The Secret Love of a Gentleman (50 page)

She sighed. “That is true.”

“And Mama, now is not the time to chastise me over a child Caro is terrified of losing. It is too late for judgements.”

“Of course, I am happy for you both, if this will make you happy.”

“Mama, I did not propose because of the child. You know I proposed before my accident.”

“I am not saying that. I do not even know what I am saying…” She sighed. “I am speaking nonsense. I am simply shocked and mourning the loss of another child of mine who is rushing into marriage. It has been a long day and I did not expect this of you.” She sighed again. “Yet, Caroline loves you, and you love her…”

They reached the stairs and he turned and held her. “I will not be a loss, Mama. It will be a gain. You will have a new daughter and a grandchild if God is just.”

“Yes. I am happy for you. I am just shocked.”

He hugged her tightly. This was not about the child or his marriage. She was thinking of him, of the fact she’d nearly lost him a few months ago. He could understand her emotion more now that he had his own child who he feared for. A daughter.

“I’m going to Yorkshire, Mama, not Timbuktu. You may visit us whenever you wish.”

She nodded against his shoulder. “I am very proud of you. But you know that.”

He’d probably not known a few weeks ago, but he did know now.

His mother pulled away. “I told you, I should have known you would fall for a woman who was in need, and rescue her. You are like your father.”

“I need to speak with Harry, Mama. If Caro wakes, tell her I will be back soon.”

She nodded.

Rob walked upstairs to his brother’s room and knocked on the door, emotion rattling around in his chest.

There was no answer.

He opened the door. The shutters were still closed and the room stank of stale liquor. Harry lay naked amidst the sheets, lying on his stomach with his arms above his head and his legs tangled in the sheets.

He’d come home when the servants were already up and preparing breakfast, but he’d still come home drunk.

“Harry!” Rob slapped Harry’s bare leg, then turned and went to the window. He opened the shutters and let the daylight in, then turned back to look at the bed again. Harry hadn’t moved. “Harry!”

He groaned.

“Come on, for once in your life I need you to do something for me. I have baled you out of a million scrapes. You owe me.”

Harry rolled to his back, his forearm covering his eyes. “What are you doing in my room?”

“Waking you up. I need your help.”

“You never ask me for help.”

“I know, but you are the only person I trust to stand with me in this and I need your canniness and also I need you to swear you will tell no one about what we are doing.”

“What are we doing?” Harry had not risen. He still lay in the bed looking up at Rob.

“I am only telling you when you swear.”

“Very well, I swear.” He sat up and the sheet slipped to his hips.

“We are calling on the Marquis of Kilbride.”

“What?”

Harry had probably never paid any attention to Caroline’s history. But then nor had Rob until the summer, and, damn it, if he was taking Harry with him, he ought to let Harry know what he was getting into.

“Kilbride is Caroline’s former husband. He used to beat her and now she is carrying my child and terrified of losing it because her former husband called on her and threatened her. And… you must swear your silence.”

“I have sworn it.”

“I did not fall from my carriage. Kilbride had some thugs who were in his pay beat me.”

Harry stood up, the sheet slipping off him entirely. “What?”

“They left me in the street. I had the men that found me take me to Uncle Robert’s. If the girls told you Mama and Papa stayed there to look after Aunt Jane it was a lie. They were looking after me. I am not proud of what happened, I was in a mood, walking in the dark, and three of them attacked me with an iron bar.”

Harry crossed to a chest of drawers and opened one to pick out a shirt. “I would not judge you for losing a fight with thugs. You could have told me.”

“I am going downstairs. I wish to speak to the doctor who saw Caro. I will leave you to dress. As soon as you are clothed come down, and we will go, but I mean it, tell no one. I do not want the family involved. You know how they are, they would all interfere, and I want this to be quiet.”

Chapter 45

“I cannot say, Mr Marlow. She has not lost the fluid about the child, which would imply the bleeding is from her womb, where the child is attached. Yet all that I know for certain is that the child is alive, and nothing about its heartbeat infers it is at risk, but tomorrow things might change, there can be no surety.”

“We are to be married tomorrow.”

The doctor stared at Rob with a pompous look. Of course it was normal to marry and then beget a child. But Rob was not ashamed, he did not care what the man thought, all he wished to know was what the risks were. Would his daughter live?

“I have seen a dozen cases like this, no more. The pregnancy will need to be monitored and Lady Framlington ought to rest as much as possible. There is no evidence from the amount of blood how high the risk is to the child, and yet if she continues to bleed there is a risk to her. A risk that the internal wound might become infected or that she may lose too much blood.”

It had not occurred to Rob that Caro might be at risk. “She has lost children before.”

“Lady Caroline has told me.”

“Her former husband kicked her stomach when she was with child.”

“That may have affected her womb, if that is the case. Usually this issue simply arises when a woman has had a number of children—”

“She has had five miscarriages.”

The doctor gave him a look that said you are too young to manage this.

Why might a woman have a child from sixteen upward, while a man must be thirty before he wed?

“The cause may be the miscarriages or the violence. I can only treat the symptoms, not the cause.”

Rob nodded. He would treat the cause. “Would you call again in the morning and listen for the heartbeat to reassure her, and then will you advise on how her brother might take her to the church.”

The man stared at him, the words in his eyes,
she should not go at all
. Yet she was with child. Rob would not delay the date, the wedding needed to occur.

“Thank you, you may go. Send your invoice to me here—”

“The Duke will—”

“I manage my own debts.”

The doctor nodded, then turned away.

Rob had a feeling the man was a social climber. He would not have come had it not been the Duchess who’d called for him. In general, he probably chose not to support the mere mortals of the world. It was probably a lance to his ego that he must be paid by a gentleman. It was men like that who Rob wished to make change through new laws. Why should the poor not be treated the same as the rich when it came to such things as medicine?

~

Rob walked out of Pembroke House with Harry. He’d told Mary and his father that he was going out on an errand for medication, having spoken to the doctor. But there was no medicine that would help Caro—except perhaps for her mind to be free from any fear of Kilbride.

“Where are we going?” Harry asked as he jogged down the steps while Rob hobbled, although his limp was becoming far less noticeable. He hoped to hide it when they found Kilbride.

“To his home first, and if he is not there to wherever it is we may find him.”

“Will your leg hold up if we walk?” Harry gripped Rob’s shoulder.

Rob glanced over at him and smiled when Harry’s hand slipped away, they were entirely opposite in so many ways and yet there was a closeness between them that ran deeper than a conflict in morals. That was why he’d wished to have Harry with him—they had always been there for each other in times of trouble throughout their school and college years. “It is getting stronger, it would, but we will take a hackney because I wish to be quick, and if he is not at home, I do not want to be walking about London like a fool. Come on, we will walk to the next square and pick one up so no one within the house sees and wonders why we have not used John’s carriage.”

“This subterfuge is not like you, Rob.”

“I have discovered a lot of new things that were unlike me since the summer. Like I can feel jealous, angry and possessive as hell.”

His brother laughed. “You…”

“Me,” Rob grinned. “Women do that to you. They take you to extremes.”

“The women I know only take me to one extreme.”

“You only stay with them for a few hours. It is not the same.”

“At least I know how to avoid making them pregnant. I would not be fool enough to do that.”

“No, you will catch the French disease.”

“God, you are so naïve. There is a thing called a condom. It is made of pig’s bladder. You use it as a sheath to protect yourself from a whore and having a child.”

“Is that all you think of the women you sleep with? Whores.”

Harry smiled. “That is what they are, and I am merely paying for the service they offer, as I’ve told Papa every time he yells at me about it. Better that than I defile young ladies.”

“Your morals are twisted.”

“And yours are broken. You cannot preach to me now you have impregnated the family’s one ward.”

Rob lifted a hand to hail a hackney as Harry laughed.

“You should have come to me if you wanted to have sex with her, and I would have told you how to avoid a child.”

Rob glanced at Harry as he climbed into the small carriage, and jested. “My younger brother, the font of all knowledge.”

“When it comes to bedroom sport, yes, and where you are concerned, definitely, because you knew nothing and look at the position you have landed yourself in.”

Harry tumbled into the seat beside Rob, as Rob leant back into the squabs. “I have not landed myself in anything. I wish to be with Caro. It is called love. Admittedly it was unplanned, it evolved, and it has continued evolving. Yet I am still wiser than you, because while you may know all about bedroom sport you know nothing about love.”

“I do not wish to know. That knowledge you may keep. John has agreed to pay a commission for me when I am done at Oxford. What will I need with love? It would be a burden to have a wife when I become a captain in a regiment. You may keep your wife. I am happy with my whores.”

Rob shook his head. Harry was irresponsible, but unchangeable. He’d endured numerous lectures from their father; none had touched him. He never changed his behaviour. But now Harry’s rebellious nature was exactly what Rob needed.

“I have no idea what we will walk into,” Rob said more seriously. “I am taking a gamble that with the two of us together, and no space to claim it might be footpads, that Kilbride will not attack us, but I do not know.”

“I should have my fists ready, then. Had you told me, I would have brought a knife.”

“This will not be a tavern brawl, Harry. I intend to call him out.”

“That is against the law and a thing of two decades ago,” Harry glared, with a look which said, are you are mad?

“It is that or I ask him to shoot against me at Mantons or I fence with him or spar with him in a club. It would not be the same, and I hope he will be eager enough to shoot me that he will disregard all else.”

Amusement growled in Harry’s throat when he looked out the far window. “I have had you wrong all these years. You are madder than me.” He looked back at Rob. “I cannot believe you wish to make yourself a shooting target.”

“I will make myself as small a one as I may.”

“And then you are able to fire.”

“And then I may fire.”

Harry shook his head. “Let us hope that he is a bad shot.”

“He has to accept the duel first.”

When the hackney pulled up before Kilbride’s town mansion, the driver knocked on the roof. Harry climbed down, then held the door for Rob.

“Wait for us.” Rob said to the driver as he paid him their fare.

When Rob climbed the steps, he thought of Caro’s small feet upon them. She must have climbed these steps the first day she had wed, and many days throughout her marriage. When she had first married, she must have skipped up the steps. She would have been three years younger than him and Kilbride had been nearly thirty. Her steps must have become heavier with the loss of each child, and with each beating.

It was a foolish distortion of society that they believed it acceptable for women to bear the age difference but not men.

Rob knocked on the door, his strike firm. He was determined to hold his ground and force this issue.

The door was answered by a porter, which probably meant that the butler was engaged in the drawing room. Either the Marquis of Kilbride was at home or the Marchioness was.

“We have come to speak with the Marquis in private.”

“He is entertaining.”

“Perhaps, but this is urgent. You may tell him that Robert Marlow is here.”

“And Harry Marlow.” Harry grinned as though this was a great lark.

Rob was suddenly swamped by his sense of inferiority. The two of them were nothing compared to the place they stood in. Kilbride had power. The mansion was neither as big as John’s nor as showy and yet it was one hundred times larger than the small rooms Rob had rented.

The plaster above them was painted with cherubs and gilded. Caro must have thought herself in heaven when she’d crossed the threshold—only to be transported to hell.

No, he was not inferior; he was better than this man, perhaps not in the measure of possessions, but possessions did not matter, it was what lay in your heart that was the measure of a man. Poor or rich—it made no difference.

“Wait here.” The porter walked away and pulled a tassel to call for a servant. A footman appeared from a door beneath the wooden staircase. The porter said something in a low voice, then the man went out as he’d come in, probably to tell Kilbride they were there.

Rob’s heart began to knock against his ribs with a heavy beat.

Caro would not wish him to do this. Nor would his father. But Rob was not doing this for Caro, not really, he was doing it for himself, to quieten the possessiveness and protectiveness. He needed to know that Kilbride would not touch them again; that he could keep his family safe. Yet the anger burning low in his stomach was also for revenge, revenge for all of Caro’s children this man had killed, and the years of life she’d lost in her glass gaol.