Chapter 21
Twenty-One
Dearest Emmaline,
By now word of my death has reached you. I know why you felt betrayed by me in life, I do, however, hope that you will forgive me in death and that you will listen to the plea of a man who has so many regrets, he cannot bear for you to experience the same. I ask that you indulge my last request, even though you owe me nothing.
I am not arrogant enough to believe that I know all the cruelties you have suffered to secure our son’s safety and security, but I can honestly say, I love you all the more for it. I am also ever so grateful that you allowed me to pursue a relationship with our son, and yet part of me wonders why you did when you hated me so. I do not blame you for that hatred, no one despised me more than I did myself. I failed you in the worst of ways and deserved every bit of the animosity you held for me. You, however, do not deserve the harsh feelings our son harbors. I have attempted to calm his ire toward you throughout the years, but to no avail, and in that respect, it pains me that I failed you yet again.
I thought of taking my chances and confessing to your husband. I fantasized about how he would divorce you and attempt to ruin me. It was a battle I relished with every fiber of my being. Yet early on in your relationship, he made it clear that he would never let you go. He paraded you around to all the balls and house parties as any proud husband should, and I had no idea how evil he was until one night when he confessed all while deep in his cups.
His confession came on Nash’s fifteenth birthday, the same night it is said he met a thief outside our club. What he didn’t know was that it was not a thief he met in the night, but me. You see, I was blinded by my rage and nearly pummeled him to death with my bare hands. That he survived is just another cruel twist of fate in our lives.
The tragedy of our love, however, produced a wonderful man who deserves everything we could not give him. It is time he knows how deeply he is loved by his mother and father. If I know our son as well as I believe I do, he will forgive us our mistakes and want to form the relationship with you every mother should enjoy.
To the very end, my heart and love have been yours. My wife, Iseabail, knows what must be done after my death and I hope you will honour her path. She too was a victim of your husband’s evil nature. She missed out on so much in her youth because of his greed. Orphaned at fourteen, she came to live with me. I will let Nash explain her circumstances since he is so deeply entwined in her past and how she came to be my wife.
I arranged for Nash and Iseabail to meet, and with any luck, by now they have fallen in love. I hope you will take over for me and arrange their happily-ever-after. They deserve in this life what I hope you and I will share in the next.
Forever yours,
Edward
—A letter from Edward Charles Hancock, Duke of Nithesdale, to Emmaline Harding, the Dowager Duchess of Ross, January 1811
“T he Dowager Duchess is here, Your Grace.”
Nash looked up from his desk. “My mother?” What the deuce was she doing at his townhouse? He hadn’t even been home an entire day. He didn’t have time to deal with her now.
Before he could tell his butler he wasn’t home to visitors, his mother burst into the room. If Mansfield wasn’t as nimble and quick on his feet, Nash had no doubt his servant would have been knocked into the wall by the woman making her way across his office floor as if she were leading an army of dowagers hellbent on stopping his sinful ways. Yet this woman was not his mother … his mother didn’t look like that .
Her hair wasn’t the severe dragon-like hairstyle he’d seen her wear his entire life … it was beautifully curled. Loose ebony locks laced with strands of gray softened her sharp cheekbones and pointy chin and made him see the beauty his mother had hidden from the world. Nor was her mouth pinched in disapproval but rather turned up in a tentative smile. The unforgiving woman of his childhood, who had appeared in the nursery only when accompanied by his father, wasn’t holding herself in the rigid posture he knew. She didn’t look like the porcelain woman he’d imagined shattering into a million pieces if he’d attempted to hug her.
And her gown …
Good God, his mother was exposing her décolletage. He suddenly preferred her normal fare of high laced collars. The men of the Ton would not, and it was as if she was comfortable in her own skin for the very first time in her life. Something his mother would never be.
What the devil was she up to? “Mother.”
“I’m glad you allowed me to see you.”
“Did I have a choice?” Nash waved his butler away and leaned back in his chair, clasping his hands over his taut stomach.
She ignored his rude comment and lack of decorum by not standing as she sat down across from him in the chair normally occupied by his solicitors. “I wanted to talk to you about …” She glanced toward the windows as if she didn’t quite know how to say what she’d come to say.
“Yes?” He prodded impatiently. He didn’t have time for her machinations or her latest lecture about his lecherous way.
She met his gaze. “About the Duchess of Nithesdale.”
“Iseabail?” Bloody hell, her Christian name slipped off his tongue like a confession. Which only made his mother’s grin widen. That was the last expression he expected. Who was this woman?
“Yes, Iseabail.” She said Iseabail’s name on a sigh, as if it brought her great joy. “I know what you’ve done.”
He was pretty sure no one knew exactly what he’d done, except Iseabail. He didn’t respond.
“Your father was a beast.” She confessed.
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
“He took away her family home and you tried to correct the injustice.”
He stiffened. It seemed his mother knew more than he realized. “What exactly are you playing at, Mother?”
“I want to help.”
“You? You want to help?”
She blushed. The act alone so out of character for the woman he knew, yet in that moment he saw the young vibrant woman she would have been as a young debutant. The one Nithesdale had spoken of with such reverence on more occasions than Nash had cared to hear.
“I have been known to do a few good deeds throughout my life.”
“Tithing at church doesn’t count, Mother. It’s selfish hypocrisy.” His words made the light in her eyes dim and somewhere inside him he felt horrible.
“I deserve your disdain, even your hatred, but there are five young women out there who didn’t deserve your father’s greed. I know you’ve been searching for them in an attempt to right his wrongs, and I admire you?—”
“Don’t,” he interrupted. He was going to be sick if she continued. There was absolutely nothing to admire about his actions.
“Nash.”
“Since when do you call me Nash?” She blushed again, only this time he suspected it was humiliation staining her cheeks. He did that to her, and once again something inside him flinched. He shut it down.
“Sorry. Ross, I’ve been a terrible mother to you.”
“Yes.” He agreed. It was true.
She continued undaunted. “I cannot make up for my mistakes.”
“‘ Mistakes ’ is a kind description for the actions of a cold and absent mother.” He really was a bastard in all senses of the word.
Her bottom lip quivered but she continued. “I cannot erase the past, but I can help you now.”
He scoffed and pulled up to his desk, dropping all pretenses of giving her any more of his time. “That’s enough, Mother. I am a grown man with little need for apron strings. I had a nursemaid for that when I was a boy. If you’ll excuse me, I have work to attend to.” He bent down over his papers and resumed his calculations.
“I know where the girls are.”
A large ink blot stained the middle of his expense column. “Pardon?”
His mother fidgeted with her gloved hands in her lap. “I know where the Blair girls are staying.”
“You know?” he said, nearly biting the words out of his mouth as he leaned forward and asked very quietly. “And you decided to say something now, instead of say, oh I don’t know, eight years ago?”
She shook her head and held her hands up as if he were a rabid dog about to pounce. It was exactly how he felt. “No, no, you misunderstand. I just learned of their whereabouts yesterday, and I knew you would want to know immediately.”
How did she know so much about what he was doing? He shook his head, it didn’t matter. “Where are they?” He ground out.
“I have dispatched a gentleman to escort the young ladies here to London as we speak. I will be sponsoring Caillen, Máira, and Ailsa this season, and the two younger girls will come out next Season.”
Stunned, he just looked at her. He had been searching for the sisters for eight years. Eight bloody years, and suddenly his mother wants to help, and she finds them in what? A month? A week? “How long have you been looking?”
“Since yesterday. I?—”
“A bloody day?” he roared, surging out of his chair and knocking it over behind him in the process. He was getting very good at knocking over chairs, but he bloody well didn’t give a damn. He had been searching and searching and now he suspected his mother, who pushed out of her chair and backed away from his tirade, was either behind their disappearance, or had known exactly where they’d been the entire time. He pushed his anger down below the surface.
“How long have you known where to find them?”
“Yesterday. I?—”
He cut her off once more, rounded the desk and stood in front of her. “Do you expect me to believe you started looking for them yesterday and they are on their way to London today?”
“Ye-yes.” She stepped back, but he continued his advance. It was only when she stumbled back into the wall and held her hand up in front of her face that he froze. “Please,” she whimpered, her voice trembling as much as the arm she held up to protect her face. “I only meant to help.”
He froze. His mother thought he was going to hit her. The cold, stoic woman he’d known his entire life stood before him, cowering as if he beat her on a daily basis.
A memory from his childhood flooded his thoughts. His mother coming into the nursery for her weekly visit. The one day he longed for destroyed before it began, as she reached down to catch him in her arms and was yanked backwards by her hair.
“What’s the price for your betrayal, Duchess ?” His father stood behind her, sneering in her face, her body bowed backward as he yanked on her hair. Her long curls Nash loved to bury his nose in when she read him a nighttime story. Nash grabbed his father’s leg and hit him over and over.
“Stop! You’re hurting her!” he screamed, only to find himself tossed through the air. His tiny body slammed against the armoire, his head splintering the looking glass. His mother screamed, terror for him filling her lungs. His head had hurt so badly he wasn’t sure if it had been his mother or him screaming—until she was dragged down the hallway away from him. The nursemaid ran to his side, soothing and cooing as she applied pressure to the wound on the back of his head.
That was her last visit to the nursery.
Dawning struck him as hard as his head had hit the glass that day, rattling reality into something much different from what it had been a few minutes earlier. He stumbled back.
“My God, he beat you.”
When her arm slowly lowered away from her face, her entire body trembling in fear, Nash backed away further. The past no longer crystal clear as he’d once thought. He rubbed at the scar on the back of his head and wondered how many scars she wore thanks to his father. “I wish he was still alive so I could kill him.”
“The last thing I want is for you to be like him,” she whispered.
Nash flinched and walked over to the sideboard where he poured two glasses of brandy. She took the glass from him hesitantly as if she didn’t trust him not to turn on her and beat her anyway. That alone told him so much about the marriage she had never disparaged.
“Did you love him?”
“No.” Quick and succinct, that one word spoke volumes about how this woman had felt about the previous Duke of Ross.
“Why did you stay with him?”
“Where would I have gone? My parents wouldn’t take me back.”
“Anywhere would have been better.”
“How would I have taken care of you?”
He bit the inside of his cheek and exhaled slowly. She hadn’t taken care of him after that day when he was four or five years old. Instead, she’d left him there in the nursery to be tended to by one nursemaid after another. He remembered each of them had been loving and caring … until his father would see their affection and dismiss them unceremoniously. The only nursemaid who had been sacked by his mother had believed in the rod more than kindness.
But did she really believe replacing a mother’s love with a kind nursemaid was taking care of him?
As if sensing his thoughts, she winced. “I know you didn’t have the best of childhoods.”
“No, it wasn’t idyllic.” Yet under the circumstances, he suspected it was the best she could have given him.
“We had a roof over our heads.” Again, she seemed to think that made up for the lack of any parental affection. “You had the best education, and you were well taken care of.”
The last part was debatable, but yes, the servants had treated him well and he’d had a good education. The camaraderie he’d felt at school with his classmates had filled the void his family should’ve occupied. His first year at Eton had been a whirlwind of activity. Fights he’d lost and won. Bullying he’d survived and grades that could have been better.
When the first holiday arrived, he’d foolishly thought he would go home and find two parents who had missed him, or at least realized their lives were better with him in it. When no ducal coach arrived to pick him up, he learned he was on his own in the world. The next holiday, he accepted the invitation to the Earl of Astley’s estate for dinner. It wasn’t the Earl, however, who invited him, it was his son, Simon Clark, the current Earl.
On his first visit, Nash had thought the house so very strange. It was blatantly obvious Simon was the only child related to the Indian Countess of Astley sitting at the dinner table instead of in the nursery. The rest were a rag-tag lot from around the world. Yet every single one of them bore the bright hazel eyes of their father.
There was also more love at the Astley holiday table than Nash had ever witnessed in his life. Laughter and teasing and the most deplorable manners he’d ever witnessed.
He’d loved it, and from that moment on Nash found it easier to accept the love that was given to him freely than to force himself where he wasn’t wanted. He was better off visiting Astley Manor or remaining alone at school than returning to the ducal home for the holidays.
Now he wondered what those holidays had been like for her.
“What did he threaten you with?” From the look on her face, the way the color seeped from her cheeks, he knew his sudden epiphany was two decades too late.
The softness she had displayed earlier hardened to the cold veneer he knew so well. “He’s gone. It serves no purpose to discuss the past.” She downed her brandy with the experience of any member of White’s, and then held the back of her gloved hand to her lips, the glass dangling from her fingertips. “I came here to tell you that you no longer have to worry about the girls. They will marry well, you have my word.”
He had to give her credit, she was attempting to help him, but the question still lingered, how had she done it? “How did you find them?”
“Women talk, my dear. They will share information with another woman any day of the week, but a man must earn their trust. You did not earn their trust.” She strode to the library door. “If you want to win your Duchess, I suggest you come to dinner next week and meet the Blair sisters. The Duchess won’t be far behind.”
She was gone in an instant. In just a few minutes she had turned his world upside down, shook out the cobwebs, and then turned it upside right again. Now she was giving him the opportunity to see Iseabail, to talk to her, hold her, win her. He never loved his mother more.