Duke of Disgrace (Dukes of Destiny Book 3) Read online

  Duke of Disgrace

  Dukes of Destiny, Book Three

  Whitney Blake

  © Copyright 2019 by Whitney Blake

  Text by Whitney Blake

  Cover by Wicked Smart Designs

  Dragonblade Publishing, Inc. is an imprint of Kathryn Le Veque Novels, Inc.

  P.O. Box 7968

  La Verne CA 91750

  [email protected]

  Produced in the United States of America

  First Edition November 2019

  Kindle Edition

  Reproduction of any kind except where it pertains to short quotes in relation to advertising or promotion is strictly prohibited.

  All Rights Reserved.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  License Notes:

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook, once purchased, may not be re-sold. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it or borrow it, or it was not purchased for you and given as a gift for your use only, then please return it and purchase your own copy. If this book was purchased on an unauthorized platform, then it is a pirated and/or unauthorized copy and violators will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Do not purchase or accept pirated copies. Thank you for respecting the author’s hard work. For subsidiary rights, contact Dragonblade Publishing, Inc.

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  Dearest Reader;

  Thank you for your support of a small press. At Dragonblade Publishing, we strive to bring you the highest quality Historical Romance from the some of the best authors in the business. Without your support, there is no ‘us’, so we sincerely hope you adore these stories and find some new favorite authors along the way.

  Happy Reading!

  CEO, Dragonblade Publishing

  Additional Dragonblade books by Author Whitney Blake

  Dukes of Destiny Series

  Duke of Havoc

  Duke of Sorrow

  Duke of Disgrace

  *** Please visit Dragonblade’s website for a full list of books and authors. Sign up for Dragonblade’s blog for sneak peeks, interviews, and more: ***

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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Publisher’s Note

  Additional Dragonblade books by Author Whitney Blake

  Acknowledgements

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you so much to the ladies of Lady Catherine’s Salon, who were warmly welcoming and remarkably helpful!

  As always, thanks to Kathryn for supporting this whole premise—and loving the love story within.

  Author’s Note

  Or, a word on divorce

  I should say that divorces and annulments were incredibly rare during the Regency period. We also have many misconceptions about how they worked and what they could be granted for. They’re far more common as plot devices in novels than in actual history!

  Divorce isn’t the most pleasant theme of Duke of Disgrace and I didn’t want to make it the absolute focal point, but it was important. While researching, I revisited Jane Austen’s treatment of marriage in her novels (especially Mansfield Park) and scoured English legal documents from the era (with a handy Latin dictionary by my side). The most concise resource I used to get my bearings was Dr. Martha Bailey’s essay “The Marriage Law of Jane Austen’s World”, which you can find via Google.

  I also contemplated news stories of the day. Among other important men, Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, and Prince Fredrick, Duke of York and Albany, had mistresses who impacted their reputations and finances to various degrees. Particularly York. His predicament and the furor it inspired shaped my thinking on having a hero, especially a barrister, whose wife was unfaithful. Jeremy’s reticence to open himself up to potentially more drama made sense to me given the social climate of the 1810s. I gave him an entirely fictional place of residence just to avoid any confusion with historical scandals.

  Meanwhile, though she is unpleasant and absolutely an instigator, try not to judge his lady wife too harshly. Women who took lovers or behaved “deviantly” often did so with good motivations. Some were abused in various ways. Others were effectively abandoned by their husbands for other women because annulling or divorcing was too difficult to accomplish. Divorce was accessible only to the very privileged and this had far-reaching implications for decades. Due to both stigma and the law, English women had trouble securing divorces well into the mid-twentieth century. None of these issues are simple, and I tried to do them some justice while telling a good tale.

  I hope you love Jeremy and Lottie as much as I do! I was rooting for them all along.

  Prologue

  July 28, 1812

  Salamanca, Spain

  The wound running in a small, vertical line along his palm was starting to smell.

  Horribly.

  He was reluctant to say that his own living flesh stunk of death. But he had been around enough corpses to admit the uncanny similarity even if he didn’t like it. Too bad it emanated from his body, which was still alive according to his inexpert medical knowledge.

  Lord Jeremy Hareden, Duke of Bowland, glanced at his wounded, stinking hand with marked trepidation. It galled him to no end that he couldn’t even recall how he had sustained the relatively minor injury.

  “Damn,” he mumbled.

  Was it shrapnel? Or had he grabbed something at the business end without quite realizing, like a simpleton? If so, he had enough training never to have done it. Perhaps he had fallen down and flung his hands out to catch himself? He had no clear or reliable recollection. There was no splinter. There were no pebbles. There was no bit of metal. Nothing at all had worked its way either out or further in.

  And everything since the battle—no, even the battle—was impossibly jumbled together in his mind.

  But no matter how he had received it, there was a jagged tear. At first, he had ignored the wound. Wrapped it himself. There were far worse-off men who needed attention. He would survive. Several days later, he could no longer ignore it. Yet his fear and denial meant he hadn’t told anyone that he was actually losing feeling in his hand.

  Jeremy thought he knew what Mr. Swindon would most likely do, and it was a terrifying thing to consider. Mr. Swindon, God bless him, was a practicing surgeon who had also worked in the morgue at St. Bartholomew’s. He was not actually a physician, which was not to say he was unintelligent. He was well-spoken and seemed logical if somewhat mystifying. Swindon held to the almost prudish idea of washing one’s hands and to the outlandis
h practice of putting his instruments in boiling water before a procedure. Well, he did when he had the time and space to do so, anyway. In recent days, there’d been very little time and space in supply.

  Swindon’s solution for infected wounds was generally to saw or hack something off the man in question. In that, he was still a traditionalist. It was an awful business. Nobody had died as the result of Swindon’s efficient, heartless amputations. He couldn’t have heart in his line of work. Not right now. No one has died yet —it’s a little too early to tell, isn’t it? Jeremy thought, studying his hand.

  If it hadn’t been his own hand, he might have been fascinated with the progression. If he waited, if he just pretended none of this was happening, would his fingers begin to go as white as his palm? Would they finally turn black and soft, as he’d seen other men’s limbs and appendages go?

  The colors were the worst sight. His fingers were a very deep red closer to his palm, while his palm was white with pink patches. The wound itself didn’t look as angry as some others he’d sustained in the past. Ironic. Rather, the flesh around the wound was more alarming. Because it had been wrapped, no one had noticed, and nobody commented on the color of his exposed fingers. If anyone saw it as out of the ordinary at all, that is.

  From head to toe, they were all looking pinker than ever from being under the Spanish sun.

  Maybe there is a reason you were wrong-handed as a child. With a deep sigh, Jeremy decided he needed to seek out Swindon or he might be in more trouble than he was now.

  He knew exactly where the surgeon would be.

  *

  The inside of the room that was Swindon’s domain in the fort looked like a circle of hell, but at least it was quieter than it had been immediately after the battle. Injured men rested on cots in orderly rows, many drugged with laudanum or spirits. Jeremy spied Swindon sitting at a large, scuffed table at the head of the cots.

  He looked exhausted, but perked up when he saw Jeremy. “Lord Hareden.”

  “Mr. Swindon,” Jeremy said. He got directly to things. “I’ve a matter that I believe merits your attention.”

  “Oh? I was not aware that you had suffered any injuries.”

  In all, they’d not suffered as many losses as the French, but there had still been enough injuries to keep Swindon busy. It was only chance that left Jeremy behind with a small number of other able-bodied men. He’d wondered at the time why he wasn’t moving on, but maybe it was Providence intervening.

  “I did not think it was an injury worth seeking aid for.”

  “Never make that assumption,” said Swindon.

  “I don’t think I will ever again, after this.”

  Swindon began looking at Jeremy’s person, tilting his balding head slightly from side to side like a garden snake. He was trying to suss out where Jeremy was hurt. “Let us see, then.”

  When Jeremy started to unwrap his hand, Swindon almost chuckled.

  “You won’t laugh when you see it,” said Jeremy. He couldn’t summon the strength to be truly irritated and tossed the torn bit of shirt he’d been using as a bandage to the floor. He’d been alternating rags made from his oldest shirt, but all of them had seen far better days. His mother would never have allowed them into the manor. Or anywhere within a five-mile radius of it.

  Feeling as though this might be one of the last things he’d ever do with his right hand, he offered it to Swindon. He trembled. He couldn’t help it.

  Swindon’s face, relaxed if tired a moment before, turned grave as soon as he caught the wound’s scent. “How long has it been like this?”

  “I can’t say with much certainty. I-I’m even having trouble recalling what day it is, I have to confess.”

  The surgeon prodded gently at Jeremy’s fingers with his own, leaving Jeremy’s right palm facing upward in his left. “It is the twenty-eighth.” He squeezed Jeremy’s index finger gently. Jeremy felt barely anything at all. “Does it hurt?”

  “No.”

  Swindon seemed to take the meaning of Jeremy’s brusque tone. “Do you feel anything at all in your fingers, your grace?”

  Shrugging, Jeremy said, staring hard at the tabletop, “I don’t know if I can really feel your hand and fingers, or if my mind is telling me that I can because I see you touching them.” The wood was only old and scuffed, not bloodstained or marked with the deep gouges of a blade. His next thought came clearly: this is probably not the table where he will cut off my hand.

  That was in the room opposite this one.

  “How have you been faring, say, since yesterday?”

  It was only upon being asked that Jeremy found he could honestly say, after a shaky breath, “I feel quite poorly. Can things, well, change so quickly?”

  Ah, “poorly” was an understatement. Exhausted. Feverish, maybe. Nauseated, definitely. The question, too, was more rhetorical. He knew that things could change so fast.

  Then Swindon softly touched the wound itself, and it burned as though Jeremy had been branded. He winced, but did not recoil. If he couldn’t handle this, he certainly couldn’t handle what was to come. A foul, yellowish fluid oozed from the wound’s edges. Even Swindon, who was used to almost everything imaginable that might be disturbing or disgusting, had to mask his gag with a cough.

  For once, Swindon looked sorry. Jeremy did not know if it was because Swindon liked him—ludicrous, seeing as he’d only encountered the man several times before.

  “It could poison your blood. I worry that it has started already. If it… if we…”

  “If we wait to see what happens.”

  “If we wait, I fear you will continue to feel worse,” said Swindon simply. “Then, I must be frank with you, your grace, it will not only be your hand that is lost, but possibly your arm, too. Or part of your arm. At the best. I cannot say for certain.”

  Jeremy felt the weight of all his limbs for what seemed like the first time—as though God Himself was pressing down on his shoulders and making it hard to move. “I see.”

  “You did make the right decision in seeing me.”

  He’d known what would happen. But knowing was different from being told.

  “If the… my hand… is gone,” he had to clear his throat, “and everything is… cauterized… will that help?” Jeremy could barely think through what was usually done in situations like this.

  Without missing a moment to reply, Swindon nodded. “Yes. It should. But if we wait to see what might happen, it would put you at unnecessary risk.”

  “Then let’s not wait.” A slow, steady sense of internal numbness overtook Jeremy when Swindon relinquished his hand. In that instant, it felt gone already.

  Swindon started to bustle around as quietly as he could, gathering things that looked completely indistinct to Jeremy, who was still processing the rapid turn of events.

  *

  They waited until Jeremy had consumed enough rum, or what he thought was rum, to be nearly drunk.

  “Do you want more, your grace? It wouldn’t go amiss.”

  Considering, Jeremy took another deep gulp, then another, from the bottle. He supposed he should count himself lucky that this was not an urgent matter in the sense that he was not currently bleeding to death. Some men did not have the luxury of being fully intoxicated before they endured an amputation. Their friends had to make sure enough of the available alcohol, if there even was any, trickled down their throats before the deed was done.

  Then someone had to hold them steady.

  “What is this?” he asked Swindon, thinking that perhaps he should have asked before drinking.

  “A concoction of my own design. Well, mine and necessity’s.”

  “That explains everything.” Jeremy pulled a face.

  “Opiates aren’t very palatable, even when they’re mixed with spirits. And I would not condone mixing them together on one’s own unless one is a physician or a surgeon.”

  “If this takes me out of my head enough for you to do what you must, then I shall co
ntinue to purchase it from you until the day I die,” Jeremy said, smiling in a twisted way. “I don’t mind the taste if I think about what it’s doing for me.”

  While they let the “concoction” take effect, Swindon set water to boiling over a small fire outside, then poured the water into a large, clean porcelain bowl.

  Jeremy did not want to examine what tools were going to go into the bowl too closely. He thought instead of little Luke, his son who’d only started to toddle and babble by the time he went away. He did not really think of Lady Hareden with much fondness. Oh, Isabel was not going to be pleased that her husband was coming home scathed.

  But then, she never was pleased with him. He turned his back on the sight of Swindon’s instruments, but the soft clink of metal against porcelain made him shiver.

  “Who taught you to do that?”

  “Do what, your grace?”

  “The, ah, precautions with the hot water.”

  “The man who apprenticed me said it helped prevent the spread of disease.”

  “How?”

  “We can only guess. But it does seem to help.”

  “Did the physicians at St. Bartholomew’s do it?”

  “Some, but not all.”

  Swindon was now setting out all of his necessary objects. Caught by an irresistible, abrupt, and morbid urge to see, Jeremy shifted back around and looked.

  The source of the metallic sound was a hardy amputation knife followed by a tourniquet—another, but clean, rag to be used as a tourniquet, anyway, long gone were very fresh strips of fabric—his eyes widened and he had to look at his own boots instead.

  “I am going to find Mr. Atkins, your grace.”

  “Why?” Jeremy asked blankly, more out of reflex than anything. He did not really have to ask. Mr. Atkins was an enormous, fair-haired, freckled aide-de-camp who’d suddenly found himself a participant in more grisly procedures than he ever thought he’d witness. It wasn’t exactly part of an aide-de-camp’s remit and while many other men in Atkins’ position might view it as beneath them, he’d taken it admirably in his stride. Maybe he was a youngest son, or not of the ton at all? Jeremy had not thought to inquire.