The Duchess's Secret (HQR Historical) Read online

‘Yes, and my daughter is very happy at the thought of snowball fights and sledging before breakfast in the morning before you accuse me of neglecting her or being a bad mother,’ Rosalind said defensively. Not only had she almost agreed Jenny was his, but they were back on the treadmill of accusation and defence she remembered so clearly from the time they travelled back to London together, yet so very far apart.

  ‘Did I do anything of the sort?’ he asked Joan.

  ‘Don’t drag me into your arguments. You two must talk through your differences for the sake of the child now you have finally arrived home. I am going out now, but if you ever hurt Miss Rosalind again you will have me to deal with. And the child will never take to anyone who makes her mother miserable, so think on that as you pick over your grievances.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ Ash said to Joan’s back as she seized Ros’s russet cloak from where it was drying in front of the fire in the kitchen and marched past them and out of the back door. Her grand exit fell flat when she came back for her boots, but she pushed her feet into them without doing up the laces and stamped out without another word. ‘Where will she go?’ he asked Rosalind and she tried not to like him for sounding anxious about her oldest friend.

  ‘The Duck and Feathers; Mrs Seth Paxton is her bosom bow.’

  ‘Then we had best do as we were bid before she comes back.’

  ‘I do not want to talk to you. You left, I survived and so did my daughter. That is the beginning and end of the story.’

  ‘And at no time in the last eight years did you think it was wrong for a child to grow up without a father?’

  ‘No, and she is not yours.’

  ‘I don’t believe you, but you can hardly claim to have given her such a wonderful life even if I did,’ he said with a cool look around the narrow hallway with its glimpses of the warm kitchen and shadowy little parlour where Joan had not had time to relight the fire. ‘And our child should not be growing up in a cottage at the back of beyond.’

  ‘It’s not that remote here and at least people accept us as we are. This is the real world most of us have to live in, Your Grace, and you are welcome to be bowed and scraped to in your own finicky circle, but there was always too much gossip and backbiting in it for me to miss the gilded pleasures and day-to-day luxuries the haut ton take for granted.’

  ‘As my wife you will have to endure them all the same,’ he said as if finding out about Jenny changed everything. The thought of being truly married to this cold and self-contained aristocrat made her want to run again and never mind the weather.

  ‘I am not your wife though, am I? You walked away from our marriage.’

  ‘And you decided to punish me by withholding my child.’

  Rosalind had thought she had covered her tracks so well he would never find her and somehow she had to protect herself and her child from a man who distrusted every word she said. No, wait, she did not have to tell him the real reason she came here to save her sanity and cut herself off from polite society. She had not admitted Jenny was his yet and he had only spent one night in their marriage bed, so why not lie? He expected her to, after all, so she might as well oblige him and he might even believe her.

  ‘Ah, that folly again. You may have met my daughter but she is not yours, my lord Duke.’

  ‘Liar,’ he accused her flatly.

  ‘No,’ she insisted as if half-amused by his persistence.

  ‘Yes. Don’t waste your breath arguing black is white. The child I just saw peering down at me from the hayloft at the inn is mine as surely as you are still my lawfully wedded Duchess, Rosalind. That little girl is a Hartfield through and through and you will never persuade me otherwise.’

  Rosalind’s heart sank into her plain countrywoman’s boots, but she tried again. ‘Nonsense; you are seeing what you want to see, not what is. My child is dark where we are both fair for one thing and she is small for her age, whereas you Hartfields are unusually tall. My Jenny is not like you for the very good reason she is not your child,’ she insisted as he watched with cynical eyes.

  She was damning herself and Jenny in the eyes of the law and the church, but the thought of losing her daughter to him was far worse than lying. Being present at Jenny’s conception did not make him a father. Being with them when she was born, caring for her when Jenny was sick or unhappy, even sitting with her when Rosalind was so weary she sometimes tumbled out of the chair at her daughter’s bedside during that terrible week when Jenny had scarlet fever so badly they almost despaired of her life—now that could have made him Jenny’s father in more than a biological fact, but he hadn’t been there, had he? No, he had been far too busy being hurt and angry with her mother for a lie that had had never felt like a lie to bother with them at all. Then the dukedom fell in his lap and goaded him to come and find his discarded wife so he could be rid of her for good. Ash did not deserve such a unique and wonderful child. Rosalind did shift under his brooding gaze when she recalled the letter she had written begging him to come and share the heart-stopping anxiety of watching their child struggle with a raging fever, then shake with teeth-rattling chills when bathing her in cold water must have brought her temperature down too far. Of course she had ripped the letter to shreds the day Jenny’s fever broke, so relieved she had not sent it when she imagined him storming home to take her child away from her. She slept on a pallet at Jenny’s bedside for a week in case she had a relapse and they slowly began to live again, without this man who thought he had a right to call Jenny his when he had never been there when they truly needed him.

  Chapter Four

  ‘The child I saw earlier today is mine,’ Ash insisted, prepared to stand in this infernally draughty corridor all night if that was what it took to get her to admit the truth. ‘And she must have come as a shock to you after we spent only that one night together,’ he conceded clumsily.

  Why had he never even thought about the chance of a child when he left Rosalind on her stepfather’s doorstep? He had departed for India so he could not weaken and beg her to give their marriage another try. He wasn’t ready to be sorry he had gone yet, though. Not when the shock and fury of finding out he had been a father all this time felt too huge to brush aside and blame himself for. He thought of all the birthdays he could not share with his daughter, all the first times he would never see. He had not been here to watch his child walk or talk for the first time. He had no idea how it felt to rock his baby to sleep. He had missed so many small details of his little girl’s life he felt a deep sense of loss for days that could never come again. Yes, he had left, but Rosalind had deliberately kept the fact she had borne him a child secret.

  ‘I will not let you put my daughter at risk because you are so desperate to get her away from me you seem to have lost any sense you ever had,’ he told her sternly.

  ‘There’s no need to be rude and I told you, she is not your get. You left me, so why would I stay faithful? I lied up on the heath to make you feel guilty, but Jenny is not your child,’ she insisted as if her hopes of keeping the lie going much longer felt hollow even to her, but she could not stop trying.

  ‘Ours, then,’ he said wearily.

  ‘No, you are mistaken.’

  ‘It might save a lot of time if I tell you I have a miniature of my little sister Amanda in my luggage that will prove your daughter is my child beyond doubt. It will be all the confirmation any court could need to say she is my legitimate child if you persist in this farce and I have to prove it.’

  ‘You are turning a chance resemblance into full-blown fact.’

  ‘Amanda lives again in the little girl I saw in that hayloft. You might have been able to fool me with dark hair and small stature if I had not lived with my sister for the whole of her short life, but since the likeness is uncanny you might as well give up now.’

  ‘What use would a mere girl be to a duke anyway?’ she said rather sulkily, as if she was beginning to give
up on the idea of deceiving him.

  ‘I don’t care if the dukedom dies with me,’ he finally said and it was true, now he had a daughter it didn’t seem to matter a jot if the title died with him if she turned out to be his only child. ‘But what the devil do you think I’ve been doing all these years, Ros? I have a fortune to pass on to my children and, as her father, I have a legal right to decide where my child lives. Now I have an heiress I could decide to do without the Duchess who goes with her.’ Maybe it was cruel to hint at parting Ros from her child, but she had parted him from his all this time. She deserved to pay for that, even if this did change everything.

  * * *

  ‘No!’ Rosalind heard agony in her own voice, but what was the point in trying to conceal her feelings now he knew everything? ‘Imogen changed me the instant the midwife laid her in my arms and you do not know me now. I am a different person.’ Memory of her child so innocent and perfect and totally herself in every way still made tears stand in her eyes. The memory would not allow her to lie any longer and it did not come naturally to her, whatever he thought of her past sins and omissions. ‘Oh, very well, I admit it; she is yours,’ she said with a mighty sigh. ‘But if you truly wanted to be a father you should have been with me while I laboured to bring her into the world and through all the anxiety and sleepless nights afterwards. If you want a say in our lives now, you should not have been on the other side of the world nursing your grievances when we needed you so much. I know you had no idea she was on her way, but even if I had somehow managed to get news to you I was with child you would not have been back in time to be with us when she was born and I hurt so much I was afraid we were both going to die.’

  He went pale at her words, but that must be because he might never have met his child, not because she might have died giving birth to her. ‘I am still her father, though, you should have told me,’ he said as if that cancelled out all the things he had done and it really did not.

  ‘But I am her mother,’ she said quietly. ‘And you still left me.’

  ‘Faults on both sides, Rosalind,’ he replied as if her inability to tell him the whole truth about her past when they eloped still cancelled out his desertion of her and it felt like a huge gulf between them.

  She grasped her hands together to stop them shaking. ‘You haven’t changed at all.’

  ‘I am sorry, that was a low blow, but really, Ros—could you not even write a single letter informing me I have a child in all this time ? Do you think you have nothing to reproach yourself for when Jenny had to get this far without me knowing she exists?’

  ‘We shall never agree, but you still have to free us from this ghost of a marriage to find your docile Duchess. All I want is to raise our child without your ridiculous dukedom destroying her peace of mind. She will never know who her real friends are if you drag her to Edenhope and make her live such an unnatural life.’

  ‘She is my daughter, Ros. And at the risk of repeating myself, a father always has custody of his children after divorce. You admitted when we met on the heath that the only legal grounds for one is adultery on the part of the wife. Such a woman is deemed to have given up all claims to being a fit mother and that sounds a stark choice to me. Lie and live alone or tell the truth and stay with Jenny and be bound to me for the rest of your life.’

  ‘Do you want her to hate you as well?’ Even the thought of being parted from her child hurt. Without her Jenny might endure a jealous stepmother, always favouring her own children over his discarded first wife’s daughter.

  He sighed. ‘Face it, Ros; I am a very rich man. You told me the truth when you said you had been faithful to our marriage didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said with a huge sigh, because lying wasn’t going to work.

  ‘So we are trapped,’ he said with an equally gusty sigh. ‘Our daughter will be hunted like a doe the moment she is of marriageable age if we two sit on our hands and leave her as my sole heiress. Her life will be made a misery by fortune hunters and worse if you refuse to be my Duchess.’

  ‘If you divorce me and disclaim her, there would be no fortune hunters.’

  ‘Just careless rakehells eager to corrupt your bastard daughter,’ he pointed out starkly and he was right. Jenny would lose her chance of a decent life and respectable marriage if her mother became notorious as a divorced woman. ‘If we agree to put a brave face on things for our daughter’s sake, it will save her from an uncertain future,’ he added as if he wasn’t any more thrilled by the idea than she was, but he was ready to be a realist.

  He had had years of practice at being cynical about love and marriage, though, hadn’t he? Given his docile and undemanding ideal Duchess, he had a very different version of marriage in mind to any Rosalind considered tolerable. She would do almost anything for Jenny, though—even stay wed to this cynical version of her wild young love. ‘I will not let you part me from my child.’

  ‘And I will not leave here without one or both of you,’ he told her as if nothing would change his mind either, so this was stalemate.

  She had to consider enduring a marriage of convenience with him. ‘You don’t want me; I don’t think you ever could have done deep down after the way you left me as if I don’t matter.’

  ‘Nonsense—one look from your beautiful blue eyes turned me into your lapdog the day we met,’ he said in the rough velvet voice that used to make her go weak at the knees.

  It sent a tingle of recognition shivering down her spine even now. Heat followed it to remind her of the passionate lovers they once were. ‘Did it? I had forgotten,’ she still managed to lie.

  ‘Now I think you remember every hour we spent together and I know your body has not forgotten mine,’ he murmured as his grey eyes challenged her to deny it.

  ‘Why would I recall what happened so long ago?’

  ‘Because my ring is on your finger and we are bound by God and man? You are my Duchess, Rosalind, like it or not,’ he insisted as if at the end of his patience.

  ‘I am Rose Meadows,’ she insisted. Rose was a better, stronger woman than Miss Rosalind Feldon or Mrs Asher Hartfield and she needed to remember how much she had changed.

  ‘That’s another form of your real name, but can we argue the rest somewhere warm?’ He shivered and huddled into his multi-caped greatcoat. ‘Damnable climate,’ he muttered so gruffly she almost laughed.

  ‘Do you think the sky will fall in if a duke sits in a kitchen?’

  ‘Confound being a duke; if I don’t get warm soon you won’t even have to pretend to be a widow.’

  ‘Don’t say that,’ she protested with a shudder that shook her to the bone. ‘I might not want to be married to you, but I have never wished you dead.’

  ‘Always an asset in a wife,’ he joked as they passed from hallway to kitchen and shut the door behind them to keep the warmth in.

  He held his hands out to the fire she stirred into more vigorous life with the poker and she heard his sigh of relief as he flexed his cold hands in front of its glowing warmth. ‘You will get chilblains,’ she warned and was about to shut all the other doors to keep the warmth in when she remembered Joan was baking this afternoon when she came back, so she searched the larder for something to eat.

  ‘Thank you, suddenly I see advantages to living in a cottage,’ he said and bit hungrily into the pasty she handed him.

  ‘They are a lot easier and cheaper to keep warm than a mansion. My room at Lackbourne Hall was so cold in winter I used to beg Cook to let me stay in her chair by the kitchen fire all night instead of going upstairs to bed.’

  ‘And did she?’

  ‘No, she was too frightened of my stepfather. He said there was no point bringing me up soft since my father left me penniless and who knew whom I might have to marry when it came down to it. I think he only tolerated me because my mother had refused to marry him if he had me packed off to school until I was old eno
ugh to be married off to someone of my father’s standing in life, like a curate or another schoolmaster.’

  ‘He spent lavishly enough on your debut.’

  ‘Because the ton would have raised their eyebrows if he did not by then. I was very much like my mother and she was a famous beauty so he could hardly pretend he didn’t have a stepdaughter when I was growing up under his roof. He did grudgingly admit I had grown into my looks even if he despaired of my common sense, but our elopement must have been the final straw for him. I feel sorry for him now I look back. I was confused and angry after my mother died and it cannot have been easy for him to be saddled with another man’s child when he and Mama had not managed to have a family of their own.’

  ‘At least he did not throw you out because you married me. My lawyer told me you left Lackbourne House a couple of months after we were wed.’

  ‘I could not endure being a duty to him for the rest of my life. If he had discovered I was pregnant after my ill-advised defiance, as he called our elopement, he would have insisted the world knew we had married and you left me within days of our wedding. I could not endure the public scandal and derision and he did not deserve it. So I chose to make a new start. My life here feels better than any other on offer after you were gone.’

  ‘She is my child as well. I would have done everything I could to support you both in comfort.’

  ‘I never wanted my child to be a duty the way I was to Lord Lackbourne when I was growing up. Jenny has always known she is loved and she has never had to go without any of the true essentials of life. Imagine how it would have been for us if we had had to live on my stepfather’s charity, always knowing we were a burden on him and a constant source of shame while you were living on the far side of the world from us.’

  ‘I never thought about consequences,’ he admitted, looking a little shamefaced about his younger self.

  ‘You were too busy making me into a monster in your head to look at anything from my side. Your grandfather was right to say you were headlong and heedless and to prod you into making something of your life.’