Page 130 of Better Love Next Time
The earl cleared his throat, raising his glass level to his slitted mouth. “Congratulations, Andrew.”
Eastwick began a speech as the earl stalked toward Julian and Kitty, looking past toward the door.
Julian blocked his father’s path. “Not staying, my lord?”
“I’ve business to attend to.” Cold eyes trailed over Kitty in her widow’s weeds. A muscle worked in his jaw. “Let me pass.”
“No. You will not run from this. You will stay, and you will listen.”
The room fell silent. Julian stood between his father and wife while his family tried to make sense of the burgeoning row.
“More than five years ago,” he said to the earl, “my wife received a letter from you. She was seventeen and we were to marry. We were very much in love, weren’t we, my lord?”
“Andrew, I do not know this girl, but whatever she has told you is a lie.”
“Liar,” Kitty grit out.
“Son, she is unhinged.”
Kitty stepped from behind him, small in comparison, hardly reaching the shoulders’ of father and son, but she was mighty in resolve. “If I am unhinged, it is because you have made me so. You invited me to meet with you and your wife. He baited me, Lady Tindall, by promising your presence. And so I went. And there, on a bank along the River Great Ouse, he had his man shove my face in the water, three times, explaining that his son would never marry a Catholic.”
Julian looked to the room. “I, you see, didn’t know what was good for me.” He nodded at Oliver. “It would also threaten his eldest son’s political career.”
Oliver paled.
“Go on, Kitty,” Julian said.
Anger intensified the green in her eyes. “In exchange for my life, I was forced to write a letter to Julian, telling him I did not love him anymore. And when the letter was completed, the earl ordered me killed.”
Gasps and curses scoured the room. His mother wept.
“You ordered her to bemurdered?” Georgiana shouted. Eastwick caught her by the waist as she lunged toward the earl.
“Tindall,” the dowager barked, “is this true?”
Tears welled in Kitty’s eyes. “I begged for my life. I begged for my child’s life. And he said, ‘your pleas have no bearing on my decision.’”
Julian stiffened, once again sick with recognition at the words he had spoken to Kitty. Words he had heard his father speak to him.
“But the earl’s man allowed me to escape,” Kitty said. “I do not know why. Except perhaps he could not kill a woman with child.”
“Lies,” his father with a smug air. But his hands opening and closing in fists betrayed his own lie.
“I can attest to this,” came a voice. Father Dunlevy stepped in the room, his hard eyes seeing only the earl. “I had Clara buried. I tended to the bruises on Katherine’s neck. Her broken spirit. I lied to Sir Jeffrey to save her. To keep her safe in Scotland.”
The earl made to leave.
Julian shoved him to the wall. “You had her governess, Clara, murdered while she waited for Kitty behind a copse of trees. You coward. Killing a woman. Because I didn’t know what was right for me. Because of Oliver’s career. Because she was not ofyourchoosing.”
The earl’s lined face hardened. “She is a Roman whore.”
Julian hurled the earl to the floor and kicked him. And kicked him again. He twisted away before he killed his own father. He rubbed his eyes, tears threatening, and turned back to the earl, his voice a harsh rasp. “I don’t know what punishment awaits you, except I know this. You will live the rest of your life with the knowledge that I am happy. With the woman you tried to have murdered. And everyone here knows the monster you are.”
He walked to his wife and, cradling her to his side, drew her from the room.
Notfelle rose from the icy earth as a testament to everything old and stubborn, filled with priest-holes and abandoned conspiracies and built for a King’s progress, with rooms to sleepone hundred of the monarch’s favorite courtiers, turrets about each corner, and painted glass.
Kitty didn’t ask Julian why he wished to visit her old home after the scene in the drawing room, but she was stronger, no longer bereft, upon entering the hall. The paneling was polished, and the hall table held fresh flowers in winter. A fire burned as if their visit had been expected. The antler chandelier had been replaced with a modest cut-glass fixture, and the wide, low-slung hall had been stripped of Sir Jeffrey’s hunting trophies.
