Page 52 of When She Loved Me
Ashamed at his lack of control, even as he stood by his action, he strode angrily away from his wife.
IN THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED, she went out of her way to avoid him, and he didn’t give a damn, seething still with that image of her being seduced—and giggling!—seared into his brain. Truth be told, he avoided her just as much, trying to decide where he’d gone wrong assuming he knew her character. He actually returned to London for a few days, as he did have business to attend, which had been put off by his previous unwillingness to leave the abbey, to leave Nicole.
He couldn’t manage any assessment of every emotion he wrestled with over the next few days, knew only that anger and jealousy were at the forefront. And a profound pain, that he’d been courting and wooing someone who was so far from what he believed her to be, that days later he still could not wrap his head around it.
When he returned to the abbey, though not quite sure why, he found the house in darkness, though the sun had only just set within the hour. He rode around the back, and stabled his horse, entering the house through the kitchen. He found Franklin, still about the chore of polishing whatever silver had been used at dinner, only two pieces, he noted.
Franklin seemed neither surprised to see him nor inclined to favor him with any greeting.
Obviously, word had spread of his unseemly behavior.
And still, he felt the need to defend it. He would not, of course, to the butler, but did bother to ask, “The countess has retired for the evening?”
Franklin set the towel upon the counter in the middle of the kitchen, set the silver bowl he’d been wiping down next to it, and turned his head sideways to Trevor. “I’m sure she has,” was all he said in a brutally crisp tone.
Ignoring this censure from his servant, Trevor stalked away from him and through the corridor to find the front stairs and the second floor. He paused outside of Nicole’s room, debating a late-night apology—for his overreaction, not his action—but the blackness noted underneath her door suggested she might well be asleep by now. It would keep until the morning.
The next morning at breakfast, he waited both his wife and Mr. Wendell, accustomed to being the first to show in the morning room, but anxious today to get back on even footing with both of them, and annoyed by their late-coming. Even Franklin wasn’t at his usual post, near the door, directing the footmen during breakfast.
It seemed the entire house had fallen to ruin with him gone but a few days. With a growing irritation, he inquired of Charlie, who’d been in and out of the morning room, where Franklin might be, if not at his post.
With a pained grimace, apparently unwilling to deliver an answer, he only shrugged and darted away, out of the room. Henry appeared then, and announced, without being questioned, “Mr. Franklin is abed, feeling poorly, I hear.” And he deposited the sugar bowl and creamer on the table near Trevor with a fairly strong thud.
The earl nodded. This likely explained Nicole’s absence from breakfast, as she doted upon the man, and was surely at his side now. With a bit of relief he attended his breakfast, still wondering where Ian might have gotten to, and then just as the clockstruck ten, he scooped up the newspaper and headed toward his study. Walking through the foyer showed Franklin, dressed in his heavy overcoat, sitting upon a chair near the door. At his feet, sat one squat suitcase and one bulging valise. In his hand he held a walking stick, one Trevor assumed he would refrain from using while performing his duties, but that which he likely needed to give ease to his back.
“Franklin?” Trevor approached, allowed that one word to ask a multitude of questions.
The old man ignored the unspoken queries. “My lord.”
“Franklin, what are you about? Are you going somewhere?”
“I am, my lord. I’ve left my letter of resignation upon your desk.” He nodded with these words.
“Are you unwell, my good man?”
Franklin straightened, as much as his back would allow and fixed Trevor with a hard glare and a curling lip. “I am not your good man, sir.”
This harshness alerted Trevor that this had to do with Nicole, and more accurately, Trevor’s treatment of her, he surmised. “Does she know you are leaving? Shall I fetch her?”
Franklin released a small and tired harrumph. “She left, you know. Ah, but you wouldn’t, would you? You were fair busy yourself, abandoning her yet again.”
Through gritted teeth, Trevor asked, “Where is my wife?”
Franklin shrugged, and Trevor resisted the urge to shake the old man until the answer fell out. “I didn’t want to have hope in you, when you came here,” Franklin said, the hat in his hand held against his knee. “But you did good, for a while. Fooled us all, is what I think now.”
Trevor turned away, intent on finding someone who would tell him where his wife had gone. Franklin’s thunderous voice stopped him, turned him back around. “You will not turn your back on me, young man! You will stay, and you will listen to what I have to say!” When Trevor faced him again, eyes widened in disbelief, Franklin leveled his tone and continued, “I’ve put up with a lot from you Wentworths over the years: your grandfather’s spitefulness and his wife’s rancor, your mother looking down her nose at us, your own father’s utter disregard for this beautiful house over the past twenty years. And I’ve had enough. I owe you nothing, but I will say my peace. That girl came here with her broken heart, crying herself to sleep for months and months, and she never once couldn’t offer a smile to someone here. She lifted up the whole lot of us, cared more for the people and the house than any Wentworth had in a hundred years. And what did you do? You chased her away. And why? Not because of anything that girl had done. Was your own meanness, generations of it, that you can’t even see good when it’s right before your eyes. I know where she went. You’d have to beat it out of me, though. Last thing I’d do to that poor girl is break her heart again by sending you to her.” His wrinkled lip curled once more. “You do not deserve her. Stay in your cold, empty house. Good luck keeping the rest of them.” He tossed a thumb in the air, toward the kitchen. “You’ll drive them away, just as you did her and me. Mark my words.”
Never in his entire life, not even while serving in the army, not in his many years at the staid and strict schools he’d attended, not even by his own cross mother, had he ever been taken to task as he just had by this man. And just when he considered that he didn’t know how to reply to every lash the old man had justwhipped across him, Franklin went on, “Why did you come here now anyway? I’ve been wondering that, trying to imagine any other reason but to break her heart all over again, but for the life of me, I can think of nothing.”
Swallowing hard, he answered the only truth he knew just now. “I didn’t want to live...tobe, without her.”
Shaking his head back and forth, his eyes still angry, Franklin said, “You’ve got a funny way of showing it.”
Crossing his arms over his chest, Trevor acknowledged this. “I’ve messed up. Repeatedly and brutally, to my regret, and her...heartbreak. But then, Franklin, you did not see her with that man below stairs—”
“I didn’t have to!” His voice was deafening just then, his face turning a mottled shade of red. He blustered, “And even if I did, I’d think nothing untoward! It isn’t her! You don’t deserve her because you don’t know her! You don’tloveher! You can’t be this foolish and wrong about her and claim to love her. You just can’t.” The hand, the one that held his hat near his knee, shook with his rage.
Believing it was in both their interests that they end the conversation here, Trevor only wondered, “You won’t tell me where she is?”
