Page 1 of His Illegitimate Duchess
T here was nothing Elizabeth Hawkins hated more than being called a liar.
The other neighbourhood children had been doing it for months now while they relentlessly teased her about her mysterious father, not believing her vehement reassurances that he was an eminent gentleman who was forced to be mostly absent from her life because of the important obligations of his title, as he’d told her himself.
Elizabeth had no more information to offer them, but she was desperate for them to stop. If it was enough for her, why couldn’t it be enough for them?
Thomas Barlow, who lived with his family in the servants’ quarters of their house in Belgravia, was the worst among her tormentors.
Elizabeth knew he’d seen her father multiple times, so she couldn’t comprehend why he wasn’t helping her defend herself.
Three years older than her, Thomas already considered himself grown in many ways and had recently started ignoring his former playmate whenever she ran to greet him after he’d spent the day driving their town coach alongside his father.
Only the thought of joining him and the other neighbourhood children got Lizzie through the tedious morning lesson attempts with her mother, who would inevitably retire to her room with a headache, thus enabling Lizzie to sneak out.
Most of the other courtyard children’s parents were employed by households on their street – Elizabeth neither dressed like them nor spoke like them, and they sometimes insinuated that they knew things about her father.
Which things, she had no idea, but she bristled at the offence nonetheless.
Lizzie didn’t know what was worse: the cold indifference or the hot accusations Thomas would fling at her whenever all the children were together.
Underneath the indignation and impotent rage she felt whenever he mocked her, there was an undercurrent of something she didn’t have a name for yet.
She felt like she wanted to shut him up once and for all, and oddly, putting her mouth on his in order to achieve that objective seemed like a really good idea.
That persistent undercurrent was the reason why, when Elizabeth had caught a glimpse of Thomas hugging and pressing himself against that loud-mouthed Sarah Baker from her window three days ago, she had screamed into her pillow for five minutes before going downstairs and interrogating her useless mother about Papa once again.
Finally, she struck gold – her mother revealed that her Papa did something called promenading in St. James’s Park every Sunday.
Her father had repeatedly told the curious 10-year-old that it was not possible for her to accompany him wherever he went when he was not with them in their home, without ever really explaining why .
Elizabeth deduced that the walk was most likely part of the important obligations of his title , and that was why he was promenading without her.
The next day, Elizabeth almost tripped over her skirts as she ran to tell her tormentor about Sundays at the Park. He simply looked her up and down, shook his head, and with that curl of his upper lip, said, “Prove it.”
So she had to. She really did.
That was what she told herself as the motion of the carriage combined with the nerves of what she was about to do almost made her cast up her accounts.
She was currently in her family’s town coach, on her way to St. James’s Park.
Thomas’s father, Mister Ed, as she’d called him all of her life, was their driver, and Thomas had the brilliant idea of using the coach to get them to the Park that Sunday.
The door was suddenly flung open, in the same jerky motion that had marked the entire drive.
“We’re here,” he said in that curt way he had with her now.
She nodded and got out of the coach without his help. There was no way she would appear even younger and sillier by asking him all the questions that were on her mind, let alone reveal that she’d never been to the Park before.
Thomas boldly took her hand and led her to a beautiful tree-lined street.
The feel of his hand made it impossible to appreciate the blooming flowers and other lovely things one might notice on a spring day.
Thomas’ steps were steady, and he seemed to know where they were going, which intensified the warm feeling in Elizabeth’s stomach.
“I cannot wait to prove you wrong,” she told him as they sat down on a bench which gave them a good view of the passers-by.
The park looked enormous. Elizabeth worried that they wouldn’t be able to spot Papa in the river of people, and that Thomas would forever think her a silly little liar.
She kept her eyes trained on the people, all of them dressed far more elegantly than the two of them.
Elizabeth’s mother usually tried to dress her like a little lady, but nothing stayed clean or unmended for too long.
Thomas just grinned in acknowledgement of her words, keeping his eyes closed and his face lifted to the sun. His lean body was relaxed on the bench, his legs crossed and stretched in front of him. He looked like a lazy cat who was enjoying the sun. Tomcat, she thought, but didn’t say it.
“Why do you tease me?” she finally blurted out.
“You make it so fun, Lizzie. You scrunch up your nose and fist your little hands, and your voice gets very shrill.”
Thomas shrugged, as if what he said was reason enough to rob Elizabeth of sleep.
“I cannot believe you,” she retorted, careful to keep her voice even.
He shrugged again, as if he couldn’t be bothered one way or the other.
“You are too desperate to be a part of our group,” he said after a while, and he might as well have kicked her in the stomach.
She swallowed, willing her lungs to work again, while Thomas continued, never having opened his eyes to look at the devastation he was delivering.
“I heard your Ma telling you not to play with the likes of us, that it’s unbecoming. Doesn’t she know we don’t really want you? And yet you keep following us around like a lost dog, even though you don’t really fit in, can’t you see that?”
Lizzie could finally see it now. That’s what today was all about. Her eyes were stinging. She couldn’t wait to see and hug her father, to find some comfort somewhere.
Dear God, please, help me. Let Papa come, and let me prove Thomas wrong, she prayed, something she’d always, inexplicably, done, even though neither of her parents had ever devoted any attention to her religious education.
“Do you see him anywhere?” Thomas asked after a while.
“Not yet. But he’ll be here, he’s here every Sunday,” she said with all the bravado she could muster.
What then? She thought suddenly, what if Papa is here, and we see him, and I prove that I am not a liar? Will Thomas and I be friends again? Will he stop hugging Sarah in dark corners?
“Why does he never come to the house, then?” Thomas, who spent every day with his own father, asked cruelly.
A familiar head of hair caught her eye before she could torture herself with the potential answers to that question.
“There he is!” She jumped up and ran, sure Thomas would be on her heels.
As she drew closer, her eyes drank him in, her tall, distinguished father.
Charles Hawkins. Love and ownership welled up in her heart so strongly and so suddenly that they threatened to choke her.
She had missed him so much. She used to cry for days after his visits when she was younger, before she learned to lock those feelings away in a tight little box inside her heart.
Never mind that, he was here now, looking every bit the gentleman that he was, with his elegant tailcoat and cravat, holding a cane in one gloved hand, and a tiny hand in the other.
Her steps faltered. Her father was holding a beautiful little girl’s hand. She appeared to be close in age to Lizzie herself, only she resembled a little cherub with her golden curls, and her dress was like one of those elaborate confections Papa would bring her sometimes.
“Papa?” she called out to him, but it sounded like a question even to her own ears.
She was standing in front of him now, with Thomas’ arm brushing against hers.
Her father’s eyes widened in what looked like horror and shock, not the pleased surprise she had envisioned.
He tried to walk past them. He must not have seen her after all.
“ Papa !” she called again, and this time she walked up to him and caught him by the sleeve. He shook her hand off, and she briefly entertained the idea that she must have made a mistake, that the tall man was a stranger and not her father after all.
But then he spoke.
“Young man, are you with this girl?”
A terrible weight settled in her stomach. The feeling was similar to the one she had when she stood in her window and watched Thomas talk to Sarah a month ago. Like something terrible was about to happen, and she had no way of stopping it.
“Yes, Mister,” Thomas replied, frowning as he glanced between the three of them.
“She must be lost. Why don’t you take her back to her family?”
“But, papa ,” Elizabeth continued, but her father cut her off.
“She’s clearly confused; she needs to go find her family. Here is something for your trouble,” he said and pressed a coin into Thomas’ hand.
“Right away, Mister,” Thomas said and led her now limp body away from her father.
“Why didn’t he address you properly, Papa ?” they heard the other girl ask as they walked away.
Elizabeth was past feeling things. Her limbs were heavy, and her heart was numb. Her mind was struggling to understand what had just happened, but since there was no way it could make sense of it, it just kept spinning in awful circles that made her belly hurt.
Thomas quickly led her back to their coach, where an angry Mister Ed was already waiting.
He must have discovered their theft and found them somehow.
Thomas left her standing and ran towards his father, whose face quickly grew concerned.
He shook his head and wrinkled his cap in his hands as he explained something at length to his son, and soon both father and son were staring at Lizzie as she stood there with her arms dangling oddly from her body.
What did one do with their arms? Was she supposed to hold them somehow? Place them somewhere? The image of her father’s hand holding the little girl’s came to mind, and a giggle escaped her.
“Are you alright, Miss Lizzie?” Mister Ed asked her in the same tone she’d heard him use with his horses many times.
“This is the weirdest dream I’m having,” Lizzie laughed again, and Mister Ed swore.
“Put her in the carriage, Thomas, quickly.”
Mister Ed was one of the kindest men she knew.
Thomas and his older sister Mary were lucky to have him, she thought.
He’d never pretend not to know them. Now Thomas would always think her a liar, and he’d marry Sarah Baker and have a dozen red-headed babies with her, and she’d see them on market day, and they’d pretend not to know her either.
Another laugh escaped her, but it sounded like a sob for some reason.
Thomas pulled her into a hug like he used to do whenever she lost a game when they were younger, since she’d always been a sore loser, but on this day, she couldn’t let herself enjoy his proximity, his warmth, or his smell.
She felt dirty somehow, unworthy of his hug.
She felt bereft, desperate, unprotected, alone in the world.
She pulled away from him and slid to the floor, hugging her knees and swaying slightly. Thomas tried talking to her, but she couldn’t hear a thing. She was already in the throes of the worst fever of her young life.
For the next two weeks, Elizabeth existed in a dreamlike state.
The pain of the fever felt so good, so necessary.
She’d usually have moments of lucidity in the dead of the night, when the house was quiet, and that was when she would try to come to terms with her new reality in peace.
She’d heard her father and mother arguing by her bedside a few times, but she kept her eyes closed. She wasn’t ready to face them yet.
She recovered the same way she had fallen ill: suddenly. One day, she simply got up and got dressed before joining her mother at breakfast.
Her mother, Miss Catherine, prompted by Lizzie’s father, tried talking to their daughter about the events that preceded her illness in a roundabout way, as mortifying as it was for her.
She wasn’t keen on her daughter knowing the circumstances of her birth.
But the girl claimed not to remember anything, and the parents were only too happy to buy the lie.
Catherine, whose life revolved around waiting for Charles to visit, keeping him happy during those visits, and then dissecting the details of those visits ad nauseam , failed to notice how the fever had burned away the last remnants of her daughter’s childhood persona.
She didn’t notice how her daughter never went to the courtyard to play with her friends any more, or how Thomas was turned away from their door time and again by their maid.
And she was too busy primping in front of the looking glass before going downstairs to greet the duke during his suddenly more frequent visits to realise that Elizabeth no longer ran to meet her father at the door like she used to.
Lizzie was unfailingly polite to the man: she answered his questions, thanked him for her presents, and endured his company for as long as she had to.
When he died two years later, she was ashamed of how relieved she was to be free of those duties.
And when Thomas joined a ship’s crew two years after that, with Elizabeth not having spoken a word to him since that day at the Park, she was finally able to close the lid on the box that held those feelings and memories and move on with her life.