Chapter 5
Five
Catherine held Arabella’s arm, and her gaze swept over her baby. She saw her precious child, lips swollen from kissing, hair mussed, dress torn. She turned Arabella halfway around and saw the blood on the back of her dress.
“Please tell me it is the time for your monthly courses and that is the reason for the blood on your dress.”
Arabella wrenched free of her mother’s grasp and put her shoulders back. “It isn’t. Time.”
“Oh. Oh, Arabella.”
A hack pulled up, and Catherine’s stomach roiled. Three men spilled out. Her husband, James Cavendish, the young Duke of Middlewich, was the first man out of the hack, followed by her two sons-in-law, David Vaughan, the blond Viscount Tregaron, and Thomas Drake, the dark-haired Earl Drake.
Catherine swore. There could not be three worse people to witness this scene.
They had been at their club, drinking and playing cards, no doubt, and had likely come to the Middlewich town house for one last taste of James’ excellent and illegal Scottish whisky before David headed to his town house where her pregnant stepdaughter Mary was probably asleep and Thomas went to the former Lovelock family town house where her other stepdaughter Harry was almost certainly wide awake, either poring over mathematical texts or rocking six-month-old baby Hypatia back to sleep with a lullaby consisting solely of six-digit prime numbers.
Catherine could tell that the three men were not drunk, but they were not entirely sober, either. She stood in front of Arabella and started pushing her towards the steps to the front door of the town house. But she was not quick enough.
James, smiling, came up to her swiftly and kissed the side of her head and said, “Kate, my darling.” He caught sight of her daughter and said, “Arabella.” Then his face changed, and Catherine knew he had also seen the torn dress, the blood.
Catherine finished pushing Arabella up the front steps, still trying to block the other two men from seeing her. “Don’t say a word, Jamie. Please.”
She got Arabella into the house and took her upstairs and into her bedchamber. Arabella’s lady’s maid Green was there.
“That will be all, Green,” Catherine said. “I will speak to you tomorrow.”
Green, white-faced, scampered from the room.
“Green knows nothing of this, Mama,” Arabella said.
“If that’s true and she keeps her mouth shut, she won’t lose her position.”
In the lamplight of the room, Catherine looked at Arabella. So lovely despite the torn and bloody dress, the disarrayed hair. She had her shoulders back, her chin up, and she was facing her mother bravely. With pluck.
Catherine went to the basin and dipped her hand into the pitcher.
“The water is still warm. Do you want to wash before we talk?”
Arabella’s shoulders sagged momentarily before she rallied. “Yes, Mama.”
“Do you want my help?”
“No.”
Catherine left the room and stood outside her daughter’s bedchamber door and wondered what she would say to her when she went back into the room.
She heard a soft voice. “You can come back in, Mama.”
Arabella was in her nightdress, in her bed, her hair brushed. There was no sign of the torn dress.
Catherine sat on the bed. She had a difficult time remembering Arabella was eighteen. Even though Arabella was a full inch taller than she was, Arabella was still her baby girl.
Yes, yes, yes, Arabella had begged, and so Catherine had allowed Arabella to have her first Season just as she turned sixteen, but Catherine thought Arabella wanted the pretty dresses and the dancing and the late nights that went with the balls.
She had not thought Arabella wanted a husband, a lover.
Yet. There was plenty of time for that, wasn’t there?
She should have remembered she had always thought Arabella was so very like herself.
And Catherine had left home at age sixteen to become an actress and by age nineteen was the mistress of a dangerous man, ten years older than herself.
Catherine should have known. She should have been on guard.
Watchful. But she had been so caught up in the last two years with her own love story, marrying James, having baby Sebastian. She had neglected Arabella.
“The most important question is,” Catherine cleared her throat, “were you a willing participant in what happened tonight?”
Arabella met her mother’s eyes. “Yes.”
“Good,” Catherine said and bit her lip. She would not have wanted it otherwise, but how could have Arabella been so foolish? “Did the man in question use a French Letter, a sheath?”
“No,” Arabella said. “He spilled outside of me, at the end.”
“Are you in pain?”
Arabella took a shaky breath in. “Not now.”
“Is there anything you want to tell me or ask me?”
Arabella shook her head.
“In a bit, I am going to go downstairs. I don’t know if your brothers-in-law saw anything, but I know Jamie will have some questions.
And one of those questions will be the name of the man who coupled with you.
He will ask me. And tomorrow, he will ask you.
I am going to lie to my husband tonight and tell him I do not know, I did not see the coat of arms on the door of the carriage.
And I beg of you, no matter what, do not tell him the man’s name, either. ”
Arabella started to protest, but Catherine took her hands and shushed her.
“Has this man asked you to marry him?”
“No,” Arabella said and lifted her chin. “But he will.”
“If this man comes to you or me or Jamie tomorrow and states his intention of marrying you, then, of course, it is an entirely different matter. But if he does not, I never want my husband to know his name. Is that clear? And David and Thomas, they must never know his name either.”
“But he loves me, Mama. He wants to marry me, I know.”
“Yes, of course, he does. You are so bright and beautiful, so loving—of course, he does. But all the same, wait. Do not speak his name until he asks for your hand.”
“But why?’
“Because if he does not, Jamie or Thomas or David will challenge him to a duel. And someone will die. Or be wounded. Or be prosecuted for murder. Do you understand?”
“Yes, but he will marry me. There will be no need for duels.”
“I understand,” Catherine said patiently while she screamed inside her own head. “But, still, you will not give his name to the men in this family until he asks for your hand. Are we in agreement on this point?”
Arabella tossed her head. “It’s silly and unnecessary, but, yes, I agree.”
“Good.” Catherine smiled a smile she did not feel, but she was sure would appear genuine. She had not been an actress for thirteen years for nothing.
She went downstairs to James’ study. All three men were standing, talking to each other in low voices, but they stopped speaking when she came in and turned and looked at her.
The mood among the men was dark. Angry. Dangerous.
“Who was the man?” James said.
Catherine folded her arms in front of her chest. “I don’t know.”
“Then I am going to get Arabella down here—” James started towards the door but Catherine caught his arm.
“Jamie.” She looked at the other two men. “David. Thomas. Of the four of us in this study tonight, I will wager there is not one of us who hadn’t done what Arabella did tonight by the time we were eighteen.”
James stiffened. David and Thomas both looked sullen.
“I know it is expected of men. But I am not a man, and I cannot and will not cast the first stone at my daughter for doing something I myself did. I thought I had taught her the error of my ways, but I was wrong. It is entirely my doing.”
The men were silent. They were still angry, she could tell.
“We treat her like a child because we want her to be one, but she is not. She says he loves her and will marry her. Let us hope he is a good man and he will be a good husband.”
Thomas snarled. “A good man? A good man would—”
“Rut with whores before he would copulate with my unmarried daughter? It is hard for me to say this, but Arabella wanted this . . . intimacy. You three are all married to Lovelock women. Are you so surprised to find that the fourth Lovelock woman has a hard time reining in her passions?”
There. That had done it. She could feel the violence in the room dissipate as each man thought of his wife and what his wife had done with him and to him and for him in each one’s respective bed.
She gave them a moment before she clapped her hands together and startled them out of their collective libidinous reverie. “So,” she said. “I must know. Whom had you settled on as the one to challenge the unknown gentlemen?”
Thomas and James looked at David. David shrugged. “I am the best shot.”
“Well, then,” Catherine smiled, “I am sure your wife Mary will be very happy to hear we have all decided there will be no duels, no challenges. We will hope for a wedding.”
Thomas and David drank their fingers of whisky and left shortly after that.
James turned to Catherine and held his hands up. “I didn’t say anything to them. They saw.”
“I know, Jamie.” Catherine went to him and put her arms around his waist and turned her face up for a kiss. He kissed her a trifle absently. And she thought she knew why.
“I’m sorry I had to remind you of my past,” Catherine said.
He leaned down again and kissed her more deeply. “I’m not. You were very wise to remind us all of our own appetites.”
“Oh, I see.” She laughed as she put her arms up around his neck and buried her fingers in his hair. “You were thinking of your old conquests just then.”
“No,” he said seriously. “I was thinking of you, and I was thinking I wished I had drunk a little less whisky tonight.”
“The good news is that I will arrange to be next to you in the morning when you wake up and the whisky has worn off.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
She sent him up to bed, saying she would be upstairs soon but she had laid down her book and she wanted to find it.
She went to a shelf and scanned the volumes there. Yes, Debrett's Correct Peerage. 1820. This year. She took the first volume out and put it on the table.
She began to look at the coats of arms depicted, searching for the symbols she had seen on the door of the carriage. There it was. A dragon and a griffin flanking a shield with three chevrons, topped with a hawk. Morpeth.
She went to the front index and found Morpeth. Family name Fortescue. Baron. She flipped to the correct page and read. And blanched.
She had seen the man in the carriage. He looked about thirty. That matched the age of the Baron Morpeth, born Giles Fortescue.
According to Debrett's, Lord Morpeth was already married.