Page 13 of The Duke's Bride in Disguise
"Really?" Coachford no longer tried to disguise his look of alarm, "It's not a love match? Or even a like match?"
"It's an arranged match," Raff muttered, ignoring his friend's worried expression, "Her father will know his daughter is well looked after, the daughter will become a duchess, and I will have a son with a pedigree lineage that can be traced back to the Normans. Perhaps two, if she is obliging."
"Lud," Coachford shook his head, "I didn't realise that when you assumed the title, you lost all sense of fun."
"Unfortunately, fun is not synonymous with being a duke," Raff replied lightly, hoping that his friend would note his bitterness and leave well enough alone.
The possibility that Raff might one day inherit the title had never occurred to him. His older brother, David, had married dutifully young and sired a daughter in his first year of wedded life. After that, a few unfruitful years had followed, in which David had sagely warned his brother that the dukedom might still one day be his. Then, miracle of miracles, a son—Reese—had been born, and Raff had been free to choose his own path. The army beckoned, for it had always been talked of as the most suitable occupation for the energetic, and sometimes wild, spare heir of Kilbride.
The boyish enthusiasm with which Raff, fresh out of Oxford, had entered service for King and country, was soon torn from him, as the realities of life as a soldier set in. Having bought himself a commission in Wellesley's army, Raff set out for the peninsula in the summer of 1809. He was but a month in Spain, when he was commanded to lead his troops into battle, not knowing that at Talavera he would witness the slaughter of more than seven-thousand British men.
Death, so much needless death; if anyone was to ask Raff to describe his six years of service, that was what he would tell them—though no one ever asked. As a soldier, he was expected to smile bravely and share nothing—especially not the fact that most nights he awoke bathed in a cold sweat and crippled by fear. For six years, Raff had stumbled blindly through the endless war, not knowing one day if he would spend the night playing cards with the men of his regiment, or helping to bury fallen comrades in shallow graves.
Raff's career, if one could call it that, came to an abrupt halt in December of 1814. After taking a bayonet to the leg, he had been sent back to London to recuperate. Once back amongst theton, and sedate London life, a strange thing happened—Raff forgot how to breathe.
Not permanently of course, but on occasion, and especially when confined in crowded ballrooms, all his breath left his body, and no matter how he struggled, panted and gasped, he could not get it back. The attacks of breathlessness, which were always accompanied by a tight chest and pounding heart, became so bad that Raff had engaged numerous physicians, seeking a remedy. Each were adamant that it related to his leg-wound and one helpful fellow prescribed a regimen of laudanum tinctures, to help ease his pain.
The laudanum did ease Raff's aches, but it also did something else; it stopped his attacks of breathlessness completely. The tinctures left Raff in such a calm, relaxed state, that he soon devised his own regimen, which was far more generous than the doctor's prescribed one.
A few drops of the tincture in his morning coffee, another few drops midmorning, with some brandy to wash it down, and for the rest of the day another few drops, as and when required. The heady, peaceful feeling that the laudanum induced was addictive, and when it began to ware off, Raff would feel chills, aches and pains—and so he took another dose, to ease that feeling. If his mind had not been addled by the stuff, he would have seen what a vicious circle it was, but it was not long until he barely left his bachelor rooms in Mayfair, preferring instead to remain in bed with the drapes closed against the world outside, while his petrified servants faithfully brought him fresh bottles of the stuff at his command.
On one of these foggy lost days, Raff had a vague memory of one of his brother's staff arriving, to tell him that the duke was gravely ill.
"He has asked to see you," the servant humbly requested.
"I will be along shortly," Raff had replied, dismissing him with a wave of a hand. Of course, instead of leaping from his bed and changing out of his nightshirt, Raff had reached for the bottle of Dover's Powder, and dosed himself into oblivion.
His next memory was of Thomas, his brother's valet, standing at the end of his bed and telling him the duke and his son were dead.
"We will need you dressed and ready, Your Grace," Thomas had said, his lined face unable to disguise his disgust at the squalor of Raff's living conditions.
"I will be along shortly," Raff replied, waving a dismissive hand at Thomas, who dutifully left the room.
He had just reached over to his bed-side cabinet for the faithful bottle of Dover's Powder, when Thomas re-entered the room, with a bucket in hand.
"Did you not hear me?" Raff had blustered, "I said that I will be along—"
The lie on his lips had been cut short, as Thomas had dumped the bucket of cold water upon his head. Raff had spluttered, as icy rivulets of water had raced down his back, shocking him into awareness for the first time in weeks.
"What on earth do you think you're doing?" Raff had roared, "There'll be the devil to pay for this, Thomas."
"Aye," the older man had replied, unruffled at Raff's threats, "That may be, but I won't allow you miss your brother's funeral on my watch. Now, let's get you washed and dressed—you can't turn up looking like an opium eater, or the papers will have a field day."
Thomas had dragged Raff from his bed with one meaty fist, thrown him into a tub of water that was objectionably chilly, and wrestled with his tangled hair and stupefied sate, until at last he was presentable.
"I don't know why my brother liked you so much," Raff complained, his body already aching as the effects of his last dose of laudanum wore off.
"He liked me because, duke or no duke, I always spoke my mind," Thomas replied, as he took a scissors to Raff's overgrown dark hair, "And now I shall do the same for you, Your Grace Grace; you need to stop this childishness. You have to be a rock of support for your brother's widow and your niece—not another burden for them to carry. You have a duty to your family and the title, never mind the people who rely upon you for their living. No more of that laudanum, for I've seen it destroy men far stronger than you. And get rid of that nimby you have employed as your man, he's wearing half your wardrobe."
"Dudley?" Raff had questioned in confusion, and at Thomas's nod, he had turned to find his own valet hovering in the corner, decked out in all of Raff's finest clothes, including a pair of gleaming Hessian boots on his feet.
"His pockets are probably stuffed with your coin as well," Thomas had said sagely, "But we'll deal with that, once we're back from Sussex."
And so, under the watchful eye of Thomas, Raff had gone to the family seat in Sussex and buried his brother and his young nephew, who had both succumbed to scarlet fever. The wretched grief and guilt that he felt at their deaths was compounded by the agony of weaning himself off the laudanum. He ached, he cried, his attacks of breathlessness returned, but no matter the pain, he managed to resist the lure of the bottle.
Duty was what pushed him when his spirits were at their lowest. His niece, his tenants, the Kilbride line; if ever he was tempted to stray from his path of temperance, he pictured the faces of all those who relied upon him. The weight of his obligations, however, rested heavily upon his shoulders. Nowadays, when he woke up in the dead of night struggling to catch his breath, it was not memories of war that flashed across his mind's eye, but the list of his obligations and a suffocating feeling of shame—for how could a man like he be up to the task at hand?
You are no duke, he would chastise himself, once the attack had ended. What type of a duke woke up frightened and scared in the middle of the night? The weak kind, a mocking voice in his head answered.
