A Sister's Secret Read Online Free Page A

Cumberland is using it to command Lady Russell’s obedience.’
    ‘Obedience?’
    Caroline showed distaste. ‘Obedience to his demands, Captain Burnside. I am sure you know precisely what I mean. Cumberland has the devil’s own way of bringing the most reluctant woman to a bed. Lady Russell, at a country house party for a week, with her husband and other guests, had the misfortune to see her husband take a tumble that broke his leg. Incapacitated, he was placed in a ground-floor room to rest and recuperate. Lady Russell, alone in her bedroom that night, woke up to find Cumberland beside her.’
    ‘Say no more, marm,’ said the captain considerately. ‘I quite understand. Ravishment, alas, and yet the sweet weakness of yielding. And so, no doubt, illicit passion was born and indiscreet billets-doux began to spring from the wanton heart. Poor woman.’
    ‘Pray curb your vivid imagination,’ said Caroline. ‘Lady Russell has no wanton heart. Ravished, yes, but much against her will.’ Her lashes flickered. ‘Cumberland is all of capable of such a thing. She might have cried out, might have called for help, but there was her husband, sick andsuffering with a broken leg in uncomfortable splints. It was not a moment to make her shame known. Further, it was Cumberland she would have had to denounce, and, though he would not have given a fig for it, I vow he would have paid her out in a most unpretty fashion.’
    ‘And so she yielded,’ said the captain.
    ‘Only in shame and anguish, sir.’
    ‘Quite so, marm.’
    Caroline frowned. ‘You are cynical, sir?’ she said.
    ‘Experienced,’ said the captain.
    ‘In ravishment?’ she enquired coldly.
    ‘In my observation of human weakness,’ smiled the captain.
    Caroline frowned again. The truth was of a shaming kind, according to Hester herself. In desperation and tears she had confessed all to Caroline. Cumberland had indeed ravished her, despite her resistance, a resistance weakened by the circumstances and perhaps, yes, perhaps by the magnetic quality of the man. Hester had blushed vividly in confessing this, in confessing all that had led to her eventual submission, and Caroline remembered all too clearly how Cumberland had attempted to bring her to bed at Great Wivenden. Hester said that after her shameful submission she had begged Cumberland to leave, but he had stayed, he had shared her bed until dawn. Much to her further shame, instead of doing the only obvious thing – slipping from the bed herself and going down to keep her suffering husband company by sleeping in a chair beside him – she had allowed Cumberland to stay and had stayed herself. He took full advantage of this and further ravishment took place during the night, and she was horrified by the extent of her submission. Worse, she conceived a carnal passion for him, a passion that was a quite unspeakableconsequence of her shameful night. She became his mistress, his infatuated mistress.
    ‘Yes, weakness did exist,’ said Caroline, returning to the subject after her long, reflective pause, ‘and I vow it a despairing thing in such a sweet woman as Lady Russell. She did conceive a passion for Cumberland. Myself, I should have conceived only a desire to strike the man dead.’
    ‘We are at the point, marm,’ said Captain Burnside, ‘where I may assume Cumberland has a revealing letter of hers and uses it to bring her to his bed from time to time?’
    ‘You assume correctly,’ said Caroline, ‘and she is in utter distraction, for her ardour died after a few brief months and she is terrified her husband will discover her guilt. If you can procure that letter from Cumberland, you will be gratefully rewarded. Since he is blackmailing her, I trust I can rely on you to see that the biter is bitten. You can accomplish this at the card table, achieving such substantial IOUs as to compel him to give up the letter in exchange for them. Such are the debts of all the royal dukes that they are never in