Page 22 of Hazardous to a Duke’s Heart (Lords of Hazard #1)
J on appeared startled to see her when he climbed into the carriage. That rather pleased her. He was always the one surprising her—might as well be the one to surprise him for a change. Though she was relieved to discover that he’d come here to meet with his friends and not some woman.
Then he smoothed his expression to the one she’d grown used to, which never showed what he was thinking. “Where to?” he drawled.
“I don’t care where,” she said irritably. “Wherever you were going. I just needed to talk to you privately.”
“So you crept into my carriage on the sly?”
“Of course not. I know your servants, remember? I merely told Will Coachman I was supposed to meet you here, and he happily allowed me to wait in the carriage.”
“I see.” He opened the panel to the driver’s box, and said, “Home, Will.”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
As soon as the carriage rumbled off, Jon closed the curtains. “It wouldn’t do for anyone to see us together. I know Will will keep quiet about it.” He faced her. “How did you find me?”
She shrugged. “When Mr. Trimnell’s clerk said you were waiting to speak to him, but would return soon, I rushed out so I could have my waiting hackney follow you. I’d already finished my business with Mr. Trimnell, for the most part.”
“ You were the client Trimnell was meeting with?”
“Of course. I was there to look over the codicil to Papa’s will. I should have done it before. Then we could have avoided this messy business in the paper.” She held up the gossip rag.
The color drained from Jon’s face. “I see.”
“I must admit—whoever forged that last bit of the codicil was very accomplished. It looked so much like Papa’s handwriting in the rest of the will that I had to examine it very closely to see the differences. Then again, I’m an artist and notice such things. I can’t imagine you did it yourself, though. Mr. Beasley forged that part, I suppose?”
Jon dragged in a deep breath. “I can explain—”
“Good. That’s why I’m here. For your explanation.” She folded her hands in her lap. “You went to great lengths to arrange this dowry business, after all.”
He tensed. “Before we get into that, you didn’t happen to tell Trimnell that you thought it was forged, did you?”
“Of course not.” She tipped up her chin. “Forgery is against the law, after all, and I like Mr. Beasley. I wouldn’t want to see him hang. Besides, he’d already told me he played a part in your escape, and it didn’t take much for me to figure out how. He provided the four of you with false passports to enable you to move about France, didn’t he?”
“Yes,” he admitted. “For all the good they did us.”
That was an interesting bit of information. Apparently, they’d never had the chance to use them. She set down the gossip rag. “So. Now you get to explain why you made up a dowry for me that you are providing out of your own funds.”
“That should be obvious.”
“You felt sorry for me?” she said, her stomach knotting up.
“No!” Jon got flustered. “Yes. Sort of.”
“Which one is it?” she asked softly.
He muttered a curse under his breath. “Since your father asked me on his deathbed to help you find a good husband, this seemed the best way to do it. I owed him so much. I figured the least I could do was make sure you married well.”
That hurt more than she’d expected. “So, if I’m understanding you correctly, this has all been about repaying my father? Even though I said I didn’t want to marry?”
“You only said that because of Cyril.” He leaned forward to grab her hands. “Tell me honestly—if Cyril hadn’t been born, don’t you think you would have married by now?”
“I-I don’t know,” she said honestly. “I would still have taken the position as governess to Chloe because Mama would still have died. Cyril had nothing to do with that. And when I was serving as Chloe’s governess, I never met anyone who appealed to me. Nor did any man ever seem interested in me. Well, except for men who wished a more . . . illicit connection.” When he groaned, she added hastily, “So, marriage would have been difficult for me even without having to consider Cyril’s situation.”
“That’s why I stepped in. It didn’t seem right you should be alone all your life. Especially since you lost your father because of me.”
That statement brought her up short. “Why on earth would you think that?”
“Because it’s the truth.” He released her hands to throw himself back against the seat. “I haven’t told you everything. I should have from the first, but I . . . I knew if I did, you would hate me.” He fixed her with a tortured gaze. “And once I met you, I couldn’t bear for you to hate me.”
“Unless you murdered my father in cold blood,” she said tenderly, “there’s nothing you could tell me to make me hate you.”
“Don’t say that until you hear the rest.” He glanced out of the window. “First of all, your father didn’t want to be my tutor. He didn’t want to leave you and your mother. He went because my father was concerned, even ashamed, of my behavior as a lad of seventeen. My father talked him into it.”
“I know,” she said.
That seemed to catch him by surprise. “You know?”
She shrugged. “I mean, you did say your misspent youth was why your family sent you on the grand tour. Besides, Papa discussed it with Mama. But he was only reluctant to take you on because he wasn’t sure he was up to the task. He said it had been different when he was younger, the previous times he’d shepherded someone through their grand tour. He’d had the stamina then. But now he was in his forties, and he was worried he couldn’t keep up with you.”
Jon snorted. “Your father had more energy in his forties than many men have in their twenties.”
“He certainly seemed energetic to me when I was a girl. Undoubtedly, that’s why Mother told him she could think of no one better able to straighten out a young noble than him. It helped that Papa said he’d talked with you at length and determined you were a bright young fellow tempted into vice by the pleasures of London. He agreed with your father that a sojourn abroad might help temper your more reckless side and allow you to develop your better qualities.”
Jon looked skeptical. “He really said that?”
“He did. Although, he also said you had a bit of an eye for the ladies.” She fought a smile. “I assume that was really the ‘misspent youth’ you mentioned last night?”
“Yes,” Jon said with a rueful smile. “I’m afraid it was.”
“So that’s it? You feel like your need for a grand tour took Papa away from me and Mama?”
“And Cyril.” He sighed. “But no, that’s merely a small part. I suppose I should begin at the beginning.”
“That depends,” she said lightly. “I’m not sure our carriage ride will be long enough for a description of your entire eleven years in France.”
He lifted an eyebrow. “You’re rather jocular about this whole matter.”
“Forgive me. I’m just nervous about what you might say. And when I get nervous, I . . . tend to make jokes.”
“Ah. I have a bit of that habit myself. Along with a tendency to behave rashly and rebel against what I’m told not to do.” He smiled faintly. “Like seduce you.”
“Who told you not to seduce me?” she asked.
“I told myself. Apparently, I even rebel against my own good judgment. And by the way, while I don’t regret one bit seducing you, it definitely has the potential to ruin your life.”
“Or enrich it. Only time will tell.” She shot him a coy look. “Besides, I think the seducing was fairly mutual.”
“All the same, your father worked hard to educate the recklessness out of me, and seducing you was absolutely reckless. Clearly, he only partly succeeded in his aim.” Jon sighed. “As became evident the night of our attempt to escape Verdun.”
She worried the strap on her reticule, suddenly nervous again. “I thought that the escape might be part of why you . . . blame yourself for his death.”
“More than a small part, to be honest.” He squared his shoulders. “I know our wish to escape probably seems foolish to you, having the advantage of hindsight. But you have no idea how useless we felt—unable to help our families, barely able to help ourselves, and seething with anger over the situation, which only worsened over time.”
“I can well imagine.” But, of course, she couldn’t. How could she? The idea of thousands of people being forced to halt their lives for a decade was nothing less than appalling.
“Life in Verdun became harder once the new commandant came in,” Jon continued. “Courcelles was cruel. He would send prisoners and détenus alike on forced marches to other camps, sometimes separating families. He demanded money at every turn, and if someone was five minutes late to appel —our daily signing of the parole record—Courcelles put him in Verdun’s prison, the Citadel.”
Jon shook his head. “When one fellow escaped, leaving his wife behind, Courcelles imprisoned the wife. Another time, angry at some midshipmen for rioting in the Citadel, he thrust fourteen of the worst troublemakers into one cell, where they nearly suffocated. Hell, he even sent one of our friends—who was supposed to escape with us—off to another depot for the most minor of infractions a couple of weeks before our attempt. Truth was, we all walked on pins and needles, waiting for the next outrage.”
She could only nod, trying to imagine her father—and Jon—having to endure such things daily.
“At that point in the war, Napoleon seemed to be winning,” Jon went on, “and having already been there for eight years, we feared we might end up spending the rest of our lives in Verdun. All we could see before us was a bleak future. Emboldened by the fact that some prisoners had recently succeeded in escaping, my friends and I agreed to escape ourselves.”
“And Papa, too?”
Jon dragged in a rough breath. “At first, he refused to go. He thought it unwise. He pointed out the disadvantages to it, cautioned us we could end up like those whose escapes were unsuccessful, some of whom died in the attempt. We wouldn’t hear of it. Once he realized we would do it with or without him, he said he would go with us.”
The regret in his voice made her reach over to grab his hand, but he shrugged it off. He seemed bent on putting himself through this recitation alone. So, she settled back to let him say his piece, no matter how alarming it might be.
“I wanted your father to join us and so he did. I knew his reasons for wanting to stay were more . . . personal—they don’t matter now—but I didn’t think them strong enough for him to remain in Verdun. And I was so bloody sure of my plan—that it would succeed, that we would at last be free—that I pushed him to go. I should never have done that.”
“I’m sure he wanted to leave as much as you did. He was just being cautious.”
“Probably,” he said in a noncommittal tone that made her wonder what he was leaving out. “In any case, we put our plan into action. Since those of us on parole were allowed to go a short distance beyond the walls of the town for the occasional excursion into the countryside, we planned a fishing party.”
“And then you just didn’t go back?”
“It wasn’t that simple, I’m afraid. Whenever we were allowed out, it was only for a few hours, and we were forced to leave our passports behind. If we didn’t return in time for appel , the alarm would be sounded and every peasant in the countryside would beat the bushes looking for us, eager for the reward they’d be given if they caught an escapee. The only way to escape successfully was at night, when we had more time to get away. And winter was best since they never expected prisoners to brave the harsh conditions.”
She swallowed. “I suppose it gets very cold in Verdun in winter.”
“Very. I knew of previous unsuccessful escapes where the men lost limbs to frostbite. That’s why we’d chosen to go before the snows were expected to begin. Getting out of Verdun was only the first stage of any plan.”
“How did you hope to escape France?” she asked.
“By crossing the Rhine and traversing the countryside there until we could reach Austria. We knew the Austrians, being enemies of Napoleon, would welcome us and help us get home.”
“That sounds like a long way to go.”
“It would have been. That’s why all the prisoner towns were chosen from among places deep in the interior of France or on the borders with France’s allies, although at that point, no one was sure which side the Germans were on.”
“I see,” she said, though she didn’t know enough about the war to “see” any of it.
“Anyway,” he went on, “before our fishing expedition, we gathered up items we’d been hoarding for weeks: provisions, small tools, coins that we sewed into our coats, and fake French passports. We’d also secured some thin, strong rope we intended to use for our escape, and we’d wrapped it around our bodies under our clothes. When we left the town for our day of fishing, the gendarmes didn’t search us or our picnic basket too closely, which we probably should have wondered at, but didn’t.”
He drummed his fingers nervously on his thigh. “Once out of sight of the city gates, we found a copse of trees where the underbrush was overgrown, and we stashed the contents of our coats and our provisions in a burlap sack, which we hung over a branch to keep from the animals. Armed with a couple of fish we’d caught to support our story, we deliberately returned fifteen minutes late.”
“Why, for pity’s sake?” she asked, confused. “Didn’t that draw attention to you?”
“Yes, which is what we wanted. Believe it or not, it was harder to break out of Verdun once the gates were closed at night than to break out of the Citadel if one knew how. I’d already been in the prison once for some infraction, so I knew its weaknesses, one of which was that—if we could get to it—the wall on one end was all that separated the Citadel from freedom. I had a plan for getting to it—I won’t go into that. The hard part would be getting over the wall. On one side it was easy to climb, provided we could evade the sentries, but on the other, I estimated, from observing it on the outside, there was a drop of about thirty to fifty feet or so, depending on which end of the rampart we were situated.”
A sickening feeling assailed her. He’d said her father had fractured his leg in a fall. She began to fear she knew how. And judging from how deathly pale Jon had become, she’d guessed right.
“That night we were successful in getting free of where we were being held, and we got almost to the wall without encountering a sentry. But there was one sentry we couldn’t avoid, and it was very dark. So, we had to move to another section of the rampart.”
He seemed to close up into himself. “We’d brought all the rope we could scavenge—enough for fifty-five feet—and had already knotted it together. The plan was for Scovell to go first since he could navigate by the stars to get us back to our copse of woods. Heathbrook was to go second, me third, and your father last.”
“Why last?”
“He had insisted upon it, so we’d all agreed to it, because if there were soldiers waiting for us at the bottom, your father could throw down the rope and return to the cell, with no one being the wiser. He was the oldest and the one least eager to escape, so we didn’t mind giving him as little risk as possible.”
He took a shuddering breath. “Everything went to hell from there. The drop from that part of the wall ended up being sixty-five feet, not fifty-five. Scovell leapt down the extra ten feet without incident, even though it took him by surprise. But he was a naval officer used to jumping long distances. Still, he couldn’t warn us about the extra drop without calling out and alerting the sentry to our presence. So, Heathbrook got bruised pretty badly in his fall, but at least he didn’t break anything.”
“And you . . . hurt your hands,” she said through a thick throat.
He shrugged. “I have big hands—it was harder for me to grip the rope, especially since I was overeager to get down. Although I made it most of the way, I lost my grip a few feet from the bottom of the rope and slid down it, which sliced into my hands. Thankfully, when I fell, I landed partly on Heathbrook, who cushioned my fall and kept me from breaking anything.”
“Though it caused more of Lord Heathbrook’s bruises?”
He snorted. “He still gives me grief over it sometimes.”
She should laugh, but she couldn’t. He hadn’t mentioned her father yet. “And Papa?”
Reaching forward, he gripped her hands. “I thought he’d asked to be last because he intended not to go through with it. I wish to God I’d been right. He’d be here now with you if he hadn’t joined us.” He glanced down at their hands. “But he did. Except that when he dropped to the ground, he landed worse than the rest of us and hurt his leg.”
He released her hands. “We couldn’t tell at first that he’d fractured his femur. No bones were sticking out, and the only thing we knew was he was in a great deal of pain. We assumed he was just badly bruised, like Heathbrook. Although our original plans had been to keep going while it was dark, we laid low until the morning instead, hoping his leg would feel better then. Unfortunately, he could scarcely stand. We were resolved to stay in our copse until he could walk, but we never got the chance. The gendarmes surrounded us and ordered us out.”
“Is . . . is that why you three think someone betrayed you?” she whispered. “Because they found your hiding place?”
“Actually, Scovell overheard a gendarme mention the betrayal in French. Scovell’s fluent, you know. Unfortunately, the gendarme never said who it was, just that it was ‘one of their own people.’ Heathbrook interprets that to mean an Englishman, but Scovell and I believe it could be anyone in our circle. It’s hard to know. But, yes, whoever it was did know of our hiding place, because they sent the gendarmes there. They also had to know what night we were planning to leave. We’ve yet to learn who it was, however.”
She thought through that. “But . . . but if the gendarmes knew you were going to try to escape, why didn’t they just grab you four as you came down the wall?”
“First of all, they couldn’t have known precisely where we would come down, since we didn’t know until that night. Besides, Courcelles wanted to make a spectacle of us, I suspect, which required daylight. Far more effective to clap us in irons and parade us through the streets in a bit of theater engineered to impress upon the other prisoners that no more escapes would be tolerated.”
“They made Papa walk in irons, too?” she asked, her throat raw from unshed tears.
“No. He was well-liked among the French because of his tutoring, so although they hauled him about, still in irons, it was in a cart, thank God.” A look of shame crossed Jon’s face. “It was the only kindness they showed him, however. After days of browbeating us, trying to find out which of us had planned the escape and who’d forged our passports, they realized they’d get nothing out of us. That’s when they packed all four of us off to Bitche.”
He pulled aside the curtain to gaze out the window as if trying to figure out where they were and how much time they had. “We’re nearly home. Hold on.” Opening the panel, he told the coachman to take them to Hyde Park and just keep driving around it until he said otherwise.
“Now,” he said, “where was I? Oh. Right. They made us walk to Bitche, of course, chained together like common criminals.” He wouldn’t look at her. “After one day of that, it became apparent your father couldn’t manage it, and it would take weeks to get to Bitche if they tried to force him. So they grudgingly put him into a cart again. But in each town where we stopped for the night, all four of us were thrown into whatever jail was there.”
She fought to contain her tears, but it was getting harder by the moment. Her poor father. How he had suffered! It was abominable.
“In one such town,” Jon went on in a harsh tone, “they did finally get a doctor to look at him. The man did what he could, wrapping his leg up and giving him a crutch, but he said that in order to see how badly the bone was fractured he’d have to cut into the leg, and that was unwise. The risk of your father dying of infection was greater than if Morris just learned to make do with the leg as it was.”
“But . . . but didn’t that mean he lived in pain?” she whispered.
Jon closed his eyes and grimaced as if her every word drove daggers through his heart. “Yes. Daily pain. Toward the end of our time at Bitche, Morris had a fall, and it must have knocked a piece of bone loose, for it began working its way to the surface. It broke the skin in a . . . a sore that brought the . . . infection the French doctor had feared. Your father had gangrene. He . . . he died of it just as we were learning of Napoleon’s abdication.”
She could only sit and stare at him. His horrendous tale showed just how much he and his friends had endured before leaving France. How much her father had endured at Bitche. It was monstrous. Papa had lived in constant pain his last three years, all because of a cruel commandant and the twist of fate that had him falling from a great height at his age.
The thought of it finally broke the dam of her tears. Looking alarmed by them, Jon handed her his handkerchief, and she accepted it gratefully. If she kept this up, she would end up with quite a collection of them.
But she didn’t care. She wept for how her father had died. She wept for her little brother, who would never know his father. And she wept for Mama, who hadn’t been able to see Papa again in this lifetime. Tory shed a veritable river of tears.
All the while, Jon sat there in an agonizing silence, as if waiting for her to finish.