Trapped in Their Manor, Twin Dukes Keep Me Captive

I swear by the Almighty Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit: if I had known that Count Chartres, Helena’s father, would return halfway through the ball that night, I would never have agreed to her invitation to sneak into her bedchamber at nine in the evening—not even if Helena possessed beauty equal to Helen of Troy, whose face brought the great city of Troy to its ruin. Yet events unfolded in the most inconceivable fashion. On his way to a separate ball, Count Chartres suddenly realized he had forgotten the diamond necklace meant as a gift for Viscountess Loyal—damn that accursed necklace! Eager to curry favor with the lady, the aging noble ordered his coachman to turn the carriage around and head back to his manor. Around that time, a loose-lipped footman—who I strongly suspected had caught me lingering too close to the household maids the day prior—told the Count that Helena was feeling deathly unwell and had not touched a bite of dinner. Desperate to show his doting affection for his daughter, the Count went straight to Helena’s private chambers himself. I need not paint you a picture of the scene that followed; you can easily imagine it. I scrambled out of the second-story window in a shameful panic as the enraged Count roared after me, shouting for his servants to fetch his hunting shotgun. The Count became the laughingstock of all Württemberg’s nobility. It was not because Helena had likely lost her long-coveted chance to wed the future Duke of Württemberg, but rather because his handling of the whole affair was utterly undignified and utterly unbecoming of a peer. Failing to catch me and beat me half to death as he’d intended, he marched straight to the palace to weep before the Duke of Württemberg, demanding I be stripped of my noble rank and exiled to Africa. The Duke thought little of the matter, yet to pacify the Count, he deemed some punishment necessary for me. “Send the girl off to the countryside,” he decreed. “She shall not set foot in Ludwigsburg for three years.” This was no trivial penalty. In the Duchy of Württemberg in 1769, apart from bustling Ludwigsburg—the namesake of my paternal family’s old estate—the rest of the land held nothing but starving serfs and provincial aristocrats with dreadfully rustic manners. To be confined to such backwaters would have been a fate worse than death for a lady of my station. But the Duke had only forbidden me from entering Ludwigsburg. He had said nothing of Paris, London, or traveling abroad to other realms. Naturally, Count Chartres seethed with resentment, yet he could do nothing to change the Duke’s edict. The reason the Duke handed down such a mild sentence was simple: my mother, the late renowned Viscountess Edmond, celebrated in her youth for her grace and beauty, still retained a measure of his favor. Now, allow me to properly introduce myself: I am Eleanor Franquemont Edmond, Viscountess Edmond. Officially, I am the daughter of the late Viscount Edmond; in truth, I am one of the many illegitimate daughters of Duke Karl Eugen of Württemberg. Yes, every party involved knows the truth—the Duke, Viscountess Edmond, myself, and even the late Viscount Edmond, who took the secret to his grave. Truth be told, Viscount Edmond would have lived and died an obscure knight had he not wed my mother. Men speak that a king is father to all his subjects, who ought to love him as they love God—and the Duke of Württemberg was father to a great many souls indeed. He fathered six legitimate sons alone. For all his unacknowledged bastards, sons and daughters alike, he bestowed the middle name Franquemont upon them. To my knowledge, five of these Franquemont illegitimate children hold noble titles, thirteen bear none, and countless more of far lower station never dare show their faces in aristocratic circles—so many, in fact, that even the Duke himself likely cannot keep count. Thanks to the Duke’s leniency, I made merry preparations to journey to foreign lands. Yet even the Duke could never have foreseen what Count Chartres would do to get his revenge. The Count hired men to pose as slave traders and waylay me on the road to the posting station! His men seized me as if I were a common peasant girl, herded me alongside other abducted common folk, and sold us to the Duke’s army as auxiliary recruits contracted to serve Britain. In turn, I was shipped off to the wild British Colony of Georgia in North America.