Chapter 29
What is that sound? Where am I? Are the festivities still going on?
Jeremy was dimly aware of voices around him, low and muffled, as if through a bathtub of water. He wasn’t sure why he couldn’t open his eyes, or why his chest felt as if there was a heavy block sitting on it, but he sensed that something wasn’t quite right.
“Your Grace?” A clearer voice. Masculine. Vaguely familiar.
Jeremy’s eyelids flickered, faint shapes visible through the thin barrier of skin. Yet, he still could not quite open his eyes, as if they were somehow stuck.
“Who’s… there?” he managed to rasp, grateful that he was still able to speak.
A relieved gasp rattled in his ears from somewhere nearby. A feminine sound, but it didn’t belong to the woman he wanted to hear.
“Can you hear us, Jeremy?” a different voice asked.
Confusion swirled in Jeremy’s foggy mind. “Colin?”
“Yes! Yes, it is me!” the voice replied.
What on earth was he doing here? Surely, that meant that Jeremy must still be at the wedding celebrations… yet some part of him was certain that he had left the festivities a while ago. Yes, he had left when he noticed Anna sneaking out.
Anna… My wife, Anna…
His eyelids fluttered open, and he winced at the assault of light from a lantern. Anna’s lady’s maid was holding it, her expression betraying concern in Jeremy’s foggy mind, as the woman looked very worried indeed.
“Your Grace, you are lucky to be alive.” The familiar face of his physician appeared above him. “If it were not for the surprising talents of this young lady here, you would assuredly be dead.”
Jeremy blinked. “I… don’t understand.”
His voice was raspy, and his mouth was so dry it felt like he had been chewing sand. The strange weight on his chest still had not gone away, even though he saw no physical reason for it.
“You suffered a quinsy of the throat,” the physician explained.
“It was preventing your ability to breathe, and your heart was struggling as a result. This… maid gave you several excellent remedies before I arrived, so there wasn’t much for me to do but drain the abscesses that remained.
Your throat will be very sore for a while, but I’ll leave you a tonic to soothe it. ”
“I... I didn’t really know what I was doing,” Katherine said quietly. “I just did everything I could think of.”
Jeremy pushed himself up into a sitting position, with the motion causing a pounding headache to flare up in the front of his skull. It pulsed behind his eyes, and he grimaced for a moment.
“Where is Anna?” he asked, as memory flooded back with the pain.
He had gotten up from the bed to fetch a glass of water…
and then he had keeled over, struggling for breath while his heart had strained to beat.
He remembered feeling strange earlier than that, while he had been between his wife’s thighs, but he had not wanted to stop, not until she had her fill of pleasure.
“Your sister-in-law commanded her to leave,” Colin jumped in, looking rather sheepish. “I considered stepping in, but… the consensus seemed to be that she should not be here. I believe she is on her way to the London townhouse.”
Jeremy’s gaze snapped toward Lord Belford. “Commanded her to leave? By what authority?”
“They… um… think she did this to you,” Colin replied, wincing. “I did not believe it, but one voice hardly matters in a majority. The butler said he would take her to London. It cannot have been that long ago.”
“How long ago?” Jeremy demanded to know, using what strength he had to lurch to his feet.
“Your Grace,” the physician protested. “I really must insist that you take to your bed and rest. You cannot be up and about; you will be weak after what you have endured.”
Colin glanced between the doctor and Jeremy, and seemed to decide that the former’s wrath was better than the latter’s. “I do not recall hearing a carriage,” he said. “They must still be preparing to leave.”
“Thank ye.” With a hand on his chest to try and ease the heavy feeling, Jeremy summoned the last scraps of his strength and ran for the door.
He charged along the landing and down the stairs, his lungs protesting with every hurried step.
There were people in the entrance hall, milling about like absent husbands waiting to hear if they finally had an heir. All of them stared as Jeremy lumbered down the last few steps and staggered toward the door, determined to reach his wife before she left.
“Jeremy!” Beatrice cried, racing toward him.
He pushed her away and continued on to the door, just as a carriage came around the corner.
“Anna!” he bellowed with what breath he had left, his legs almost failing him as he half-stumbled down the porch steps.
The driver pulled the horses to a standstill, staring down at the Duke with wide-eyed surprise. Jeremy paid the man no heed as he walked on to the side of the carriage and heaved open the door.
From within, Anna’s familiar face emerged. “Jeremy?”
“Where do ye think ye’re going, eh?” he asked, forcing a smile.
She cautiously stepped out of the carriage, her anxious gaze flitting to the porch where a crowd had gathered.
“Don’t look at them,” Jeremy rasped. “Look at me.”
“You are alive,” she whispered, her hand reaching up to touch his cheek. “Oh… you are alive. I thought I had lost you. I feared the worst, and then…”
Her gaze returned to the porch, a deep frown furrowing her brow.
“Apparently, there was something wrong with me throat,” Jeremy told her, covering her hand with his, willing her to keep her focus on him.
“It made it hard for me to breathe, but that lady’s maid of yers did enough that I survived it.
Remind me to give her a larger income once we get rid of this rabble from our home. ”
He tried to laugh, though it hurt his chest. Still, he would have taken all the pain in the world if he could just see Anna smile with relief.
Slowly, Anna withdrew her hand. “I think that I am the one who must leave.” Her throat bobbed, her voice strained with hurt.
“You should return to your bedchambers. You should rest. I am so very pleased that you are well and alive, and that I have not lost you… But I think it would be best if I depart.”
“Leave? Nay, lass, there’s nay need. Ye don’t have to go anywhere,” he insisted, frustrated that Beatrice had done this.
He briefly looked back at the mob on the porch, noticing their hard stares and accusatory scowls. No wonder Anna didn’t want to stay, but he wouldn’t let those idiots force her out of her own home.
“I really am glad that you are all right,” Anna said, her voice catching.
“You cannot know how glad I am, but… I cannot stay here. I cannot stay in a place where I am not welcome. You do not know what was said to me, Jeremy. No matter what I say now, or what you say, or what the physician says, it will not change what they think of me.”
He reached for her hands, but she stepped back, her shoulders bumping into the side of the carriage.
“Anna, don’t pay them any heed,” he urged, his tone harsher than he had intended. “I know ye didn’t do anything to me. Why should their opinion matter?”
“Because this is my home,” she replied sadly.
“And it has all been ruined. It will never be the same again. I could not, in good conscience, stay here in this manor with a woman who despises me. But, nor can I be the one to cast out a woman and a child who have nowhere else to go. They are your family. They should stay. I shall make it easier for everyone.”
Jeremy ran a hand through his hair, unable to believe that everything had fallen apart so catastrophically while he had been out cold.
He had been so happy before he collapsed; he knew that much.
He had felt content in a way he hadn’t in years, if ever, when she was there in his arms, glowing with the flush of her satisfaction, her body warm against his.
“Ye’re me wife, lass,” he insisted.
“In name only, just as you requested,” she replied, her face falling. “No expectations, remember? At least, this way, I do not have to go to the trouble of hanging all those blankets and curtains and ropes again.”
He managed to take hold of her hand. “The townhouse is in disrepair. It’s not suitable for ye.”
And I don’t want ye to go… If his mind hadn’t been so dazed and his pain hadn’t been so insistent, perhaps he would have told her that. Perhaps, he would have said that he had changed his mind and wanted everything that having a wife entailed.
“It shall serve me well enough,” she replied as she turned and mounted the carriage steps. There, on the top step, she turned back, now almost the same height as him. “Please, rest yourself and do not worry about me. I could not bear it if you became ill again.”
He moved toward her. “This is ridiculous, lass. This is yer home. It was yers before it was ever mine, and it is more yers than Beatrice’s.
” He cleared his sore throat. “She’s not in her right mind, lass.
She’s still grieving. She thought I might die, and she lashed out.
She’ll be sorry, lass. I know she will.”
“Jeremy, all those people up there were ready to chase me out of my own manor. Your servants, most of all,” she replied quietly.
“Those guests will spread lies to the scandal sheets, and I will have to endure another bout of having my name dragged through the mud. I am sympathetic to Beatrice’s condition, but I would rather not be near the one who caused that when it comes. Forgive me.”
She leaned in and pressed a tender kiss to his cheek.
“I will do what I should have done from the start,” she whispered as she withdrew, her eyes gleaming with sorrow. “I will live alone and start afresh. Now, go. Rest. Your family will need you more than ever.”
She gently withdrew her hand from his and stepped into the carriage, shutting the door behind her.
Inside, Jeremy heard her tap the side to signal the driver.
The man looked down at Jeremy for some kind of permission, but when Jeremy neither responded nor moved, too foggy and confused to even notice the man, the driver snapped the reins, and the carriage began to move away.
Jeremy watched his wife leave, and though every instinct within him screamed for him to run after her, to make her stay, he simply didn’t have the strength.