Afterwards
229 Words
Afterwards
When Henry Quayle, fifth Earl of Malmstoke, returned from the West Indies and read his wife’s suicide letter, he screamed with rage. Turning on Boyle, he drove her from Creed Hall with his horsewhip, beating her as savagely as he’d ever beaten his young wife. Then, mad with fury, he ransacked his wife’s room, smashing furniture, shredding her clothes.
In Rose’s dressing room, he discovered her godmother’s jewelry case. Quayle broke it open with a poker. He shrieked like a banshee when he saw the pebbles nestling in the satin lining and the note his dead wife had left for him. Midway through smashing the box to smithereens, he felt a pain in his chest. Breathing became difficult. His legs buckled.
“Help,” he whispered, but nobody heard him.
It was several hours before his servants dared to venture into that part of the house. They found their master dead on the floor, his wife’s note clenched in one fist.
Eighteen months later, on the other side of the Atlantic, Will and Rose Cobb’s first child was born, on a bright spring day when the foals pranced in the meadows and young fruit trees blossomed in the orchard.
The sixth Earl of Malmstoke, disliking Creed Hall’s bleak aspect and unpleasant history, placed it on the market. The Hall, along with the hidden cupboard and the countess’s secret journal, passed into the hands of the Strickland family. But that’s another story . . .
- Writer
