The Earl's Regret_Brides and Gentlemen

by Joyce Alec

  The face of Lord William gazed down into her tear streaked face. His eyes were wide with concern, and immediately his hands were on her shoulders, steadying her.

  “Dear heavens, girl, whatever is the matter with you? You look as pale as parchment.”

  He must have noticed the parchment in her hands, for she did not speak.

  “What is that?” he asked, gesturing to it.

  She shook her head, more tears fluttering down her cheeks.

  “Come now, I cannot help you if you do not tell me.” He peered at her very gently, his eyes cautious. “Take a deep breath to steady yourself, there you are.”

  Henrietta managed to take a shaky breath, and the shuttering sobs subsided momentarily.

  “There, now. Tell me what happened. Are the wedding nerves finally catching up with you?”

  Anger flushed her cheeks, and she clenched her fists once more, the parchment crinkling in her palm.

  “No…your brother…he…” she began, and unable to say the words out loud, shoved the letter into Lord William’s hands.

  It only took him a moment to finish reading, and when he looked at her, his eyes were wide with disbelief.

  “Lady Henrietta, you mustn’t believe this,” he started, but she shook her head violently.

  “Then what do you propose I believe, Lord William? Surely this letter was not intended for me. He apparently meant to send this any day now, and never meant for anyone to see it.”

  Lord William’s eyes narrowed, his head tilting to the side. “Where did you find this letter?”

  Henrietta shook her head once more. “That matters not. What does matter is that your brother does not love me. He loves another woman, and I am not about to marry a man who will begin our marriage in the most unfaithful way that a man could.”

  She snatched the letter from his grip, glared at him for even being related to Lord Pembrooke, and straightened herself up.

  Down the hall, she could hear Lady Charlotte and Lady Mary calling for her.

  Her strength and courage returning, the anger currently winning control, she shoved past Lord William and down the hall.

  “Where are you going?” Lord William called after her. “You can’t leave! The wedding is in two days!”

  “The wedding is off!” She cried in return, the tears welling up in her eyes once more, feeling as if they might spill out at any moment, but she wouldn’t allow them to. Lord Pembrooke didn’t deserve her tears. Not after what he had done to her.

  6

  Starlight and Secrets

  She reached home before long and was not particularly surprised to know that Lady Mary and Lady Charlotte had followed her.

  Her parents were the most surprised to see her home, and she spent the better part of the afternoon sobbing into her father’s shoulder, the letter a wrinkled, tattered mess after everyone else had the pleasure of reading it.

  By evening, the house had settled into an uneasy silence, disbelief on everyone’s lips, but Henrietta would not listen to any of them. She didn’t dare give her heart any sort of hope about the situation.

  She loved Lord Pembrooke above any man she had ever met, and never in her wildest dreams had she ever suspected he could have so blatantly discarded her feelings like that. She locked herself away in her room, and despite the urgent pounding on the door from her friends and her mother, she would not come out.

  The letter that had so changed her life stayed within arm’s reach, and she stared at it for so long that her eyes grew sore. How was it that in her efforts to set things right before her wedding, she inadvertently sabotaged herself? The worry for the jewels seemed as if it had happened years before, and she wondered why she ever cared so much about them in the first place. It was interesting to her how the mind could make such a big deal out of something so insignificant when something so horrible was happening just under her nose?

  She wondered if she knew the woman. She thought back to any and all of the balls that she and Lord Pembrooke had ever attended together, naming each and every acquaintance she could remember to herself. None of them seemed particularly charming, but that didn’t mean that she and Lord Pembrooke were not well versed in hiding their feelings in front of others. For certain, he had successfully hidden this relationship from her for as long as he had, however long that actually was, and she would have remained unaware of it if she had not stumbled upon the letter in his room.

  In all fairness, she never should have found the letter. But if she had not, she would have married a man who cared little for her or her heart, and immediately would be breaking his marriage vows. Did his faith and his integrity really mean so little to him? How could he look at her and say such sweet things and not mean them?

  Faith.

  Before another dark thought passed through her mind, she knelt to her knees in front of her window. The moon had just begun to ascend into the sky, the bright, milky light surrounded by pinpricks of stars. If her heart was not so distressed, she would have been able to fully appreciate the beauty.

  Lord, she prayed in the deepest recesses of her heart, her head cradled in her hands. There are no words for what I feel right now. I am so grateful that You already know all, for I do not wish to utter one more word about what has happened today. My heart feels as if it has been beaten, ripped apart, and tossed out into the frigid night. I do not understand what Your plan is, nor do I understand what happened today. I just know that I cannot handle it a moment longer.

  All I ask for is Your peace and Your grace. You are my fortress, my deliverer, and my Savior. There is nothing I can do apart from You. And in order to get through the foreseeable future in my life, in order to pick up all of the pieces that have been shattered beyond recognition, I need You to carry me.

  There was a sharp rap of knuckles on her door, and she glared at the wooden surface.

  “Go away,” she cried. “I already told you to leave me be.”

  “Henrietta?”

  Her hands fell to her lap, and she nearly fell over. She felt as if her heart stopped all together.

  Lord Pembrooke?

  She stared at the door, breathing very quickly, and she looked all around. Did she…did she just imagine his voice in her anguish?

  “Henrietta, please, can I come inside?”

  She rose to her feet immediately and crossed the distance to her door. She nearly pulled the door open for him, but a twinge of fear caused her to hesitate.

  “What are you doing here?” she said, and it came out rather quietly. Her eyes stung, and after she had thought she had cried all of the tears she possibly could, she was surprised to feel more of them fill her eyes.

  “I need to come in. We need to talk,” he replied calmly.

  She could almost imagine his face. His brows furrowed, his lips taut, his jaw clenched.

  “No,” she replied before the thoughts had formed in her mind. “There is nothing you can say. I found the letter.”

  “What letter?” he asked, exasperated. The tone that he took made her realize that he must have said those words many more times today than just in that moment.

  She debated with herself for several moments before she recognized the fact that this conversation would need to happen at some point, and it might as well happen now while all of her arguments were fresh in her mind.

  She pulled the door open and fastened her best glare on her face as she looked into his face, but it was immensely difficult. In the low light from the candles lit around her room, the anxiety was evident upon his face. She had not prepared herself for seeing him, and it nearly made her lose her nerve.

  She turned and walked across her room to the chair beside her window where she had just been, seated herself upon it, and gazed out the window.

  Lord Pembrooke hesitated by the door, and took a few steps inside. When she didn’t look up at him, which took all of her strength, he cleared his throat.

  “What in the world has happened?” he asked quietly, his voice barely a whis
per.

  She did not answer him.

  “I come home from town after having a lovely talk with the minister about the wedding to find that my fiancée has left in a horrendous rage, going on about a letter that she discovered, and that our wedding has been called off?”

  She could feel his gaze on the side of her face, but she focused her gaze on the moon outside.

  “You must speak to me, Henrietta, for I have no earthly idea what is going on at all.”

  She whipped around and glared at him, her eyes narrow. “Do not use my Christian name, you have no right to it any longer.”

  “What do you mean?” He asked quickly, the color in his cheeks deepening. “My brother told me everything that happened, and I still do not understand –”

  “Do not come here and pretend to be the innocent one!” Henrietta replied, standing to her feet now, her hands clenched tightly at her side, her voice rising. “I found this,” she said, holding up the tear stained letter, “in your room this afternoon. You can stop the farce; I discovered your secret.”

  “What secret?” He asked, the astonishment clear on his face. “That I have a lover? How can you believe something so preposterous? And what, may I ask, were you doing in my room?”

  “It would have been my room as well in two days’ time,” she retorted angrily, repeating Lady Mary’s words to him. “And I was looking for these jewels that disappeared, thank you very much. But stop trying to avoid the subject! You have taken a lover, and I would have been completely unaware of it had I not discovered this letter!”

  “You keep saying these things, and I will continue to tell you that you are wrong! I have no one in my life aside from you! What need would I have for another woman?”

  She shook her head angrily. “I do not know, why don’t you enlighten me?” she replied.

  She noticed his hands clench and loosen. He was growing angry as well. Good, she thought. Maybe he will finally tell me the truth.

  “So after all of this time, after knowing me for our entire lives, you just now decide that I am a liar and am capable of such deceit?”

  These words caused her pause, and she rubbed the letter between her fingers. “Isn’t that what people do when they are trying to cover up something? They act and pretend as if everything is normal?”

  “I cannot believe this…” he said, pressing the bridge of his nose with his forefinger and thumb. “After all we have been through, it is baffling me how little you really think of me.” He looked squarely at her. “I do not have a lover, not apart from you. You are the only woman I have ever loved and the only woman I have ever wanted to love.”

  Oh, how she wanted to believe him. How she wanted to just throw herself into his arms and be done with the whole thing, to put it all behind them.

  When she didn’t reply, he held out his hand.

  “Now, give me the letter.”

  She took a step back, clutching the letter close to herself. “No, I don’t want to.”

  “Why not? I want to see exactly what it is that I have been accused of.”

  She watched his face. Would his face betray something that his words would not as he read the letter through? He waited patiently as she decided.

  She passed him the letter and watched as he unfolded it. He held it as if it was something disgusting. She watched him carefully as his eyes scanned the letter, yet his eyes remained curious and his brow furrowed. Perhaps he was a much better actor than she had ever realized.

  He lowered the letter and sighed.

  She braced herself. Here it comes, the truth, she told herself.

  “This is not my letter,” he replied flatly, looking down at the letter once more.

  “Then how can you explain that it was in your room?”

  “Where did you find this?” Lord Pembrooke asked, shaking the letter gently.

  Henrietta crossed her arms over her chest. “In the side table beside your bed.”

  The statement perplexed him. “Well, I keep my letters from you in there,” he replied, and then rubbed his chins with his free hand, his eyes on the floor. “But I did not write this letter.”

  She rolled her eyes.

  “It was lying right in the drawer beside my letters,” Henrietta replied.

  He looked back down at the letter, reading it through once more. Henrietta could only stand there and watch him, wondering what in the world was going through his mind. Was he about to admit that he had been discovered? There really was no way he could escape the truth now.

  “This is not my handwriting,” he said eventually, still studying the letter intently.

  “I beg your pardon?” she asked, the humor lost to her.

  He looked up at her, and pointed down to the letter. “This isn’t my handwriting,” he repeated.

  “It is indeed your handwriting,” she said slowly, peering carefully at him. Had he lost his mind? “I have received more than enough letters to recognize your handwriting.”

  “Yes, but I more than aware of how I write, and have been for my entire life, and this is not my handwriting.”

  “You must be joking,” she replied. “It is your handwriting! It is!”

  “I must admit that it is quite the striking resemblance, and I can certainly see how you could easily mistake it for mine,” he said, looking up at her. “But I assure you. This letter was not written by me.”

  “There is no possible way that you can explain that.”

  “Find me one of my letters,” he replied.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Find me one of the letters that I wrote to you.” He paused. “You still have them, don’t you? Or have you already thrown all of those into the fire?”

  The pain in his voice stung her, and she shook her head.

  “No, I didn’t throw them into the fire. They’re right over here.”

  She crossed the room to her desk underneath the opposite window and pulled the most recent letter that he had sent her from a tall stack of papers. She returned to Lord Pembrooke with it and handed it to him.

  He opened the letter, and a small smile pulled at the corner of his mouth, but she realized that it was a sad smile. He continued to read for a moment before he nodded.

  “Here,” he said, pointing to the word time in the letter she had just handed him. “Do you see how I write my letter T? Here tail of the T swoops down ever so slightly underneath the word. As it does on every letter T in this letter.”

  He pulled the other letter out once more, and pointed to another letter T, this time on the word activity. “Do you see how they are different? Here the T does not drop down below the other letters. It’s a subtle difference, but it is there.”

  Henrietta sighed. “Perhaps I misunderstand you. You wish for me to believe that this other letter was not written by you because one of one tiny little difference?”

  He shook his head. “Please go get me another letter, and I will prove that this is different.”

  She obeyed and returned with a few more. Together they bent over the letters that he had spread out over the table beside her door, and he moved a few candles nearer so the letters could be seen more clearly.

  Hope had begun to flicker in her chest. His calm had helped her to see that perhaps she was wrong, and that this letter was not actually written by him. The closer they looked and compared the one letter to all of the rest of his that he had sent, it seemed more and more that it was different.

  She crossed her arms and stood a little ways back from the table. “How do I know that you aren’t changing your handwriting ever so slightly so that you do not get caught?”

  He rolled his eyes and sighed heavily, his palms rested on the table.

  “Why in the world would I go to all of that trouble just to change a slight thing about it? Certainly if this was something I was doing, wouldn’t I change it drastically so that no one could pin the letter on me or believe that I had written it if it ever was found?”

  His logic seemed sound, and cert
ainly he had a reason and answer for every question she had asked him, and they all made sense.

  “That would just be a poor decision, and eventually lead to a predictable mistake, no matter what way you look at it.”

  There was little left in her mind to doubt him, and she felt an enormous relief wash over herself.

  “Do you promise me that you didn’t write this letter?” she asked quietly, pointing to it.

  Lord Pembrooke looked at her, and then he turned his whole body to face her, taking her face in his hands. He tilted her chin up towards him so she could not look away.

  “I swear on my very life that I did not write that letter.”

  There was nothing but honesty in his eyes, she realized, and she lost all of her strength. Her knees gave way, and she was thankful that he was already holding her, for she collapsed into his waiting arms.

  The guilt and the grief of the day resurged, and she cried into his shoulder as he held onto her.

  How could she have been such a fool? How could she have really believed that he would have wronged her? Perhaps the idea was so great and so terrible that her fears had made something out of nothing and she allowed herself to be carried away by it.

  “I’m sorry. I'm so sorry," she kept saying, unable to contain the rush of emotions washing over her. She felt so ashamed of herself and her ability to doubt him so easily.

  “It’s all right,” he said, stroking her long hair which had come loose from its plait. “Don’t worry, it’s okay now…” he whispered.

  They stood like that for a long time as they allowed the distance between themselves to lessen, the distance that she had created. She allowed him to love on her and whisper things in her ears to help her feel better.

  I do not deserve a love such as this, she thought. He has already forgiven me for ripping him to pieces. How must he have felt to be on the receiving end of my actions?

  The moon was no longer visible through the windows when she calmed down, and they made proper amends.

  “I’m sorry I ever thought that you could do that to me,” she said, hoping that he knew just how much she meant with those words.