Page 2 of My Darling Mr. Darling

And that, as far as Mr. Darling had been concerned, had been that. He’d left immediately, presumably for London—and in the morning, it had taken three servants to wrestle Violet into the carriage bound for Mrs. Selkirk’s Seminary for Young Ladies.

There she had stayed for nearly six months. Six months of the purest hell that she had ever known. It had begun innocuously enough—a slimming regimen, bleaching cream rubbed vigorously into her cheeks, daily recitations of ladylike virtues repeated like mantras until they crept over even into Violet’s dreams.

Then had come the rapped knuckles. Then the beatings. Then the confinement. The more Violet resisted, the worse it became. And the worse it became, the more Violet resisted.

Early one April morning, recovering from the latest infliction of torture, Violet acknowledged at last that she could not bear to stay at Mrs. Selkirk’s any longer. Either it would kill her, or she would end up exactly the same as the poor, spirit-broken girls who were her classmates. She drawn on every last ounce of courage she had yet possessed, slid open the window of the infirmary in which she had been confined, climbed carefully down the trellis—and Violet Townsenddisappeared.

Chapter One

London, England

August, 1828

“You’ve had a wife for nearlyeightyears, and you never told me?”

John pinched the bridge of his nose and slouched in his chair, suppressing a wince. Though Alex—the Duke of Davenport, to those with whom he was not so well acquainted—had been his closest friend since childhood, the mandidhave a way of grating on the nerves every so often. A flair for the dramatic, no doubt acquired from his mother.

“It wasn’t personal,” John said. “Only my solicitor knew. And the reverend, naturally.”

“And,” Grey St. Clair—Marquess of Granbury—interjected, “the bride. Shedidknow, didn’t she?”

John shot a scathing look toward Grey, who merely tipped his glass of whisky in a mocking salute. Something of a satisfied grin played about Grey’s mouth—but then, perhaps a bit of smugness was due, given the fact that John and Alex both had meddled in Grey’s affairs of late, and Grey was not a man known to let an opportunity for retribution pass him by.

“Yes,” John gritted out between clenched teeth. “The bride was, in fact, aware.” The whisky seared its way down his throat and pooled in his stomach. It ought to have been a bracing burn, but instead it felt rather like the flames of hell burning him from the inside out. “After I lost her—”

“How does oneloseone’s wife?” Alex inquired, drumming his fingertips upon the polished mahogany arm of his chair.

Tugging at his cravat, which seemed to have grown far too tight in the last few minutes, John snapped, “It’s easier than you might think.”

“But to lose anentire woman.”

“How had you imagined I might have losthalfof one?” John snarled, exasperated. “And she was—” Abruptly he snapped his mouth closed. Christ, it would not have been any better to admit that she had only been seventeen at the time. Little more than a child. “She was…ill-equipped to be a wife in any sense of the word. I sent her away to be educated.” In all honesty, out of sight, out of mind was how he’d dealt with the uncomfortable reality of having a wife. He’d scarcely considered her at all, until…

His fingers brushed his coat, directly over the interior pocket. He said, “She fled from Mrs. Selkirk’s Seminary for Young Ladies. So you see,Idid not lose her—Mrs. Selkirk did.”

Grey snorted. “Splitting hairs.”

John grunted, sulking over his whisky. The unfortunate fact was that Grey wasright. Violet had been his charge, his responsibility—hiswife, if only in name. He had owed her a duty of care, but in his mindset at the time, it had been more convenient simply to shunt her off to school and forget about her…at least until her wild ways had been sufficiently tamed and Mrs. Selkirk had made a lady of the little urchin.

“Mrs. Selkirk’s,” Alex mused reflectively, casting his gaze upward as though searching his memory. “Would that be the seminary that closed some years ago?”

“The very same,” John replied, striving to keep the snarl from his voice. In fact,hehad seen it closed himself. Had he known what sort of hellish institute the elite seminary had been, he would never have sent Violet there—even if hehadbeen in a frothing rage at the time.

“A shame,” Alex said. “I had heard that their girls were, by and large, beyond compare. Accomplished, refined—as good as the most exacting governess could produce and better, in ways.”

It was true, in a sense. The ladies who had emerged from Mrs. Selkirk’s were, without exception,exceptional. But they were also spiritless, timid things who rarely spoke above a whisper. Placid little automatons who spoke only when spoken to, and who occasionally flinched at the advent of any sharp sound. The girls had not been molded into models of propriety so much as they had been abused into it. John had seen horses broken with more care.

And he had sent Violet there, to that awful place. It made little difference to his conscience that he could not possibly have known what would await her there. He hadn’t known—but that was hardly an excuse.

“Mrs. Selkirk’s,” he said, “was an abominable institution, and the girls who were sent there rarely emerged unscathed. Violet ran away in early April, and Mrs. Selkirk decided not to inform me until late July—a fullthree monthsafter she’d gone missing.” He drained his glass and set it aside. “I saw it shut down myself. It seemed the least I could do.” For every girl who had not been fortunate enough to escape. For every girl who had come away with dead eyes, and from whom he’d collected pages and pages of testimony, written in virtually identical precise, neat script.

For Violet, who had probably been worse than the lot of them put together. If Mrs. Selkirk had rapped a girl’s knuckles bloody for a malformed flourish on a single letter, he could not imagine what tortures Townsend’s headstrong daughter might have been subjected to.

Actually, he could imagine it only too well. And that was the problem.

Alex drummed his fingertips on the arm of his chair. “So. She’s been missing—what—seven years? And you’ve found her only now?”

“She’s sneaky. Cunning.” Cleverer than he had expected a young girl let loose in the world to be. “After I had the first advertisement placed for her safe return, she wrote to me.” That had been in August of the year she’d gone missing, and she’d sent a letter—postage due—that contained only two sentences.