Page 2 of A Widow for the Earl (The Gentlemen’s Club #5)
CHAPTER TWO
ONE YEAR LATER…
“ H onestly, I am impressed,” Beatrice said blithely, tying the ribbon of her dark red bonnet underneath her chin. She wore a garnet-colored gown to match, choosing to perform the part that society had decided she should play.
“Impressed? By what?” Teresa Deverell, one of Beatrice’s dearest friends, asked with a puzzled look upon her flushed face.
Beatrice forced one of her most wicked grins, so that her friend would not worry.
“That my father is still able to find anyone brave enough to marry me. Either these gentlemen are eager to take on the challenge of surviving me, and gaining the accolade of being that sole survivor, or they are not very fond of their lives.” She heard her voice catch, covering it quickly with a snort. “ I would not take the risk.”
“Oh, my dearest Bea,” Teresa murmured, shaking her head. “Why does he not relent? Why does he keep insisting upon this?”
Beatrice shrugged. “What use is an unmarried daughter? He will not have me back at Fetterton, I have been soundly dismissed from any other residences I might have escaped to, so I have nowhere else to go but to the residence of a living husband.”
Her cousin, Valeria, who had been making adjustments to a bouquet of dried flowers, looked up from her work. “What of your own fortunes?”
“What of them?” Beatrice replied, putting a finger to her lips and nodding pointedly at the door. “I have no fortune of my own. At this point, I am uncertain of whether I even have a dowry, or if my father is just handing the same one down to whoever volunteers to be my husband next.”
Valeria cringed, mouthing, I am sorry.
Considering her dire lack of enthusiasm and her propensity for escaping, Beatrice simply assumed that she was being guarded on the morning of her wedding.
There would be a servant out in the hallway somewhere, pretending to perform some task or other, while they were secretly eavesdropping and ensuring she had not fled.
I do not yet have enough of a personal fortune to buy my own residence, was what she wanted to tell her cousin. Soon, perhaps, but I will either be married or widowed again by then.
“I imagine all of society are champing at the bit, eagerly awaiting the scandal sheets,” she said, rising from the chair of her vanity. “Did you see the article the other day?”
Teresa pulled a face. “I have been avoiding them.”
“Which one?” Valeria asked at the same time, bringing a biting laugh to Beatrice’s lips.
“The one where they called me the ‘Bride of Death.’ I rather liked it,” she replied cheerily, though there was no cheer left within her.
It was all for appearances, all so her cousin and dearest friend would not know what a shell she was, crushed by each humiliating, tragic, unfortunate wedding. Her humor was the rope that pulled her out of her despair, and though it was fraying, she clung to it fiercely.
Beatrice turned to Teresa, her false smile aching her cheeks.
“I would not be surprised if your beloved author begins an entirely new periodical about a wild young thing who seems to have the terrible luck of leaving dead husbands in her wake.” She feigned a gasp, clasping her chest like a dramatic heroine.
“Is it horrid luck or is it part of a murderous scheme? Find out in the next instalment.”
“The writer of my cherished Miss Savage and Captain Frostheart would never do such a thing to you,” Teresa protested, blushing a little. “But… I did hear that there is a periodical circling society that is… somewhat inspired.”
Beatrice’s heart sank, though she hoped her face did not show it. “Who is the writer?”
“I do not know,” Teresa replied. “I have tried to find out, to put an end to it, but I am not much of an investigator.”
Beatrice sniffed. “Well, whoever they are, they ought to pay me for my part as macabre muse. There is certainly no money to be had in losing husbands; I can tell you that.”
“You do not need to do that, Bea,” Valeria said quietly, crossing the room from the window seat, abandoning the bouquet of dried flowers on the sill.
“Do what?”
Valeria smiled, her eyes shining with sadness. “You do not need to behave so bravely. You are among friends.” She took hold of Beatrice’s hands. “I admire your fortitude, I always have, but… do be honest with us. How are you, really?”
The question jarred Beatrice, who had been rehearsing other jests and quips in her head to bolster her blasé performance.
She had not thought she was so transparent.
Indeed, she had thought she had done rather well, pretending that everything was quite all right, and that this was just another wedding to get through.
One that might stick, this time.
“I am… tired,” she said, swallowing thickly. “And I am so nervous that I cannot stop yawning. Have you ever noticed that, how you yawn when you are nervous? I wonder why that happens.”
Teresa nodded in understanding. “I was nervous when I married Cyrus.”
“I could not be less anxious about the wedding itself. A wedding is as commonplace to me now as washing my face in the morning,” Beatrice replied, mustering a halfhearted chuckle. “I am nervous about… Well, the obvious.”
Gasping, Teresa smacked herself lightly on the forehead. “Of course. Forgive me. I… do not know what I was thinking. Of course you are scared. Who would not be, considering what you have been through?”
“To have one husband die on the wedding night is a tragedy,” Beatrice said, reciting an article she had read about herself six months ago. “To have it happen twice is careless. I cannot even begin to think what society will say about a third incident. Beyond suspicious? Incriminating? Murderous?”
She would never admit it out loud, but she had been fleetingly relieved on her first wedding night, when her husband, Lord Albany, had not come to visit her chambers.
When she had learned the following morning that he had not visited because he was dead, that relief had lingered, though it had been tinged with confusion.
There had been no relief when it happened again on her second wedding night.
She had liked Lord Brinkley well enough.
He was not someone she would have chosen to marry, because she would not have chosen anyone if it had been up to her, but he had seemed lovely: good-natured, good-humored, and kind to her during their brief meetings before the wedding.
He had laughed at her jokes, too, which had put him in her good graces.
“It will not happen thrice, Bea,” Valeria insisted.
Teresa nodded. “They were terrible accidents. It could not possibly happen thrice.”
“It rather sounds like you are tempting fate,” Beatrice replied with a tight smile, giving Valeria’s hands a squeeze. “I really do think society will hunt me down with torches and pitchforks if Lord Wycliffe so much as scrapes a knee today. I pray he does not suffer anything greater than a hiccup.”
“What do you know of him?” Teresa asked, glancing at the clock on the mantelpiece; it would soon be time to depart for the wedding.
Judging by the slight furrow of her brow and the flicker of her eyelids, she was more nervous about Beatrice’s third wedding than she was letting on.
Beatrice pulled away from Valeria, walking toward the window, wondering if this would finally be the last time she ever saw the view of Fetterton Manor’s grounds.
It was not the grandest of manors or the most elegant of estates, but it had a rustic charm that she would miss very much.
It was, after all, her home, and rather a pleasant place when her mother and father were not there.
She smiled at the cypress trees that bordered the shabby driveway, watching them sway in the wind, the greenery so vivid in the bright morning sun that shone down from a cloudless sky. A good omen, by anyone’s reckoning.
“Not much. I have not met him,” she said. “I know that he is six-and-thirty, and he only agreed because he needed a wife quickly. What better bride to have than one with a ruined reputation, though not of the ordinarily scandalous kind?”
His name was Sebastian Hartley, the Viscount of Wycliffe, and that was pretty much everything else that her father had told her about him.
“What more do you need to know?” Henry had barked at her when she had dared to enquire.
“He has accepted. You ought to be grateful and cease these silly questions. It was not easy to find someone who is willing to overlook the fact that you might have killed your previous two husbands, and he does not believe in superstitions or curses, so speak less and get out of my sight.”
Beatrice had not removed herself from his sight. Instead, she had asked a particular question that had been bothering her since Lord Albany’s untimely death, remembering a certain look in her father’s eyes when she had returned to Fetterton in the aftermath.
“Do you truly think I am capable of that?” she had asked bluntly. “Can you truly look at me, your daughter, and say you believe I might have killed those gentlemen?”
Her father had not answered. He had risen sharply from his chair in the study, cast her a withering glare that made her stomach churn, even now, and marched out without a word. He had said everything without saying anything at all.
“It may sound cold,” Beatrice said, her back still turned to her cousin and her friend, “but I wish that I had at least… consummated one of the marriages before my husbands died. Not because I am some manner of desperate minx, but because I would, at least, have had my independence. It continues to astound me that going through the rigmarole of a wedding is not considered enough.”
Valeria clicked her tongue, shaking her head. “It is peculiar.”
“What makes it even stranger is that, for a man who clearly wants rid of me, my father has insisted on declaring my honor intact,” Beatrice muttered, no longer caring if there was an eavesdropper outside the bedchamber.
“I would be quite content on my own, but no—apparently, to him, my absence in his life does not count unless I have a husband to ‘control’ me.”
As if summoned, a knock came at the door, though her father did not wait before marching in.
“The carriage is here,” he said gruffly, frowning at her gown. “ That is what you are wearing?”
Beatrice flashed him a dry smile. “A ‘Sorceress’ must look the part. It was a choice between this and my black bombazine, but I thought a funereal appearance might be in bad taste. Red is a little more… mysterious. Something for the gossipmongers to really lose their minds about.”
The scandal sheets had referred to her by many other names aside from the ‘Bride of Death.’ She favored ‘Sorceress’ for it came closest to describing how she actually felt about her two dead husbands: cursed.
“Get in the carriage,” Henry spat, eyes flashing with fury. He did not temper his voice even a little as he turned to his niece and Teresa. “You too. The sooner this circus is over, the better.”
He had never cared for the people Beatrice actually cherished, and would not have remembered Teresa’s name if his life had depended on it. All he cared about was never having to deal with his daughter again.
Valeria took Teresa by the arm, leading her out of the room, flashing a curt look at Henry as she did.
After all, he was a mere Viscount; they were Duchesses.
Indeed, Valeria might have put him in his place if it had not been for Beatrice subtly shaking her head.
She did not need anything else to make this day worse than it already was.
“They do say that the third time is lucky,” Beatrice said crisply, as she made to leave. “Let us hope that is true for me.”
Henry grabbed her by the arm, holding her back for a moment. “Yes, let us hope so,” he rasped, his grip painful, “for if anything should go awry this time, I will not accept you back. You are no longer my daughter. You are just a burden.”
“How hard it must have been for you,” Beatrice said coldly, prizing her father’s fingers off her arm.
“Why, I imagine there is not a gentlemen’s club in England that will still have you, when you have such an embarrassment for a daughter.
You must be looking forward to being able to show your face again. ”
He glowered at her, lifting his hand as if he might slap her.
“I have never wanted to come back,” she continued, refusing to give him the satisfaction of seeing her hurt by his words.
“As such, you have my agreement: if this marriage does not go well, I will not return. Once the wedding is done, you have my word that you shall never see me again, not even at your funeral. Or mine. Whichever comes first.”
She strode out ahead of him, praying with all her might that this wedding, this marriage, would proceed without issue.
It had never been something she wanted, to be married, especially not to a stranger of six-and-thirty who clearly just wanted a young bride as quickly as possible.
But being the wife in a loveless marriage was preferable, at this juncture, to truly being labeled a murderess.
Indeed, better a life shackled to an irksome husband than a life spent in jail for deaths that had nothing to do with her. But in society, suspicions were tantamount to evidence, and she did not want to find out what her punishment might be.
They already called her ‘Sorceress.’ She did not need a witch hunt.