Page 53 of Maid for the Duke

‘Good morning, Catherine,’ he murmured, placing a hand upon the cold stone. The grave was immaculately tended; Will had seen to it personally. He visited without fail whenever he came to Sussex, and the gardeners had standing orders to keep the place clear of weeds and fallen leaves, as though his sister herself might scold him for any neglect.

He wished she would speak back to him. Theirs had been a close bond, strengthened after he’d become her guardian when they’d still been so young. Normally he could conjure her voice, her teasing, her unflinching wisdom. Yet this morning, she was silent.

‘I have created a terrible mess,’ he said, his fingers still resting on the smooth surface of the gravestone. ‘I fell in love.’

The words lingered in the air. Now that he had admitted it aloud, he felt the truth of it settle in his chest. It was not mere desire, nor fleeting infatuation. His feelings for Amelie had become something enduring, something that reached into his very core.

‘I denied it, of course,’ he went on, his voice rough. ‘Denied it to myself and, worse, denied it to her. When she spoke from her heart, I responded with cruelty. I told her she was not good enough to be my duchess. My duchess…’ He gave a bitter laugh. ‘The most unforgivable of insults, to the very woman who had given me back my will to live.’

Will paused, making himself confront the image of Amelie’s face when he had ignored her declaration of love.

‘My thoughts are so mixed up, I cannot fathom what to do. For so long I have focussed on my duty, on fulfilling the expectations everyone has of me. I think I wanted to do a good job, but more than that it was something to hide behind, an excuse to stop me from really living my life.’

He thought of his grief following Catherine’s death, this need to shut himself away from the world. Only Amelie had been able to break through the walls he had built around himself. With her patience and kindness, she had burst into Will’s life and revived him when he’d been struggling the most. How could he ever have thought she was not worthy? Amelie was the very definition of goodness.

‘I think I was afraid,’ he said slowly. ‘Afraid of getting it wrong.’ He let out a sharp bark of laughter. In the end, he had got everything wrong.

Will bowed his head, the damp grass cool beneath his boots.

‘I told her she was not suitable to be a duchess,’ he whispered, unable to believe the words had come out of his mouth, shame clawing at him. ‘I uttered those words as though they were truth, when in fact they were the greatest lie. She is the best person you could ever meet. Yet I cast her aside because I was afraid of something tarnishing the Ashmead name. As if she could ever diminish it.’

He ran his fingertips along the carved letters of Catherine’s name. ‘I thought duty must come first.’

The silence pressed against him, heavy and unyielding. He desperately wanted to hear Catherine’s voice even though he knew it impossible.

He closed his eyes and tried to imagine her as he had loved her the best: hair streaming out behind her, running through the grounds of Ashmead Hall, calling out for him to chase her before collapsing to the ground, giggling, when he’d drawn near.

Then he thought of the late afternoon when Catherine had extracted the promise from him. She had asked him to plump up her pillows and help her sit up in bed. Normally even when she felt weak and breathless she found it hard to keep a smile from her face, but that afternoon she had been deadly serious. Will remembered how she had taken his hand and asked him to grant her this one thing—to take some time for himself, away from his duty, his responsibility, to do something that would make him happy.

At the time and in the months following her death, he had thought of it as Catherine’s way of helping him to heal, to make him stop for a little while and see the world outside of his duties to the dukedom and parliament, but now he realised it had been so much more than that. It had been a promise not to see the world in such a black-and-white fashion; to understand that, although his sense of duty was important, it could not be the only ruling emotion. There needed to be balance, space for happiness to bloom and develop.

As he opened his eyes, a ray of sun shone out from behind a cloud and Will felt something shift inside him. He had behaved terribly; he hurt the woman he loved most in the world in the cruellest way. Whatever the outcome, he needed to make amends. He needed to find Amelie and tell her he was sorry, that he had been completely wrong. She would make the finest duchess, and he would shield her from anyone who had something to say about her social standing or her family’s scandal. It was what he should have told her a week ago when they were still in Grantchester.

The pain he had caused might be something she could never forgive, but he had to try all the same.

‘I must beg her forgiveness,’ he said quietly. ‘And then, if she will let me, I will spend every single day showing her how much I appreciate her.’

He straightened slowly, the pale sun glinting upon the stone, as though blessing his resolve. ‘If she can forgive me, my duty will be to make her happy each and every day.’

This was what his sister had asked of him when she had sought his vow not to think solely of duty, to take time for himself. To find a way to balance his own happiness with his responsibilities.

Will pressed a kiss to his fingertips and laid them upon the gravestone. ‘Wish me courage, dearest sister. For I mean to win her back.’

Chapter Twenty-Seven

The dower house was set in a secluded corner of the Richcliffe estate and, as the carriage wheels crunched over the gravel drive, Will could not help but stare out of the window in admiration. It was a neat stone building, the edges softened and obscured by climbing ivy, the front garden an explosion of colour with the last blooms of roses in neat beds.

Closing his eyes for a moment, Will wondered if he might be finally drawing close after all his searching. After his visit to his sister’s grave and his realisation that he had made the biggest mistake of his life, he had rushed back to London, eager to find Amelie and apologise. Whilst on horseback, he had rehearsed the speech he would give her, the apology she deserved and how best to phrase the request that she forgive him and consider a life with him.

That had been three weeks ago and he still had not given the speech to her. He’d searched everywhere: returning to the slums to see if the children were back with Mrs Creedy; visiting the Fleet prison to enquire if Amelie had visited her father. Even Mrs Potter had helped—asking discreetly amongst her acquaintances whether anyone had hired a new housemaid. Nothing had worked. There had been no trace of Amelie. It was as if she had disappeared off the face of the earth.

Will had not given up, compiling a list of all the areas in London with cheap rooms to rent and visiting them systematically, asking questions of the locals to try to locate her. Last week he had even travelled to Tenterden in Kent, where Amelie’s family home had once been, thinking perhaps she had returned to ask for help from her childhood friends. No one had seen her.

Despair had turned to desperation and, just as he had run out of places to search, he had received a letter. A couple of weeks earlier, when he had first returned to London, he had written to Lady Elizabeth Dreardon, thanking her for taking the time to visit him in Grantchester but telling her circumstances had changed and that he could not go through with her suggestion of how they might live their lives, connected but very much separate.

Almost three weeks had passed before he’d received a reply, short and to the point, as he would expect from Lady Elizabeth. It was the second line that caught his attention and made him shout for his valet to start packing:

I am grateful for your note, but I had assumed this was to be the case, given Amelie is now in Dorset without you.