Page 91 of His Illegitimate Duchess

“Y our mother?” Elizabeth said happily. “Oh, I cannot wait to finally meet her!”

“You still haven’t met her?” Isabella asked with such surprise that Lizzie felt like she had done something wrong.

“She’s been in Italy all this time,” she replied defensively. “But she’s here now, so send our apologies to Sophie and my brother, because we are heading to Norwich.”

“Stevenson left on horseback last night,” Colin informed her as they headed upstairs. “He wanted me to have a good night’s rest, so he didn’t tell me anything beforehand. He left a note to be given to me in the morning, together with the housekeeper’s letter.”

Elizabeth noted that he seemed uncharacteristically agitated, and she found Stevenson’s way of relaying this news to Colin odd, but ascribed it all to the unexpected change in plans and possible excitement of seeing his mother again.

Charlotte met them downstairs as their things were being loaded into the carriage.

“The Earl sends his regards; he is unable to see you off himself,” she said, looking embarrassed and pale.

Talbot didn’t seem to care one way or the other and quickly excused himself to go talk to the groom about something.

“How are you feeling?” Lizzie whispered to her sister, who had broken her perfect composure in order to hug her own waist with both arms.

“Oh, Lizzie,” Charlotte said with tears in her eyes. “We had the most awful fight last night, and things were said that can never be unsaid, and then he just left, and I don’t know where he is.”

Lizzie grimaced as if in pain. “I am so sorry. These things happen. Married couples argue.”

She knew they were just empty words, but she so desperately wanted Charlotte to be an arrogant, icy queen again.

“He said,” Charlotte said, and almost choked on her sob. “He said he never should have let Nicholas talk him into marrying me,” she whispered.

Elizabeth’s eyes widened, and her hand flew to her mouth, but she stopped it by grabbing the collar of her pelisse instead.

“I had no idea, none,” Charlotte added. “What should I do now?”

Although Lizzie knew it hadn’t been a real question, she still replied, “Go get dressed and ask Isabella and Frederick to take you to Ashbury with them. When you’re there, explain everything to Nicholas and have him summon your husband to resolve this.

If he did indeed do what Sinclair claims he did, this is partly his fault as well. ”

“You think so?” Charlotte looked more hopeful.

“Absolutely, Nicholas will help you. It’s not good for you to be alone right now.”

Charlotte nodded. “Thank you, sister.”

And the two women hugged goodbye.

“Poor Charlotte,” Lizzie sighed ten minutes into their carriage ride.

“I say poor Sinclair,” Talbot mumbled as he stretched his long legs in front of him.

“Colin, he told her that he never should have let Nicholas talk him into marrying her!”

Talbot shrugged. “That could have just been his hurt pride talking. What a blow to a man, to be declared an incompetent lover to an entire house party. Besides, was that really such a surprise to her? Hawkins, steering his friend in that direction,” he clarified when he saw Lizzie’s confused face.

“From what I’ve gathered, it never even crossed her mind. Poor Charlotte,” she said again.

“I admit I don’t know your sister well enough to speculate whether she was hoping for a love match, but I dare say that almost all of the marriages in the Ton are based on considerations of family, wealth, and title. Her surprise surprises me.”

“I think it was more so the expression of regret that hurt her,” Lizzie said.

“Like I said, wife, she hurt him first.”

“Do you think that justifies what he said? Should I have hurt you back?”

“Heavens, no,” Talbot looked taken aback by her sudden venom. “I’m merely explaining that he may have been speaking from a place of hurt instead of genuinely regretting his marriage.”

They were both silent for a while.

“Is there a chance that this is not his fault?” Lizzie asked, remembering Isolde’s advice to Charlotte and how that must have affected her sister’s attitude.

“What? Their unsatisfying bedsport?” He asked, rather scandalously, and Lizzie nodded.

“Who knows? Only the two of them know what they are doing and how they are doing it behind closed doors,” Colin said, and then gave her a suggestive smile.

“Forget it,” she protested. “Thunder is right there,” she inclined her head towards where the dog was sleeping at her feet. “Besides, I want to hear more about your mother.”

“Ah. So we’re discussing only miserable wives today,” he said disdainfully.

“Why do you say that?” Lizzie asked, and then hastened to add, “I’ve just now realised that you’ve never really spoken to me about your parents, beyond the generalities.”

“I happen to have good reason for that. They were two unhappy people who were not meant to be together, so they thought it best to infect everyone around them with their misery.”

Lizzie knew something about such parents, but she let him talk because she suspected he had his own wound he needed to drain.

She didn’t know what she had expected him to say, but it certainly wasn’t the following:

“My father won my mother in a card game,” Colin said as he moved the curtain to be able to see through the carriage window.

“Pardon?” Elizabeth hoped that she had misheard.

“It all started with a house party, as such things often do. My maternal grandfather, who was a hopeless gambler, had invited a lot of very rich men to his home in the hopes of marrying off his oldest daughter to one of them, as well as fleecing at least some of them at the card table. My mother, Charlotte, was only seventeen years old and wasn’t even out in society yet.

They were not only waiting for her older sister to marry, but there was an understanding of a peculiar nature that my mother would marry her cousin Edward, who was twenty years old at the time, so there was no rush.

Everyone who knew them said they had been made for each other. ”

Elizabeth’s body leaned forward without her permission, so strong was the pull of the deep sadness in her husband’s voice.

“My father, who was two and thirty, saw the beautiful Charlotte outside in the garden once during his stay at her father’s estate.

I believe he even briefly spoke to her. And he was hopelessly gone from that day onward.

You notice, perhaps, that I keep using the word hopeless.

You shall soon see how integral it is to this story. ”

“One night, the men played cards until dawn. My grandfather was losing miserably, and, unbeknownst to everyone but my father, he was already playing with borrowed money, namely his older daughter’s dowry.

This party was his last chance to recover financially, but he lost it all to my father.

So when my father proposed forgiving his debt and even paying off the previous one for him in exchange for his younger daughter’s hand, my grandfather didn’t even need five minutes to consider the offer before accepting it. ”

Elizabeth gasped, but Colin’s gaze never moved from the window.

“They decided to marry them right then and there to seal the agreement, but to give Charlotte several more months at her parents' estate to allow her to get used to this change of circumstance. Both men thought that would be enough for her to accept her fate. She would be a rich duchess; what was there to complain about?”

“How did she take it?” Lizzie asked.

“Surprisingly well in the beginning,” Colin said.

“She still lived at home, still had her friends, still saw Edward regularly, and my father was this distant idea of a man who would some day come and take her away. But that day came sooner than she had thought. At first, she was impressed by the life in London, the balls, the plays, purchasing new clothes and furniture and whatever else her young heart desired, but once the shine wore off and she was confined in Norwich about to be delivered of me when she was 20 years old, things started to deteriorate.”

“My father was obsessed with his wife, and she hated him more and more with every passing day,” Colin said with a weary sigh.

“They both lived in their own hell. From what I’ve been told, the event that irrevocably changed everything was Edward getting married when I was two years old.

I don’t know if my mother had held out hope until then, although if she did, I don’t know what it had been for, escape?

My father’s death? Edward’s love? Who knows.

But that was when she started being unfaithful to my father, insulting him openly, and just overall making herself and everyone around her even more miserable. ”

“Why did your father not separate from her?”

“I told you, he was obsessed. It was rather unhealthy, and that had been clear to me even as a young child. It was like any sort of life with her was preferable to a peaceful existence without her. I didn’t understand it back then,” Colin replied.

“Do you think she hated your father more than she loved Edward?”

“I honestly, to this day, don’t know whether she’d actually loved Edward or if her behaviour was all just a response to this chaos she was thrown into.

She had been raised from childhood with this one idea, that she would be Edward’s wife, and that she would be living here and like this,” Colin explained, waving his hand to speed up the story, “and then to wake up one day and be told that it was all for nothing, to forget all about this future you’d built your entire identity on… ”

“That must have been devastating. And disorienting,” Lizzie remarked.

Colin nodded.

“On the other hand, I sometimes think that perhaps it was a question of character, and that she would have behaved like that with Edward as well. Doctor Cooper claims that there are illnesses of the spirit and the mind that affect certain people, so it could have been one of those. I don’t know.”

“I’m so sorry, Colin,” Lizzie said as she squeezed his arm compassionately.