Page 54 of My Deceitful Duchess
“North, north, and north again. Dover was too close to France for her comfort, and so we settled eventually in Sheffield. She would have taken us to Scotland, if she could have managed it—but our money had run out. We lived in a little cottage on the Duke of Venbrough’s land. My sisters took in mending, and two of them apprenticed out to a seamstress. My brothers worked the fields.”
“And you?”
“I did the sewing, the mending—I learned the same trade as my sisters,” she said flatly. “But I was never apprenticed out.Mamanhad higher aspirations for me. I was pretty, and beauty was a currency she understood. She used it to tempt the duke.”
“He must have been twice your age,” he said, and he could not keep the disgust from his tone.
“Thrice. He was five and fifty on the day we married. I was just eighteen.” Her fingers knotted in her lap. “I think it’s possible thatMamanhad been his mistress at some point or another. She was a beautiful woman, and I think she thought that entitled her to something better than working with her hands. But her beauty had begun to wane just as mine had begun to bloom, and the duke began to…take an interest in me.”
“He wanted to marry you?”
“Not immediately, I don’t think,” she said. “I believeMamanconvinced him to it. She was like that—charming, persuasive. He had recently decided to take a wife, but he had had no luck on the marriage mart, you see. Aduke, and he could not secure a bride.” A strange, harsh laugh followed, so acidic it could have stripped the varnish from furniture. “He railed about modern women, how not one of them knew their place. How all he desired was ason. AndMaman—well,Mamanwas perfectly happy to provide him a broodmare for his precious son. And since she had borne six children, he assumed my fertility would be assured.”
The duke had thought to purchase a bride like he would ahorse. Revolting. “So you agreed to wed him.”
“Mamanpersuaded me, too.” This was offered with a bow of her head, in a way that he supposed was meant to convey some measure of shame, of humiliation. “I owed it to the family, to secure their future. All I would have to do is marry a man who had one foot in the grave already. And he had brought such lovely trinkets—I think I wanted to convince myself I loved him, at least a little. It made it all more…palatable.” The shudder that slipped down her spine suggested that it had, in no way, beenpalatable.
“He wanted to mold me into the ideal bride—a duchess of his own devising. I learned to read and write English, to speak without a trace of an accent. Heerasedme,” she said, and her chest hitched, just a little, like she had swallowed back a sound of sorrow. “Everything that I had been was worthless in his estimation. He would say he waspreparingme, turning me into a proper duchess…but it was never true. He only wanted someone to control—I was nothing more than a womb he intended to fill with his heirs.”
Carefully, Sebastian asked, “How long were you married?”
“A little more than a year. I was—unable to produce a child.” Her fingers tightened in her lap, the knuckles turning white. “And that was…unacceptable.”
“He was cruel to you.” It was not a question.
“No one cares if a husband mistreats a wife,” she said, and her shoulders drew back to what he was fairly certain was a long-ingrained angle.
“Icare,” he said, and her frosty gaze landed on him for only a split second before she let it drift away once more. “It’s why you help them, isn’t it? The women you take in? You know what it is like to be in such a position, to be at the mercy of a cruel man. You help them because no one helped you.”
A queer little sound slid up her throat. Her lips trembled with the effort to contain it, and at last she brought up one hand to press it to her mouth. “I didn’tkillhim for it,” she said, and the brittle trickle of her voice evoked a flutter of hands around her as Ladies Clybourne and Livingston stroked her back, her shoulder, with sympathetic murmurs.
Thiswas why she had left so much out of her statement to the authorities. With how the Amberleys had tarnished her name to the authorities, if she had confessed that her husband had beaten her, she would only have becomemoresuspect. It would not have been so long a leap in logic for them to conclude that a wife who had endured her husband’s abuse might be provoked into putting a permanent end to it.
“I’m not accusing you,” he said, slipping one hand into his pocket to toy with his pocket watch. “I only want to understand. The Amberleys…they weren’t frequent visitors?”
She shook her head, swiped at her eyes with one trembling hand. “I wasn’t judgedpresentableenough for visitors for several months,” she said. “The duke did not announce our marriage until shortly before the Amberleys came to visit. I thought they had come out of curiosity. He had not been expected to marry, after all. He’d gone to London the year before for a Season that had proved disastrous to his pride. But he put me on display when they arrived, like he was taking a doll down from its shelf, and I was expected to perform as he commanded. A pretty young wife, soon to bear an heir—or so he told them.”
“Cui bono,” Sebastian murmured, half to himself.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Cui bono,” he repeated. “It’s a Latin phrase meaning ‘who benefits.’ Given the fact that you had two accusers, the authorities assumed that you thought to make yourself a wealthy widow, thereby benefitting from your husband’s death. But perhapsbecausethey were the ones to make the complaint, they overlooked the Amberleys entirely—even though Julian, as your husband’s heir presumptive, stood the most to benefit of anyone.”
“A son would have displaced him,” she said. “And the worst of it is—I hated the duke so fiercely, I would never have said anything of them had they simply left me alone. They did me afavor.” A shuddering, hysterical laugh erupted from her lips. “But I overheard them talking—they were in the duke’s room, watching him die of the arsenic they’d fed him. They were going to kill me, too. They couldn’t take the risk that I might be with child. And I didn’t know how much longer I had before they would arrange some sort of accident for me, so I fled.”
“How did you manage it?”
A one-shouldered shrug. “The duke had me placed in the servants’ wing. I crammed what little I could into a reticule—”
“The estate jewels?”
“I never stole them!” Her cheeks burned with vivid, furious color at the barest hint of such an accusation. “I was never even permitted to wear them; I had only a few trinkets which the duke had given me before our marriage. The money I received from selling those lasted less than a year.” She subsided with a sulky murmur of, “Ididburn the manor.”
“We’ll keep thatoutof public record, I think,” Sebastian said. “Though I’m not certain it could be held against you—since at the time, it was yours to burn. Is that how you escaped? Fire as a distraction?”
She shook her head. “I was going to slip out quietly,” she said. “But I encountered Julian in the hall. I think he had surmised that I was leaving, perhaps that I had discovered their plans for me—I had an oil lamp, and I dashed it onto the floor between us, and then there was fire everywhere. I didn’tintendto burn the manor. I only wanted to be rid of him.” She chewed her lower lip. “There was so much smoke, and it grew so thick so quickly—I had cut Julian off; the hallway was too narrow for him to proceed, but I couldn’t go without rousing the staff. They might have smothered in the smoke otherwise. Patterson—”
“That name doesn’t enter into any statements,” he said. “Who was he?”
