Chapter 36
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
God himself could not have commanded a more picturesque setting for the earl’s disgrace.
The scene as Julian entered the drawing room looked like heaven’s handiwork.
The sun, low in the sky, reflected off the ice clinging to earth and shone through the expansive windows like heaven’s beacon.
It bathed Georgiana’s infant son’s gold hair as he gnawed on the lace hem of the countess’s petticoat.
His mother sat in deep conversation with Oliver’s wife, Lady Acomb, who sixteen years later, still clutched a hanky and alternately sniffed and sipped sherry.
The sun burnished the brandy in Oliver’s hand, his brother’s wig askew and grumbling on colonial troubles with Nicholas Eastwick who dwarfed a glowing gold-upholstered chair.
His sister Caroline frowned at her children who flitted and laughed across the vast room with Oliver’s daughters.
Next to Caroline was Julian and Georgiana’s aunt Charlotte.
And Julian’s grandmother, the Dowager Countess of Tindall, a calculating woman who brought misery to all those she visited on her annual tour of her family’s homes like Torquemada.
Further enhancing this scene of golden domesticity, Oliver's eldest, Sophia, played a lively Italian song on Kitty’s mother’s pianoforte.
Georgiana saw Julian first, arching a brow with Stephen at her hip.
And there was the Earl of Tindall, his back to the door, warming his hands at the fire with Caroline’s husband.
The fiend who had thrown a cigar to Kitty’s skirt and ordered her killed.
Who had torn her and his son from his life.
Who had terrified Kitty so she would rather have him think the worst of her instead of divulging her secret horror.
Julian asked Georgiana to remove the children, and his cousin herded the brood and sent them off with a nurse.
Outside the door, he pulled Kitty into his arms, wishing he could turn back time and rescue her.
Nothing bad will happen, he had once assured her.
I won’t allow it. Why hadn’t he eloped with her before leaving for Southampton?
Because he had wanted the money his father had held from him.
“If you don’t want to see him,” he said, “we will leave right now.”
“No. I must see him. I must do this.” She stared ahead as if reliving her horror. Her hand sliding down his sleeve, she led him into the room.
His mother lifted her gaze and gasped. “Miss Babbington. Is it you?”
His father turned and Kitty’s nails clawed into the back of his hand. The bastard paled. His eyes flashed fury. Then, arrogance. And finally, cool indifference. All these emotions directed straight at Kitty.
The room quieted.
“Thank you for joining us for this joyous occasion,” Julian said.
“May I present to you the girl I have known for sixteen years, my friend, my love, the woman with whom I have chosen to spend my life, my wife of two years”—he added that for the earl—“the former Miss Katherine Babbington of Notfelle, Huntingdonshire.”
The room filled with applause. Those sitting, stood, even his surly grandmother, who clutched the rubies at her wrinkly throat and praised God and coming heirs.
“Two years,” his mother exclaimed. “Ah, what a joy you kept from me.”
Footmen dispersed flutes of champagne amongst the guests.
The earl hadn’t applauded. He twitched. Georgiana’s gaze worked back and forth between Kitty and the earl.
Kitty’s nails dug deeper.
Julian murmured in her ear, “Does Georgie know?”
“I told her I wasn’t safe. I think she is putting it together.”
Oliver toasted Julian with a wink. “To my brother. Ever the rogue. Two years, you say? I wish you most happy. And to you, Kitty, I wish you patience and understanding.” Oliver cocked a brow to their father. “My lord?”
The earl cleared his throat, raising his glass level to his slitted mouth. “Congratulations, Andrew.”
Eastwick began a speech as the earl stalked toward Julian and Kitty, looking past toward the door.
Julian blocked his father’s path. “Not staying, my lord?”
“I’ve business to attend to.” Cold eyes trailed over Kitty in her widow’s weeds. A muscle worked in his jaw. “Let me pass.”
“No. You will not run from this. You will stay, and you will listen.”
The room fell silent. Julian stood between his father and wife while his family tried to make sense of the burgeoning row.
“More than five years ago,” he said to the earl, “my wife received a letter from you. She was seventeen and we were to marry. We were very much in love, weren’t we, my lord?”
“Andrew, I do not know this girl, but whatever she has told you is a lie.”
“Liar,” Kitty grit out.
“Son, she is unhinged.”
Kitty stepped from behind him, small in comparison, hardly reaching the shoulders’ of father and son, but she was mighty in resolve.
“If I am unhinged, it is because you have made me so. You invited me to meet with you and your wife. He baited me, Lady Tindall, by promising your presence. And so I went. And there, on a bank along the River Great Ouse, he had his man shove my face in the water, three times, explaining that his son would never marry a Catholic.”
Julian looked to the room. “I, you see, didn’t know what was good for me.” He nodded at Oliver. “It would also threaten his eldest son’s political career.”
Oliver paled.
“Go on, Kitty,” Julian said.
Anger intensified the green in her eyes. “In exchange for my life, I was forced to write a letter to Julian, telling him I did not love him anymore. And when the letter was completed, the earl ordered me killed.”
Gasps and curses scoured the room. His mother wept.
“You ordered her to be murdered?” Georgiana shouted. Eastwick caught her by the waist as she lunged toward the earl.
“Tindall,” the dowager barked, “is this true?”
Tears welled in Kitty’s eyes. “I begged for my life. I begged for my child’s life. And he said, ‘your pleas have no bearing on my decision.’”
Julian stiffened, once again sick with recognition at the words he had spoken to Kitty. Words he had heard his father speak to him.
“But the earl’s man allowed me to escape,” Kitty said. “I do not know why. Except perhaps he could not kill a woman with child.”
“Lies,” his father with a smug air. But his hands opening and closing in fists betrayed his own lie.
“I can attest to this,” came a voice. Father Dunlevy stepped in the room, his hard eyes seeing only the earl. “I had Clara buried. I tended to the bruises on Katherine’s neck. Her broken spirit. I lied to Sir Jeffrey to save her. To keep her safe in Scotland.”
The earl made to leave.
Julian shoved him to the wall. “You had her governess, Clara, murdered while she waited for Kitty behind a copse of trees. You coward. Killing a woman. Because I didn’t know what was right for me. Because of Oliver’s career. Because she was not of your choosing.”
The earl’s lined face hardened. “She is a Roman whore.”
Julian hurled the earl to the floor and kicked him.
And kicked him again. He twisted away before he killed his own father.
He rubbed his eyes, tears threatening, and turned back to the earl, his voice a harsh rasp.
“I don’t know what punishment awaits you, except I know this.
You will live the rest of your life with the knowledge that I am happy.
With the woman you tried to have murdered.
And everyone here knows the monster you are. ”
He walked to his wife and, cradling her to his side, drew her from the room.
Notfelle rose from the icy earth as a testament to everything old and stubborn, filled with priest-holes and abandoned conspiracies and built for a King’s progress, with rooms to sleep one hundred of the monarch’s favorite courtiers, turrets about each corner, and painted glass.
Kitty didn’t ask Julian why he wished to visit her old home after the scene in the drawing room, but she was stronger, no longer bereft, upon entering the hall.
The paneling was polished, and the hall table held fresh flowers in winter.
A fire burned as if their visit had been expected.
The antler chandelier had been replaced with a modest cut-glass fixture, and the wide, low-slung hall had been stripped of Sir Jeffrey’s hunting trophies.
Cecil shuffled in over the stone floor, rubbing his rheumy eyes, and took their coats. “Dinner’ll be served in a trice.”
The entirety of her memories of her mother were here.
Next to the fresh flowers should have been the pair of Vincennes porcelain-and-gilt vases Sir Jeffrey had sold long ago.
She went to the brass lantern and unlatched the miniature door.
Her mother had lit it before she had guided Kitty into the parlor and wove her stories of phantoms and faraway lands.
Julian soothed her shoulders from behind, brushing a kiss to her cheek. “Notfelle is yours, Kitty, if you want it.”
She turned in his arms, and he grinned at her parted mouth.
“The money I lost at the tables? Let’s just say the negotiations were tense, your brother trying his best to earn a facer with sneers and an excessive need to examine his fingernails.
But in the end he needed the funds for a wife and a captain’s commission in the Horse Guards.
Thousands for a heap of stone, fallow fields, and your mother’s memory. Happy Christmas.”
Kitty managed an “oh.”
“Come with me,” he said, gently as if she might break. But the worst was over. The best yet to come. Yes, surely the best.
His arm solid and safe about her, Julian guided her up the staircase where the railing’s wood stain, once worn thin from the hands gripping it, had been sanded away and refreshed. Above her hung a portrait of Mary Babbington that had been stuffed in the garret after her death.
They walked to the nursery, the scene of many happy nights where she had learned the complexity of love and its pleasures. She sat at the edge of the narrow bed with the faded pink coverlet where she had become a woman.
Julian, tall and masculine in a coal-black suit, looked adorably out of place pacing the childish surrounds with its small chairs and pink peeling wallpaper.
“Lovett was my father’s man,” he said. “I suspected it until Cyril Murray came forward for the reward. I gave him double for a signed statement. After you told me what he’d done to you, I wish I’d slit his throat.”
“He didn’t kill Clara. She was already gone when…” She shook her head at the memory. “When I ran back to my horse. And he did allow me to live.”
“Cyril must have seen you in Southampton and quit his position, knowing if the earl discovered he hadn’t disposed of you, he’d be done for.
And Miss Dixley. She was one of the earl’s spies.
I should have trusted my gut. A serving wench would never have a prayer book.
And likely not a prayer book. Did you ever see her open it? ”
Kitty reared back. Althea had been the earl’s spy? Not her friend? She knew why Cyril Murray had kept her identity from the earl but… “How could the earl have been ignorant of our marriage if Miss Dixley was a spy?”
“I don’t know.”
“Could she have changed her mind?” Had Althea become her friend? Maybe she had come to like Kitty or seen the earl’s wickedness beyond her task.
Julian grunted. Then he told her the most fantastical tale of Althea Dixley being an assassin. It made some sense. Her feigned upbringing as a parson’s daughter. Her deft lies and able handling of pistols.
“Did Georgiana read you my letter?” he asked. “On Madame Féline?”
“You made her cry, Julian.”
He paused his pacing, his expression like a cat in a dovecote. “She deserved it, you know. Ripping my character. Demanding I marry you.” He shifted his feet. “She read the good parts? How much I loved Madame?”
“Georgiana did not see them as the good parts.” Kitty dipped her chin. “But yes, she did. And it did… warm my heart.”
In long strides he came to her, sitting down beside her, his knees high on the little bed. And it was like the night they had first made love. So awkward on her part.
“Dearest Kitty.” He placed two fingers on her chin, lifting her face to meet his gaze.
“I am glad you left me. I deserved it and more, it gave me time to think, to see how I hurt you and the habits ingrained in me. I won’t ask for your forgiveness, but I promise you, I will root these demons out of me.
Because I love you. I never stopped loving you since the day I met you. ”
“I love you.” Her voice was soft, hollow. “And I am so very ashamed.”
“Do not grovel, Kitty. That is my job.”
“But I did not go to you. You said courage is going forward when the outcome is uncertain, and I was not courageous. I broke your heart in my cowardice. I knew you would suffer when I wrote out that letter. That is the worst part of it.”
“Never be ashamed. You did what you had to do. To live.” He searched her face, his eyes wet with regret. “I only wish I could have known my son. Andrew. Did he look like me? A future scoundrel?”
“He had your hair and eyes.” Tears welled in her eyes to replace those streaming down her cheeks and falling past her jaw.
Tentatively, she slid her trembling hand into his and kissed him. Her lips parted his, softly tugging and pressing until Julian overcame his surprise and let go of his guilt.
He felt nothing, nothing but pure joy.
He covered her mouth, moving between the lips that felt just as he remembered. Full, moist, and sweet. The tip of his tongue met hers. She leaned closer, rising up against his chest.
He lashed an arm around her waist. The velvet skin of her cheek brushing his palm, the shivers she made, wrecked him.
She pulled away, grazing her lips with her fingertips.
Her cheeks were flushed. Her eyes were clear, green more than hazel, and her pupils hauntingly wide.
Her lips split into a smile any pirate would be proud of.
His eyes drifted over her face with the recurring feeling of returning home. “Kitty. I love your smile.”
He pressed her to his shoulder, locking his fingers into her hair. “Now tell me everything about my son.”