Chapter 34

Mrs Aubrey and her brother Captain Hart were, by contrast, having a frustrating stay in the city of York. Fraternal harmony did not reign supreme in the rather down-at-heel inn where they had taken rooms.

They had arrived just in time to attend, along with hundreds of others, the wedding of the Duke of Northriding and Lady Georgiana Pendlebury; they had stood at the rear of the crowd and Hart had witnessed the nuptials in a high state of resentment and bitter thwarted desire. Georgiana had never looked half so well, nor half so alluring, and to think that she had so nearly been his, to remember the sweet taste of those rose-petal lips and watch another man claiming her – a bloody duke! – was almost more than the Captain could bear.

He was furious that they had come too late, and felt inclined to blame his sister for it, and to animadvert upon the subject at tiresome length over the coming days.

‘Nonsense,' she scolded him, contemptuous of what she saw as his flawed reasoning.

‘It's not nonsense, Caro! I am sure the wench would have paid us more if we had arrived before the wedding took place. What a lost opportunity! She'd have been in the devil's own panic, scared of losing her prize at the last moment, and I dare say would have given us anything we asked for.'

‘Perhaps. Or perhaps she would have set her precious brothers on us – have you thought of that?'

The Captain had not thought of that. He had offered for Georgiana's hand last spring and been summarily rejected; that had been bad enough. But later, when their clandestine relationship had come to light, he had endured a much more unpleasant interview with Lord Irlam, in which that gentleman had made it all too clear that his sister was and always would be well above Captain Hart's touch. There had been no violence upon that occasion, but there had been the threat of it – mention had been made of horsewhips – and the blazing anger and contempt in the Earl's blue eyes had left a deep impression. Adolphus Hart, despite his military profession, was not a man possessed of a great measure of physical courage, and the Earl, he knew, was an amateur boxer of no small repute. Irlam's hands had twitched involuntarily throughout that meeting, as if he barely had his murderous impulses under control, and Hart had not the least desire to develop a closer acquaintance with what was said to be a punishing right. But that prospect had retreated, and he also had a great dislike of being forced repeatedly to acknowledge his sister's superior mental acuity.

‘Rubbish,' he said uneasily. ‘She would never breathe a word to them. Inform her brothers she attended a damned orgy, and did heaven knows what there? I tell you she wouldn't, not for the life of her.'

‘You may be right, of course,' said Mrs Aubrey with exaggerated patience. ‘But you were the one who would have suffered the consequences if you were mistaken. In extremis, desperate to make sure the wedding went ahead and short of time, she might easily have confessed her shameful secret to them and sought their help. Of course they would have been as keen for the match to proceed as she. More so, perhaps! And they, backed into a corner, might well have decided that violence was the only answer to her plight. They might even have been so wrought up at the thought of you showing your face again that beating you to a pulp was more than they could resist, whatever the consequences. But they're gone now, the grown one and the cub together, so we don't have to concern ourselves with them. This way is better, can you not see?'

The Captain could not see. The truth of the matter was that he had become obsessed with exacting his revenge on Georgiana's sweet body; the idea of forcing her to submit herself to him before her marriage to the Duke, so that the Duke came – hah! – unknowingly after him, had taken possession of his mind and deranged such wits as he had. His sister was cooler, more patient, and explained to him that the fact of Lady Georgiana's marriage made not the least difference. ‘The one thing we can be sure of is that she dares not tell her husband. She has no family here to turn to now, and she will be obliged to meet with me alone and unprotected. She will arrive in trepidation but also in anger, thinking she has only me to deal with. And then you will reveal yourself. Imagine her consternation! She thought she had seen the last of you, that you were a mere footnote to her past, a regrettable little mistake, but soon she will realise how wrong she was. You will like that, I expect.'

Hart expected that he would, too. Their last meeting had not gone to plan; he bore the evidence of that in the livid scar on his temple. Georgie had bested him then, had humiliated him, but she would not do so again. The humiliation would be hers. If she were not all sweet submission – even if she was, perhaps – he would give her a mark of her own to remember him by. He was almost past caring about the money now.

The difficulty was that three days had passed since the wedding and the Duke and his bride had not so much as set an elegantly clad foot outside the door of the mansion on Petergate. Captain Hart and Mrs Aubrey between them haunted the place to keep it under observation, and they knew that all the guests who had attended the wedding had now departed, but still the newly-weds did not emerge. The thought of what they might be doing – were surely doing – in their bridal seclusion inflamed Georgie's former suitor all the more, till at last his sister agreed that they could not rely upon a chance encounter, but must take the risk of setting something at least of their demands down on paper and sending the new Duchess a note, demanding an immediate meeting. She was forced to admit that she and her brother knew nothing of their plans; the pair might even now be intending to return to their coastal fastness, where it would be almost impossible to follow them, or to set off for one of the Duke's numerous other properties, or even to go abroad. The conspirators were severely limited in their financial resources, and could ill afford another expensive journey across the length and breadth of England or beyond. They must act now, or risk failure.

Caroline spent hours crafting her billet, and despatched it to the ducal mansion by means of a respectable messenger; her brother was there, lurking, to see it delivered. Now all they had to do was wait, with what patience they could muster: a fair amount, on Mrs Aubrey's part, and very little, on the Captain's.