Page 108 of Lord Ashley's Beautiful Alibi
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Their sail upthe Seine was the calmest Kane had ever taken.
The merchant barge on which Kane had bought passage for them was a newly registered one docked below Mount Valerian to the west of the Periphique of Paris. Yves Pelletier, whom Scarlett Hawthorne had put to work the same day as Kane over a year ago, aided in obtaining the barge. Pelletier sailed with Kane and his wife to Rouen because the old port master whom Yves knew had recently died. If the new port master at Rouen docks found the crumpled license watermarked and stained and the handwriting difficult to read, well, then, the barge’s owner, a British fellow with a good Norman accent, shrugged. “C’est la vie.What can one do, eh?”
They docked in Rouen only for a few hours, as the captain loaded provisions and let go of the ropes again before the sun rose the next morning.
A certain Monsieur Bonfleur and his wife, who was heavily with child, left the barge at Le Havre and transferred to an old refitted schooner whose papers said it hailed from Bordeaux. This, the harbor master at Dieppe debated. But filled as his harbor was with craft of all sizes and nationalities, his confusion led him to allow the sleek ship to sail without much ado. After all, his wife could be a woman of great consequence if he was late to home and her stew had gone cold.
The Channel crossing for the married couple Bonfleur was secured by a man whose reputation was that of smuggler. His looks, that of a handsome rogue with only one eye and the swagger of a bounty pirate, disturbed the husband. But the fellow, by name of Jacques Durand, promised to land the couple quickly in Dover. Amazingly, Madame Bonfleur took to the storm more easily than her husband. He was very ill over the rear deck in the ten-hour sail that blew them north, then south into Dover.
After hiring the best carriage available in the crowded port, the Earl of Ashley sat in the well-padded coach for the drive to Grosvenor Square, number 20, praying for speed and no breakdowns. His wife was suddenly in labor.
Hours later, immediately upon entry to his townhouse, the earl sent his faithful old butler, Friendly, and a young footman, whose name the earl did not yet know, to Doctors’ Commons for a special license. Friendly’s orders were that the footman speed home as soon as word came that the earl could have an audience with the archbishop. The earl needed this license to marry, as his wife, whose own birth was recorded in St. George’s registry, was about to deliver their first child.
Yes, he gave his butler the papers to show that he and his wife, for he did name her that already, had been married by the British envoy, Anthony Merry, in Paris last July. However, they wished to have the blessing of the Church of England. Ashley’s marriage was of such importance to him, said the letter Friendly presented to the archbishop, that he would marry this woman every day of his life if that was what it took to make her truly his wife by the law of England.
By the law of man and of God, she was his beloved, and he needed their marriage legitimate as the air and sky and grass, so help him God.
The archbishop sent not only his writ to number 20, Grosvenor Square, but also one of his younger clergymen. The marriage, the second for the Ashleys, was declared three major pushes before the earl and his wife were delivered of a squalling baby boy. They named him Piers Alfred William Whittington. He slept in the Ashley family rocking cradle, his mother’s curiously crafted purple knitted blanket across his chubby little body.
At labor’s end, the earl—not in top health from the worry, the rocky Channel sailing, and the fear for his beloved wife—kissedthe woman he adored and buried his lips in her long black hair. There for a scant minute—because a man did not wish to appear daunted by the vicissitudes of life—he shed happy tears.
And when he raised his face, his beloved,legalwife, twice over, brushed his tears from his cheeks. “My darling husband, you are my fondest treasure, my dearest hope, and my most surprising mate. I love you now and will every day of life. Beyond, as well. Now go leave me and organize us all so that we all may live in freedom and in love from this day forward.”
Minutes later, the clergyman gone, the baby sleeping, the countess napping, the earl jogged down the circular main stairs to the kitchens. There he poured everyone in the servants’ hall a hefty three fingers of the scotch whisky Friendly had dutifully kept in the wine cellar for such an occasion as the master’s return.
“To us all.” Kane raised a toast to the four assembled before him. “May we have courage and strength, valor and might to fight for the success of our country, and the health and happiness of us all forevermore.”
THE END OF THE BEGINNING
