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Chapter Thirty-One
Your Grace,
It is with a heavy heart that I write you this letter. You have committed a grave crime against my daughter by denying her her rightful place as the Duchess of Seaton, and I demand you rectify it.
You appear to have forgotten your vows and taken another wife. Not once have you acknowledged the existence of your former wife in England and over the years. Will you claim that it never happened? Will you claim that you did not ask my Vanessa to marry you that night in our home in Versailles when we invited you to dine with us? The very night you called the local parson to marry the two of you in the drawing room because you could not wait a day longer. If you have forgotten, then let the document attached to this letter remind you.
The woman you are married to now is not your wife by law. I will demand you introduce your real wife to the world or I will do it myself.
Lady Digby
His hands held the letter so tightly he began to crumple it around the edges. His teeth were clenched and his throat almost had no room for air to pass to and from his lungs. He recalled seeing Vanessa at his wedding.
Vanessa had been raised in England but after her father’s death, she and her mother had been forced to move to France—her mother’s homeland—by the man that had inherited the title and fortune where they had fallen into dire straits. Nicholas had met her and they engaged in a brief affair that ended when she and her mother mysteriously disappeared one night.
Hehadcared for her, even funded a life of luxury for them in Versailles, but he had not loved her. After coming up empty in his search for the two Whittaker women after their disappearance, he had simply moved on with his life. Or so he had thought, for his past now seemed to have come back to haunt him, fill his life with venom.
He picked up the marriage certificate and peered at it, willing the contents to differ. They could never be different because they were true. That was his signature he was staring at. It could not be any other person’s.
“Bloody hell!” He rubbed his hands over his face, taking his fingers through his hair.
For the life of him, he could not recall the particular dinner he had been invited to by Vanessa and her mother. The morning after was no better because he had woken up to an empty house. That had been the night they had disappeared. His memories of dinner and the events after were vague due to the amount of liquor he had consumed.
Nicholas glanced down at the date on the marriage document. It was the same night that he could not remember. When he had asked around for them, the neighbors had seemed clueless. Some purported that they might have left sometime during the night as they had been seeking passage to Portugal for a while.
However hard he sorted through the details, nothing came up in his memory of him signing a marriage contract. He could not believe he had been so drunk as to have married. Yet, the signature could not be anyone else’s.
Releasing a shaky breath, he poured himself some gin he found in a cabinet in the study, then sat back down in his chair, mulling over past and recent events. He read the letter again, taking down the contact address that had been included and penning a reply to it.
Lady Digby,
We must meet at the earliest opportunity to discuss this matter in detail. I cannot tell whether or not your claims are true.
Seaton
He needed answers. He could not have his life fall to pieces again just when he had begun putting it back together.
The image of his wife’s worried and disappointed face when he had left her last night flashed in his mind, twisting his heart. It seemed unreal that he was happily married to his best friend just last night and finally ready to consummate his marriage and make her his. Now, he was no longer sure to whom he was truly married and legally bound.
* * *
Brightness enough to blind jerked Jenny awake from her sleep and she scrunched her face, her arm going up to cover her still closed eyes. “Wake up!” came the dowager’s commanding voice.
With some difficulty, Jenny opened her eyes. Her grandmother-in-law was yanking open the curtains in her husband's bedchamber. She had not been able to fall asleep immediately after Nicholas's hasty departure and after lying awake for a while, she had helped herself to a generous amount of liquor to cure her pain. Instead of the pain being cured, she had lost consciousness.
She sat up, her head pounding and her stomach turning. "What are you doing in here?" she asked groggily, wincing at the light that was streaming into the room through the uncovered windows. "Why are you even in the mansion this early?"
"Early?” The dowager raised a brow. “It is nearly noon and you have overslept."
“Do I not have the right to sleep as long as I want?”
“Not today, you do not.”
"You seem to have forgotten the festivities we had that stretched into the night?" Jenny massaged her throbbing temples.
"I have not forgotten but I need you to wake up," the dowager pursed her lips, glancing around the bedchamber. "I must say that I am pleased to find you here this morning. And judging by the state of the bed, it has been quite an eventful night for you, has it not?” Jenny sighed, catching on the woman's insinuation as the memories of the earlier hours of that morning stung her like a swarm of bees.
"Duchess,” she said, “I will ask you to refrain from barging into my matrimonial chamber." She was in both physical and emotional pain and cared not about how she spoke to the dowager. One did not care for propriety when one was wounded.
