Chapter 2
Two
That the duchess had the vocabulary of a sailor should not have surprised Richard, as his wife had all the morals of a doxy prowling the docks.
Still the shouts coming from the room above, wishing him to very creative ends, rankled.
It was Sunday after all. Could she not show some restraint?
Despite their forced vows, he had given his wife almost everything she desired for the whole of their four-year marriage: gowns, draperies, furniture, works of art, house parties, balls, and his absence as much as reasonably possible.
He had lived up to every bit of their wedding contract and more.
Another curse echoed through Locust Lodge.
Please be a son. It could not be wrong to pray for an heir.
An heir would end their farce of a relationship.
The duchess could enjoy the society of her friends in a separate residence while the next Duke of Aylton was raised to live the motto on the family coat of arms. Honor, Fidelitas, et Integritas.
A motto that few of Richard’s predecessors took to heart.
The next shout included plagues of fleas, lice, spiders, and an elephant’s hind end. The duchess was indeed getting more creative. The last five months had been deucedly difficult for them both.
With only six bed chambers, Locust Lodge was the least of Richard’s holdings.
Situated too close to Town to be a proper hunting lodge.
Richard purchased what was best described by the standards of the ton as a cottage a decade ago, two years before his father passed.
The house provided an escape within a quarter day’s ride of London.
Close enough to tend to his responsibilities but far enough to avoid his father’s machinations.
Never had he thought the house would become as detested as a scourge of locusts.
Where each day he lived knowing that he, His Grace Richard Thomas Kenworth, the eighth Duke of Aylton, was the stupidest man in all of England.
Stupid to hope that his lot would ever improve and in time his wife could be satisfied with more than Richard’s money.
They had agreed that after a birth of an heir, they would spend as much time as possible on separate estates.
All his problems would be solved.
Assuming the child was his.
Not that paternity mattered. The child was his wife’s, so in the eyes of the law, the child was his.
He chose weeks ago to believe the child was his because the alternative would only injure the innocent.
Richard knew all too well the rejection of a father.
The agreement he made with the duchess would give her freedom to live as she wished, and him the right to raise his son.
However, if the baby was a daughter…more years of negotiation, more distrust, and perhaps even the fall of the Dukedom loomed ahead of him.
There must be an heir, or his half-brother would triumph.
Pacing, he crossed the floor again. His man of business could not divest Richard of this particular property fast enough. At least he had the foresight not to whisk the duchess off to one of the entailed properties where he would be forced to relive this day every time he visited.
At the moment, the only redeeming quality of Locust Lodge was that not a single one of the duchess’s friends, family, or paramours had located her during the extended confinement ordered by the physician after her fainting spells at the beginning of the London season.
He had hoped the happiness of the most recent occupants, his cousin Deborah and her husband, Captain Godderidge, to whom he had rented the dwelling, might linger.
Any good omens their presence brought to the Lodge left with them when they moved to a more permanent residence.
Although his cousin proclaimed Locust Lodge to be a perfect hideaway for newlyweds, the cottage was not the place for a demanding duchess whose life without entertainments and parties lacked purpose.
The numerous complaints made during their sojourn made the situation all the more unbearable.
One would have thought his wife would have been happy to have a comfortable residence where the stresses of society allowed her to rest, as the physician insisted she must.
Please be a male child. Another pregnancy was unthinkable.
The shouts upstairs grew less frequent.
At the faint sound of music, Richard moved to the window.
Beyond the walls of the lodge, in the nearby village, the last of the Michaelmas celebrations wound down as the sun set over the trees with their multicolored autumn leaves.
He had barely noted the holy day. Richard attended morning service at the village church as expected.
The duchess stayed home. For once, her complaints were justified as a midwife and then a doctor joined as her labor progressed.
According to Richard’s reckoning, the baby was late, but the midwife thought it was not.
The duchess grew incensed at the midwife’s claim that the child was coming too soon.
A claim that, if true, increased the probability that the child was not Richard’s.
Thus, only the young doctor attended the duchess in her labor.
Even this morning the duchess begged for guests.
Richard thought Locust Lodge was the perfect place to bring his wife, the Duchess of Aylton, for her confinement.
She, of course, would have preferred to stay in Town at the ducal mansion, or at his large country estate, Redbridge House, where she could have received all the friends and visitors she wished.
In fact, any of his entailed properties, including the one in Yorkshire, would have been preferable to his wife, as her friends knew where those estates lay.
The problem was, as it had ever been in their marriage, not all of his wife’s guests confined their visits to the parlors.
Finding his half-brother clad only in breeches lying atop his wife’s occupied bed a year ago had been the final straw.
Rumors had long persisted that his less than discreet wife had made a cuckold of him.
Yet until last year, Richard had never had proof.
Servants loyal to his wife were discharged, and Richard made one last attempt to salvage his marriage during the parliamentary break.
At first, he thought he was successful, as his wife turned her attentions to him.
When Parliament resumed last February, the duchess said she was with child.
Still, that did not stop her flirtations at the annual Duke’s ball at the beginning of the season, disappearing at least twice into the garden.
After she fainted at a soiree, the physician suggested that she be confined to bed, alone, in as quiet an atmosphere as possible.
Hence the removal to Locust Lodge. Richard could see to her well-being and lend his voice in matters political in Parliament.
Richard had not worked out exactly how the next stage of his marriage would proceed.
Divorce required parliamentary approval.
He would have to lay bare his wife’s infidelity.
Yet, he could not live under the same roof as the woman he had been trapped into marrying.
There was a townhouse in Bath… it should provide the social life she craved.
A scream reverberated through the Lodge.
Richard stopped pacing and looked up the stairs, straining to hear the sound of a baby’s cry.
Instead, the maid of all work he hired to replace his wife’s abigail after the unfaithful lady’s maid had been caught sneaking in love letters, rushed down the stairs.
“The doctor says to fetch a clergyman and begs you to come.”
Jenson, Richard’s valet, ran for the rectory. Richard took the stairs two at a time up to the largest of the bedchambers.
A thin sheen of sweat glistened on the duchess’s pale face. Her normally coiffed hair lay in damp strands across the pillow. No cries of a baby filled the room. The doctor washed his hands in a bowl of red water.
Richard had never wished her dead. Even now he could not. He approached the bedside.
Her eyes fluttered open and then closed. “I told you, I was not meant to be a mother.”
How often had she made the same claim? The same announcement she made on the morning after their wedding before barring him from her suite of rooms for most of their marriage.
If only he had approached the church about an annulment, then…
But the trap she laid with her father would cast doubt on any claims he made about her virtue or lack thereof.
His pale wife beckoned him closer.
Richard leaned down to hear her last words. A weak but mocking laugh punctuated her declaration as she pushed him away with all the strength of a baby locust.
Though she meant to shock him, her words smothered any spark of feeling he had ever felt for the woman who shared his name for the last four years.
The priest entered the room in time to administer the last rites to the duchess, but too late to bless the girl child who never took a breath. Too late to hear the confession of a failed husband.
Richard exited the house, never to return.