Chapter 21

Twenty-One

“ C herie, you’re doing so well.”

“You’re going to make it, my dear.”

“Just hold on. Just keep holding on.”

“Another spoonful, Your Grace. I know it tastes bad, but…”

“I’m sorry, Cherie. I wish so badly…”

“... I’d do anything…”

“...please forgive me…”

“I’m so, so sorry.”

The voices blurred together, overlapping with one another in harmonies and discordant tones that she couldn’t tell apart, like trying to pick out individual instruments in an orchestra. She was still asleep, she thought. Otherwise, she didn’t understand why she couldn’t reach out and touch these people, who seemed to crowd around, press against her, trying to reassure her that everything would be okay.

But why am I asleep? Are you supposed to sleep this long? How long has it even been?

She couldn’t answer these questions, and every time they drifted too long through her mind, she pushed them away again. Stay asleep , another voice seemed to whisper in her ear, and this one sounded remarkably like her mother’s. Stay with me.

Mother! She wanted to shout, and then she was chasing the ghost of her mother through the hallways of her father’s estate in the countryside. Her mother was laughing, running ahead of her, always out of reach. She turned a corner, and there was Thomas, standing in the parlor, a look on his face like he’d been struck by lightning.

“You look like your mother,” he said, bowing low over her hand. He lingered there, seemingly unsure if he should continue, and then he let his lips graze along her bare skin. It was the first time a man had kissed her, and she was stunned into speechlessness. When she looked up, he was smiling at her tentatively. “I never noticed it before, but you are her spitting image.”

“I miss her,” she blurted out, and whereas, moments before she’d felt like a young lady, now she felt like a child again, crying out for her mother. But Thomas didn’t look annoyed. He merely nodded.

“I miss my mother too.”

“I miss you, Cherie.” This voice was closer, louder. It didn’t seem to be coming from a dream. It was coming from much closer, and although she knew instinctively it belonged to someone she loved, she also knew that with this voice came pain, uncertainty, and doubt.

No, she thought desperately. I want to stay here, in this dream.

Her mother was back, laughing with her. Her father was there, too, filling the drawing room with the sound of his hearty laughter.

“Every day without you feels like an eternity,” the voice said. “And it makes me remember all the days I have spent in your presence. I shouldn’t have wasted a single one of them. From the moment you came back into my life, and especially from the moment you came to live in my home, I should have spent every second of every day with you, appreciating your humor, your laughter, your stubbornness… all of it.”

Cherie’s heart seemed to speed up. Who was this person, and why did he sound so sad? She wanted to comfort him, to tell him that she was sure he had appreciated her, but she couldn’t speak.

“But now I know what I could lose, I will never take it for granted again,” the voice continued. “I only hope it’s not too late, and that you will wake up and be able to forgive me. Please, Cherie. Please, forgive me.”

There was pressure somewhere around her side, and Cherie realized that whoever was speaking had also taken her hand. He seemed to be squeezing it.

“I have to go now, but I’ll be back. I’m going to make sure he can’t hurt anyone ever again. You don’t have to worry about that. I’ll see him behind bars. It won’t be hard. He made it easy for us.”

Don’t go! She wanted to shout, but her mouth wasn’t working. Or at least, her mouth outside of the dream world wasn’t working. Inside, her words reverberated, bouncing off the walls of her head.

“Goodbye, Cherie,” the voice said, and she felt a soft, cool pressure on her forehead. A kiss. The same kiss on the hand! The same kiss from the parlor!

So, it was Thomas. Thomas was talking to her. And he was sorry for something. But why was he sorry? She wanted to shout out to him, to beg him to stay, to tell him he had nothing to apologize for, but then she felt his presence move away, and she knew he was gone.

I love you , she shouted inside her head. I think I have always loved you. And she promised herself that when she woke from this dream, she would say it out loud, as well.

“Are we ready?” Thomas asked the captain of the Bow Street Runners as the carriage holding them all trundled along the street toward Lord Rochford’s London mansion. “Do we have everything we need?”

“We’re ready, Your Grace,” the captain responded briskly. He was a no-nonsense kind of man with a thick gray mustache and steely eyes, and Thomas couldn’t help but trust him. He was exactly the kind of person he wanted on his side for arresting the earl.

Nor was he the only Bow Street Runner in the carriage. There were three of them sitting across from Thomas. Meanwhile, on his right sat Aidan, looking stoney-faced. To his left was Mr. Norton, who could attest to the cognac having cyanide in it. This wasn’t a trial, of course, and they wouldn’t be presenting evidence, but Thomas had wanted them all assembled to confront the earl and make sure he knew exactly how cornered he really was.

“Don’t worry,” Aidan said, laying a reassuring hand on his shoulder. “We’re going to get him.”

Seconds later, the carriage pulled up in front of Rochford House, and they dismounted from the carriage and made their way up to the house. Thomas walked surely but calmly as he approached the front door of his cousin’s house. There was no need to run. He wasn’t here to make a scene. Only to make sure that Lord Rochford was behind bars.

He knocked decisively on the door. When it opened, the butler blinked at him.

“Your Grace?” he said, clearly surprised by the late-night visit.

“Tell the earl that I am here to see him,” Thomas boomed. “And make sure he knows I am not alone.”

“Y-yes, Your Grace,” the butler stammered. “But you can tell him yourself. Despite the late hour, he is still awake in his study, having a?—”

“Good. Take us to him.”

They followed the butler into the house, then down the hall, until they reached the study. Thomas didn’t wait to knock or to be announced. He flung open the door and swept inside, his black coat billowing behind him.

Lord Rochford was sitting at his desk, drinking a whiskey and smoking a cheroot. When he saw Thomas, his eyes narrowed, and he slowly and deliberately stood up.

“Your Grace,” he began, bowing. “To what do I owe this—” He stopped mid-sentence as Aidan, Norton, and the four Bow Street Runners entered the study behind Thomas. “—pleasant surprise,” he finished, his cool gaze flickering over them all with interest and even a little concern.

“The cognac you gave me for my wedding to the duchess,” Thomas said, speaking loudly and clearly before anyone could say anything else. “The duchess drank it.”

Rochford’s gaze remained neutral. “As I expected her to,” he said. “It was a gift, after all.”

“Don’t play dumb,” Thomas snapped. “The bottle was poisoned. You know it, and we obviously know it, which is why we are here.”

“The bottle was poisoned?” Rochford tilted his head to one side. “What makes you say that?”

“Because Her Grace nearly died!” Aidan shouted. His temper was much closer to the edge than Thomas’s, and Thomas laid a steady hand on his friend’s shoulder. He was angry, too, but he also didn’t need to shout. He knew they had the man cornered.

“And because Mr. Norton here knows a clever trick for revealing the presence of cyanide in a substance,” Thomas said. “And he used it on the cognac. Norton, bring forth the bottle.”

Norton stepped forward and pulled the bottle out from under his cloak. It was still blue.

“And what does that prove?” Rochford asked, eyeing the bottle. “All I see is a blue liquid.”

“My lord, you gave this bottle to the duke and duchess,” the captain said, moving forward. “It remained sealed in the duke’s office until yesterday when Her Grace opened it and drunk it. She immediately fell ill and is now on death’s door. Meanwhile, both Mr. Norton here and the apothecary who claims he sold you the cyanide tested this bottle. There is no point in denying it. We have all the facts.”

Thomas smiled as the look of incredulity on Rochford’s face gave way to one of fear. “Did you hear that, Rochford? he murmured. We have all the facts. You are done for.”

His eyes met the earl’s, and in them, he saw the pure hatred that he had always come to expect from his cousin.

“The only question I can ask is: why?” Thomas shook his head. “You suspected I would not try to have an heir. You had only to wait to assume your place as the next Duke of Wheaton. Why would you poison me now with a bottle you gave me? Why take that risk?”

A long silence passed, during which the earl continued to glare at Thomas. Then his face broke into a furious, twisted look, and he spat, “ Because it should have been mine! It is mine, by right! By law and by right! You were nothing but a disappointment to him, Wheaton! He hated you from the moment you were born because he always suspected what you were. I was his favorite; I was the one he picked; the one he wanted to follow in his footsteps. And if your mother hadn’t been the tramp that she was, it would have been me!”

“How dare you speak of the late duchess like that!” Aidan roared.

“No, it’s okay,” Thomas said, holding up a hand. “Let the earl make his accusations. There is no proof.”

“You are a bastard!” The earl shouted, spit flying from his mouth. “Your loose mother was desperate for an heir, so she allowed herself to be… sullied… I cannot even think of it! But your father knew! He always knew! And if he could have proved it, he would have had me as his rightful heir all along!”

A ringing silence followed this pronouncement, and Thomas felt himself grow cold. Even though he had allowed it to happen, he still felt a profound unease as he imagined what Aidan and Mr. Norton were thinking. Even the Bow Street Runners were staring in shock at him.

Shame crept up his spine and heated his face. But now was not the time for shame.

“So, my father told you, did he?” Thomas asked, as calmly as he could. “May I ask when?”

“He told me right before he died,” Rochford spat. “During the same conversation when he told me I should find any way possible to marry Lady Cherie, because she was the woman you had always secretly loved.”

Next to him, Thomas felt Aidan stiffen.

“Is that true?” his friend asked him, and Thomas forced himself to turn and meet his friend’s gaze. “You were in love with Cherie before you married her?”

Thomas’s mouth felt dry, but it wasn’t just nervousness and shame that were currently coursing through his body. There was also relief. At last, he was coming clean about all the secrets that he had carried alone for far too long.

“Aidan, I have loved your sister for many years. And from the moment I met her, I knew she was someone I wanted in my life forever. I’m sorry I never told you. I should have—but I was afraid of ruining our friendship by telling you of the feelings I harbored for Cherie. When we were forced to marry because of circumstances, I also felt a profound shame that I had somehow ended up with the woman of my dreams without ever coming clean to you about my feelings.”

“You have nothing to feel ashamed of,” Aidan said at once. “You married my sister to save her honor and knowing that you loved her all those years only makes me happier. I want my sister to be loved, Thomas. I want her to be adored the way I adore the duchess.”

Thomas felt a lump rise in his throat. He hadn’t realized how much he had been hoping for Aidan’s approval, and how much he had been fearing telling him of his feelings, until this moment.

“Thank you, my old friend,” Thomas said.

Aidan looked as if he wanted to say more about this, but instead, he grunted, “Let us return to this subject later. For now, we need to deal with Lord Rochford.” He turned to face the earl, who was watching this exchange with narrow eyes.

“Your attempt to buy my sister into marriage was disgusting,” Aidan spat. “And it is made even more disgusting to learn that it was born out of the late Duke of Wheaton’s revenge against his son for some perceived and unproved crime of his mother. I don’t care what may or may not have happened between the late duchess and her husband. I don’t care if Thomas is his father’s trueborn son or not. The late duke acknowledged Thomas as his, and that is all the proof I need.”

Lord Rochford started to say something, but Aidan cut him off.

“And even if Thomas wasn’t his father’s trueborn son—even if there was definite proof that he wasn’t the true heir to the dukedom—I would still be proud to call him my best friend.” Aidan looked at Thomas, and Thomas felt his heart swell.

“He is the best man I’ve ever met,” Aidan said simply. “Whereas you…” He looked back at the earl, and his expression became thunderous. “You are scum.”

“I was only doing what the late duke asked me to do!” Rochford shouted. “He wanted his ‘son’ out of the picture! He wanted me to be the real heir! When we spoke on his deathbed, the things he told me…” He glared at Thomas. “He told me he had never stopped thinking of me as his true son, that he was sorry for abandoning me, and that I must marry Lady Cherie and assume the dukedom, no matter what it took. He made me promise him, on his deathbed, that I would do that!”

But Thomas was already shaking his head.

“The truth, Lord Rochford, is that my father used you. He used you to fit his own agenda. He treated you like his heir when he thought he couldn’t have a son, and then he used you again, once I had disappointed him. You know, he also told me something on his deathbed. He also told me I was a bastard, and he might be right; I’ll never know. But what I do know is that if I had truly followed in his footsteps, if I had shown the cruelty and craftiness that he had, if I had been happy to keep his business going despite the damage it was causing to the people who worked there and the land around it, then he never would have told me I was a bastard. Maybe he still would have hated me, but he wouldn’t have tried to ruin me. Because the man cared about one thing only: his profits. And the worst part about me, to him, wasn’t my ancestry, but my values.”

Thomas drew himself up to his full height, squared his shoulders, and looked around at all those assembled.

“But I’m proud to be the kind of man who shuts down a business that cared nothing for the lives of the people who worked there. I’m proud to be different from my father. And I’m proud to be the Duke of Wheaton because it means I can build a new legacy for the duchy, instead of the one my father left behind.”

“But he wasn’t your father!” Rochford shouted. There was something desperate in his expression now, and if Thomas hadn’t been so angry at what he’d done to Cherie, he might have even felt a little sorry for him. But while Thomas might have sympathy for how terribly his father had treated the earl, his sympathy ended there. Rochford was a grown man, and he should have chosen to not let his anger and resentment make him a monster.

Thomas took a step forward. “He might not have been my father, but he wasn’t yours either. I know you tried to replace your father with mine, but you never could, because my father wasn’t capable of love. And that’s what a father does: he loves his children.”

Thomas glanced at Aidan, and suddenly he knew one thing with utter clarity: if Cherie ever woke up, if she survived this, then he wanted to live as husband and wife with her. And he wanted to have a child with her.

And with this realization burning through him, he turned back to the earl. “Maybe you are my father’s true son,” he said suddenly, “because you are no more capable than he was of understanding love. And maybe I’ve let him influence me too much as well because I have also been trying to deny love. But no more. No more will I deny the love I have for my wife, and no more will the hatred you and my father spread ever affect me, my friends, or my family. You’re done, Lord Rochford.”

The earl slumped back at these words, stumbling a little, and the captain of the Bow Street Runners stepped forward.

“Lord Rochford, you are under arrest for the attempted murder of the Duchess of Wheaton,” he said. He signaled to his men, and the three of them surrounded Rochford, then moved forward as one. They grabbed him and turned him around, then put handcuffs on his wrists. Rochford didn’t protest or struggle. All the fight seemed to have gone out of him.

The Bow Street Runners led him forward and out of the study, and Thomas, Aidan, and Mr. Norton followed. Out in the hall, all of the servants seemed to have gathered, undoubtedly alerted to what was happening by the butler. They stood in the hall, watching silently, their expressions grave, as Rochford was led out of the front door, down the drive, and into the carriage.

“Finally, they got him,” Thomas heard one of them mutter, and a profound sense of relief washed over him. Rochford was behind bars, and who knew how much harm he had caused beyond the poisoning of Cherie? He would direct the Bow Street Runners to interview the staff and try to discover more of his crimes, as there were surely too many to count. But for now, Thomas was just glad that Rochford could no longer hurt Cherie any more than he already had.

He stepped outside, where Aidan joined him. Together, the two men watched as Rochford was loaded into the carriage. Before he followed the earl inside, the captain turned back to them.

“We will book him in tonight and keep him there until the trial,” he told the two dukes. “We will be in touch shortly to have you both bring your evidence forward. But I don’t anticipate that it will be a lengthy trial. The earl was not particularly clever, and the evidence against him is overwhelming.”

“Thank you for your help,” Thomas said, and he shook the captain’s hand.

“Not at all,” the captain said. “Please accept my well wishes for the duchess and her speedy recovery.”

Then he climbed up into the carriage, the driver flicked the reins, and the carriage set off down the street.

Thomas let out a long, slow breath. “Well, at least that’s done.”

“I have never been so relieved to see a person behind bars,” Aidan agreed. There was a short silence, and then Aidan turned to look directly at him. “Thomas… about my sister.”

Thomas’s heart hitched. He’s angry about how I kept this secret all these years.

But Aidan didn’t look angry. In fact, he looked the opposite. “The things you said earlier, about how you loved her for years, does she know that?”

“She knows I first had feelings for her many years ago.”

“But does she know you fell in love with her then?” Aidan’s tone was urgent. “Does she know you love her now?”

Thomas swallowed. “No, she doesn’t.”

“Then you have to tell her,” Aidan insisted. “You have to tell her right now.”

“But she isn’t conscious.”

“And she might never be again. But you still have to say it. Before it’s too late. Otherwise, you’ll regret it for the rest of your life.”

“You’re right,” Thomas said. It suddenly seemed like the most obvious, simple thing in the world: he loved his wife, and he wanted to tell her that. The confrontation with Rochford had suddenly made everything so clear.

“About the other thing…” Aidan said. “I hope you know I meant what I said to Lord Rochford: I don’t care whether or not you’re your father’s legitimate son. You are still a great man, my best friend, and the Duke of Wheaton.”

“Thank you,” Thomas said. He held out his hand to shake, but Aidan shook his head and pulled Thomas into a tight hug.

“Don’t be silly,” Aidan said. “We are brothers. And we’ve been forged in fire at this point.” He released Thomas, then stepped back to look at him, and his eyes filled with tears. “Now go tell my sister you love her, while you still can.”