Chapter 2
Chapter
A Marriage Most Curious and a Countess Who Could Not Keep a Bed Warm
Printed on Cheap Paper for the Dearly Interested
My Dearest Readers,
There are marriages of convenience, marriages of ambition, and marriages of desperation. And then there is the peculiar union of the Earl and Countess of Chester, which appears to contain all three in such quantities as to render the distinction moot.
Readers will be pleased, if not surprised, to learn that the invalid brother, so lately removed to quieter environs for the so-called preservation of his fragile health, is expected to return to Dorset shortly.
One wonders at the wisdom of such a journey.
Has the sea air failed him so entirely? Or is there some greater urgency drawing him back into the orbit of his sister’s newly elevated circumstances?
We cannot help but note that this return follows closely upon the Countess’s recent and conspicuously public appearances, wherein she has been observed clinging to her husband’s arm with a devotion that might almost persuade the charitable observer of matrimonial harmony.
Almost. For while the Countess may promenade boldly beneath the spring sun, it seems there are shadows yet within her own household that no amount of London light can dispel.
Sources—reliable, as ever—suggest that the Earl, whose former enthusiasms in matters of the heart are well known to our readership, has made a most singular vow within the privacy of his marriage. A vow, dear reader, not of fidelity—though that might have been remarkable enough—but of abstention.
Yes. You read correctly.
It is said that the Local Adonis himself, once so prodigal in his attentions to the fairer sex, now denies his Countess even the smallest conjugal kindness. No warm bed. No whispered endearments. No evidence, in short, that the union has been consummated in anything but name.
The only reasonable explanation is that the Countess inspires no such appetites in him at all. If he is the Local Adonis perhaps it’s time the Countess earned her own name. We’re partial to the Ice Bride here at The Quill.
Your faithful ink-stained observer,
E.S. Mallory
Editor-at-Large, The Poisoned Quill
Julianna paused on the threshold of Sedgewick Manor’s master bedroom, which had once been Thomas’s room.
It had the same hush as it had when her brother had inhabited it.
The curtains were still drawn shut to keep out the light.
And it still smelled distinctly like laudanum, medicinal and faintly sweet.
Fred had given no instructions for the room to be made ready for his use before they left for London and now, upon their return, he still had not.
So all the damned, telling signs of tuberculosis remained scattered about exactly where they’d been when they left.
The neat stacks of spotless linen handkerchiefs that Mrs. Sykes had set upon the washstand.
The wicker basket beneath filled with those Thomas had splattered with blood that would not wash out, no matter how many times they tried.
The shallow basin that sat nearby, empty now, but she remembered it as always tinged faintly pink.
Thomas’s precious lifeblood had been spotted around the room everywhere, as if he did not need it all inside him where it should be. And Julianna, holding a copy of the awful Poisoned Quill in her hand, felt as if she’d been bled dry too. But in an entirely different way.
She closed her eyes. She missed Thomas. As soon as this mess was settled she’d go and visit him. But first she had to contend with learning from The Poisoned Quill of all places the secret her husband had been keeping from her. The one he’d lied to her about after promising not to.
Fred had made a vow to keep her marriage bed cold.
Which, given what she now knew about his relationship with the Baroness, was something she could understand.
But what she could not understand was why he’d kept it from her.
Why, after every truth she’d told him about herself, he’d still kept his secrets?
And worse, she’d caused him pain. She’d seen the anguish too clearly on his face every time they’d kissed or touched to pretend she hadn’t. Unwittingly, but did that make it any less terrible? She wasn’t certain.
She closed her eyes at the sound of the floorboards creaking with weight behind her.
She knew who was there without turning but she didn’t know if she could face him yet.
She wanted to be even-keeled about this.
Level-headed. But there was too much swirling around inside her for that.
A lingering anger at the promise he’d made her to tell her the truth that he’d broken.
Betrayal that their private secrets had been flung out into the world.
And shame that she’d pushed him into something he wasn’t ready for.
It was all whirling around inside her, a tornado of emotions she wasn’t certain she could control.
“Jules,” Fred said after a long minute when he must have been staring at her back.
“Is it true?” she asked. “What The Quill said?”
“Will you turn around?”
She looked once more at the empty basin on the washstand. At the place where all that blood had once been. And then she turned.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” She tried to keep her voice soft, her tone modulated. She didn’t want to force him into a conversation he wasn’t ready for, but nor could she keep on like this. Giving everything while he kept himself apart from her. While he held onto his secrets.
“You know why.”
“I don’t. I really don’t.” She looked around desperately. She needed some space, something to ground herself. “Is it habit? From all these years of keeping things to yourself?”
His blue eyes turned glacial. “I apologize you found out in this manner. That was not my intention.”
“Fred! I hate that they printed this but that is entirely missing the point. The point is that you lied to me. You keep lying to me, even after you’ve promised to stop. And I—I’ve shared everything with you.”
He just stood there, staring at her. His expression was completely shuttered.
“Please talk to me,” she said. “I need to know if there are more lies, more secrets. Please, Fred.”
“Julianna,” he said finally. His voice was so formal, so cold, as if the Fred she’d known so intimately just hours ago was a million miles away now. And Chester had taken his place. “We do not have time for this. The Inspector is on his way.”
“Fred. Don’t do that. Talk to me, please.”
He stared down his handsome nose at her. “Do what?”
He was giving her nothing. Not even a twitch of his stupid brow. He was as implacable and icy a lord as she could imagine. Her Fred had left the premises.
“I cannot have this conversation with Chester. I truly cannot. That man can go hang.”
“Chester is me. He always has been. I’m sorry if you thought otherwise. Or that my personal intentions had anything to do with you. They didn’t. That was never a vow about you. It was about me.”
She closed her eyes at those words. Trying so hard not to let them gut her. “No, Fred. It was about us both.”
And still he gave her nothing.
“I think,” she said slowly, “that it will be best if I go back to Farrow Cottage for a while.”
“You may do as you please, Julianna. You are not my prisoner.”
Julianna. Not Jules. At least, she supposed, he’d stopped calling her Miss Farrow.
She glanced up at him once more. “I don’t want to leave you, Fred. I meant what I said in the carriage.”
“We all say things we don’t mean. I wouldn’t take it too hard.”
She turned away from him. She’d been a fool to think he could put Chester away so completely.
And Chester had never been a man she could love.
“Tell me then, what should I do? What would you do if your husband had taken his vows in bad faith? If he promised to stop lying and keeping secrets and then kept on doing it? A habit he couldn’t break. ”
“They were never in bad faith. I made my vows—to your brother, to myself, and to you, in the very best faith I knew how to keep.”
“No,” Julianna said. “Don’t you dare bring my brother into this.”
“Why shouldn’t I? You know as well as I do that his machinations have been behind all of this. Or did you find yourself standing here in this room for some other reason?”
She closed her eyes against his words yet again. “What do you mean?”
He scoffed at her. “You know what I mean very well, but I’ll repeat it if I must. That I would not ever touch you was the first promise your brother extracted from me. In the same breath he used to demand I ask for your hand.”
Of course it was the same breath, she thought.
Thomas had no breaths to spare. It didn’t surprise her that he’d exacted that kind of promise from her husband.
He thought he’d been protecting her, because he hadn’t been there to protect her from Robert Rothchild.
And that was ridiculous but she could understand it.
That was the issue, wasn’t it? She could understand both of them and still it hurt.
She felt a tear slip down her cheek. “So we were never more than what my brother demanded we be?”
Fred stared at her, blinking. She thought he might reach out and wipe her tears away as he’d done on their wedding day so many weeks ago. But he didn’t.
“I am sorry you are feeling poorly. Gilbert will help you back to Farrow Cottage should you need any assistance.”
And then he turned on his heel and he left.
She made for the stairs, tears flowing freely down her cheeks now.
Her hand found the door and opened it, and then she was outside and walking.
Past the jumbles of thorn and vine that had once been the striped Galician roses.
Past the hedgerows whose leaves were finally beginning to bud.
Past the jonquils and buttercups and cheerful oxeye daisies that came up every June, and the primroses and bluebells that should have bloomed weeks ago but who were just beginning to show themselves.
She gathered them as she went, those flowers of early spring whose abundance had been pushed later in the year by the unusually long winter.
Spring always came, she reminded herself, as she picked her way along the muddy paths back to Farrow Cottage. It always came in the end, no matter how far away it felt.