The Plain Bride by Chasity Bowlin
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Rosedale Manor, Boston Spa
Mayville restedhis aching head upon the cool floor. All the curtains were drawn, and the room was almost entirely black, save for the single crack of light penetrating those drapes like a blazing inferno to his bleary eyes.
Placing his hands under him, he pushed his body up from the floor. As he did so, his feet sent an empty bottle skittering over the bare floor. He was in an unused part of the house, so the carpets were all rolled up, and the wood floor was freezing under his bare feet. Everything was covered with dust. Well, not everything. The shattered remains of various pieces of furniture littered the room, along with destroyed sections of plaster. Behind the plaster was the dark, rough-hewn wood of the original Tudor structure that had predated the baroque grandeur that his grandfather had felt reflected their status.
Thoughts of his antecedents made his stomach roil, and he dropped his head once more to the floor. He hadn’t been sober in days. While the entire four-month separation from Thea hadn’t seen him deeply in his cups on every single day, the past week had been the worst. Since the bloody letter had arrived.
Recalling the icy tone and his wife’s cool words made him livid all over again. She’d simply reminded him that she was amenable to either a divorce or an annulment but that she wished for him to keep her apprised of his choice so that she might understand what would be expected of her. He wanted to throttle her. He wasn’t divorcing her. He damned well wouldn’t be seeking an annulment, either, given that he’d have to deny bedding her. That was a fact he’d never willingly deny, and he wasn’t about to let her do so either.
He took two steps, and his stomach turned over. To keep from falling down, he had to grab onto the splintered bed post. It shifted, and he landed on the floor, flat on his arse. And that is where he sat, cursing her, cursing himself, and cursing the copious amount of brandy he’d consumed, when Gray walked in.
“You’re a damned wreck,” he observed flatly.
“Were you invited?” Mayville asked sharply. Too sharply. He placed one hand to his head to see if it had actually split open.
“I have an open invitation. Or did you rescind it when you elected to be an idiot?”
Mayville lay back down, lowering his head gingerly to the floor. “Leave me to die quietly, please.”
“You’re not dying. Not today. Not for some time to come, I should think. You’re going to get up, sober up, take a bath because you reek, and then we’re going to Bath so you can beg your wife’s forgiveness.”
That got him up off the floor. Headache and rolling stomach aside, he would not tolerate that insult. “I’ll go to hell first!”
“How is that any different?” Gray demanded, sweeping his hand about the room. “You’re living in a house that, apparently, time was not depreciating quickly enough, so you’ve lent it a helping hand! You drink yourself into misery by night, suffer through the day, and start all over again. You have made your own hell, Mayville, and I am here to drag you from it, whether you like it or not. Men facing impending fatherhood are required to at least pretend responsibility for a bit!”
“Now, listen here,” Mayville insisted. “I am a man fully grown, and I can decide how to live my own life. If I want to drink morning, noon, and night, it is my right to do so! And no one, not you, not Thea—Wait. What did you say?”
“Coffee, bath, and then we talk,” Gray said. “Actually, bath first. You really do reek to the heavens.”
Mayville said nothing. What could he say? It was likely true. In fact, he was fairly certain it was true. No one could consume that much brandy and not smell. Climbing to his feet, he followed Gray from the room and then looked about. He was in the east wing of the house, a place he hadn’t been in years. “How the devil did I even wind up here?”
“No one knows, but the servants heard you destroying the furnishings sometime after midnight. Several of them left. Two thought you’d gone mad and would murder them in their beds, and another thought it wasn’t you at all but that the house was inhabited by ghosts,” Gray explained. “Your butler is perturbed, incidentally.”
He didn’t care. Not in the slightest. “How did you know? Did she tell you?”
Gray turned back to face him, and his pity was easy enough to read in his expression. “No, she did not, nor did she tell Sabine. Her maid, who does know and is ostensibly keeping her secret, wrote to Sabine and confessed the whole of it. Not to gloss over it all, but apparently it is not going well for her. She is quite ill. What that means, I cannot say. But I think it behooves to move a bit faster and leave for Bath as soon as possible.”
“She won’t see me,” Mayville said. “And if she’s ill, what if seeing me only makes her worse?”
“I do not think that it will, not if you’re in a frame of mind to be humble once we get there. It won’t kill you to eat a bit of crow. If that brandy you’ve swilled hasn’t killed you, nothing will. Once I can stand to smell you, I’ll you everything else I know.”
“It can wait until we’re on the road. Get everything ready for us to depart. If what you say is true, the sooner we leave, the better.”
Althea was in her bed,staring up at the ceiling once more and praying that she would not vomit again. Why anyone thought to call this morning sickness was a mystery to her. It was morning sickness, noon sickness, afternoon, evening and night sickness. There was not an hour of the day, it seemed, that she was not on her knees, retching into a chamber pot.
A knock sounded at the door, and she called out weakly for the person to enter. Her assumption, that it would be Sarah, could not have been more wrong. Sabine entered, looking elegant and lovely as always. Instantly, Althea felt worse. Just looking at her friend in her fashionable traveling dress and perfectly coiffed hair made her terribly aware of her own appearance. Lank hair in braids, her night rail disheveled and her face paler than the linens she currently rested upon, she would look like she was at death’s door.
“What are you doing here?” she asked. “You should not have come. I am very ill, and I would hate to pass that illness to you.”
“You are incapable of passing along what you have caught, my dear,” Sabine replied flatly. “I know what ails you, Althea, and do not think to deny it.”
“Sarah,” Althea said.
“Indeed, Sarah. But I would have come regardless of her letter, and I would have easily guessed what is the matter with you. No one can be that ill and have a belly that round. You cannot hide it forever, you know. The truth will always come out. And it is truth which has brought me. Mayville did not betray you to Charlotte. Lady Bruxton had set her spies on us, it seems.”
She was too tired, too weak, and her brain too fogged from lack of any decent sleep for weeks at a time. “What are you talking about?”
“Miss Penelope Dennings. She was one of Charlotte’s squadron of debutantes—all carefully chosen to show her in her most advantageous light. She never picks the prettiest girls, only those who can be easily eclipsed by her but with nice enough features that they are forgettable and draw no notice.”
She recalled the bevy of young women at the end of the corridor the night she’d been confronted by Lady Bruxton. “One of them spied on us?”
“We were perhaps not as discreet in our discussions of your circumstances as we ought to have been. I can recall several occasions where we talked of your arrangement in vague terms in dress shops or other public places,” Sabine explained, stepping deeper into the room until she could sit on the edge of the bed. “If a person followed us for long enough and listened hard enough, the details would not have been difficult to put together.”
“Then how did she know that he called me Thea? He is the only one to do so,” Althea insisted. She did not want to have hope. Not now, when they were so very far apart and the chasm between them too great to bridge.
“When he arrives, you may ask him.”
Althea shook her head violently and immediately regretted the choice. A wave of nausea assailed her that had her once more leaning from the bed to heave into the chamber pot. But the contents of her stomach were long since gone.
Sabine moved to the washstand and returned with a cold cloth, which she pressed to her forehead. “Have you called for a physician? Surely you cannot go on this way.”
“I’ve called for two different physicians, and both simply shrugged as if this is just a normal part of carrying a child and I was being hysterical,” Althea said bitterly. “And I have, daily, wished this misery on them both.”
“Then, we shall not get another physician. We will instead get a midwife, someone who will be more sympathetic to your plight. Rest, Althea, and I will see to it. You will need your strength in the coming days, I think. I should expect them here by the end of the week.”
“I don’t want to see him. Perhaps he didn’t betray me to her, but in the end, he still wants to be with her, and if he knows that I am carrying his child… I don’t want him that way. If I’ll only have him out of obligation, I’d rather not have him at all.”
“You are both impossibly foolish,” Sabine said firmly. “You squander love. You love him, and I believe, in my heart of hearts, he loves you. But you are both so unwilling to risk your pride, you will not admit your feelings—not to yourselves or one another. And now there is a child to think of. A child needs both parents to love it and treasure it. If Gray and I should ever be so lucky…”
Althea watched as Sabine sank back down onto the bed once more, tears in her eyes. “What is it?”
“Before Gray and I married, I had been carrying his child. I lost it not long after, a fact that I grieve constantly. All I want is to have that with him, to have a family and see his eyes light up when he looks at our child. You can have that, Althea. You can have that happiness if you will simply be brave enough to reach for it!”
“I’m sorry for what you have lost, for what you are suffering. But Mayville is not Gray. Gray is a good man, an honorable one!”
“And so is Mayville, only he does not know it. He punishes himself for the sins of others and believes that he is tainted by their misdeeds. It is illogical, but then, you are a lovely woman, and yet every time your father called you plain or ugly, you believed him. We are all illogical when it comes to our families,” Sabine argued.
Althea had no answer for that. It was all completely true and more damning for it. “I will think about it. That is all I can promise.”
Sabine nodded. “Then, I shall go see to securing a midwife for you—one who will actually help you.”
Althea watched her go, and while her own misery pressed heavily on her, the tears she shed in that moment were for her friend. She felt ungrateful for complaining of her sickness when that sickness was the result of having the thing she had always wanted and the very thing Sabine would gladly suffer any discomfort for. And then she did something she had not done since she’d left her father’s house: She said a prayer. She offered it up for her friend, that one day she might have the promise of a child of her own.
