John Forsythe

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Tea with a doting mother

Eleanor, the Duchess of Winshire always greeted the Duchess of Kingston with warmth and courtesy. More so than if she had actually liked the woman, for Eleanor held that courtesy and kindness was a duty that one owed to oneself, however unworthy the recipient. 

Today, she was struggling to maintain her facade. “And so you see, duchess,” said the other lady, “that scoundrel has kept my poor daughter-in-law’s baby from her out of sheer spite. My son’s baby, too, as the world knows, though she was born during my daughter-in-law’s unfortunate first marriage. Heaven alone knows how he treats the dear little girl.”

“Very well, or so I understand from Cordelia Deerhaven,” Eleanor replied. “Cordelia says that John Forsythe is besotted with his daughter.”

“But duchess,” Kingston’s duchess complained, “of course, Lady Deerhaven would make that claim. But the little girl is not Forsythe’s so why should he treat her well? And how do we know that he does?”

“I am sure you do not intend to imply that Cordelia lies, duchess,” Eleanor said. Mendacious of her, for she was certain that her guest meant to imply that very thing. “She is, after all, a lady of excellent reputation.” Unlike the other duchess’s daughter-in-law, who had abandoned little Jane years ago to run off with the married lover who had got her with child before she trapped poor John Forsythe into marriage.  whom she had since married. Neither of them had shown any interest in the child until the last few weeks.

“Cordelia and her husband visit Cumbria frequently, and she has mentioned many times over the years how much Captain Forsythe loves Jane. I do not know, duchess, how often you have visited…?” That was even more of a lie. Eleanor knew perfectly well that the Kingstons had never visited; had never even written to enquire about the good health and wellbeing of the little girl who was John Forsythe’s in every way except blood.

The Duchess of Kingston stood, her mouth puckered as if she had sucked on the lemon, and her nose in the air. “I can see you have made up your mind to support that reprobate Forsythe. I see no point in prolonging this conversation. Rest assured that my husband and I will do everything we can to support our son and his wife in his efforts to bring our granddaughter back where she belongs.”

Eleanor stood, as well. “I can assure you, your grace, that even if I was not an intimate friend of the family, I and my family would still be doing everything we can to ensure that a happy little girl is not ripped away from the place where she belongs by people who have not shown any interest in her for her entire life to date. My butler will show you out.”

***

The ton refused to support Lord and Lady Tenby and Tenby’s ducal parents in their demands to have Jane Forsythe handed over. Their legal challenge failed in the courts, for part of the settlement of the divorce Lady Tenby had demanded had been  absolution from any responsibility for or interest in her daughter. The Tenby’s therefore kidnapped the child, inadvertently taking with them Pauline Turner, who loved both the child and John Forsythe.

This story and what happened next is told in Perchance to Dream, out on September 7th.

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An Excerpt from Lady Beast’s Bridegroom on WIP Wednesday

This excerpt gives you my hero and his best friend.

After washing off the dust of the journey and changing into clean clothes, he set out in search of a dinner. He was just about to enter a pie shop that looked clean and was busy enough to hint at tolerable food when he was hailed.

“Peter! I thought you were buried for life in the country!” He turned to see Captain John Forsythe, who had served with Peter during the Peninsular campaign and later in Belgium. As tall as Peter himself, John had dark hair while Peter’s was fair. John was altogether more massively constructed, so that he felt as strongly about the nickname ‘Bull’ as Peter did about being called ‘Beau’.

Strictly speaking, the man was Captain Lord John Forsythe, but he refused to use the honorific, saying he had done nothing to deserve it beyond being born in a marquess’s family some years after his older brother.

John looked in the doorway of the pie shop and protested. “Not here, Peter. I can do better for you than that. I’m off to my club to have dinner. You will join me, of course.”

“I thought I’d just pick up a pie,” Peter told him.

“Not enough to keep body and soul together.”

“I don’t know,” Peter protested. “Remember that pork pie in Belgium?” After Waterloo, that had been. A baker, delirious with joy at the defeat of Napoleon, had given them her entire day’s baking as they passed her establishment on their way back into Brussels. After handing most of the haul out to the men they’d managed to bring back with them, John and Peter had shared the last pie.

“Pure heaven,” John agreed. “But so is the roast beef at Westruthers, Peter. Come on. Eat with me. I want to know what you’ve been up to.” His mouth twitched upward in a smile. “And I want to tell you about my betrothed.”

“You are betrothed? John! When did that happen? Who is the unfortunate lady?” He fell into step beside his friend and listened to rhapsodies about the most perfect and lovely woman in the world all the way to the club and on through most of the two courses of a delicious meal.

Eventually, even John realized he was repeating himself. “I am sorry, Peter. You should have stopped me. You cannot be interested in where Belinda is buying her bridal clothes and what linen she has chosen for our new townhouse.”

“I need to meet the lady for whom you have become interested in such things, John.”

“Come with me tomorrow afternoon and I’ll introduce you,” John proposed, and when Peter demurred, saying that he would not want to play gooseberry, John said it was no such thing. “For I am never allowed to be alone with her, more is the pity. Even when I proposed, her mother sat on the other side of the room. And no wonder. She is a diamond, Peter, in every way. Do come along, for her drawing room will be crowded with callers and it will be good to have a friend of my own there.”

And why not, after all? His appointment with Mr. Richards was at noon, so he was sure to be free by three o’clock. “Very well. I’ll come and make the acquaintance of your paragon. When is the wedding?”

That set John off again. The date had been set for after the end of the Season, and none of John’s representations had served to move it closer. “Her mother will not hear of it,” he complained. “I promised we would remain in town so that Belinda could continue to enjoy the parties and so forth, but her mother insists. They will not even announce the betrothal, or allow me to speak of it.” He sighed.

“What does your betrothed say?” Peter wondered.

“Oh, that she cannot wait to be my wife, but she feels she owed it to her mama to abide by the lady’s wishes. And I do see that. Belinda is the Weatheralls’ only daughter, and Weatherall tells me that his wife and Belinda have spent all winter planning for the fun of the Season.”

John managed not to raise his eyebrows. “I collect that Miss Weatherall is a young lady, just out?”

“This is her third Season, but she has had a hard time of it in other years, poor dear. Girls jealous of her beauty have been very cruel to her. I cannot help but admire her courage in returning. She is wonderful, Peter, and very mature for her age, I assure you. A great reader, and feels just as she should on all the things important to me.” His eyes stared into nothing and his lips curved in a fatuous smile. “And as beautiful as the dawn.”

He continued to extol the virtues of his beloved until Peter declared himself ready for bed after his days of travel, and they parted with an arrangement to meet the following afternoon.

 

 

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First meeting on WIP Wednesday

First meeting in the book, that is. They first met a decade earlier, and the picture he formed of her was not positive. When she turns up at his house seeking refuge, he suspects her of ulterior motives, and is certain she must be causing trouble. After fretting about it all morning, he goes to find them, sure they won’t have stayed in their room, as his housekeeper assured him they would.

He heard nothing in the house. No voices, no movement. Down the main central passage he went, from one end of the main wing to the other, and then up the branch passage that led to the other tower.

When he reached the other end of the main wing, he knew he had been right. The visitors had not stayed put. He could hear them downstairs in Mrs. Thorne’s kitchen, laughing and talking. What on earth were ladies like that doing in the kitchen? Making a nuisance of themselves, he’d be bound.

He wasn’t going to be kept out of his own kitchen by a pair of Society ladies. And if they were bothering Mrs. Thorne, they could simply get back to their rooms, and so he would tell them.

He walked down the servants’ stairs to the kitchen, which was in the lowest level of the main wing of the house. It and its associated store rooms were the only part of the main wing in regular use, though Mrs. Thorne had women from the village up several times a year to give the whole place a good clean.

When he reached the bottom of the stairs, he was struck dumb by the sight of a pretty young lady in a simple day gown slicing a loaf of bread, while an older one whom he recognized as Miss Turner was helping Jane to sprinkle powdered sugar over the top of a cake.

That was the most startling part of the scene, though all of those currently in the kitchen were busy. Another strange female, presumably the maid, was buttering the slices as Lady Vivienne cut them, and a large lean man had stopped setting the empty end of the table with crockery and cutlery to eye him suspiciously.

Jane looked up from the cake and flung up her hands, scattering sugar all over Miss Turner. “Papa!”

Mrs. Thorpe twisted her hands in her apron and eyed him warily. “Captain, sir.”

John heard her, but couldn’t tear his eyes off Miss Turner, who was nothing like the besom of his imagination. She wasn’t even much like her former self except in general appearance, somewhat modified by the passage of time. The haughty female who had been bosom friends with his former betrothed wore her discontent on her face and looked down her nose at the world.

This older version of the woman he had met years ago was altogether softer. More rounded, for a start. Eight years ago, she had been slender to the point of gaunt. The extra weight was distributed in all the right places, too, which he shouldn’t be noticing.

Nor was she dressed in the height of fashion. In fact, he was fairly certain he had seen the dress under the capacious apron that had caught most of the sugar. If he was right, and it was one of Mrs. Thorne’s, she certainly didn’t seem to be bothered by it.

She was laughing as she dusted sugar off her nose and cheeks. When she darted out a tongue to taste her own lips, he tore his eyes away, embarrassed by his reaction.

“Papa, did you come to have some of my cake? Miss Turner and I made it our own selves!”

There was only one possible answer. “I would love some cake you made, Jane of mine.” For his darling girl’s sake, and not because he was at all interested, he added, “Will you introduce me to our guests?”

Jane went to jump down from the chair she was standing on and realized two things in swift succession. First, that she was still holding the sieve of powdered sugar. Two, as she turned to hand it to Miss Turner, that the lady was had been soundly dusted.

“Oh dear,” Jane said. “I threw sugar on you.”

“These things happen,” Miss Turner said, with a twinkle in her eye. “You were excited to see your Papa.” She took the sieve and held out the other hand to help Jane jump to the floor.

Jane grabbed John by the hand and pulled him towards the table. “Lady Vivienne and Miss Turner, may I present my Papa, Captain Forsythe?”

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The Preface on WIP Wednesday

This is a long one–2,500 words. I’ve written a preface for Perchance to Dream, and I don’t know if it is good, bad, or indifferent. If you can bear to read it, let me know your opinion in the comments.

John Forsythe placed a tender kiss on the cheek of his baby daughter, then passed her to her nursemaid, gently, so as not to wake her. “You have worn her out, my lord,” the nursemaid whispered, smiling.

John returned the smile. His hour and a half outside with his little girl had cemented the decision he’d been coming to for weeks. In a few days, she would reach her first birthday. It was time for John and Tina Jane’s mother to resolve their difficulties. Yes, their marriage had begun in lies and continued in discord, but surely they could build on their joint love for their daughter and build a real marriage? John was going to find his wife and ask her to try.

He had collected Tina Jane from the nursery after her breakfast and carried her with him on his rounds of the stable, the dairy, the barn and the poultry yards. He couldn’t say who enjoyed it more—him or the baby girl, who loved the animals, the bustle, and being with her father.

The name had been the cause of one of their fights. Augusta had wanted to name her baby Phillippa Augustina, uniting her own name with that of Philip Spindler, the treacherous rat who had impregnated her then abandoned her to marry the bride who was his family’s choice.

John had first been flabbergasted at her sheer effrontery at wanting to name the child born in their marriage after her former lover, then furious. Augusta reacted to his unequivocal ‘no’ with a six-week-long sulk. She had shut herself in her room and had refused to talk to him. She had not even visited the baby.

As he searched the house for his wife, John’s mind continued to revisit the sorrowful memories. The saddest part was that it had been six weeks of bliss. None of her tantrums or weeping jags or other dramatics. Jane could get on with the work of the estate, and spend all his spare time with the baby. He had fallen in love with the wee mite from the moment she had been placed in his arms on the day she was born, and had tumbled more deeply every hour he spent with her.

In the end, he had given Augustina Jane her first name as an overture of peace to his wife.

After all, however it came about, however he and Augusta felt about it, they were married. It had, to a degree, worked. Augusta emerged from her room, resumed her place at the dinner table, accompanied him to social events in the neighbourhood and did her best to behave well in public.

She even began to show an interest in the baby, or at least in having Tina Jane’s nursemaid trail behind Augusta with the little girl dressed in a gown made from scraps of fabric left over from whatever Augusta was wearing. “Do we not make a picture, Lord John?” she would simper.

“Where is Lady John?” he asked each servant that he met, but she must be restless today, for she was not in any of the rooms to which he was sent. Lord and Lady John. She insisted on the ridiculous title rather than his preferred use of the military title he had earned fighting Napoleon’s armies, and retained as a part time soldier in the local militia.

Again, it seemed a small price to pay for a relative degree of marital peace.

“She is very young,” he reminded himself. Only nineteen when he met her, and much younger in her years. Her parents had alternatively ignored her and given in to her many whims. She had always been able to get anything she wanted, merely by having a tantrum.

Even John, though she had not wanted John himself. Only a fool with an estate and noble connections who could be trapped into marrying her without asking too many questions. An older man she could manipulate as she had manipulated her parents.

She had been disappointed to discover that the worn-out soldier she’d conspired to trap had a will stronger than her own, and would not bend to her pleading or her histrionics.

Though he gave way to her in minor things, all the sulking in the world had not convinced him to allow her to redecorate the house that had been fully refurbished eighteen months ago before they moved into it, or to take her to London for the Season where they would inevitably meet Spindler and his wife, or to fire Thorne, his manservant, who had been with him since Salamanca in the Peninsular Wars, because Thorne had come across her beating the nursemaid with a riding crop, and had taken the crop off her.

John, appealed to by both Augusta and his manservant, discovered that the nursemaid’s crime had been to argue that Tina Jane should not go out visiting with Augusta on a cold and blustery day, since the poor little girl had the sniffles.

John had been coldly furious. “Miss Embrow was right to protest, Augusta. Taking our daughter out in this weather when she is already ill would have been foolish.”

“But Lord John,” Augusta protested, “it was not her place to question my instructions.”

“It is her place to put the welfare of the baby first. But even if she was wrong, you should not have beaten her. I will not have any in my household subjected to such violence. You will never raise a hand or any other implement to a servant again.”

She had been cowed by his anger, perhaps, for she slunk away and treated him to a week-long sulk, after which she emerged to demand that Thorne be dismissed for laying hands on her when he took the crop off her.

John’s refusal earned him the silent treatment for a further two weeks.

Still, she had not persisted, so perhaps she was learning. She was, after all, nearly twenty-one and had become a mother. She might be maturing. He’d seen a firm hand and kindness transform many a wild young man into a steady officer.

Indeed, for the last few days, she had been smiling, sometimes even at John. She had even spent an hour in the nursery yesterday, ignoring Miss Embrow as she had since the incident, but playing pat-a-cake and peep-a-boo with the baby.

Where on earth could the woman be? She was not in the house, and she was hardly one to spend hours in the garden. He checked with the stables, and discovered that she’d ridden out, and refused to take a groom with her.

John was worried. Augusta was not the most accomplished of riders. Perhaps she has fallen. He ordered his own horse saddled and rode off in the direction the grooms indicated.

The path split, with one branch entering his woods, and the other joining the lane that led out to the village road. John rode a short way along the lane, but he could not see Augusta or a horse, so he returned to the woods. Perhaps she felt the need of the shade.

The path led to a clearing where the woodcutter had a cottage that he used, but this was not the season for harvesting or planting or clearing undergrowth. So why were two horses tied up at the side of the cottage, and why was smoke rising from the chimney?

John stopped just inside the trees to examine the scene. He couldn’t be sure, as it was in the shade and partly obscured by the larger of the two horses, but he thought the smaller one was Augusta’s mare. He was still processing the implications of that when the cottage door opened and two people came out. One was Augusta. The other he could identify by the man’s white-blonde hair. It was Spindler. The swine bent to give John’s wife a tender kiss.

John nudged his horse into a walk. Spindler looked up at the clop of hooves, started, and ran for his own horse. John resisted the urge to give chase as Splindler threw himself into the saddle and kicked the beast into a gallop. After all, what would he do with the man if he caught him?

Rearranging the dirty dog’s pretty face would be satisfying, but it wouldn’t solve the problem of his marriage.

Augusta looked up at him without a hint of remorse or concern, trying but failing to compose her face into a serious expression. But a beaming smile of absolute delight kept breaking through. “Lord John, don’t be cross. We didn’t do anything, honestly. And he brought such good news.”

He didn’t trust himself to speak to her. He dismounted, tied his horse beside hers, and walked past her into the cottage. Didn’t do anything? The blankets had been thrown from the bed and the room reeked of sex.

Augusta had followed him, to stand in the door. “You must try to understand, Lord John. We have not been together for nearly two years.”

Nor had Augusta and John. Not once since they wed. John had been patient, thinking that she would accept their marriage in time. He had also been celibate, since he had long since promised himself that he would never cheat against his marriage vows, as both his parents had.

And she thought he should understand? “I do not understand, Augusta.” When Captain Forsythe spoke in that tight clipped voice, soldiers knew to stand to attention and keep quiet, for retribution was about to fall. “I don’t understand how you can stand there and expect me to countenance you and your lover meeting in secret, right here on my lands, less than a mile from the nursery where our daughter sleeps.”

Augusta was not one of his soldiers. “My daughter,” she insisted. “Mine and Phillip’s.”

A touch of panic spiked his fury. “Not according to the law,” he reminded himself. “She was born within our marriage. I have claimed her. Spindler has no rights here.”

At that, the smile blossomed again, though her eyes remained wary. “Not Spindler. Lord John, that is what he came to say! Kingston is dead! Phillip is free!”

The Duke of Kingston was Spindler’s grandfather, and in some ways the orchestrator of John’s misery. Spindler had been his pensioner, along with his mother and father. Disliking his grandson’s attachment to Augusta, who had only beauty to recommend her, being of modest family and wealth, he forced Spindler to make a choice. Poverty and Augusta. Riches and a bride of Kingston’s choosing. Either he did not care that the scoundrel had impregnated Augusta, or her condition did not become apparent until after her lover married the selected lady.

Kingston’s death was not a surprise. Even John, who took no notice of Society gossip, knew he had been failing since the apoplexy that followed the tragic deaths, months ago, of his heir and his heir’s son. Which made Spindler’s father the heir presumptive, and now the duke. Spindler’s father, who had never refused his son anything except his attention.

“He is not free,” he told Augusta. “Your lover is married and so are you. You both have a spouse and a child.”

She stared at him as if he was speaking in a foreign language. John didn’t want to look at her. He moved around the room, picking up a chair that had been knocked over, folding the blankets, pulling the underblanket off the mattress and throwing it into a heap by the door to take to the laundrymaid.

“We can be together,” Augusta insisted. “Tenby—he is Earl of Tenby now—does not have to please his grandfather ever again.”

John faced Augusta. She was clenching her fists and jutting her chin, ready to fight. “Augusta, talk sense. You are both married. Tenby lives in London. You live here, with me.” His voice dropped to a growl. “And you can be sure I will not turn a blind eye to you meeting your lover here or in London.”

He took a deep breath. She was not listening to him. Instead, her eyes were fixed on some mythical and impossible future that only she and Tenby could see.

“Augusta, we could make something of our marriage. Wouldn’t life be better if we were comfortable with one another? Would you not like more children?”

That caught her attention. “No!” she declared. “I don’t ever want to go through that again, getting lumpy and ugly. And then the pain! No, my lord, not even for Tenby. But he says he has his heir and that cow is pregnant again, so there might even be a spare. He will not ask it of me.”

John shook his head. It was like arguing with a river. You could talk all you liked, but it wasn’t going to stop flowing in the direction it had chosen. “You and Tenby cannot wed,” he pointed out. “You are both married to other people.”

At that, she crossed the room, laid a hand on his arm, and looked up at him pleadingly. “Yes, but we could live together. Tenby says that if I move in with  him, you can easily sue him for stealing me away (though I was always his, so that part I do not understand), and then petition the church for a legal separation. You get to keep Augustina, and you will not have to pay for clothes and the like for me ever again. And I get Tenby.”

“You will be cast out of Society,” John warned. He would, too. Not so much because he would be blamed, but because he would be laughed at. People might pity a cuckold, but they did not admire him. Still, he could live without Society.

“We can live in Paris, Tenby says,” Augusta said, airily, “where they understand these things. It is the best plan, my lord. Everyone gets what they want.”

“What of Lady Tenby? What does she want?”

If John had hoped to appeal to Augusta’s sympathy for another woman, he would have been disappointed. She shrugged. “She gets to call herself Marchioness and live at Spindler Palace with her sons. I don’t care about her. It is me that Tenby loves.”

“My answer is no. Your plan is foolish, Augusta. You and Tenby owe it to your children to make the best of your marriages. Come. We shall return to the house. I shall write to Tenby and tell him that if he approaches you again, he will regret it.”

That was not the end of it, of course. Augusta was convinced that she was the female half of a romance for the ages: a Helen of Troy, an Isolde, a Guinevere, an Eloise, a Juliet. Nothing would be allowed to stand in the way of her happy ending. She blocked John’s every attempt at a reconciliation, raised the option of a legal separation at every opportunity heedless of who else might be listening, and in the end forced his hand by running away to France with Tenby.

By then, it was almost a relief to see the end of what would have been a total disaster from the beginning, except it had given John his little Jane. When Lady Tenby died shortly after the church courts had granted their legal separation, John barely argued at all about taking a case to the House of Lords for a full divorce.

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Reluctant heroes on WIP Wednesday

The Writer is an automaton built in the 1770s using 6,000 moving parts by Pierre Jaquet-Droz, his son Henri-Louis, and Jean-Frédéric Leschot. Some regard it as the world’s first programmable computer. In Perchance to Dream, my hero makes automata.

I’m trying my hand at an enemies to lovers trope in the next book in A Twist Upon a Regency Tale. In Perchance to Dream, my hero had shut himself away in the country. He lives in a tower, guarded by his faithful servants, the Thornes. Guess the fairy tale! Here’s John’s first scene.

Ravenham, Cumbria, May 1825

“Another letter from that Miss Turner, Captain,” Thorne reported.

“Throw it in the fire,” John commanded. Thorne didn’t comment, but put the letter into his pocket, no doubt to store it with the others.

He didn’t need to read it to know it would be another request for cuttings from the roses that rambled everywhere at Rosewood Towers. At least, he assumed that all five letters were on the same topic. Not that he’d read them, but Arial, Lady Stancroft, whose letters he did read, had said that was what Miss Turner wanted.

Or claimed to want. Arial was one of only three females in the world that John trusted. Arial, wife of his dearest friend, Peter Ransome, Earl of Stancroft. Cordelia, wife of his half-brother, the Marquess of Deerhaven. Thorne’s wife, Maggie Thorne. Presumably, the world held other good females, whom John had not encountered. Pansy Turner was not one of them. John remembered her from his time in London, eight years ago, and wouldn’t trust her an inch. Arial, who was kind and good, might think the harpy would travel all the way to Cumbria for a bunch of rose cuttings. John was sure the Turner female had other motives, to do with her being single and him lacking a wife.

“If that’s all, Thorne,” John hinted.

“No, sir. I came to remind you that you promised to take Miss Jane fishing this afternoon.”

He had, too. He cast a wistful glance at the pieces of automaton scattered across his work table. “Tell Mrs Thorne I will collect her in ten minutes,” he said. “I had better change into something old.”

Not that he had anything new. He had last bought clothes in 1818, not long before he married Jane’s mother. But Mrs Thorne would growl if he went fishing in anything that was still presentable enough for visitors. Not that he ever had visitors.

Jane was waiting impatiently when he arrived at the other tower. “Papa, I thought you had forgotten me,” she scolded.

“Hush, Miss Jane,” said Mrs Thorne, throwing him a worried glance. “Your Papa would never forget you.”

That hurt on two counts. First, that Mrs Thorne could think he would be cross with his darling girl for challenging him. Second, that the only reason he was here, as the Thornes well knew, was his standing order to remind him of any promise to his daughter. When the melancholoy was bad, he forgot everything.

“I am sorry I am late, darling girl. Shall we go and catch some fishies?”

She gifted him with a sweet smile, took his offered hand, and for a moment, his world righted.

The world held four good females, he amended, and the best of them all was Jane, who was only seven. She was something of a tyrant, but she had a good heart.

They passed the rambling manor house and walked through the wild overgrown garden to the trout stream. Jane described the fish she was going to catch, speculated on when her wiggly tooth might fall out, spelled for him the words she had learned that morning, and described the new dress Mrs Thorne was making for her, which was the same colour as the roses.

The roses reminded him of Miss Turner. Five letters! The woman was determined. He hoped the latest would be the end of it.