Chapter 26 #3
She did not show many outer signs of her illness.
With her guests gone, she was restless again and constantly out visiting, sometimes taking Pamela with her, though more often going alone.
When she invited guests to the house—he rarely did so for fear of overtiring her—she sparkled and was gay.
Duncan Chamberlain looked distinctly uncomfortable one evening when she chose to flirt with him.
But there were times—sometimes whole days together—when a high fever and the coughing kept her confined to her own rooms.
The duke visited her there daily, asking after her health, trying to draw her into conversation. She was not to be drawn.
And she would not go to Italy or see any of his doctors, she declared whenever he raised the subject.
She kept to her rooms the day before that set for their departure. Peter Houghton took her mail there to her late in the morning, including a letter from a friend in London with whom she often corresponded.
It was a cold and blustery day, one that constantly threatened rain.
It was high time they were on their way to warmer climes, the duke thought as he left the nursery, where all was excitement and half-packed trunks, and made his way downstairs to pay his daily call on his wife. She had not come to luncheon.
She had gone out before luncheon, her maid told him. Armitage had thought that her grace had gone only for a short walk, but she must have misunderstood the matter. Her grace must have taken the carriage and gone into town.
The duke frowned. He had come from the stables little more than an hour before. No one had said anything about Sybil’s taking out a carriage.
And yet it was not the sort of weather in which she would walk. And luncheon had been two hours before.
“Thank you,” he said, nodding curtly to his wife’s maid.
No carriage had been taken, he discovered five minutes later at the stables. The duchess had not been there.
“But I did see her this morning walking in that direction, your grace,” Ned Driscoll said, pointing toward the lake. “But that was hours ago.”
“Thank you,” the duke said.
It was starting to rain, a cold, driving rain, which quickly chilled the body even through clothing and found a cheerless path down one’s neck. The duke walked briskly toward the lake.
One of the boats was out on the water, he saw instantly—overturned and floating without direction. Something dark was caught among the reeds close to the island.
Some minutes later, from the other boat, he disentangled his wife’s body from the reeds and lifted her into the boat. He rowed back to shore, beached the boat, lifted her carefully into his arms, and began the walk back to the house.
Even soaking wet, with her clothes saturated, she weighed no more than a feather. One white and fragile hand was resting across her stomach.
His feet felt as if they were made of lead. There was a soreness in his throat and in his chest that impeded his breathing.
He had loved her once—her beauty and her light step and her sweet voice. With all of a young man’s ardor he had loved her. And he had married her and vowed to love and cherish her until death. Yet he had been unable to protect her from the sort of despair that had driven her to take her own life.
There were a few grooms outside the stables, watching his approach as if they had sensed that something was wrong. And Jarvis and a footman were somehow out at the top of the horseshoe steps as he carried his burden up them.
“Her grace has met with an accident,” he said, surprised at the firmness of his own voice. “Send Armitage and Mrs. Laycock to her room, please, Jarvis.”
“She is hurt, your grace?” The butler for once had been surprised out of his stiffness.
“Dead,” his grace said, walking past him and into the great hall and past Houghton and his brother’s valet standing there, the latter covered with the dust and mud of travel.
He carried his wife into her bedchamber and laid her carefully on her bed, straightening the sprawling limbs, arranging the wet clothing neatly, reaching out to close the dead eyes, touching the beautiful silver-blond hair, now wet and muddy.
And he knelt beside the bed, took one of her hands in his, laid it against his cheek, and wept.
Wept for the death of an ardent and immature love that had been unable to bring any comfort or peace to the beloved.
And wept for the woman he had taken to wife with such high ideals—the woman who had just killed herself rather than face a final illness with only his arms to comfort her.
Wept for his own frailty and infidelity. For his own humanness.
He got to his feet eventually, knowing that Armitage and Mrs. Laycock had been standing behind him for some time. He turned without a word and went through the dressing room into the oval sitting room.
His steps took him to the escritoire, on which was an open letter. He should not read it, some remote part of his mind told him. It was his wife’s. But his wife was dead.
And so he bent over it, quite without curiosity. And found out thus, before Houghton and his brother’s valet had the chance to speak with him, about Lord Thomas Kent’s death in a gaming-hell brawl a few days before.