Page 58 of His Forgotten Bride
His chair scraped the floor as he stood, reaching for it with fingers that trembled. And then it was in his hand, this scrap of paper that had changed the course of his life.
His name, in his hand, the ink faded with age upon paper a bit crisp and blackened along the rightmost edge. And beneath it, Claire’s.
Claire Eliza Hotchkiss.
He had forgotten everything of her. Even her middle name came as a surprise. And yet she had retained all of her knowledge, every precious thing that he had lost.
“I did not abandon her,” he said. “It was not by any choice of mine that she was left alone.” How could Claire have believed it? By the date, they had been married just a few days before he had been thrown from his horse. How could she have believed in his father overhim?
He didn’t realize he had spoken the last out loud until Mrs. Shipley responded. “She did not. Not at first.” Her fingers slid along the mantel, slipping the book back into its place. “Our cottage—mine and my husband’s, in Havenwood—faced east, my lord. From the front window, you can just see the gables of Newsom Manor breaking over the trees, atop its hill. Claire sat there for weeks, my lord, waiting. Waiting for you to come for her. Waiting from dawn until well after dusk, when it was too dark to see any longer. Until she had to face the truth at last—that you were not coming, that unless she left Havenwood in all haste she would bear a nameless child in a very small, very judgmental village.”
“I couldn’t have come for her,” he said, almost defensively. “I was out of my mind with laudanum and pain. For weeks, no one was even certain I would live.”
“Your father told her you were gallivanting about London.”
“He lied.” Probably he had taken one look at Claire and judged her unsuitable, unfit to be the future Duchess of Bridgewater. “He lied about everything.” He glanced once more at the paper in his hand, the symbol of a life that had been stolen from him. “And so did she.”
Mrs. Shipley straightened in infuriated defense of her sister. “A lie of omission. A lie to protect herself, her son.”
“Ourson.” The anger was still too fresh; he forced his hands to remain unclenched lest he crumple the fragile paper. “Ourson, whom she would have kept from me.Ourson, who deserved to have his father.”
“And his mother.” She made a scathing sound in her throat that would have done his father proud for its rancor. “I told her—I told her she should not have become involved with you. You lot, you are all alike. Selfish and arrogant, believing the whole of the world exists only to serve your whims. Well, I’ll not humor your conceit a moment longer.” She jabbed a finger at the door. “Get out of my house, my lord.”
“The license goes with me,” he said. “You have no claim on it.”
Mrs. Shipley shrugged. “It makes no difference either way. Either Claire is a marchioness and entitled to your support, or she is just the same as she has been these last seven years—sole guardian of her son.”
Her abrasive tone goaded him into speech. “I don’t require a piece of paper to determine custody of my son. I could mount a case in the courts, marriage notwithstanding.”
“Then I will lie for her,” Mrs. Shipley said simply. “And you will never see your son again.”
Shocked, he stumbled through the open doorway. “You would lie for her? In a court of law?”
“My lord, Claire is mysister. I wouldkillfor her, if the need arose.” But as she swung the door closed in his face she could not resist one last volley. “Stupid man,” she sneered, “to think you are the only one who has suffered.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The words haunted him for the rest of the day and well into the evening as he sat in his library nursing a glass of whisky. Of course he was not the only one who had suffered. He had never thought he had been. Though he had, perhaps, behaved as if he had believed it to be so. But he had also lived seven years blind to his own past, resentful of the fact that whole parts of his life had been stripped from him.
Now there was the added resentment that the one person who could have pulled him from that wretched darkness had not done so. Singlehandedly she could have lifted him from his despair, given back to him what he had lost—at lease the most crucial parts of it. The parts that yet taunted him with their absence. The parts whose lack had made him feel only half a man, missing something essential that he could neither name nor know.
His missing piece had been at his side, living within his household, for weeks. And though she had said nothing,donenothing, she had strewn bits of herself all over his life. Her gingerbread, her cider, particular turns of phrase—they had poked at him, tormented him.
Instead he had suffered mingled guilt and shame, convinced that his actions had led to the deaths of two innocents. That he had been unworthy of the absolution he sought, that he could never deserve the happiness he had reached for.
But that possibility was no more closer to hand than it had ever been.
The worst of it was that he had been falling in love with her all over again. Hehadloved her once. Enough to buck the expectations of society and marry beneath him, to take a simple country girl and make a marchioness of her. Had she given him half a chance, he would have adored her for all she had given to him. A family, a child.
Which had been his all along.
He touched his pocket and felt the crinkle of paper within, the marriage license he had tucked away there. A decision would have to be made on that account. Currently they were trapped in a marriage that was not a marriage. Unless and until the license was properly filed, Matthew would be deemed illegitimate, and Gabriel’s claim on him would be tenuous at best.
Worse still, he had no idea if a marriage license seven years old and singed at the edges would even be accepted as valid.
He cradled his head in his hands, rubbing at his temples to stave off the intrusion of a headache. Not a migraine, thank God—it seemed those were done with him for the time being. Perhaps because he’d ceased to strain at the end of his tether, reaching for things beyond his grasp. Claire had brought the migraines back with her when she’d reentered his life. In retrospect, he supposed he ought to have taken that for some sort of sign. But what few memories he’d recovered hadn’t been nearly as elucidating as he might’ve hoped. For all that he’d suffered the ill after effects of them, he’d gotten precious little out of them.
He paused, his glass of whisky halfway to his lips.
