He was intending to ask. Always had been. She hadn’t twisted the dratted man’s arm at all. Perhaps she wouldn’t strangle him, but the jury was still out over the ice cream.
Hope hailed a hackney to take her to Gunter’s, where she impatiently waited an hour for him to arrive. When he didn’t, in a panic and imagining all sorts of hideous reasons to explain it, she hired another one to take her home where she was met by a white-faced Charity and her mother, who rushed towards her the moment she put one foot through the front door.
‘What’s happened?’ Because clearly something hideous and catastrophic had. But of all her panicked and hideous imaginings, nothing could have possibly ever prepared her for the catastrophe which had.
Chapter Twenty-Two
There is always a scandal at the Renshaw Ball, but I am all astonishment at what must surely be the biggest of them all. For the reclusive Dowager Marchioness of T. apparently never eschewed society at all—she was instead an inmate in a private madhouse for lunatics in Wiltshire! And if that bombshell wasn’t shocking enough to have you reaching for your smelling salts, Gentle Reader, then the accounts of how her insanity rendered her both witless and incoherent will! For I have it upon the most intimate authority from a lady close to the besotted Marquess that his mother’s physicians had to restrain her repeatedly over the years simply to prevent the deranged and deluded Dowager from hanging herself by the neck from the rafters of her cell...
Whispers from Behind the Fan
August 1814
Five days on and Luke still couldn’t think of Hope’s betrayal without wanting to smash something with his fists. Even if she hadn’t betrayed him outright, because he couldn’t believe she was that cruel and callous to have gone to the newspapers herself, she had betrayed his confidence somewhere and that was unforgivable.
Thanks to her indiscretion, perhaps tattling to her flighty sister Charity or the unsubtle Roberta who adored gossip because she liked to be the first to spread it, she had completely ruined his poor mother’s life. All those years of suffering, then the years of slow recovery, all his painstaking work to keep it all a secret to protect her were all now for nought. One careless conversation and it had all come crashing around their ears. The awful truth was out, and the impending relapse was as inevitable as his heartbreak and he couldn’t bear the thought of it.
Or her.
His own stupid fault for trusting Hope in the first place, he supposed, when he was usually so cautious about letting anyone in. It was, no doubt, brought about by the profound effect she had always had on him. But then again, he should have known better, as she had a profound effect over all men so he should have steered well clear. Instead, he had uncharacteristically thrown all caution to the wind and had been thoroughly seduced by the siren from the outset, and cross-eyed with lust, he had left his mother exposed. What had he been thinking to bare his soul to a woman from a family who made a near weekly appearance in the scandal sheets?
He never should have dragged his mother to London and he certainly never should have allowed himself to fall in love. Two hideous and gross errors of judgement which would have far-reaching and horrific consequences. All he could do now that he had returned her to the sanctuary of Tregally at breakneck speed, was wait for the inevitable fallout and deal with it as best he could.
To that end, he had sent a message to Dr Long Fox the moment they had arrived home late last night, informing him he would need to receive his mother at Brislington House as soon as there were obvious signs her health had begun to deteriorate.
His mother had put a brave face on it all though the long journey—but that mask would crumble soon enough. Bitter experience told him it was a matter of when, not if, and he had to be prepared. Perhaps for another long haul. In the meantime, all he could do was wait, quickly offload as many of his responsibilities in London as he legally could, and batten down the hatches again to prevent exposing her to more danger. It wasn’t much of a plan but, frankly, the best plan he could make in such a hurry.
If only it didn’t all hurt so blasted much.
If he could focus only on his mother and forget Hope, then he wouldn’t feel quite so out of control. However, his emotions were all over the place, clouding his mind while his heart bled buckets inside his chest.
He rested his forehead on the leaded glass of his study window and listlessly stared out at the stars.
What a hideous, but totally avoidable, mess.
‘Couldn’t sleep?’ His mother’s voice behind made him jump and he instantly squared his shoulders, not wanting her to see that he was broken too when she needed all his strength now more than ever.
‘I have too much to do.’ She was pale. Dark shadows ringed her eyes, making her look older than her fifty years. ‘I still need to write to my managers and my solicitor before I can go to bed but you should try to get some rest. Shall I fetch you some hot milk?’ Five days on and the crushing guilt meant he still couldn’t be in his mother’s company for more than a minute or two at a time. This time he couldn’t blame his uninterested father or his callous brother for threatening her mind. Ultimately, this mess was all his fault.
He was a blasted idiot!
Idiot!
And he should have known better.
‘I’d much rather some company.’
‘I’ll go wake Clowance.’ The nursemaid would know what to do. If anything, out of the three of them, Clowance was calmly taking it all in her stride.
‘Is it your plan to avoid me for ever, Luke? We’ve hardly swapped ten words since we left Bloomsbury. Please talk to me.’ She stroked his arm. ‘I can see you’re hurting.’
Of course he was hurting. He was in hell. ‘I should never have subjected you to London.’ Some of the guilt leaked out before he could stop it and he burdened her with his pain. ‘I keep thinking that if I’d have left you here or simply left the solicitor to deal with my unwanted inheritance and stayed here in the first place, none of this would have happened. I’m so sorry.’
‘I told you to go to London, as I recall, to have a grand adventure and then I pushed you into visiting because I wanted one too.’
‘Still—I should have mitigated against all this. I should have anticipated it.’
‘Why? Because I am your sole responsibility, put on this earth purely so that you could nobly protect me?’ She shook her head. ‘I never had you so that you could be my parent, Luke. That is not the way our relationship should be, and I hate the fact you feel so beholden and responsible when none of what happened was ever your fault.’
