She laughed, the trilling sound not fooling him. “Oh, Clarence, or any number of men, really. It matters not.”
She arched on the bed, showing off her lithe figure to its best advantage.
“You don’t mind, do you?” she asked.
Did he mind if other men fucked his wife? Edmund found he minded less than he should. As a member of a secret society that often shared other men’s wives, he had no right to restrict Ann’s activities. He had settled on a properly disinterested answer when she spoke up again.
“I always supposed that if you wished to have a legal heir of your own blood, you would have gotten one on me before now.”
Oh, his wife knew how to twist the blade in his belly after all. He’d thought that — besides sparing her his attentions — leaving her in the country might ensure that she remained an unspoiled woman of good sense and fine moral character. Something had happened in Shropshire. But what?
“Perhaps we’re each to have one child born on the wrong side of the blanket,” she said, finally referencing Eddie. “Though…as your legal wife, my child will be recognized as your heir, whether or not you actually father him.”
Edmund tried not to make mistakes. Hence, he had but one illegitimate child. One suit from a tailor inferior in his craft. One investment in an overseas railway that turned out to be a mistake.
But he knew then that he’d made a colossal error, the biggest of his life, by writing to his wife about Eddie’s arrival rather than riding out to tell her himself. She’d clearly taken offense to theway she’d been informed, and she was now going to make him pay.
“I do say, Ann,” he began, “I’m terribly sorry about how I told you about Eddie.”
“Eddie,” she said faintly. “Your son.”
Edmund thought back to that blasted letter.
“Yes, my son. Edmund.”
“You named him Edmund.”
He felt the room spin, something about this conversation seeming decidedly off. Or perhaps it was the brandy he’d had at Chevestrer’s this afternoon. She turned her whole body away from him, facing the far wall. The existence of his son, and especially the fact that the son was named Edmund, must have hurt her. It was unlikely that a later-born child would bear the same name.
“His mother named him,” said Edmund. Then he realized this didn’t make it better. “Without consulting me.”
“Did she?” asked Ann, as if she, too, were spinning through space because of their conversation.
“We’re no longer…”
“That’s not my business,” she replied quickly.
“As my wife, it is your right to—”
She was lying on the bed, still. “As your wife, many things are my right.” It was clear: Ann had been denied her rights as a wife for far too long, and she’d come to town to claim them. Or create havoc.
“Ann, I—”
Edmund stopped himself when he saw her ribs expand, then quickly contract. She was crying, silently. Ann was hiding her pain from him. She wasn’t merely angry; she was hurt.
A profound rage blurred his vision as he sat naked on the bed, regretting the pain he’d caused her but not little Edmund’s existence. Fucking Crispin ruining Miss Ann Cardmaker had ruined his life. Her life, too, if today was any indication.
Maybe they could have been happy, even as a marriage arranged hastily to prevent scandal, but she’d been too young to be a wife at the time of their marriage. Edmund cursed his parents, his brother’s tutors, the whole fucking aristocracy.
And mostly, he cursed himself. He should have come back from the minor estate in Keswick to rein his younger brother in. Truthfully, Edmund had written his behavior off as youthful folly, not imagining he’d seduce a draper’s young daughter so completely that pregnancy was possible.
At the time, Edmund had felt sorry for the girl, but he’d mostly felt sorry for himself. Cursed with a bride selected by his dead younger brother’s cock, a scrawny little scrap of a girl, all pretense of choice snatched from him.
She’d looked at him with unmasked terror in that chapel on his country estate as they’d exchanged vows, despite his attempts to stoop and draw in his shoulders to appear smaller. Then that horrifying, ratty little doll had driven home how young his bride had been. How unprepared she had been for what Crispin had put her through. And if elegant, lithe Crispin overwhelmed a girl, what would a hulking beast of great appetites do to her?
And so, the night of his wedding, Edmund had drunk so much brandy in the Wake Court cellars that he’d vomited into his boot and railed at those earthen walls. He vowed to lock himself in that subterranean cell forever rather than trouble his child bride.
His reactions weren’t all noble. His curses, hurled at the heavens, included some aimed at her. He was burdened with a silly little girl who’d fallen prey to an obvious rake, and their bond would last until one of them died. Full of self-pity and cursed with a hard cock, he made his way to London and raked enough for two healthy men. For fourteen years.
