I return, I hope you and my sisters will come back to the big one to dine with us.”

  They exchanged tentative smiles of amity.

  The first person Thomas met as he entered Christie’s auction house was the Duke of Denford.

  “Castleton! Come to see the Titian Venus sold, have you? I warned Caro you wouldn’t let her keep it.”

  “So she told me. You weren’t quite frank with her about its value, were you? Five thousand was the sum Bridges mentioned, but you told her only three.”

  Denford looked annoyed. “I’m not pleased with you. You made Caro angry with me. She would barely speak to me when I called before you took her out of London.”

  “You were willing to cheat her.”

  “No,” Denford said, shaking his dark head. “I wouldn’t do that to Caro. I offered her a fair price. Three thousand was all that Bridges would have paid. He likes to make a fat profit.” He gave a smile that appeared to be genuine though Thomas still didn’t trust the man. “I congratulate you on your good sense in bringing it here. Given the excitement the Venus has aroused, Bridges is furious—fears he’ll have to pay much more at auction.”

  “Indeed.” Thomas had no intention of discussing his business with a man he disliked.

  Denford regarded him thoughtfully, kneading the silver knob on his affected walking stick. “Marcus Lithgow knows something, but he’s keeping it to himself. Where did Caro have it tucked away? Humor my curiosity.”

  Thomas rocked back on his heels and came to a decision. “I’ll tell you the whole story,” he said, though he intended it to be a heavily edited version, “if you’ll do something in return.”

  “Now I really am curious.”

  “Dine with me tonight and tell me about Robert Townsend.”

  Thomas left for London, bidding her once again to “get some rest.” Caro wanted to cling to him, beg him not to leave her alone in his gloomy mansion, but she let him go. He didn’t even embrace her, merely dropping a chaste farewell kiss on her forehead. Who could blame him? She’d rejected his offers of comfort so many times in the past weeks. The minute he left the room, she thought of calling him back but couldn’t shake off her lethargy. Half an hour later, she regretted it more. Yet all she’d have done was cry again. He must be mightily weary of her tears. Any man would be. The busines
s that called him to London must have come as a huge relief.

  The man was a saint to put up with her. The thought of herself, Caro, living with a saint raised a faint smile, which in turn lit a spark of vigor in her sluggish limbs and exhausted soul. The sooner she continued Thomas’s lessons in unsaintly behavior, the better. Yet the reflexive naughtiness of her thought bothered her. Was that really all she needed? She wasn’t seventeen anymore.

  At last, it had stopped raining. A glorious summer day beckoned her into the gardens she’d scarcely noticed when Thomas took her out for little invalid strolls. The areas close to the house were laid out in a charming old-fashioned way. Wandering through a parterre of flowerbeds surrounded by low box hedges, she noticed a dead rose and tugged it off. A thorn pricked her thumb, the insignificant pain a sharp reminder that she was alive. Among the well-tended plantings she noticed that a large patch of sweet william, one of her favorite flowers, was overcrowded. Getting down on her knees, she reached over the foot-high hedge and pulled at one of the smaller plants. Digging ungloved fingers into the earth to loosen the roots, she relished the cool damp soil, the sun on her neck.

  She had a faint recollection of working with a miniature spade and planting seeds under the gentle direction of a man. She couldn’t be certain, but she liked to think it was her earliest memory, and the man was her father. Her mother had deplored her fondness for gardening. Though a genteel enough occupation, it led to dirty fingernails. So usurping the gardener’s duty with her bare hands had become another weapon of defiance in her lifelong battle with Elizabeth Brotherton. A struggle that culminated in her running away with Robert Townsend because her mother forbade the engagement. It had been the reaction of a rebellious child.

  It was time to acknowledge squarely that her first marriage hadn’t been perfect, and to wonder if things would have been better if she’d taken a more conventional path. Not that she regretted her life with Robert. She would never blame him.