Chapter 5
Chapter
Fred stood in the grand entryway of Sedgewick Manor.
Like Farrow Cottage where he’d just been, it was the first time he’d stepped foot in the Manor in a decade.
His boots scraped against the marble floor, layered in dust. The thick scent of mildew clung to everything: the banisters, the draperies, even the walls.
He looked around, shocked that the great house was in such an utter state of disrepair.
It looked, he couldn’t help but notice, exactly as bad as he currently felt.
There was no one to greet him, so he removed his gloves himself, and then his hat and his coat. The housekeeper had retired long ago and the footmen had gone on to other service, each with an adequate reference written by his solicitor on his behalf.
The caretakers he’d paid to close up the house had done the job, barely. The roof had not collapsed, nor the foundations crumbled, but that was the best he could say of them. Outside, the gardens had grown thick and wild. Inside, it was as quiet as a crypt.
His footsteps echoed as he made his way down the long corridor toward the study.
The portraits on the wall watched him as he went, those long-dead Sedgewicks with their cold, imperious eyes.
He looked like them now, in a way he never thought possible when he was the Darling of Dorset.
The bright-eyed, thick-thighed eighteen year old who had rambled through these halls, laughing at all those unsmiling faces that peered down at him. More fool him.
He’d had an unhappy childhood, certainly, but his teenage years, spent in the company of Thomas and other bosom friends, had once felt like happiness. He had been praised, indulged, wanted. Close enough to happiness, at least, that everything before and after now seemed grimmer by comparison.
He found the master study quickly, not knowing where else to go. The smell hit him first as soon as he stepped inside. Old paper and stale brandy. The faint, haunting trace of Eva’s rose soap that still clung to the edges of the room.
May she rest in peace.
She, like everyone else in his life, had deserved more than he’d given her.
Fred crossed to the window and pulled back the heavy curtain. Light speared through the filth on the glass and spilled across the covered furniture, glancing off the empty decanter on the desk and filtering onto the stack of yellowing papers beside it.
He coughed as dust, aroused by his entrance, bloomed into the air. The loud, sudden sound of his hacking broke the silence that pressed in all around him. Tomorrow he’d call for Gilbert to bring the London staff to Dorset. He’d have brought them himself if he’d had any intention of staying.
He hadn’t, of course. But then he’d strode into that cottage and it had broken his heart.
Thomas was dying. He’d said so in his letter, but Fred hadn’t—Christ—he hadn’t believed it.
He’d imagined exaggeration or a joke. Perhaps a ploy to force the matter of Julianna’s betrothal.
That was cynical of him, but no more so than he usually was. And usually, he was right.
But nothing about Thomas’s condition had been faked.
His cheeks, which Fred remembered as always laughing and round with joy, were hollowed out such that he appeared nearly skeletal.
His teeth, which had always flashed a bright, blinding white when he smiled, looked gray now, encased in purple, inflamed gums. And that rattling cough.
By Christ, that cough could wake the dead.
Fred couldn’t very well hand the man a bag of coin and walk back out the door again, no matter what he’d intended. He couldn’t. He was an arsehole, truly, but not so dastardly as that.
And Julianna.
He’d hardly remembered her at all, except as a child. She wasn’t that any longer. She was a woman now and an unexpectedly exquisite one.
Not that he’d allow himself to think of her in that way. Not only did she hate him, which she’d made more than evident this morning, but Thomas had made him promise.
He would marry her and he would not touch her. Ever.
What Thomas didn’t know was that he needn’t have bothered extracting such an oath.
Fred had maintained his own chaste celibacy since the accident.
It was his libido that had gotten them all into this mess—he’d only been at that dinner the evening of the accident to spend time with the Baroness.
And so it was his libido that he’d wrestled to the ground afterward.
At first it had been difficult, certainly. He had been a man of appetites in his youth, but only his wanting for a good meal remained now. He hardly thought of sexual relations at all these days.
So he could not account for the way his breath had caught in his throat when Julianna opened that door and stared at him, her dark eyes liquid and furious.
She’d looked at him as if he were the most despicable thing she’d ever seen: a worm washed up by a storm and then burned to a crisp by the sun.
A mouse gutted and turned inside out by some bird of prey.
And he’d reacted to her horror with a jolt of arousal. The reaction was so abrupt, so out of place for him, that his body had felt for the briefest of moments like it belonged to some other wanton fellow entirely. One who always walked around half-mast. Not Fred.
But then disgust, his old familiar friend, had flared hot in his stomach.
Not at her, but at himself. That he had had that reaction at all.
It was…inappropriate. And certainly not something he expected to suffer again.
He had simply been surprised, he told himself now.
Taken off guard by the sheer ferocity of her beauty.
Fred pressed a palm flat against the cold windowpane and stared at the cracked, empty fountain outside. There was only ruin around him now, which truly was befitting, wasn’t it?
He remembered what the Manor had once been.
What he’d once been. Before the night of the accident broke his heart and he’d skulked off to the Continent where it grew back twisted and hard.
Its rough edges still sometimes scraped against the inside of his chest, removing any chance it might ever heal itself again.
He closed his eyes against the memories that tried to overtake him.
Farrow Cottage had always been where he was happiest but it would do him no good now to dwell.
He crossed the room to the fireplace instead and picked up the old poker to shove aside the ashes that hadn’t been cleared in years.
But there were too many of them, too thick and damp to even consider starting a fire, so he just watched them scatter instead.
Tomorrow. He’d deal with all of it tomorrow. He’d call for his staff, send word to his solicitor to draw up the marriage contracts, and visit the Bishop in person to request the license.
Tonight, he’d go stay in a coaching inn. But first he sat down at his desk and lit the single candle that still remained in the single silver candlestick he found there. He rummaged around for a quill he then dipped into the dregs of the inkwell.
He’d taken to writing letters to Eva when they were in France, as some kind of outlet for the intense, all-encompassing loneliness of that time. He never gave them to her just as he would never give this one to Julianna, but he found some comfort in the habit nonetheless.
Jules,
Julianna,
It is a strange thing to be summoned to marry a woman who loathes me by a man who once called me brother. Stranger still that I should comply.
You would not believe it of me, but I am not a man who generally complies with the wishes of others. In truth, I came here intending to tell Thomas his idea of marriage could go to hell.
But I needed only one look at him—and one at you—to know I could not walk back out the door of Farrow Cottage without doing what he asked of me. I owe him that at least, the last vestige of what was once a friendship.
You think me a monster but your opinion of me will not weigh heavily. I have borne worse these past ten years.
I will sign my name beside yours in the parish register. I will stand beside you before God. But I will never reach for you. I will never claim what Thomas forbade. I will never place a hand upon your skin—not in love, not in anger, not even in kindness.
This is my vow to you. Not the one I’ll recite in front of the Bishop, but the one I utter to you from the depths of my damaged heart. Where, I believe, it matters.
Yours,
Frederick Sedgewick
Earl of Chester
Fred took the letter and slipped it into his desk drawer. When he stood to leave, his eyes landed on the floor where his footprints had been preserved in the dust there. Ghostly artifacts, staring back at him.
He shook his head. There were too many ghosts here. He made for the door and the coaching inn.