The reluctant countess, p.23
The Reluctant Countess, page 23
“I don’t dislike the American duchess.” Lydia was conscious of a queasy feeling in the pit of her stomach. Perhaps a touch of guilt. “In fact, Lord Pettigrew offered her husband one of his puppies.”
“In that case, I assume that you made up a story about Her Grace’s party in order to tarnish the reputation of her close friend Lady Yasmin.”
“I didn’t make it up!”
But she had.
Still, all was fair when it came to protecting one’s buffleheaded brother, surely? Giles the Guileless, unable to recognize the machinations of a designing woman. Just look at how trusting he had been as Lydia’s chaperone. She could do—and had done—precisely as she wished.
Giles flicked a glance at her, and Lydia saw very clearly that her brother didn’t believe her, which hurt. Though she deserved it.
Fine.
Yasmin’s name wouldn’t cross her lips again, but she wouldn’t merely give in and leave her brother to a sorry fate either.
“Good afternoon,” she said, turning around.
She hunted down their butler in his pantry, polishing some silver. “Duckworthy, from now on, please deliver all the mail to me first. My brother tells me that several letters addressed to me have ended up on his desk.”
“Aye, my lady,” the butler said with complete indifference.
Another week
Dear Giles,
You haven’t answered my letter . . . Perhaps foolishly, I am hoping that we can still be friends. I intend to return to society, you see, and brave it out. I have experience in that. You didn’t ask, but I find I would like to tell you about Hippolyte.
Monsieur Charles was so dashing to a silly sixteen-year-old. Most people in the court ignored me, since my mother was engaged in an affaire with Napoleon; Empress Joséphine was livid. It made Hippolyte’s attentions all the more potent.
I was as stupid as you can imagine, treasuring every whispered compliment and clandestine letter. I foolishly accepted his assurances that he could not court me openly, or even dance with me, because of my mother, or so he said.
After a few months, he lured me into an elopement, arranging for a ceremony with a false priest. He kept me in a cottage for a week before laughingly telling my parents what he had done. He offered to marry me if they gave him an estate.
But I gather his most important mission was to communicate Empress Joséphine’s contemptuous congratulations.
She knew, you see. She more than knew: she planned it. She loathed my mother for seducing Napoleon, and Hippolyte was a weapon close to hand. They had been lovers, which everyone but myself knew. My ruination was the perfect revenge for an angry empress.
The two of them laughed openly about how easily I’d been seduced. I thought I outgrew the pain, but I didn’t. It affected my attitude toward intimacy. My clothing is provocative because I cannot give in to how gossips characterize me. Still, inside, I have always felt disgusted by the memory of my own behavior.
You taught me not to be ashamed, and I will always be grateful.
I don’t have much more to say than that. I wanted you to know that although I was a silly girl, I was outgunned, as they say.
All best wishes,
Yasmin
Two weeks later
Dear Giles,
I haven’t heard anything from you, likely because you agree with the wisdom of my first letter. Or because you are busy. I read the account of your fiery speech in Lords. Bravo!
My grandfather’s new puppy has been delivered. He has named him Puck, after the mischievous Shakespeare character. He got hold of one of His Grace’s favorite velvet slippers . . .
And a week later . . .
Dear Giles,
I have decided to ignore the fact that you are not writing to me. I am used to embarrassing myself, after all. The French court believed I would quietly fade out of society after that dreadful thing happened with Hippolyte. I keep imagining that perhaps my letters are going astray, so in case they are, I told you in an earlier letter about how silly I was at sixteen. Yet I insisted on returning to French society two years later. I could not allow that malicious creature, Hippolyte, to ruin my entire life.
The scandal followed me here, along with the lascivious gazes, the pinches, and the rest of it. But at least I held my head high. I suppose that’s why I’m still writing to you. I am too stubborn to accept it when people turn their back.
We had a conversation at dinner last night that made me think of you . . .
Another week, two letters, another week . . .
Dear Giles,
My grandfather and I have been invited to Cleo and Jake’s country house, so we will travel there tomorrow.
My grandfather’s correspondents tell him that Lydia and her betrothed are celebrated everywhere. I’m sure you know of the attention paid to her wedding gown in the gossip columns. I also read that you are certain to marry Lady Stella, having danced with her twice at a ball.
I have been thinking about my first letter, the one in which I told you that I would not marry you. Your silence seems to agree with me. Certainly, I am not what you wish for in a countess. In my own defense, I am faithful and principled. I have integrity, and Hippolyte is the only man whom I allowed to take advantage of me. Before you.
I’m forcing myself to write this final letter, to tell you that I’ve changed my mind about our marriage, and I hope you will at least consider it.
For years, I have never wanted to kiss anyone, until I met you. In fact, the very idea was repellent. My revulsion stemmed from the aftermath of that dreadful affaire, the way people in the French court characterized me as a grisette, a bonne amie looking for another man.
Yet from the moment I saw you, I wanted to kiss you.
The truth is that I have fallen in love with you.
I am hopeful that you might come to love me as I am. That you chose a woman who is undignified because that person—me—will make you happy. I know my reputation is wretched. But couldn’t we overcome the scandal together?
Please write me back. I have penned this letter eleven times and crumpled it each time. I am going to force myself to send this to you.
In all sincerity,
Yasmin
Lydia did not like getting up early. But in the service of her family, she forced herself downstairs at the crack of dawn to sift through the mail waiting to be handed over to the post. Sure enough, her brother—her poor, besotted brother—was writing to Yasmin every night. One day he wrote to her twice.
The woman wrote to him as well, not as frequently, but regularly. A day came when a letter from Yasmin appeared on the entry table after luncheon; luckily, Lydia noticed it in passing. That Frenchified handwriting caught her attention.
The return address was for Mr. Addison, so apparently, Yasmin had moved on to another house party.
“My dear brother,” Lydia said at dinner that night, “so many people are asking me whether you have a tendre for Lady Stella. Surely, you feel, as I do, that the lady is principled and intelligent. Her spectacles are strangely flattering.”
Giles looked at her over his roast beef. “I like her.”
Excellent.
“Do you like her more than you like Blanche?” she asked boldly.
“Yes.”
With that, Lydia gave up her hope of seeing Blanche as a countess. Stella would do. If only Lydia could be certain that Giles’s attachment to Yasmin had been fleeting and died from not seeing her. Not to mention not hearing from her.
Yet he kept writing the woman every night.
Lydia found it pitiful. Her brother had no dignity. Yasmin never responded! Well, she had responded, but he didn’t know that.
As far as he knew, Yasmin had turned to another man.
Giles’s persistence was beginning to pose a problem, given Lydia’s upcoming nuptials. She and Rupert would travel to Belgium on their wedding trip, tracking a rumor of excellent bloodhounds bred to high standards. She was looking forward to being Lady Pettigrew, a future marchioness.
If only she didn’t have to worry about her brother sending more pitiable letters, once she wasn’t there to confiscate them.
Just when she was considering that she might have to bribe Duckworthy, Giles missed a day. She crept down the stairs in the early morning and discovered the salver in the entry held a few letters to peers . . . and nothing for Lady Yasmin.
Another day passed without a letter, and then a third.
The morning before her wedding day, fortune turned in her favor. She and Giles were seated at breakfast, and Lydia was devouring The Morning Post’s gossip column, which not only detailed her wedding gown but claimed, untruthfully, that she would arrive at St. Paul’s in a coach drawn by four white horses. Without question, crowds of Londoners would cluster around the church door, hoping the groom would toss coins.
“Goodness me,” Lydia said, clearing her throat. “I know that I have been rather unkind to Lady Yasmin, but I must be the first to offer my congratulations. It says here that she has agreed to become a duchess.”
Her brother didn’t look up, but she saw a pulse beating in his forehead. “Indeed?” he said flatly.
Another person might have thought that he had lost interest in the woman, but Lydia knew Giles. His lips had tightened. In fact, he looked so forbidding that she actually felt a bit nervous. But after all, she was merely noting what was written in the newspaper.
“Here,” she said, handing over the sheet. “You can read it for yourself. I have a hundred things to do before tomorrow morning!” And with that, she left.
The next morning, she confiscated one final letter addressed to Yasmin, her last-ditch effort to save her brother from a terrible marriage.
There is only so much you can do for a person. She pitied Giles; she truly did. She had done her best, and she would marry Rupert with a clear conscience. Her father would have been proud of her efforts. The late earl may have been weak and light-fingered as a youth, but he would have hated to see his son repeat his marital mistakes.
The next morning, she walked slowly down the aisle of St. Paul’s Cathedral, her hand tucked under her brother’s elbow. She caught sight of two girls who had tormented her at school and sailed past them with a bright smile.
She would be a marchioness, whereas neither of them had found a husband. No one had murmured a word about her father’s thefts in months, and no one had discovered that she was fathered by a footman.
When she was Lady Pettigrew, no one would even wonder about her birth.
At the end of the aisle, Rupert turned around to meet her, his brown eyes rather anxious. He had a strange likeness to a basset hound, but she smiled at him, anyway.
He was a sweet man, and they both liked dogs, and that would be good enough.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
A broken heart is a stark kind of pain. In Yasmin’s case, it didn’t make her burst into gales of tears, or write ranting letters, or have the slightest impulse to tell anyone.
After his first letter, Giles had never written again. Of course, he was busy. Likely, he was irritated at her. Perhaps he hated her. Unquestionably, he agreed with her first letter, breaking off their engagement.
It felt as if a shard of glass lodged deeper in her heart as the days went by. She’d walk around a corner and discover Cleo in her husband’s arms. The shard would shift, sending pain streaking through her chest. She had been certain Giles would respond to her letter about Hippolyte, but every day that passed without mail, the shard gouged again.
Finally, she wrote him a last letter . . . that letter. The one saying she loved him.
She didn’t send it through the post, because she kept worrying that perhaps her other letters had been lost in the post. Instead, she dispatched one of Jake’s grooms all the way to London. He reported that he had handed the letter to the Earl of Lilford’s butler, who promised it would be waiting when His Lordship returned from Parliament.
Days passed, a week . . .
Giles didn’t write back.
How could he not respond, after she put her heart on the page? She had other things she needed to tell him.
But she faltered at the idea of writing into that silent void.
After all, Giles wasn’t injured or dead. The papers reported near daily on his oratorial prowess, when they weren’t detailing his blooming romance with Lady Stella or simply mentioning him escorting his sister to this or that event.
One night she dreamed that he was tossing her unread letters into a ditch. The next night she dreamed that he galloped away, leaving her on a dusty road, and when she looked down, she was holding a little girl by the hand.
Her father had maintained dignity in the face of his wife’s lust for an emperor. Yasmin could do the same while her betrothal was besieged by the bespeckled, befreckled Lady Stella.
That was not fair to the lady. She herself had broken off their betrothal before Lady Stella and Giles were linked in the press. Still, she would write no more letters. Dignity would bring her through. Or at least, that’s what she told herself in the middle of the night.
Every morning, she woke convinced that Giles was not in love with Stella. Far more likely, once Yasmin was out of sight, and desire waned, he turned back to his work and forgot about her.
Then night would fall, and with it came fear and shame. Giles had decided she was too scandalous, too frivolous, too stupid to marry. She had slept with him before marriage. He had never bothered to buy her an engagement ring. His sister hated her.
Undeniable facts made Yasmin feel defenseless and vulnerable. Desired, but not respected. Fairness made her admit there wasn’t much about her to respect. Likely Hippolyte told everyone in London how lustful she’d been.
Shame squirmed in her stomach and made her feel more nauseated than the babe she was carrying was already doing.
“Why hasn’t your earl paid us any visits?” her grandfather grumbled over breakfast. “And why aren’t you eating your toast? You love toast. Shall I ask for kippers?”
Yasmin felt herself turning pale. “No!” she gasped.
Her grandfather narrowed his eyes. “Shall I ask for some ale?”
“Absolutely not.” She felt a little dizzy, meeting his eyes.
Cleo walked into the room, tossing a laughing rejoinder over her shoulder at her husband.
“The fiancé of yours hasn’t sloped off, has he?” the duke asked. “Just when you need him?”
“I don’t need anyone,” Yasmin said lightly. “I have you, Grandfather.”
His Grace reached his hand across the table and took hers. “You do have me.”
Yasmin managed a wobbly smile.
Cleo said, “I agree with your grandfather: Where is that fiancé of yours?”
“It’s a secret betrothal,” Yasmin said uncomfortably.
“If I were engaged to you, I would shout it from the rooftops,” Jake Addison said, grunting when his wife poked him in the side. “That is, of course, if I hadn’t already married my delightful wife.”
Yasmin fiddled with her fork. She had thought that perhaps if she wrote to Giles saying that she loved him, he would answer. In that case, she wouldn’t have to inform him that they had to marry because of the babe. It was so mortifying.
She and Giles could no longer break the engagement; she was carrying a child.
Yasmin shook her head. Across the table, Jake was piling scrambled eggs scattered with chives on his plate. The odor was revolting. “If you’ll forgive me,” she gasped, jumping to her feet.
She was barely in her room before she fell on her knees before the chamber pot. She didn’t realize Cleo had followed her until her friend draped a cool, damp cloth on the back of her neck.
Yasmin bit back a sob. “I peed in that pot last night.” She started sobbing. “Now I cast up my accounts on top, which is revolting. I almost never cry!”
Cleo curled an arm around her waist and pulled her to her feet. “Goodness me, you’re tall. Almost as tall as I am, aren’t you? Come over here.” She led Yasmin to an armchair and pushed her into it without ceremony.
Turning away, she dropped another linen cloth in the basin and wrung it out. “For your forehead. Now, where’s your fiancé?”
“In London,” Yasmin said, her voice breaking. “I wrote him a letter breaking off our engagement before I knew I was carrying a child. Since then, I’ve written letters that he hasn’t answered. I had the groom deliver a letter to his house, but he didn’t answer that either.”
“Well, spit!” Cleo exclaimed.
Yasmin blinked.
“Vastly improper American slang that Merry taught me,” Cleo explained. “I don’t know Lilford terribly well, but this isn’t characteristic behavior, is it?”
Yasmin shook her head. “I wrote one letter that I would give anything to take back,” she blurted out. “Two, actually. First, I broke off our engagement. Then I . . . I told him how I felt about him. Now I’m so humiliated. Of course, I put him on the spot, and he wouldn’t have liked that.”
“Do you love him?”
Yasmin nodded. “I just wish I hadn’t told him.”
“Does he know of the babe?”
“No.” She took a deep breath. “I hoped he would marry me for a better reason.”
“I shall send my husband to fetch your future husband,” Cleo said, dusting her hands together. “Lilford has no choice about marriage now that you’re carrying a child. His lordship can explain his correspondence failures in person.”
Pure humiliation made tears press on Yasmin’s eyes again. “Your husband has more important things to do.”
“He will understand,” Cleo said. “Happy marriages require conversation. Misunderstandings cannot be allowed to fester.”
“Giles is tremendously busy in the House of Lords. He puts things . . . me . . . out of his mind when he’s working.”
