The Fall of a Saint

For a while. He felt another possessive thrill at the thought. It would not do to advertise her condition just yet. With Parliament out of session, they could retire to the country, finishing out the term of gestation in privacy. He had no desire to visit Aldric House, for the place held nothing but bad memories. Perhaps the future there could be different. The thought of the months ahead and the reward at the end of it had him feeling as giddy as a child waiting for Christmas.

‘Your Grace.’ The bishop’s whisper hissed through the quiet of the church.

The vows. He had not been listening. Madeline glared all the more, as though he were the stupidest child in the nursery.

He smiled apologetically. ‘If you would repeat the question, your Eminence?’

The bishop did as requested and Michael turned his attention to the business at hand, answering and repeating as charged with what he hoped was a confident voice.

Madeline Rosemary Cranston’s voice was quieter, but no less steady.

Rosemary. Another omitted detail about his new wife. He would pay attention from now on. She might not enjoy his company, but he would give her no reason to fault it. When the bishop called for it, he offered the ring of braided gold that his mother had worn, watched as it was blessed, then took it back, slipped it onto her finger and promised to endow her with all his worldly goods.

There. The job was done, the knot was tied. They knelt and were prayed over.

* * *

Maddie seethed. He was the one who had wanted this wedding and he had not even been listening to the vows. To fumble over a simple ‘I do’ was a slight almost too great to bear. It was proof that he did not care about her at all. The marriage was just one more step that stood between him and his precious heir.

She calmed herself again, for it could not be good for the baby to always be so angry. The child had given her no reason for such bitterness. Its father had. But she would not blame an innocent.

The bishop was going on and on about fruitfulness and praying that God would endow her with a large family.

Her stomach twisted. One child with this man was more than she wanted. She had accepted that she was to live and die alone. The love she’d saved for the family she would not have with Richard would be doled out, a little at a time, to the charges she educated, for there would be no children of her own.

It seemed the baby she’d wanted would come after all, in a sham marriage to the stranger who had ruined her. It is not too late to stop this. The bishop had not finished the ceremony. Doctor Hastings had sworn to help her. He and Evelyn were there as witnesses. She had but to announce that she could not go on and they would take her in.

But what good would it do her to be alone to raise a bastard? The duke had made his feelings clear. He would persist until she surrendered and legitimised the child.

Now the bishop was speaking of submission, which was even worse than children. If St Aldric’s goal was to have a woman in his bed, who had promised at an altar that she would not refuse, then she had played right into his hands.

A promise given under duress was no promise at all, she reminded herself. But all the same, her thoughts wandered back to that night, to awakening with a stranger.

She had been asleep and dreaming. It had been her favourite sort of dream. Richard had returned to her, just as he had said he would so long ago. Everything would be right at last. There was no job ahead of her, no more difficult children to teach. No more sour-faced parents expecting Miss Cranston to tend to the education of offspring that they could not be bothered to spend time with. After years without hope, she would be a bride.

And yet she had hesitated. ‘I thought you dead,’ she had whispered to him. ‘In the Battle of New Orleans. There was no word of you after.’

‘I am not dead,’ he assured her. ‘Just sleeping, as you are now. I am coming back to you. We will marry, just as I always promised. But tonight, it will be as it was before I left.’

She smiled and let her phantom lover ease her back onto the mattress. There was no pain, as there had been that first time. She was ready for him. She had been waiting for so long, for the long, slow glide of his body in hers. He was lying on top of her, his warmth taking the last of the chill from the winter air.

She wrapped her arms around him, feeling the warm solidness of a man, whole and undamaged by battle. Two arms held her. Two legs tangled with hers. The lips on her throat were full and hot, the tongue tracing designs to the open neck of her nightshirt until it found her breast. If only for a little while, she was young again and happy. She sighed in relief as he entered her. She had been so lonely for so long....

She had given herself freely to him, returned his kisses and stroked his body, encouraging him to do as he would with her. She had climaxed with him, even as she realised that the voice crying out in triumph with hers was unfamiliar.

Then she had opened her eyes.

She was shaking again, with shame and self-disgust. She could pretend that the fault was all his, but that was not the whole truth. She had lain with a stranger. Worse yet, she had enjoyed it. She was everything she feared, a woman of no virtue and loose morals, no better than her mother had been.

Not now. She was in a church in London. Dover was as much a dream as Richard had been. She ordered her body to be still, but it would not obey, any more than it had on the night she had met the duke. She had been a fool to search out St Aldric and an even greater fool in marrying to spite him. If she was not careful, she would fall into his bed again, though there was no real feeling between them.

This could not go on. There must be some way to turn back the clock and return to the life she’d had. It had not been happy, but at least it had been predictable. She had but to open her mouth now, before the bishop pronounced the final words, and tell them it had all been a terrible mistake. But she could not bring herself to speak. She was trembling so hard she was surprised that the whole church did not see it.

Now she was swaying on her knees, very close to a full swoon. She gripped the communion rail before her, watching her knuckles go white with strain. Her vision narrowed as though she was at the end of a tunnel, looking down at the finger wearing the heavy gold ring.

The man at her side had noticed. He reached out and laid a hand over hers, as though he sought to comfort her.

She froze. If she put a stop to this, all of London would hear of the mad girl who had left St Aldric at the altar. She would be left with a bastard and a reputation not just tattered, but notorious. And he would grow in estimation to a tragic figure, undeserving of such horrible treatment. Beside her, St Aldric smiled and withdrew his hand. He thought he had quelled the shaking with his reassurance.

The man was insufferable. He had despoiled her memories of Richard and made her doubt her own heart. Then he’d left her in a delicate condition. He had trampled her life into dust. And now, though he cared less about her than he did the baby she carried, he thought all could be made right between them with a sham ceremony and a pat on the hand.

No matter what might lie in her future, she would waste no more time in fear and trembling over the likes of St Aldric. And in marrying him, she would teach him the lesson he should have learned in the schoolroom: to do unto others as you would have others do to you.

Chapter Four

Michael stared into the glass before him, wishing that it held gin instead of champagne. It was far too early, in both the day and the marriage, to seek alcoholic remedy to the problems before him. If his current surroundings were a reflection of his future with Madeline, a strong drink at breakfast might not go amiss.

A church ceremony had cured the creeping sense of guilt he’d felt since the night in Dover. He had thought the worst was finally over and his life could return to normality.

But when Michael glanced out over the decoration of the feast she had arranged to celebrate their nuptials, he could find nothing normal in it. He must thank God for her good taste, he supposed. It could have been worse, had the surroundings been ugly. Of course, the level of excess was totally inappropriate for a wedding breakfast, which, in his opinion, should be small, tasteful and over quickly.

This had all the trappings of a masquerade ball. She had thrown wide the doors and cleared half the rooms in his town house to hold the crowd she had invited. Then she’d had the servants set every table in the place for guests. Every surface was decked with mountains of flowers, tropical orchids drooping on long stems from the midst of profusions of greenery. The walls were hung with ribbons and gold cages containing pairs of annoying, but beautiful, parrots.

Everywhere he turned little red faces looked down at him with beady black eyes. And whistled and chirped.

‘Could we not have had doves?’ he blurted, unable to contain his annoyance. Then, at least, the sounds would have been soothing.

‘But, darling, doves are so common.’ She gave him a pout worthy of a courtesan. ‘And you said I could have anything. The guests are quite envious of it.’

The females, perhaps. All around him he heard awed whispers.

Lovebirds.... Very rare.... Straight from Abyssinia.... She bought every one on the boat....

The males looked as he felt, as though they were longing for a stiff drink to dull the effects of the squawking on their nerves. At least they did not have to pay for the damn things.

‘It is a pity there was not time to teach them to speak,’ she said.

He hid the flinch. With the evil smile she wore, he could imagine what she wished them to say. She wanted choruses of high-pitched voices accusing him of actions he could not defend. And doing it in front of what seemed to be half of London.

‘A pity,’ he agreed through clenched teeth. He could not shake the feeling, when he looked into his wife’s triumphant eyes, that he was serving sentence for the crime. She must understand that this union was for the best. She was a duchess and not a gaoler. She had lost her position but gained a life of ease and a rank so august that no one would dare question her past.

Their lives would not be ordinary, especially not while they contained this many parrots. But they would be as far beyond reproach as any in England. That was all he had ever wanted for himself, and he had assumed by the way she lamented her lost reputation that it was what she wanted, as well.

He had meant to do little more than glance in her direction, to acknowledge her comment and prove that he was not bothered by it. But he had held the gaze too long, turning it into a battle of wills. For a moment, her confidence faltered and she looked as lost as he sometimes felt when under the scrutiny of this supposedly civilised society. Then she rallied and raised her guard again, looking as aloof as any lady of the ton.

Good for her. It had been rude of him to stare. Few men in London would have had the nerve to return such a look from a duke. But the little governess he had married weathered it well. None here would have guessed that, scant weeks earlier, she might have been a servant in their homes. She had best maintain that hauteur and let people think her proud. The more distant her treatment of society, the more desperate it would become to befriend her. If she was granted the gift of old age, she would be like those horribly intimidating dowagers that ran Almack’s, casting fear into the hearts of all, lest some mistake on their part result in a fall from grace.

For now she was young and her antics, no matter how outrageous they might seem to him, would be copied as the latest fashion. It was beginning already. This morning, Hyde Park was empty, Bond Street was quiet and ladies who would be barely out of bed had dressed and forced unfortunate husbands, sons and brothers to dress and celebrate the marriage of St Aldric.