Chapter 3
Chapter
Fred felt his chest constrict as his hand gripped the letter. Thomas wanted him back in Dorset. Dorset was the one place in England where he swore he’d never set foot again.
No.
He read the entirety of the letter and then read it again, just to make certain he hadn’t been in some kind of fever-dream the first time.
Farrow Cottage and its inhabitants were after all the embodiment of his warmest, happiest childhood memories.
Perhaps if he were ill he might imagine a missive as absurd as this one.
But, alas, no. Thomas wanted him to marry his sister. The demand was so far from the bounds of reality—so preposterous—that Fred could barely wrap his mind around it.
He hardly even remembered Julianna, except in the broadest of strokes.
How he’d called her Jules and her brother called her Julie-bug.
How, after the accident, her eyes had blown so wide with fear and shock Fred couldn’t stand to look at them.
And how, to his utter shame, he’d been glad when she’d turned her face into Thomas’s chest and hidden it away.
He dipped his quill into the inkwell, letting the nib hover over the pristine sheet of vellum while he composed his reply.
Thomas,
I am in receipt of your letter but I wonder if you can say the same for your wits.
Although, perhaps, I should not be surprised.
You always were a practical jokester of the highest order.
On the odd chance this is not the joke I must presume it to be, I will say that, as it happens, I am not well-suited to marriage.
And I doubt your sister would thank you for volunteering her for the task, however well-respected the title of Countess of Chester may be.
Is it the respect you’re after? It cannot be the money.
If you recall, I have already offered my protection and my funds to you both and was turned down in no uncertain terms. I believe you said at the time, and I do quote, that I might go fuck myself.
You will understand why I question your wits now, to write and demand I offer her my hand in marriage. I am certainly not the man for the job and I—
He stopped writing. The quill tip blotted against the page, a single ink dot spreading like blood across its off-white expanse. He stared at the half-written letter and then into the fire burning in the hearth.
That night.
That terrible night was clawing itself back into his memory.
He had no wish to revisit it. Not the accident, nor the steamer packet he and Eva used to cross the Channel only hours later.
Certainly not the way the wind had whipped a frenzy across the deck, making his teeth clack together until his jaw had ached.
He had never regretted his choice to flee.
But now, tonight, sitting in his study with Thomas’s letter in his hand, he let himself question that impulsive decision made a decade ago by a boy who was too young to understand its repercussions.
What it would mean to lose his home, his best friend, and his reputation in one fell swoop.
How it would hurt him so badly he never bothered to try and have any of those things ever again.
He reached for the unfinished reply on his desk, balled it up, and tossed it into the fire where the flames greedily took it.
No.
No second guessing of decisions made too long ago to change.
No wondering what if, or perhaps.
No thinking of that night again.
Just the remembrance of it made his chest hurt, as if some long expired part of him was trying to awaken.
Well, that wasn’t going to happen, was it?
He’d read Frankenstein. He understood the danger of reviving things, flesh or feeling, that were better left dead. He would never—ever—marry Julianna Farrow.
And yet, here he still sat, long after the fire had eaten that damnable letter.
He couldn’t go back to Dorset. Not the place of mud and rain and too many splintered lives.
Where the gossip rags didn’t merely follow him as they did in London, they had defined him.
Where he was not an earl but a cautionary tale, endlessly retold.
The Darling of Dorset Disgraced. The Local Adonis who Lightfooted Away.
He would never be able to live down the decision he’d last made there. He’d only been eighteen for Christ’s sake, but it didn’t matter.
He could refuse.
He could send the letter back with a single sentence: No.
He could, with remarkable ease, do what he usually did: hide behind the facade of the Earl of Chester.
He was handsome, he was rich, and he was not afraid of being as aloof as was needed to ensure his peace and quiet.
His general air of churlishness didn’t stop the intrusions of the papers or the occasional misguided debutante, but it generally did the job everywhere else.
His fingers curled around the arm of the chair until the leather creaked. And then, very deliberately, he loosened them. He didn’t want to do what he always did. It was time to put this silly notion of Thomas’s to rest.
But he wouldn’t do it by letter.
He was an adult now, not a reckless young man just on the cusp of it. Tomorrow, he’d go to Dorset and look Thomas in the eyes when he told him no. He’d pay him off and then walk away, a new start for them both. Which should have been done years ago.
He’d tried of course with that annuity and Tom’s response had left no room for misinterpretation or for trying again. It had been Fred’s last attempt at anything as maudlin as feelings.
So Thomas must certainly be joking. The idea of Fred marrying Jules was just too preposterous otherwise.
But if he wasn’t…if Tom was truly dying…Fred shook his head. No, he couldn’t be. He wouldn’t let himself think about that.
He pulled a fresh sheet of vellum toward him anyway and wrote two short lines to Gilbert, the ink stark and final on the creamy expanse of the paper:
Have the traveling trunks brought down.
We leave for Dorset at first light.
He sanded the page, sealed it, and rang the bell before he could change his mind.
And then, because he could not resist pressing his thumb to his own wound, he pulled from his desk drawer the yellowed, frayed issue of The Poisoned Quill that he’d kept all these years.
As if reading it over and over might make it hurt less. It never, ever did.
THE FALL OF THE LOCAL ADONIS
The Poisoned Quill – May 12th, 1850
Printed on Cheap Paper for the Dearly Interested
DISGRACE IN DORSET! THE LOCAL ADONIS HAS ALWAYS BEEN DORSETSHIRE’S DARLING, BUT HAS THIS CARRIAGE-DRIVING CALAMITY GONE TOO FAR?
It is with a quill quivering in moral indignation that we bring you the latest and most ruinous tidings of one Mr. Frederick Sedgewick, formerly of Dorsetshire, known to many a simpering debutante and too-trusting mother as “The Local Adonis.” And oh, how the mighty have fallen!
Though truthfully, we were never quite convinced he stood all that tall to begin with, except in his own looking-glass.
This week, London and Dorset alike are ablaze with word of the ghastly midnight accident upon the Weymouth Road where a barouche carrying none other than the Local Adonis himself, Frederick Sedgewick, collided most tragically with the landau of the late Mr. and Mrs. Ignatius Farrow, killing both parents and leaving little but twisted iron, bloodied lace, and whispered scandal in its wake.
Miraculously their children, young Master Thomas Farrow (bosom companion to Mr. Sedgewick) and his twelve-year-old sister Julianna, survived the wreck with injuries deemed “non-fatal.”
What happens now you might ask? We certainly did.
But the mystery only deepens. No official charges have been brought.
No trial has been called. And the Sedgewick estate stands shuttered.
Horses sold, servants dismissed, and, here’s the true kettle-boiler, Frederick and his dearly beloved stepmother, Eva Sedgewick, have vanished across the Channel, making a quiet, rather cowardly escape to the Continent.
To Mr. Sedgewick, if this rag reaches your perfumed pocket: your secrets are safe only until we find them out. And we always do.
Yours in Disgust & Delight,
E.S. Mallory
Editor-at-Large, The Poisoned Quill