Betrayed Countess (Books We Love Historical Romance) (49 page)

“A business failure? But Everett is on his way home, yes?” She sat and gripped her hands together. The baby kicked again. “It is so cold in here, I should start a fire.”

“Please don’t bother.” Hobart’s mouth was tight, his once merry eyes looked about to burst from his face. “The ship Everett boarded was transporting gold from West Africa. But on their way back they were attacked, not by these English pirates, but a French Naval warship….”

“Mon Dieu. But Everett, he is all right, is he not?” Bettina’s insides churned and the baby objected. Her nails bit into her flesh.

“The small frigate escorts were no match for the French cannons. We were trying to keep a low profile, to not draw attention. They fired on our ship … sank it. I’m afraid—I wish to God I didn’t have to tell you this. The Admiralty said everyone was lost.” He hung his head and turned away from her. A gurgling sob erupted from his throat.

“No, Willard, you must be wrong. There is a mistake, obviously.” Her voice was strident. A heaviness tumbled down on her like pelted stones.

“The Admiralty has checked as well as they could, given the hostilities and the danger.” He raised his head, his cheeks scarlet, his eyes full of tears. “But it seems that every person was … drowned or killed. God help us, I’m so sorry.”

“
Mais non
! What about the baby? He will never see the baby. This cannot be true.” Bettina’s voice shrieked higher in pitch. She pressed on her abdomen as if the truth wriggled inside her. Her heart seemed to shove up her throat and she gasped for breath. She lurched to stand. Hobart stared up, her shock mirrored in his eyes. The room seemed to spin around her, hurtling her out of balance.

Chapter Thirty-Six

Flashes of dark and light, and angry screams swirled around in a fog. Bettina heard crying, a sound resembling a wounded animal. She pried open her eyes. Rose sat in a nearby rocker, creaking back and forth, weeping into her hands. Bettina’s head throbbed; she couldn’t lift it from her pillow. But she remembered the dreadfulness. Her friends didn’t think she did. The Admiralty decreed it—Everett was presumed dead.

Bettina drifted in and out of a torpid sleep. Rose drifted in and out of the room. People pushed broth and cups of hot tea at her. To please them, she ate and drank a little. Her only effort was using the chamber pot. She desired oblivious slumber, where she didn’t have to think. Still, her dreams pricked and poked at her with images of Everett’s smile, and she could hear the timbre of his voice. Time melted into a blur as she buried her sorrow by hiding under the covers.

“Maman?”

Startled, Bettina opened her eyes to Christian, who studied her with a puzzled expression. His brown eyes were the same as hers. His growing smile—so like Everett’s—jarred her senses.

“I’m sorry to bother you, Mrs. Camborne, but Master Christian insisted on seeing you.” Oleba stood back in the doorway. Her voice was mellow, but her smile conveyed pity.

Bettina blinked and strained to sit up and shake off her inertia. The room seemed to tilt around her for an instant. She gripped the mattress. “It is all right, Oleba, you may leave us.” Her voice rasped out over a thick tongue.

Christian held out his small hand where he cradled an apple slice. “Maman, you eat.”

Bettina shuddered and reached out her arms to embrace her son and kiss his warm cheek. “Yes, I will eat
… later.” The boy giggled as she nuzzled his neck to luxuriate in the fragrance of his skin.

The baby kicked at that moment. Life marched on all around her and she knew she had to return to the living.

After soaking in a hot bath, Bettina dressed and brushed her hair. In the looking-glass she saw a woman far older than two and twenty. Her gaunt features no longer fresh, her eyes were faded and bruised around the edges.

The door creaked open. “May I come in?” Maddie stepped into the bedchamber, her mien tentative. “I asked ’bout you every day. I be sure you’d come out of it, been near on two weeks. How do you feel?”

“Maddie, I….” Bettina dissolved under her friend’s sympathetic gaze. She dropped the brush. Her chin sank to her chest, her eyes filled with tears. In a rustle of skirt, Maddie hurried beside her. Bettina wept on her shoulder—a shoulder that smelled like the kitchen comforts of the inn. She wept so hard, the sobs wrenching her body, that she feared she would lose the baby in a torrent of water.

“Oh, child, you be havin’ a right to cry,” Maddie said softly as she stroked her hair. “If anyone ever did.”

“What will I do … without him? How can I…? I do not believe he is gone.” Bettina hated to let loose her deepest fears, it gave them power over her. “I cannot believe it.”

“Just let them feelings all out. Such a grievous shame for this to happen.” Maddie continued to hold her like a child wrapped in her strong arms. “I’ll bring you up some lemon balm to calm that sorrow in your mind and heart.”

When her crying eased to whimpers and the tears dried up, Bettina straightened with a gasp and squared her shoulders. She dabbed at her blotchy eyes with one of Everett’s handkerchiefs. “I have no time to pity myself. I have two children depending on me.”

* * * *

In crackles of tissue paper, Frederick unwrapped his New Year gift in the library. He dragged out the blue scarf and cap his grandmother had knitted. “Thank you, Grandmother.” His tone was dull, like his gaze had been since he learned of his uncle’s ‘disappearance’.

“It is lovely, Frederick.” Bettina sat in Everett’s desk chair, Christian in her lap. She refused to let anyone speak of death and no one would wear black. But the year 1795 stretched out before her, long and uncertain and still edged in fog.

The fire sizzled with the turf and furze they now used to save the cost of coal.

Rose knelt before Frederick and slipped the scarf around his neck. “It matches your eyes, dear.” Her eyes looked huge in her thinning face; her words sounded forced and brittle.

“More presents?” Christian squeezed his stuffed pony to his mouth.

“No more presents,
mon fils
.” Bettina sprinkled sand on the letter she’d written to Hobart in London. She asked him to check again with the Admiralty for information about Everett’s ship. She shook off the excess sand. Her persistence was strained at the seams, along with her abdomen.

She shifted her son to her knees and pulled more paper out of the desk drawer.

“What are you writing now, dear?” Rose groaned as she stood.

“More progressive lesson plans for the children.” Bettina kept her mind occupied. Helping the children gave her a feeling of accomplishment.

“You can’t continue teaching in your advanced condition. Decent women don’t flaunt themselves at this time of breeding.” Rose sounded weary and looked fragile as a twig.

“I do not mind. It will keep me busy.” Bettina set Christian on his feet.

“Where’s Papa?” the little boy asked.

“Oh, I suppose it doesn’t matter.” Rose wrung her hands and drifted from the room.

“Papa is far away at sea.” Bettina caressed her son’s cheek.

Frederick scowled. “You shouldn’t lie to him.” He jumped up and rushed out.

“Everything is fine, he will come home.” She spoke to the closed door, tears heavy behind her eyes. “The weather is bad now. In the spring, it will improve.”

Clasping her son’s hand, she left the room and walked with him down the hall to the kitchen. She wanted to check on Rose. Goosebumps formed on Bettina’s arms when she hurried through the dining chamber. They only bothered to heat the library and kitchen, and the two rooms in the servants’ quarters on this floor.

Rose stirred boiling laundry over the kitchen fire. Her skinny arms shook with the effort. They’d been forced to let their laundress go. Bettina pored over ledgers, trying to keep the household accounts in order. The money Hobart sent from the business was sparse and she knew it wouldn’t last much longer.

If Everett had a bank account anywhere, Bettina couldn’t access it. She’d have to admit to his mother they were never married. Her pride was a tattered rope she bound around her fears.

* * * *

Bettina shuffled papers on the library desk. The crooked scrawl on the scraps was evidence that Dory’s siblings had learned the basic skills of reading and writing. If it helped them find a better occupation when they matured, she’d accomplished that at least. She stretched their resources, and the children’s bellies, with meals of peas
e porridge.

“What does your solicitor say?” she asked Rose. Peder had ridden down in the February drizzle and brought back two letters from the inn. Bettina fingered the correspondence in her lap, which posed a severe problem.

“He says they’ll need to invest my small stipend from Sam’s estate in the war to keep the funds going.” The woman crackled the pages. “I hate to do that. But I’ve spent much of it giving Lew money to feed the horses. What did Mr. Hobart write?”

Bettina sighed and stared into the hearth flames. She thought of her first time in this chamber, when Everett sat behind this very desk, unsure of hiring her as a tutor for his nephew. She swallowed past the lump in her throat. “Mr. Hobart would like to buy Everett’s share of the business. As if there is no hope of him ever returning.” She rubbed her hands over her cheeks.

“I know you have hope, dear.” Rose stepped close. “I find my hope waning, as awful as it seems.” The woman turned away and muffled a sob.

“The business is not what it was before the war, unfortunately. He will send out a solicitor with papers for you to sign, if it is acceptable.” Bettina said it quickly, but the words still burned her mouth.

“For me to sign? You are his wife, don’t be silly.” Rose clicked her tongue, her scrawny form lost in a rumpled dressing gown.

“I hate to confess this.” Bettina put her hand on her belly where the baby wriggled and kicked. Gas burbled up her throat. “Mr. Hobart knows now, and you must know as well. Everett and I
… we were never married. We waited for the papers to be processed confirming Miriam as deceased, since she was missing for more than seven years.”

“But he divorced her, you told me.” Rose gaped at her; her lower lip quivered. “You must be delirious in your condition, your grief.”

“Mais non.” Bettina inhaled slowly. “Everett … he was not able to find her to ask for a divorce.”

“This is incredible, my dear. Then the children
…? Oh, merciful heaven.” Rose slumped in a chair, fanning herself with her hand. Her skin looked pale as pastry dough. “I can’t fathom it. It can’t be true.”

“Should I ask Mr. Slate to come in and wave burnt feathers under your nose?” Bettina hid her impatience and concern.

“No … no. Give me a moment. The darling children. How can this be?” Rose moaned and dragged herself upright.

“I had to stop Dory’s stipend. I regret that. But I want to keep tutoring the little ones.” Bettina forced her mind to other things, miserable to have to negate her children’s legitimacy. “You will sell then?”

“I suppose it is the wisest thing to do, if it will give us funds.” Rose’s bony hand trembled to hold the gown at her throat. “Did you know … my dear Sam started that business? Oh, how proud he was of it.”

Bettina retired upstairs and kissed her son goodnight in the maid’s room off her own, where he slept on a truckle bed beside Oleba. This room stayed warmer in the winter, being behind the master chamber chimney. She climbed into the large four-poster, shivering in the
frigid sheets. She pulled out the wool scarf where Everett’s scent still lingered and held it to her nose.

* * * *

Peder crumpled his hat in one hand. His hair flopped over his eyes as he scratched at his wrinkled shirt and shifted his dusty boots in the library doorway. “Mrs. Camborne, I ain’t glad to has to do this. Not so happy to go back down the mines.”

Bettina closed the household accounts ledger. Peder behaved so unobtrusively, she’d almost forgotten he still lived there. “I understand. You need more money than I am able to pay you. And we no longer require your services. I wish you well.”

The young man tugged his forelock and trailed dirt out the front door.

The baby shifted and Bettina leaned back in the desk chair with a groan. She stood and walked to the library window. Outside, sea pinks and bluebells poked through the soil. Spring had come, but she felt no sense of renewal. A sharp pain shot up from her pelvis. She patted her abdomen. She couldn’t wait to give birth. She hadn’t spoken to Rose about it, but she planned to insist the woman sell the manor. Bronnmargh was too much house for them to maintain on meager funds. Only the guilt of betraying Everett with that action kept her silent. She also worried where Mr. Slate would go, as they’d no longer need a butler in a small cottage. The little money from a bank account wasn’t enough to pay a pension.

She thought briefly of selling the necklace her father gave her, but she refused to use it to pay for the upkeep of the manor.

Hobart had sent them an amount from the business sale that would tide them over for a while.