The Mad Earl's Bride (Scoundrels 3.50)

He would die in something like peace with something like dignity. That was better than the lot of scores of wretches in the cesspits of London, he told himself. It was better than what his mother had endured, certainly.

The library door opened, and Hoskins entered, bearing a letter. He set it face down on the library table so that the seal was plainly evident.

It was the Earl of Rawnsley’s seal.

“Damn,” Dorian said. He tore the letter open, scanned it, then handed it to Hoskins.

“Now you see why I chose to be a nobody,” Dorian said.

Hoskins had learned Dorian’s true identity only yesterday, at the same time he’d been informed of Dorian’s medical condition—and offered the opportunity to depart, if he wished. But Hoskins had fought and been wounded at Waterloo. After the horrors he’d experienced there, looking after a mere lunatic was child’s play.

Moreover, to Dorian’s vast relief, Hoskins’s manner remained matter-of-fact, with occasional ventures into a gallows humor that lifted Dorian’s spirits.

“Is it the irascibility of age?” Hoskins asked mildly as he handed the letter back. “Or was the old gentleman always like this?”

“He’s impossible,” Dorian said. “Born that way, I suppose. And quite convincing. For most of my youth, I actually believed I was always the one at fault. There is no dealing with him, Hoskins. All one can do is try to ignore him. That won’t be easy.” He frowned at the letter.

His remaining aunt, Hugo’s widow, had visited Dartmoor a short while ago and spotted Dorian on one of his gallops through the moors. She’d written the earl a highly exaggerated description of Dorian’s riding garb—or lack thereof—and passed on a lot of local gossip, mostly ignorant speculation about the reclusive eccentric living at Radmore Manor.

The earl’s letter ordered Dorian to appear—his hair properly shorn and his person decently attired—at a family council on the twelfth of May, and explain himself.

If they wanted him, they’d have to come and get him, Dorian silently vowed, and they would never take him away alive.

“Did you wish to dictate a reply, sir?” Hoskins asked. “Or shall we chuck it into the fire?”

“I’ll write my own reply. Otherwise you’ll be targeted as an accomplice, and made to feel the weight of his righteous wrath.” Dorian smiled faintly. “Then we’ll chuck it into the fire.”

ON THE TWELFTH of May 1828, the Earl of Rawnsley and most of his immediate family were gathered in Rawnsley Hall’s drawing room at the moment that a section of the ancestral roof above them chose to collapse. In a matter of seconds, several tons of timber, stone, and miscellaneous decorative debris buried them and made Dorian Camoys—one of the very few family members not in attendance—the new Earl of Rawnsley.

In a small sitting room in a house in Wiltshire, Gwendolyn Adams read the weeks-old newspaper account several times before she was satisfied she had not overlooked any details.

Then she turned her attention to the other three documents on her writing desk. One was a letter written by the present earl’s recently deceased aunt. According to it, her nephew had turned into a savage. His hair hung down to his knees, and he galloped half-naked through the moors on a murderous white horse named after a bloodthirsty pagan god.

The second document was a draft of a letter from the earl to his “savage” grandson. It gave Gwendolyn a very good idea why the heir had failed to attend the funeral.

The third document was the present Lord Rawnsley’s reply to his grandfather’s obnoxious letter, and it made Gwendolyn smile for the first time since the duc d’Abonville had arrived and made his outrageous proposal.

Abonville’s mother had been a de Camois, the French tree from which the English Camoys branch had sprouted centuries earlier—and thus Rawnsley’s very distant cousin. Abonville was also the fiancé of Gwendolyn’s grandmother, Genevieve, the dowager Viscountess Pembury.

The pair had attended the Camoys’s funeral, after which a harassed solicitor had sought the duc’s assistance as nearest male kin: papers needed signing, and any number of legal matters must be attended to, and the present Lord Rawnsley had refused to assume his responsibilities.

Accordingly, the duc and Genevieve had journeyed to Dartmoor. There, they discovered that the new earl had fallen victim to a terminal brain disease.

Gwendolyn’s smile faded. Bertie Trent, her first cousin, had taken the news very hard. At present, he was hiding in the stables, sobbing over an old letter, creased and faded past legibility, from his boyhood friend Cat Camoys.

She moved the papers aside and took up the miniature Bertie had given her.

The tiny likeness allegedly represented Bertie’s friend. It had been painted years earlier by a singularly inept artist, and it did not tell her much.

Still, twenty-one-year-old Gwendolyn was too levelheaded a girl to base the most momentous decision of her life upon a picture two inches in diameter.

In the first place, she knew she was no great beauty herself, with her pointy nose and chin and impossible red hair. She doubted that her green eyes, to which several suitors had composed lavish—and very silly—odes, compensated for everything.

In the second place, physical attractiveness was irrelevant. Rawnsley had not been asked to fall in love with her, nor she with him. Abonville had simply asked her to marry the earl and bear him a son to save the Camoys line from extinction.

She’d been asked to do this because she came of a phenomenally fertile family, famous for producing males. Both characteristics were critical, for the Earl of Rawnsley hadn’t much time to sire an heir. His physician had given him six months to live.

Unfortunately, there were no documents offering any insights into the brain disease itself. The little Genevieve and Abonville knew they’d learned mainly from the earl’s manservant, Hoskins. His Lordship had volunteered no details, and pressing him for information would have been unkind, Genevieve had said.

Gwendolyn frowned.

Her mother entered the room at that moment and softly closed the door behind her. “Are you truly thinking it over?” she asked as she took the seat next to Gwendolyn’s desk. “Or are you only making a show of hesitation for Papa’s benefit?”

Though she had taken time to reflect, Gwendolyn did not feel hesitant. She knew the task she’d been asked to undertake would not be pleasant. But that did not daunt her in the least.

Unpleasantness was only to be expected. Illness, whether of the mind or the body, was disagreeable; otherwise so much labor wouldn’t be dedicated to making it go away. But illness was also exceedingly interesting, and lunatics, Gwendolyn felt, were the most interesting patie

nts of all.

Lord Rawnsley’s case, combining both a mysterious neurological disease and aberrant behavior, could not have excited her more.

If the Almighty had sent her a letter, signed, witnessed, and notarized, she could not have felt more certain that He, in His infinite wisdom—about which she had entertained doubts on more than one occasion—had made her expressly for this purpose.

“I was making absolutely certain there wasn’t anything to think about,” Gwendolyn told her mother. “There isn’t.”

Mama gazed at her for a long moment. “Yes, I heard the celestial summons—as clearly as you did, I don’t doubt. Papa is another matter, however.”

Gwendolyn was well aware of this. Mama understood her. Papa did not. None of the males of the family did. That included Abonville. Gwendolyn was sure the marriage idea was one her grandmother had planted in his head while convincing him it was his own. Fortunately, Genevieve had an enviable talent for making men believe just about anything she wanted them to.

“We’d better let Genevieve talk him round,” Gwendolyn said. “Otherwise he will create delays by raising a lot of needless obstacles, and we have no time to lose. There’s no telling how long Rawnsley will retain his reason, and he must be of sound mind for the legalities.”

That wasn’t Gwendolyn’s only anxiety. At this very moment, the Earl or Rawnsley might be taking one of his reckless rides and risking a fatal tumble into a mire.

Then she would never have a chance to do something truly worthwhile with her life.

Before she could voice this concern, her mother spoke.

“Genevieve has already begun working on your father,” she said. “She knew what your answer would be, as I did. I shall go downstairs and signal her to administer the coup de grâce.” She rose.

“Thank you, Mama,” Gwendolyn said.

“Never mind that,” Mama said sharply. “It is not what I would have wished for you, even if you will be Countess of Rawnsley. If that young man had not been Bertie’s friend, and if he had not looked after your idiot cousin all through Eton—and doubtless saved his worthless neck a hundred times—” Her eyes filled and her voice was unsteady as she went on, “Oh, Gwendolyn, I should never let you go. But we cannot leave the poor boy to die alone.” She squeezed Gwendolyn’s shoulder. “He needs you, and that is all that ought to matter, I know.”