Page 76
25 March 1818
Nothing had changed.
Everything had changed.
I might have a daughter. My baby mightn’t have died.
A parade of emotions marched through Adelhied Tyndal, Countess of Amhurst, and she pressed both palms against her hectic stomach.
Joy, fear, grief, and anger.
Fury unlike any she had ever known. Far surpassing the rage she’d felt for Amhurst’s philandering and whoring. Or the seething wrath toward her parents for ensuring Charles Abott was sent to the front lines during The War of the First Coalition.
They’d all but pulled the trigger of the gun themselves that had taken his young life.
How the Duke and Duchess of Featherstone had scurried to annul her marriage to Charles. The union they’d arranged decades before with Armond Tyndal, Earl of Amhurst, must take place at all cost.
Adelhied could only imagine the people her parents must’ve bribed. Even so-called pious men of the cloth. For the annulment had been granted in an unheard-of seven weeks.
A mere seven weeks after her beloved Charles had given his life, they dared to erase and nullify her marriage to him. Against her wishes, of course. But when had they ever considered her wishes?
Adelhied laughed aloud, the scraping sound caustic and bitter to her own ears.
How furious Father and Mother had been to learn she carried Charles’s child after the annulment. Adelhied had hidden the pregnancy for as long as she could for fear they’d harm the baby or force a miscarriage. She’d learned just how conniving and devious her parents were, and her genuine heartbreak over Charles’s death gave her a reason to isolate herself.
She’d been a full six months along before they learned the truth, and then they were forced to keep her condition a secret. After all, her parents had made certain she wasn’t married any longer. Now they had an unwed daughter, heavy with child.
The irony brought an arch smile to her mouth.
Even those two spawns of Satan couldn’t out scheme the devil.
Trailing a finger over the carved mahogany back of the settee, Adelhied thought back to the last time she’d seen either of her parents. It had been over four-and-twenty years since she’d seen or spoken to the Duke and Duchess of Featherstone. Not since they’d forced her into an arranged marriage to Amhurst.
She’d climbed into the coach after the ceremony and never once looked back.
There was nothing to look back for.
Charles had died during the siege of Toulon. Their daughter had been stillborn.
Everything she’d loved had died. She no longer cared about her future. A future she was determined to shut her callous, unfeeling, heartless parents out of. Every letter from them had been returned unopened. Until, after five years, they’d simply stopped writing.
They’d made their miserable beds. They could blasted well lie in them.
Now, all of these years later, gossip brought Adelhied to the house she’d vowed never to set foot in again. A rumor that a woman who looked just like Adelhied had been seen in London. A woman with red-blond hair, unusual green eyes, and in her early twenties.
Four-and-twenty, to be precise.
Adelhied’s one-time good friend, Rosemond Lancaster, now Baroness of Turlock, had written Adelhied. She’d seen the young woman eating an ice outside of Gunter’s Tea Shop in the company of Ronan Brockman, son of the Marquess of Trentholm.
Adelhied knew the Brockmans, of course. She also knew the Marquess and Marchioness of Trentholm. While Adelhied had spurned her parents these many years, she wasn’t so imprudent as to rebuff le beau monde entirely.
It was a simple matter—a few coins in an overworked servant's palm—to learn which assemblies the Featherstones were invited to and avoid them. To always send a maid ahead into shops to ensure Mother wasn’t there ahead of her. To avoid the parks, museums, tea shops, and theaters she knew her parents favored.
Today, however, Adelhied would see her parents face to face.
By all that was holy, she would have her answers.
Her three sons had offered to accompany her, but she’d declined. They were good men. Decent men. Men of integrity and honor.
