Читать книгу The Duchess’s Secret - Elizabeth Beacon - Страница 10

Ash stopped pacing his austerely opulent office in the sticky heat to glare between the gaps in the window screens at the lush landscape outside. It was monsoon season and most of his neighbours had departed for the hills with their families, but he had no family. He stayed to watch the relentless miracle of the rains enrich this exotic, fascinating land and to seize the odd business opportunity they were too far away to grasp.

He swung away from the view and cursed the steamy heat for sapping his energy and dulling his mind, then strode to his desk and picked up the letter to reread impossible news. Stupid to hope his eyes had deceived him and he must have imagined those dire words in neat script on hot pressed paper.

The outside of the letter was almost unmarked by its long journey, as if to prove he was now a very important man. Even his letters must be taken great care of aboard a busy merchantman. Not for this cursed thing a sack in the hold with the cargo.

He blamed the form of address the prestigious firm of London lawyers used to direct it: To A. Hartfield of Calcutta; with the words, Sixth Duke of Cherwell, Marquess of Asham and Earl Morfield added in smaller letters, as if to warn of terrible news.

It is with great regret we must carry out our sad duty as the Fifth Duke of Cherwell’s legal representatives and executors and inform you of His Grace’s untimely death.

The day before yesterday your cousin, Charles Edward Frederick Louis Hartfield, died in a terrible carriage accident on his way to spend the summer months at Brighton...

Ash could not make himself read any more, now or when the first shock of those words bit like steel. The shining young hope of the Hartfield family, his scapegrace cousin Charlie was gone. The lad could only have been four and twenty. Ash pictured the gangling seventeen-year-old youth he had last seen seven years ago and sadness beyond tears caught him by the throat. He wanted to yell defiance at the gods. Was his whole race cursed to die before their allotted span on earth? No, reason stepped in and argued—his grandfather, the Fourth Duke, had lived to be an upright, if irascible, eighty-eight and even Ash’s father, Lord John Hartfield, managed to survive into his forties before he met his end drunk on the hunting field. Yet three years after Waterloo, Ash’s mind flinched at the dreadful truth that his brother Jasper was dead, left among the piles of dead on that bloodiest of battlefields until his batman found him. All over Europe there were fathers and brothers, sons, husbands and lovers dead so many decades before their time because of the war. He was not the only one to feel this aching loss day after weary day, but he never thought Charlie would join in and make Ash feel blighted and guilty that he was alive when two better men were cold in the ground.

There was no point blaming himself for not being there to protect his little cousin from every ill wind that blew, but he still did. Charlie would have hated it after growing up under Grandfather’s stern gaze until the old man gave up his fierce grip on life five years ago. Better be glad Charlie had had a few years as a handsome young duke with the world at his feet than curse the gods for taking him so long before his time. No, why the devil not? He was right to be furious. Except stamping about the room blaspheming and trying to pretend his eyes must be deceiving him did not make him feel better and heavy tears were still aching in his throat.

Ash glanced at the date below the formal listing of the lawyers’ partnership and chambers. He hated the scribe who had set it out so neatly he clearly did not care about the tragedy he outlined. Ash had been Sixth Duke of Cherwell for six months of blissful ignorance. The letter had made its slow way through Biscay, past Spain and Portugal, down the coast of Africa to the Cape of Good Hope until it got to the Indian Ocean and at last to here. If he went home he would have to wear the heaviest coronet below the weight of a crown on state occasions. He shuddered; Charlie or Jasper should be there to lead what was left of the Hartfield clan.

Ash cursed again and paced and cursed a bit more. The vexing problem of what to do about the slightly smaller and lighter coronet of a duchess crept into his head like a bad fairy. He had a vision of Ros in it before he bit out a choice epithet to add to the collection echoing around this lofty room like malicious flies. He did not want to be haunted by visions of the loveliest girl he’d ever seen gloriously grown into her looks after eight years apart from her hoodwinked husband. Eight years without him to catalogue her by the changing seasons and count the lovers she was sure to have cuckolded him with by now. Only a handful of people even knew of his misbegotten marriage; two were dead and the rest had kept quiet so divorce might not be the nightmare it was for other noble cuckolds. They had been apart for so long there would be discarded lovers aplenty in Rosalind Feldon’s wake. He could take his pick of deluded fools to sue for criminal conversation with his wife, then seek a bill of divorce in the House.

No, it was foolish to delude himself it would be so easy and there could be no hiding his youthful idiocy now. The public dissolution of his marriage would be chewed over and chuckled at in every newssheet in the land. At least when they realised the sad depths of his youthful folly his peers would send his Bill of Divorce through unopposed and there was sure to be plenty of evidence; no woman as fiery, passionate and silly as his wife could have fooled her own kind she was virtuous for so long and she could hardly marry one of her lovers with a husband still alive.

The thought of Rosalind in the arms of whoever was keeping her now sent a roar of fury through him that hurt like a whip. As well he had so many weary weeks aboard ship to look forward to, then. By the time he got home and tracked down his Duchess he would be cold as ice. Neither Jas nor Charlie had lived long enough to wed and have children, so it was up to Ash to sire legitimate heirs to the family honours and next time he would make sure he picked a plain and dutiful wife. His new Duchess would not blind him to her true character with breathtaking looks and fine acting and they would enjoy a marriage of convenience. He could not be like his father, careless and wild himself and managing to ignore his wife’s parade of lovers once she had provided him with an heir and a spare. That sort of marriage was not for him and he needed a dutiful wife without a head full of silly dreams. Love and lies made a tangled trap he had no intention of ever falling into again.