When a Duchess Says I Do

by Grace Burrowes

  “I don’t understand. You reported a vicar committing adultery, a man breaking his marital vows and preying on an unwilling woman. What was there to laugh about?”

  Duncan brushed a lock of hair back from Matilda’s brow. “Adultery is conjugal relations with another man’s wife. Rachel was unmarried, therefore, adultery did not occur. The bishop recited from the same primer the vicar had: Women tempt men on purpose, they entice us, they offer weak protests to heighten the pleasure of the chase, they hope to get with child so we’re bound to support them. Besides, the vicar was happy to manage a rural congregation in the godforsaken West Riding, and he excelled at coaxing funds from the local squires, barons, and wealthy yeomen.”

  “That is vile.” Matilda was angry for the poor maid, but she was equally incensed for the young curate.

  “That is the way of the world, I was told. David, whom God loved most dearly, had two hundred concubines and was a scheming murderer. Who was I to judge a good man for a few harmless pleasures?”

  Another curate, one without a true vocation, might have withstood this collision of piety and evil, but not Duncan Wentworth. “Such a church did not deserve you.”

  “The bishop agreed. I was instructed that if I failed to acquire a greater sense of tolerance for human failings, if I was unable to grasp that no man is perfect, then clearly, I lacked a true calling. The girl would be given a few coins if she conceived, and the appropriate charities would see to the rest.”

  He spoke calmly, as if reciting the course of a battle fought long ago on foreign soil, though Matilda sensed that the conflict yet raged inside him.

  “Which means,” she said, bringing Duncan’s knuckles to her lips, “the bishop had been confronted with the same situation previously, had a solution in place, and was complicit in the vicar’s knavery.”

  “The bishop, the vicar’s wife, the church elders…a great joke was in progress, and nobody had warned the maid or the new curate. He was not the butt of the humor, though. By the time I returned from consulting my bishop, Rachel had conceived. She was past the stage where the herbwoman’s tisanes could be safely attempted.”

  Those tisanes could kill a woman if used carelessly. “Was she given a few coins?”

  “She was berated for enticing the vicar into sin. I came upon the lady of the house delivering this tongue-lashing, which proceeded unabated as I stood witness. I collected my things, left without a reference, and escorted Rachel to Leeds. A schoolteacher’s salary was inadequate to arrange regular meals, much less regular medical care. The child came early and preceded her mother into death by a handful of days.”

  He fell silent, and Matilda waited for yet more sadness.

  “I seriously considered joining them.” Spoken softly, wearily.

  “You did not, because suicide is a sin.”

  He drew his finger along Matilda’s lips. “I did not, because I am a Wentworth. We are cursed with tenacity. I failed Rachel, I failed her child, I failed my calling. She put her trust in me, and I failed her. At first, I reasoned that continued life was to be my penance. I did not deserve the comfort of death.”

  “Which is youthful, melodramatic balderdash. You did everything in your power to right a grievous wrong.”

  He caressed her lips again, sweetly, gently. “So fierce, Matilda. I took years to come to that conclusion. The guilt has ebbed, though it will plague me all my days. My strengths and abilities as a curate were not equal to the challenge before me. I learned bitterness and rage, but I also learned that I love to teach. In the company of children, I took a small revenge against those who had betrayed Rachel. I taught the children well. I made sure they knew their letters and ciphering, that they could go out into the world with more than the ability to empty a chamber pot or recite rote prayers.”

  Suffer the little children to come unto me.…“As revenge goes, that’s commendably farsighted. I hope the bishop died of dysentery.”

  “He remains in his office. The vicar and his wife retired five years ago to a peaceful old age.”

  “That must be galling.”

  “I suspect this is why man turns to God, as a final arbiter of life’s unfairness. I dream of publicly denouncing the bishop, but what good would that do Rachel or her daughter? I am also still technically ordained—I was not defrocked—and vengeance is unbecoming of the clergy.”

  “You tried to bring the matter to justice, Duncan. You offered the truth to those in a position to make amends. Few would have been as honest.”

  He sat up just as Matilda reached for him. “And my honesty arguably resulted in two avoidable deaths.” He climbed from the bed naked and went to the fire, adding coal and poking the flames to life. “Truth always comes at a price. If you never explain how you came to be wandering in my woods, I will accept your discretion as the wiser course. Sometimes, the past should remain buried.”

  Duncan stared into the flames, a perfect lance of a man in three-quarter nude profile. He clearly did not believe that philosophy of silence. He’d been forced into it by circumstance.

  As Matilda had.

  “Come back to bed,” she said, patting the quilt. “I’m sorry the church betrayed your trust. You deserved better.”

  He did not deserve for Matilda to betray his trust, either, and yet she must, and soon.

  * * *

  Having told the story of his disappointed youth, Duncan hoped for some great insight into what he should have done instead or how he might have more effectively couched his accusations. Curled around a sleeping Matilda, no such revelations befell him.

  Nothing had changed for having entrusted that tale to another, nothing except that Matilda had put her finger on the harm done. Rachel and her baby had been victims of injustice, and Duncan’s faith in his spiritual superiors had been betrayed.

  If faith in those authorities was misplaced, then all faith was without grounds. Duncan’s innocence had been laid to rest as surely as Rachel and the child had. What did that leave but determination to avoid such entanglements in the future, and to move forward with an expectation of disillusionment?

  Duncan kissed Matilda on the temple and rose, then drew the covers over her. He hoped she would join him in this bed from now on, but he would not voice that request. She must come of her own free will, as she had the first time.

  He dressed and made his way to the family parlor, intent on creating a household budget. Matilda longed for a home of her own, and Brightwell needed a consistent hand on the reins.

  Trostle’s successor—for he would have one—would be held to account, just as Mrs. Newbury and Manners expected to be. A budget wanted thought, and remaining at Matilda’s side was not conducive to anything but yearnings and conjectures. Then too, if Duncan remained with her, he’d awaken her, and she needed her rest.

  The family parlor was warm, and Duncan’s knee was grumbling at him. To his disappointment, he was not to have solitude.

  “Why aren’t you hammering and sawing away on your lift?” he asked.

  Stephen had spread diagrams all over the reading table, a ruler, carpenter’s compass, and abacus among the documents. He was in his Bath chair poring over the drawings, and did not look up when Duncan posed his question.

  “You really should set up a sawpit,” he said. “As much mature lumber as you have, as much coin as it would fetch on the market, you should make the investment.”

  I had planned to be in Rome this time next year.

  Duncan had not planned on falling in love with Matilda. “Draw me up a proposal, complete with budget, site plan, and estimated operating costs. Better still, buy this property from me and turn your talents to making it profitable.” He took the reading chair Matilda favored, closest to the fire, rather than examine Stephen’s sketches.

  “What has turned your reliably dull disposition so rotten?” Stephen asked, tucking a pencil behind his ear. “You’ve barely made a start on this place and already, you’re ceding the match.”

  Duncan rubbed his
knee, a futile undertaking once the damned thing decided to ache. “Have you ever tried to hold authority accountable for wrongdoing?”

  Stephen capped a bottle of ink and set it on the standish. “Yes, and that folly inspired my dear papa to break my leg. He said he’d done me a favor. If I was so intent on begging for food, I might as well have a twisted limb to evoke the sympathy of passersby.”

  That was more than Stephen had ever said about the origins of his injury. “He broke your leg on purpose?”

  “As much purpose as Jack Wentworth had about anything when he was three sheets to the wind. I expected him to share with me the first food he’d brought to the house in three days. This time of year…” Stephen’s gaze went to the window. “I hate this time of year. I don’t hate England, but I hate the darkness.”

  He also hated pity—probably more than darkness, cold, snow, or his late father—so Duncan temporarily ignored the disclosure of Jack Wentworth’s evil.

  “I’ve asked Matilda for permission to embark on a courtship.”

  Stephen stared at him for a good five ticks of the mantel clock. “You are begging for heartbreak. Damned near demanding it at sword point. I expect you alone of all people to behave rationally, and yet, you offer your name to a woman who is likely wanted for hanging felonies.”

  Hence the uneasy roiling in Duncan’s gut. “I’ll take her to the Continent where the king’s men cannot pursue her.” Though what Matilda wanted more than anything was a home and family of her own, not life as a fugitive.

  “And what if her troubles follow you there? Will you change your name, cut off all ties to family, expect her to do likewise?”

  This conversation was extraordinary, not for the content—one Wentworth making a futile attempt to talk sense into another—but for the fact that Stephen was the party counseling prudence.

  “Most criminals are safe enough if they can elude justice for any length of time,” Duncan said. The runners and patrollers preferred to go after game laying a fresh trail, when the motivation to pay a reward was still high.

  “Matilda has been running for months, Duncan.”

  “You don’t know that. You reach that conclusion based on her slenderness and her secretiveness.”

  “She might never tell you what mischief follows her, until it has become your mischief too. Abetting a felon, becoming an accessory after the fact, will see you hanged, and that scandal is no way to repay the loyalty of your cousins.”

  Duncan rose and closed the curtains, for only cold and darkness lay beyond the window. “Tell me, Stephen, did my many attempts to persuade you to moderate your behavior ever succeed because I’d made you feel guilty?”

  “Of course not, but why Matilda, Duncan? Why a woman about whom you know virtually nothing? You can have your pick of heiresses, bluestockings, well-read widows.…I could line women up from here to London who’d accept a proposal from a ducal Wentworth, regardless of his age or mental condition. You instead choose a woman who might be led away in chains tomorrow. Why?”

  The question had no logical answer, and Duncan had come to this parlor for solitude. He’d wanted to savor the intimacies he’d shared with Matilda, not fall into a brown study over a past he could not change—another past he could not change.

  “Matilda is intelligent,” he said, “learned, well traveled, and favorably disposed toward me, despite my dull character and ancient years. She is unmarried and her heart is not elsewhere engaged. Should I turn my back on her because of events that don’t concern me?”

  Stephen wheeled away from the table and shifted to the chair near the fire. Duncan knew better than to offer assistance.

  “You speak as if you have only two choices,” Stephen said, propping his leg on a hassock. “We are Wentworths, and we don’t meekly endure what life hands us. I account myself responsible for Jack Wentworth’s death, for example.”

  Duncan stopped three steps short of the door. “Drink killed him.”

  “In the philosophical sense, perhaps. He was already quite drunk and intent on becoming drunker. He reached for the bottle on the windowsill, which contained rat poison. I had placed the bottle there myself. Not very bright of me—or perhaps it was brilliant, in a diabolically evil sort of way. Papa always kept his blue ruin on the windowsill.”

  “You did not kill him, Stephen. You were a child, a small boy no more capable of plotting murder than I am capable of witty flirtation aimed at women half my age.”

  Stephen withdrew the pencil from behind his ear and flicked it over, under, and through his fingers.

  “Believe that if you must, Duncan, but when Papa was choking his last, he bid me to run for the surgeon. I hadn’t run for four years at that point, courtesy of my father’s loving discipline. I could lurch, hobble, struggle, and crawl, but not run. So I ignored the dictates of honored authority and didn’t even try to make haste. By the time I had fetched Nan Pritchard from the pub, Jack Wentworth was wonderfully, absolutely dead.”

  Duncan knew a confession when he heard one, and a plea for absolution. “If Jack Wentworth was too drunk to know rat poison from gin, then his death was an accident, Stephen. Had you tried to intervene, he’d be just as dead, and you might have a useless arm to go with your poorly knit leg. Forgive yourself, though in my estimation, you have nothing to forgive yourself for.”

  Stephen brushed a glance over him. “Jack was making plans for my older sisters that no decent man contemplates for any woman, much less for mere girls who call him father. My point is that I was eight years old, crippled, unlettered, and none too bright, and yet, I might have put that rat poison into Jack’s blue ruin rather than wait for an accident to solve my problems. I had an option, but I would not admit that to myself.”

  More than anything, Duncan wanted to put his arms around Stephen and comfort that guilty, battered eight-year-old boy. Stephen would gut him with his sword cane and serve the pieces to the house cats if Duncan so much as hinted of sympathy.

  “No eight-year-old should have to contemplate patricide.”

  “No eight-year-old,” Stephen replied, “should have had Jack Wentworth for a father. The fact remains that you need not meekly accept that the only solution to Matilda’s problems is to run from her past.”

  I can stand and fight her enemies—if she wants me to. But then, how had fighting for Rachel turned out? “My thanks for your counsel. Does Quinn know about the rat poison?”

  Stephen shook his head. “He’d blame himself. Bad gin fit the situation well enough. You can take my secret with you when you and Matilda disappear to Cathay.”

  That smarted, as it was intended to. “Design me a sawpit, please.”

  “What’s the point? You’ll be in Cathay.”

  “Perhaps I’ll be right here, raising a family with my devoted wife.” Duncan quit the room rather than listen to Stephen deride such fanciful twaddle.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Matilda would have considered this meal a feast just a few short weeks ago, though her appetite was nowhere to be found. The dining parlor was cozy, the fowl and ham well prepared, and the apple torte delicately spiced. Lord Stephen regaled her with tales of his exploits in Copenhagen, where he knew neither the language nor the customs.

  “I thus came to the battle of wits unarmed,” Lord Stephen said, topping up Matilda’s glass of Sauternes.

  “Shakespeare,” Duncan muttered, from the head of the table. “Though relying on the Bard to supply your humor rather underscores your point. Excuse me, please. It’s time I sought my bed.”

  He rose and bowed to Matilda, then left her alone with Lord Stephen and an abundance of food.

  “Duncan becomes even more polite than usual when he’s upset,” Stephen said. “He saw you nick the roll.”

  I have lost my touch. “I’m merely taking a snack to my room for later.”

  Lord Stephen cut another serving of apple torte, set it on a plate, added a few slices of cheddar, and passed it to her.

  “That’s a sn
ack for later. The roll in your pocket is stolen goods, to sustain you when you leave here in about”—he glanced at the mantel clock—“five hours.”

  Matilda had not decided to leave. She had decided that she needed to leave soon. Duncan’s tale of disappointment and betrayal at the hands of the church only made the decision more imperative. He did not deserve to be entangled with a woman who’d quite possibly lead him to the gallows. Then too, his family was planning a visit.

  Better for all concerned if Matilda decamped before they arrived. “I won’t leave tonight.”

  Stephen peered at his wine. “Duncan could divine the reason for that assurance, and he could do so without even thinking about it.”

  Daunting thought. “Today is Tuesday,” Matilda said. “The laundry was done yesterday, and the dress I wore when I arrived will not be dry until tomorrow at least. I would not leave in a damp dress.”

  He lifted a glass a few inches in Matilda’s direction. “I take your point. Nor will you leave in a borrowed dress—because if the rag you arrived in is found here, that’s evidence you were on the premises—but you will leave. Why?”

  Matilda toyed with her torte. Cook had used the honey liberally, though Duncan’s piece sat untouched on his plate.

  “I am not safe here.”

  Stephen snorted. “He’d die for you. I’d die for you because he’d expect it of me and I haven’t anything more pressing to attend to at the moment.”

  Matilda put aside her fork. “Then you and he are not safe because of me. When I leave, I will not take my Book of Common Prayer. You will burn it for me, please.”

  “If you like, though that has to be a mortal sin. I haven’t committed one of those in quite some time.”

  “So glad I could provide you a bit of diversion.” She rose and curtsied, ignored the apple torte and cheese on the table, and left Lord Stephen to enjoy his dessert.

  A prudent woman would go straight to her room, count up her coins for the fifth time that day, and ensure her meager belongings were neatly stowed in the wardrobe, ready to be tossed into a spare shawl and bundled together for travel. Matilda had been prudent, before fear and confusion had sent her down cow paths and game trails, into overgrown woods, and into Duncan Wentworth’s arms.