Page 50 of Desires of a Duke Collection

As soon as she’d turned the questions on him, he’d tensed and perversely that had allowed some of her panic to recede. She would listen to anything he had to say if he didn’t pry into her past. This was the opposite of her nightmare. Spring instead of autumn, life instead of death, and Devon instead of Cumbria. Lord Markshall was not James Rowson, the future Lord Navenby.

“It all started with a vivacious young woman of my then acquaintance, called Matilda. She is now the Countess of Lakenham.” His voice was calm, but with an edge. “We met in the park, on Rotten Row no less. Matilda was, is, an excellent horsewoman. My stallion took an interest in her mare. It was rather diverting. Henry, my horse was getting rather amorous—” He stopped himself. “Anyhow, that’s not to the point. We became friends, and there was an expectation I would court Matilda.”

So far, so usual. Horse antics were often liable to bring couples together. James’ horses had always adored her because they knew if she was there they’d get a decent gallop.

She was thinking of James again. She must focus on Oscar.

He paused. “Matilda was rather intractable, in the end and we didn’t suit. But her sister… Well.”

Emily blinked in the darkness. He couldn’t mean…

“Lydia was lovely and very flirtatious. I came to believe she was attracted to me, as I was to her. Younger than Matilda, she was jealous, I believe, of her elder sister. She would meet me in secret, and we would talk and kiss.”

Her stomach ought not to be able to roil with nothing in it, but it did. Acerbic fire rose in her throat. A young woman scorned and another seduced. He had courted one woman and given rise to expectations, whilst stringing along another lady. She knew what damage such deceit could inflict. This was not benign. He was so much baser a rake than she’d ever thought.

All her limbs congealed like she was standing above a precipice. Lifting her head, she shifted an infinitesimal distance away from his curled tendrils around her. He allowed her to go.

“One thing led to another, as these things do.” There was the sound of crumpled fabric.

“You didn’t marry her.” That much was evident. She fought the urge to order him to stop telling her. Not knowing was so much healthier.

“I didn’t promise,” he emphasized. “She was willing. We had fun and the affair ran its course. She was that sort of girl.”

Emily bit her lip until the pain was more than that in her chest and pressed her eyelids closed. It was better she heard this and remembered what he was: a rake who used ladies for fun. A man who thought nothing of throwing over one woman who adored him for another he’d cultivated.

“I told her she needed to take some preventative actions. I offered to buy her some monthly regulators, Pennyroyal, and such things. But she probably already knew about these things and decided not to use them. The silly girl allowed herself to get in the family way,” he said regretfully. His inference was clearly that Lydia had tried to ensnare him.

A babe out of wedlock. Anger unfurled in the pit of her stomach. “Her family…”

“They were furious. Well, I only heard about this later.”

Emily jerked away. She was going to throw up. Only a few moments before Markshall had been soothing her. Now he was calmly announcing that he’d... He hadn’t just said what she thought he had. Her skin crawled, and she fought the instinct to brush herself off, or wash, or run away. He had touched her with the same hands that had... They had kissed. She had kissed him.

“What happened to her?” she choked. She imagined this girl, Lydia, bedraggled, impecunious, round with her shame.

“Lydia was sent off to a little village in the middle of nowhere to live as a ‘widow’. She’s settled comfortably now.”

“You ruined her.” She didn’t mean for it to come out that way, somewhere between a sickened accusation and almost a question. Maybe it was a plea for this all to be untrue.

He didn’t confirm or deny the charge.

Her mind reeled. “It was breach of promise. They could have taken you to court and forced you to marry her. They should have.” That would have been fitting revenge. A proportional revenge that was the right line between accepting the situation and doing nothing, and exacting a bloody pound of flesh from his heart like a merciless vixen.

“Ha. And have their family name dragged through the mud?” He laughed mirthlessly. “You don’t think I’d have meekly rolled over, do you? I didn’t promise to marry her. Either of them. It was hoped I would ask. But judges don’t blame a man who doesn’t buy a cow when the milk is given away for free.”

He was correct, but that didn’t mean she had to like the injustice of it. Ladies didn’t choose to pursue breach of promise cases for fear of it inferring some deficiency in their purity and desirability. It was only actresses and tarts who went after men for breach of promise. Most gently bred women didn’t want the scandal.

“How could you?” He’d broken Matilda’s heart and that was bad enough. But he’d ruined Lydia. Not a trifling dent to her good name like Emily worried about these days, but an irrevocable blemish. A sin.

“I’m a rake.” His exacting accent sounded like cut glass. “It doesn’t do to romanticize rakes. I was young, arrogant, and powerful. I wanted her, and she made herself available.”

His matter-of-fact attitude chilled Emily more than the damp ground. In the space of a few sentences, her feelings towards him had changed. Any nascent ideas she might have entertained that he might not be so bad had died in this pit. Their easy banter and the comfort she’d begun to derive from his presence had paled and begun to decay like a fern in fetid water without light.

“She thought you would marry her.” Yet another man dashing the dreams of a woman he callously rejected. They all just enticed a woman for as long as convenient to them, then discarded them like a mud-smeared handkerchief. “Even though you didn’t have a formal agreement, I think it’s horrible.”

There was a long silence. And if she hadn’t been listening carefully, she might have missed his response.

“As do I.” His whisper was almost silent. In the darkness, she thought she could hear a smile in his words. “Could you forgive it?”

“What, could I forgive you?” If it was light, he’d see her shaking her head instinctively. “For abandoning Lydia?”

“Yes.” There was suddenly a desperate hope in his voice.

It could have been na?ve Miss Green who fell for a charming libertine and trusted him. Any woman might think a man was sincere in his regard and make a mistake. This was why she wasn’t married, after all. Because men weren’t to be trusted.

Sins shouldn’t be punished too severely, either, so arguably forgiveness would be the right thing. If for no other reason than to avoid a woman staining her own repute with a man’s offense.

“No. I don’t think I could.” Men like Markshall deserved no forgiveness.

“Of course.” He exhaled, a cross between a sigh of relief and despair.

The prickly thing in her stomach demanded more. “What did you think I would say?”

There was a shuffle of sound and the blanket was thrown more completely over her, still heated from his body. She flinched away but didn’t reject it, allowing it to lie over her like a dead weight.

“Some women think wicked men whom they can reform would make the best husbands. They are desperate to heal the darkness in my soul. They make excuses for me. I barely need to make them for myself. They say, ‘she knew what she was doing,’ or ‘she’s in a nice position now, comfortable, with her daughter’.”

“No right-minded woman would condone such an act.” Her strident words echoed off the walls of the pit. Every woman should understand the importance of a man keeping his promises, whether they were explicit or implicit.

“Perhaps not while they’re in company.” He sounded entertained. “And perhaps not if the man were a boot-maker or a sailor. But an earl? An earl of marriageable age, who has been paying particular interest? I think you might be surprised how many idealistic debutantes are willing to blame a woman’s weakness to justify their own inclination.”

“I can’t... That’s not true.” She didn’t want the world to be so shallow.

Minutes went past in silence.

“It’s the darkness before dawn, you know,” Markshall said eventually.

“Is that what this is?” It just felt like darkness. She couldn’t see him, just gloom.

“Yes. Tomorrow it will all be over and forgotten.”

He meant to be comforting, but she could only see a young woman, alone with a young child. She’d like to think this was the end, but she wouldn’t forget Lydia. Emily would love to have a child, but not in the circumstances Oscar had described.

She wanted a normal family. Failing that, some days she wished she could roll back time to more innocent days. When she and James were best friends and adored each other, and there was no question of impropriety and everyone pretended not to notice Emily was a girl and ought not to hunt and fish and shoot with such abandon. The thrill of riding over hedges and streams following the hounds was enormous, with James always beside her, or just behind when he couldn’t keep up.

Was it the same for Markshall? Did he long for a simpler, innocent time, before he’d followed the path of vice? Or perhaps he’d always been on that path. Not likely, though. Children were born innocent and corrupted by the world.

“What was your childhood like?” Her question came out on impulse. There must be a reason that he'd behaved so abominably.

“Good.” His response was curt.

“Oh.” Was that all he was going to say? He might have been abused and refused love. That might be why he chased affection then pushed it away.

“You’re disappointed I wasn’t mistreated? I was, obviously,” he drawled. “But I had food and drink, a bed with a horse-hair mattress, woolen blankets and a fire all night. I didn’t see much of my parents, but who does?”

She did.

“I had no-one sell me into an abusive, inappropriate trade. No-one starved me or forced me to make two hundred silk flowers a day. I was well educated, and my school room had every modern convenience.”

That wasn’t what she’d meant at all. She tried again. “What of love?”

“What of it? I had everything. And it made me think I was entitled to even more. There is no way to turn me into a victim, Lady Emily. No dark secret about my parents not loving me excuses what I became. What I am. A rake.”