Page 31 of To Tame the Wild Rake
“The binding was at my instruction, my lord,” said one of the two doctors Aldridge had retained. “He was violent and uncontrollable. It is in our report, my lord.” The other doctor had been dismissed after loftily informing Aldridge that his colleagues and the London doctors Aldridge had consulted did not know what they were talking about.
Aldridge had read the report in London. A litany of injuries to the warders and even one of the doctors. Multiple attempts to break out from the tower rooms to which Haverford was confined, three temporarily successful. And repeated self-inflicted injuries as he fought even his own body.
The words on paper had not prepared Aldridge for the deterioration in the three months since he last visited. He had hated and feared his father for most of his adult life. Despised him, too. But this miserable animal was not that man.
Haverford might have reacted to the pity in Aldridge’s eyes, or perhaps some lingering intelligence sensed Aldridge’s authority over the others in the room, for he strove mightily to reach the son he did not recognise, struggling to break free from his restraints, his eyes burning with hatred and his mouth spewing barely intelligible imprecations.
“It would be best to leave, my lord,” the doctor suggested. “We have made him as comfortable as we can, but he will hurt himself if he keeps fighting the bindings like that.”
“I’ll sing to him, my lord,” the largest warder offered. “Soothes him sometimes, it does.” And he began to sing a sentimental ballad in a pleasant tenor.
Aldridge led the doctors from the room. In the outer room, another warder sat watchful, waiting until he was needed. He leapt up and knocked on the door that gave access to the stairs. “It’s me, Frank,” he called. “His lordship is ready to leave.”
The bolts on the outside of the door rattled as they were disengaged. It was kept locked and bolted from the outside, and always attended by someone whose job was not only to allow authorised comings and goings but to act as a last line of defence should Haverford somehow manage to break out again.
Aldridge supposed the monster the duke had become might overwhelm all four of the warders during his wash, but four inches of solid oak fastened with iron must defeat him? Still, Haverford had broken out a number of times.
“Brandy, gentlemen?” he suggested to the doctors. He certainly planned to have one.
He had another later with the estate’s steward, Auberon Fitzgrenford, the grandson of an indiscretion of a former duke.
“The doctors will keep His Grace dosed with laudanum, on my instruction,” Aldridge told Auberon. “It will make his care easier and reduce his suffering. If it shortens his life, as the doctors warn it might, I take full authority for the choice.”
Auberon shrugged. “No argument from me. I would rather not have more injuries amongst the staff. If the old man was a dog, we’d have put him down months ago, either out of mercy or to avoid bites.”
“He is not a dog, however,” Aldridge said. “We will do what we can to keep him comfortable and under control, Auberon, and that will have to be enough.”
He sat over his brandy after Auberon said good night, staring into the fire. The old man would continue to breath for another few months, and give his reluctant heir a brief respite before he had to step up into the spotlight.
Aldridge had been under scrutiny all his life, as the notorious son of a scandalous duke. He’d learned to ignore it, to do what he wished or what was needful regardless of what people said. The increased attention would not make a difference. Still, he felt as if a cage was hovering, ready to drop and imprison him for the remainder of his days.
It was this place. He could vaguely recall Haverford Castle being a wonderful place to be a child, when Jonathan was a baby in the nursery and David Wakefield lived in the west tower. David was Haverford’s son by a gentlewoman who had died shortly after Jonathan’s birth. Mama had defied her husband and taken him in.
Halcyon days, those. Mama would come up to the nursery every day to spend time with the baby, and would read to Aldridge or play games with him. David treated his two younger half-brothers with amused affection, and let Aldridge follow him around like a puppy.
Then came the hard years. When Aldridge was just turned twelve, David fell afoul of His Grace’s temper and was exiled. And the governess came. Looking back as an adult, Aldridge understood her strategy. Seduce the heir and control him, and then wait. Unfortunately for her, Haverford discovered her in Aldridge’s bed a couple of years after she started, and put paid to her games by installing her in his own. Aldridge was given a willing maid to play with, someone nearer his own age. At the end of the summer, he was sent off to Eton.
After that, visits to Haverford Castle were usually brief and unpleasant, Haverford having decided that his son was old enough to be moulded into a man after Haverford’s own image. These walls had witnessed many beatings, both verbal and physical, every time Aldridge failed to come up to the expectations Haverford never specified.
Enough brooding.He rose to his feet and put down his empty glass. He had a busy day tomorrow, out with Auberon to take Christmas boxes to tenants around the estate. The following day, he’d give the servants their Christmas bestowals, and then he’d be able to leave for Gloucestershire, to join his mother and sisters to celebrate the season. He’d be out of this gloomy old place soon enough.
Though it wasn’t the place itself he hated. Perhaps, once Haverford was gone, he’d be able to make new memories. Unbidden came an image of Charlotte with his baby in her arms, smiling at him from the chair on the other side of the hearth.
Bad enough to be haunted by memories, but if things that had never happened were bedevilling him, it was high time to go to bed.
15
In March, Charlotte came up to London to support her sister and brother-in-law. In April, she and Sarah sat in the public gallery of the House of Lords as Nathaniel Miles Thomas Beauclair, Earl of Lechton, resplendent in his parliamentary robes and flanked by two other earls, made his formal presentation of his credentials to the clerk.
The next day, Charlotte and Nate waited in one of the outer rooms of St James Palace while the Dowager Lady Sutton, the twins’ mother, presented Sarah Elizabeth Beauclair, Countess of Lechton, to Queen Charlotte and the Prince Regent, at the Queen’s Drawing Room—the first in ten months, and therefore very crowded.
Lord and Lady Lechton hosted a ball the following week at the Winshire mansion, the Lechton townhouse being too small. This rounded out the events that marked Nate’s and Sarah’s full ascension to the honours and duties of their new position.
Aldridge came to Charlotte to solicit a dance. She had not seen him for months; not since he left London for Haverford Castle, but the old uncomfortable feelings rose stronger than ever. And when he bowed over her hand in greeting, a powerful tingle ran from the fingers he touched so lightly to her core.
She managed to hide her reaction, to ask after his family. The duchess had been late arriving in town, since she waited for Matilda to be well enough to travel after the birth of her child. Aldridge had been to Haverford Castle again, and had only just returned to London.
Her own family news mostly circled around Sarah and Nate, who were just taking to the floor as the musicians tuned up for a new set. Aldridge led Charlotte out, and they took their places for a country dance too vigorous for speech, but not so energetic that Sarah and Nate didn’t spend it lost in one another’s eyes.
