Page 34 of The Duke of Swords (The Highwaymen #4)

THREE DAYS LATER , Rae got her bleeding.

Well, false worry. She went looking for her husband to tell him, and he wasn’t anywhere to be found.

She thought that he must have thrown one of his fits and gone walking. This did happen, sometimes when she wasn’t even around. She thought nothing of it until hours later, when his valet went to lay out his clothes for dinner and found a letter in his bedchamber addressed to his wife.

The valet didn’t read it, but brought it, still sealed, to her. The valet paced as she read it, looking worried, as if he thought she might take it out on him.

She wasn’t certain why they had any servants left at all. Why didn’t they all just take their leave? Working for Rutchester was not for the faint of heart, she thought.

The letter was dreadful.

He had left her, and he hadn’t told her where he was going.

He said that was better for both of them.

He had left her in charge of all of his finances, saying he trusted her implicitly with them, and said that she should be all right, to hire anyone for anything she needed.

He said he didn’t want his child growing up frightened of him, that it was better to have an absent father than a monstrous one.

Rae wanted to tear the letter up.

She almost did, but she settled for crumpling it up in one hand and hurling it against the wall.

Then, chagrined, she smoothed it back out as best she could.

Interesting, wasn’t it, the way she had reacted to the letter? The way she had wanted to destroy it? Was he rubbing off on her, her husband?

She contemplated that for too long, and then forced herself to set it aside.

She had to find him.

RUTCHESTER SPENT THE journey across the ocean with books about pregnancy.

It took nearly a month to cross to New York by ship.

Once the journey ended and he was on American soil, however, she would only be about two months along, it seemed, and she would not look as if she were increasing, not for some time.

The books said that with a first pregnancy a woman might not look pregnant until she was five or six months along. And, of course, the books called it pregnant, but that was because they were medical books. One would never say such an impolite word aloud, of course.

He spent the rest of the time making schemes for how he could send her letters without her finding out where he was.

He thought he might send letters back to someone in England who could post them to her from somewhere else.

He wasn’t sure who to ask, of course, because he was not entirely sure that anyone in his life was going to agree that this was a good idea, to leave his wife alone while she was carrying his child, leave her to fend for herself entirely.

It was only that, in his way, he was protecting her. And the babe.

And he knew it was the best way, the way to ensure their safety.

Well.

Ensure their safety from him, that was.

He did worry about not being there to protect them from other threats.

But those threats were gone. Champeraigne was dead. Fateux was dead.

Seraphine wasn’t, true, but she was a woman and surely the duchesses were a better form of protection than he would ever be against her. And besides, he was sure the other dukes would help to protect his wife and child. He would have protected their wives and children, of course.

When he arrived in New York, he rented a house in that city, and he hired a few servants.

He remembered what Rae had said to him, about how he must talk through what had happened to him with his father, and he decided the best person for this would likely be a valet.

When he was hiring men for the job, he indicated he would need a good listener, who would be discreet, and he ended up with a man whose family was Irish, whose accent got thicker when he heard about all the things that Rutchester confessed to him.

But it was odd.

He did not feel as if he was improving. He was angrier, it seemed, going through all of it again. Talking about it made him feel, well, worse in some ways, as if he was reliving the entire experience, as if it was happening to him afresh and wounding him even worse this time.

In the past, he hadn’t realized that the things his father was doing were entirely wrong. He’d sort of told himself all fathers did things like that to their little boys.

It wasn’t until he was older that he understood that wasn’t true.

So, going through these memories, he was outraged in a way he hadn’t been before, and the small boy in his memory—the one who had been resilient through a lot of it—that boy seemed more wounded that he might ever have imagined before.

He had told himself it hadn’t been that bad, but it had been worse.

He cried a lot.

He wasn’t getting anywhere, he didn’t think.

There was only one thing, though, one thing that seemed better about going through it all, and that was that he realized he had been so helpless and so small and so, well, blameless.

Some part of him had thought it was his own fault when he was small. He had thought he must have done something to bring it upon himself.

Now, he realized that was foolish.

But it only made him feel more helpless, this thought, because now it seemed that terrible things happened for no reason whatsoever. Before, if it had been his own fault, he could simply stop doing the things that led to his being tortured, but now…

No, bad things happened and there was no recourse.

He could never have prevented it, nor could he prevent anything bad happening in the future.

He was utterly, totally, and in all other ways damaged.

He’d been hurt in this disgusting way when he was small and nothing could undo that and he would always be very, very broken.

He had no real defense against being hurt in the future either, for he realized that it hadn’t been his fault.

If he hadn’t caused it, it had just happened . For no reason .

Another month passed.

She still would not be showing. Her belly would still be flat.

He had done the right thing, hadn’t he?

He missed her.

He missed England. He missed Andiley. He even missed London.

New York was colder and sort of harsher in some way he couldn’t quite explain.

America was harsher in general. All Americans were savages, he thought, and that was why they had come here.

The savagery of the new world called to some savagery in their hearts.

He had thought some part of him was savage, but no.

He wanted the civilization of England back.

He wanted tea , damn it all to hell.

He wanted good roads and a reliable post and the convenience of easy travel and the lack of being buried in so much snow .

But mostly, he missed her .

And then one day, she was there.