Tall, Dark & Notorious: The Duke's Cinderella Bride

Lady Sulby’s top lip curled back disgustedly. ‘Your mother, Jane. A woman much like yourself. That is, completely lacking in morals and—’

‘How dare you?’ Jane had known when the maid had informed her that Lady Sulby wished to see her that she was about to bear the brunt of that lady’s displeasure, but she had been in no way prepared for the vitriol of this attack on her mother and herself. ‘My mother was good and kind—’

‘And who told you that, Jane?’ The other woman eyed her with scorn. ‘That fool of a parson who married her?’ She shook her head contemptuously. ‘Joseph Smith—like every other red-blooded man, it seems!—never could see any fault in his beautiful Janette. But I knew. I always knew that she was nothing but a shameless wanton.’ Her eyes glittered fanatically. ‘And in the end was I not proved correct about her immoral character?’ Lady Sulby surged to her feet, her face twisted and ugly in her fury.

Jane staggered back from the attack, all the time shaking her head in denial of the dreadful things Lady Sulby was saying about the woman who had died shortly after giving birth to her. ‘My mother was sweet and beautiful—’

‘Your mother was a harlot! A temptress and a whore!’

‘No…!’ Jane recoiled as if from a physical blow.

‘Oh yes.’ Lady Gwendoline glared at her contemptuously. ‘And you are exactly like her, Jane. I warned Sulby when he insisted we take you into our household. I told him what would happen—that you would only disgrace us as Janette disgraced us. And last night I was proved correct in my misgivings.’

‘But I did nothing last night of which I am ashamed!’ Jane attempted to defend herself, totally stunned at the things Lady Sulby was saying to her, and shocked to the core by the raw hatred she could clearly see in the other woman’s face.

‘Janette was not ashamed, either.’ Lady Sulby shook with rage, that wild glitter in her eyes intensifying. ‘She did not even apologise for being three months with child when she married her gullible parson!’

Jane really felt as if she were going to faint dead away at this last accusation. Her mother had been with child when she had married her father? With Jane herself?

But that did not make her mother a harlot or a whore. It only meant that, like many couples before them, her parents had precipitated their marriage vows. Jane was far from the first child to be born only six months after the wedding…

She shook her head. ‘The only person that should concern is me, and I—’

‘You would think that.’Lady Sulby glared at her. ‘You who are just like her. With never a thought for the disgrace you bring on this family with your wanton actions.’

‘But I have done nothing—’

‘You have most certainly done something!’ Lady Sulby’s hands were clenched at her sides. ‘The Duke’s valet has informed Brown, the butler, that they are leaving this morning, and—’

‘The Duke is leaving…?’ Jane repeated hollowly, surprised at how much this knowledge managed to distress her when the rest of her world appeared to be falling apart—when she already felt as if she were in the middle of a nightmare without end.

‘Do not pretend innocence with me, Jane Smith,’ Lady Sulby told her sneeringly. ‘We all witnessed the way in which you deliberately set out to attract the Duke yesterday evening—to tempt him to your bed, no doubt with the intention of trapping him into marriage. But if that was your hope then his hasty departure this morning must tell you that it was a wasted effort. The Duke is not a man to be trapped into anything—least of all marriage to a wanton chit like you. Oh, you are a wicked, hateful girl, Jane Smith!’ Lady Sulby’s voice rose hysterically. ‘A veritable viper in our midst! But I see from your rebellious expression that it bothers you not at all that you have totally ruined any chance of Olivia becoming the Duchess of Stourbridge!’

Jane very much doubted, after the Duke’s comments yesterday evening concerning Lady Sulby, that there had ever been the remotest possibility of Olivia finding herself married to the Duke, and was sure that any hope that Olivia would do so had only ever been Lady Sulby’s own misguided fantasy after Lord Sebastian St Claire had failed to arrive.

‘I want you out of this house today, Jane,’ Lady Sulby told her shrilly. ‘Today—do you hear?’

‘I have every intention of going.’ After this conversation, and the things Lady Sulby had said about her mother, Jane knew that she could not stay here a day, an hour, a moment longer than absolutely necessary.

‘And do not imagine you can come crawling back here if, like your mother, you find yourself with child!’ Lady Sulby scorned. ‘There is no convenient parson here for you to marry, Jane. No besotted fool you can beguile into marrying you in order to give your bastard a name!’

Jane became very still, all the pain she had felt at the unfairness of Lady Sulby’s accusations concerning the Duke fading, all emotion leaving her as she stared at the other woman as if down a long grey tunnel.

Lady Sulby’s eyes narrowed with spite as she saw the shocked disbelief Jane was too stunned to even attempt to hide. ‘You did not know?’ She trilled her triumph at having shaken Jane’s composure at last. ‘Even after she died giving birth to you Joseph Smith could not bear to sully the memory of his beloved Janette by telling you he was not your real father!’

‘He was my father!’ Jane’s hands had clenched at her sides. ‘He was…’ Tears of anger blurred her vision at the terrible things this dreadful woman was saying about her mother and father.

She had never known her mother, but her father had been everything that was gentle and kind. Jane did not believe he could have been that way with her if he had not been her real father.

Could he…?

‘He most certainly was not.’The older woman looked at her with triumphant pity. ‘Your mother seduced your real father, a rich and titled gentleman, into her bed, hoping that he would become so besotted with her he would discard the woman who was already his wife. Something he refused to do even when Janette found herself with child!’

‘I do not believe you!’ Jane shook her head in desperate denial. ‘You are simply trying to hurt me—’

‘And am I hurting you, Jane? I hope that I am,’ Lady Sulby crowed triumphantly. ‘You look very like Janette, you know. She had that same wild beauty. That same untameable spirit.’

And suddenly Jane saw with sickening clarity that Lady Sulby had spent these last twelve years trying to break that spirit in Janette’s daughter. She had belittled the physical likeness she perceived to Janette by dressing Jane in gowns that did absolutely nothing to complement her. Lady Sulby hated Jane as fiercely as she had hated her mother before her…

‘Janette was spoilt and wilful,’ Jane’s nemesis continued coldly. ‘She had the ability to twist any man around her little finger in order to persuade him into doing her bidding. But she made a terrible mistake in judgement in her choice of lover,’ Lady Sulby sneered. ‘A mistake immediately brought home to her when he did not hesitate to dismiss her from his life when she told him of the child she was expecting. You, Jane.’

‘You are lying!’ Jane repeated forcefully. ‘I have no idea why, not what Janette was to you, but I do know that you are lying!’

‘Am I?’ Lady Sulby eyed her derisively even as she reached out a hand to her desk and plucked up one of the sheets of paper lying there. ‘Perhaps you should read this, Jane?’ She held up the page temptingly. ‘Then you will see exactly who and what your mother really was!’

‘What is that?’ Jane eyed the letter warily. Who could be writing to Lady Sulby now, twenty-two years after Janette’s death?

‘A letter written twenty-three years ago by Janette to her lover. Never sent, of course. How could she send it when her lover was already married?’ Lady Sulby sniffed disgustedly.

‘How do you come to have her letter?’Jane shook her head dazedly.

Lady Sulby gave a taunting laugh. ‘Think back to twelve years ago, Jane. Surely you remember that I came with Sulby when he came to collect you after Joseph Smith died…? Of course you remember,’ she scorned, as Jane flinched at the memory. ‘Just as I remember going through Janette’s things and finding letters she had written to her lover but never sent. Vile, disgusting letters—’

‘There was more than one letter?’ Jane felt numb, disorientated.

‘There are four of them.’ Lady Sulby snorted. ‘And in each one Janette talks to her lover of the child they have created together in sin—’

‘Give that to me!’ Jane snapped warningly, snatching the letter from Lady Sulby’s pudgy hand to hold it fiercely against her breast. ‘You had no right to read my mother’s letters. No right! Where are the others?’ She moved to the desk, sifting agitatedly through the papers there, easily finding the other three letters written in the same hand as the one she already held. Letters which Lady Sulby had obviously been reading when Jane came into the room. ‘Does Sir Barnaby know about these letters…?’

‘Of course he does not.’ Lady Sulby sniffed scornfully. ‘I have kept them hidden from him these last twelve years. Why do you think I was so concerned when I saw you with my jewellery box yesterday?’

Because the letters had been hidden there!

‘How dare you?’ Jane turned fiercely on the other woman, cheeks flushed, her eyes glittering deeply green. ‘You are not fit to even touch my mother’s things, let alone read her private letters!’

Lady Sulby recoiled from that fiery anger, her hand held protectively against her swelling breasts. ‘Stay away from me, you wicked, wicked girl.’

‘I have no intention of coming anywhere near you.’ Jane faced the older woman unflinchingly. ‘I would not want to soil my hands by so much as touching you. I have tried so hard to like you but never could. Only Sir Barnaby has ever been kind to me here. Now I can only feel pity for him, kind and loving man that he is, in having such a vicious and vindictive woman as his wife.’

‘Get away from me, you horrible girl!’

‘Oh, I am going—never fear.’ Jane’s head was up as she walked to the door, her spine proudly straight. ‘Let me assure you that I shall leave here as soon as I have packed the few things that truly belong to me.’ Including her mother’s letters!

Jane knew, as she hurried down the hallway to her tiny bedroom at the back of the house, that she was glad—relieved!—to at last have reason to leave Markham Park.

No matter what the future held for her—where she went, what she had to do in order to survive—Jane knew it could never be as awful as the years she had spent at Markham Park under the knowing and cruel hatred of Lady Sulby.

Chapter Four