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Chapter Ten
Hermione felt frozen to the spot with her hand in the air. She had only heard the very end of the Duke’s conversation with his mother and the insult that came with it.
He thinks so little of me.
She fixed her eyes on his face in the candlelit hallway, watching him close his eyes, clearly astonished to find her there, having heard him. A brief memory flashed before her eyes. She was standing outside the church with the bouquet dropped to the floor and Phoebe hurrying to pick up the flowers.
“He is not coming!”her father had ranted and raved at her.“What did you do to cause this? He thinks so little of you that he would treat you, treat our family like this. He does not care for you at all.”
“Lady Hermione?” the Duke said, opening his eyes again. “What you heard, I–”
“Do not explain, Your Grace. I crave no such explanation,” she said hurriedly, stepping back from the library. She had come to read the same book that was clutched under his arm. Now, she wished to be as far away from him as possible. She backed away, aware that he continued to stare at her, then she turned, breaking the connection entirely.
“Lady Hermione?” he called after her.
“Oh, Antony, how could you be so cruel?” The Dowager Duchess’ voice followed her through the corridor.
As the pairs’ words grew muffled the more distance Hermione put between them, she found herself walking quicker and quicker. She moved through the corridor, heading back to the drawing room door through which she had left her family. In the open doorway, she could see Phoebe playing the piano in the far corner of the room, talking animatedly to Officer Stenham who was turning the pages of the sheet music for her. Their father and aunt were bent together, whispering conspiratorially.
She couldn’t face them now. If they knew what she had just heard, they would condemn her once again for failing to obtain a gentleman’s good opinion. She couldn’t bear to hear anybody else’s distain of her. She’d heard it enough recently. She backed away from the drawing room, only her feet didn’t head toward the stairs, to her surprise, she headed for the front door instead. She crept out the door, being careful to close it softly behind her before she walked down the main driveway, heading toward the cliff edge.
It didn’t matter that darkness had fallen for the moon and stars were bright tonight. The closer she got to the cliff edge, the more clearly she could see it, with the sheer drop stretching out beneath her down to the tide, with the waves crossing against the rocks. She stared at those waves, trying to lose her sadness in admiring their beauty, but it did no good.
She lifted a hand to clutch the locket around her throat as the full memory came back to her. She was standing outside of the church when one of the pageboys had hurried out to meet them, explaining that the groom was nowhere to be found. Forty-five minutes had passed before they were all forced to accept that he was not coming. She had been left at the altar with no words of explanation, nothing at all. He had merely abandoned her there, leaving her a ruined reputation and a church full of people ready to spread the gossip.
She was unwanted, unloved, and discarded, just like the bouquet she had discarded so easily. She hung her head as she looked down at the waves beneath her, thinking on what she had heard the Duke say.
“Lady Hermione could leave this house tomorrow, and I’d think no more of her than I would the next wave that crashes onto the shores of Lyme Regis Bay.”
It seemed no gentleman thought anything of her, not even the Duke she had been attempting to charm and had kissed.
* * *
Antony had gone straight to the drawing room, only to find Lady Hermione was not there.
“Have you seen Lady Hermione?” he asked her father, watching as the Earl of Branigan looked up from his conversation with Mrs. Atkins. The Earl smiled a little.
“You wish to see her, Your Grace?” he looked quite happy at the idea.
“Yes, have you seen her?” Antony asked, trying not to think too much of the reasons why the Earl was smiling so.
“She said she was going to read for a bit,” Lady Phoebe said as she paused in her playing at the piano. Antony looked down at the book in his hand, realizing just why she had been outside of the library in the first place. “Perhaps she has gone to the library?”
“Perhaps so,” he said, trying not to reveal what had happened. He turned back to see his mother standing in the doorway.
“But, Antony–” she spoke quietly, so that the others couldn’t hear them as they returned to their conversation, but he interrupted her, pleading with her to let him speak first.
“Do not tell anyone what has happened. I will find Lady Hermione and make my apologies to her,” he explained, watching as his mother nodded, without a trace of a smile in her features. Sighing at the pain he had managed to cause both his mother and Lady Hermione with just one sentence, he left the room, being careful to close the door behind him.
He first hurried up the staircase, taking a candle with him as he headed to her room. He knew it would hardly be proper to visit Lady Hermione in her chambers, alone, but desperate times called for desperate measures indeed. Yet, repeated knocks on her chamber door showed it was empty inside. He hurried back downstairs when he saw the butler standing by the window beside the front door, staring through the glass.
“Mr. Harris? Is something wrong?” Antony asked, hurrying to his side.
“Oh, Your Grace,” the butler jumped and bowed quickly, “I may be imagining it, but I could have sworn I saw a figure walking out by the cliff.”
Antony snapped his gaze out of the window, searching for this figure. “There!” the butler said abruptly, pointing out of the glass. In the moonlight, Antony could see the figure move, wearing a dress.
It has to be her.
