A Secret Affair (25 page)

Barbara set her letter down, resigned to the interruption.

“You are upset?” she asked.

“I am
never
upset,” Hannah said. Then she set down her own letter and smiled ruefully at her friend. “Well, a little, I suppose. I had looked forward to having them there.”

“Why?” Barbara asked. “When one is to have one’s lover at a house party, Hannah, why would one want his family there too?”

It was a good question and one she had been asking herself just a few moments ago.

“Is it a little like inviting one’s family to join one on honeymoon?” Hannah asked.

They both laughed.

“But we will, of course, behave with the
utmost
discretion,” Hannah said. “Good heavens, the very idea that we might not.
You
will be there and all sorts of other respectable guests.”

“Then the cousins will be missing a pleasant few days in the country,” Barbara said, laying a hand on her letter again. “It will be their loss.”

“But I wanted them there,” Hannah said, hearing too late the slight petulance of her tone. And there was that word again that she had been warned against—
wanted
, but could not have.

Well, you cannot always have what you want
, she expected Barbara to say before returning her attention to her vicar’s love letter. But she said something else instead.

“Hannah,” she said, “you are not behaving at all like the jaded aristocrat with a new lover you like to see yourself as. You are behaving like a woman in love.”

“What?”
Hannah half screeched.

“Is it not a little peculiar,” Barbara asked—and she looked suddenly every inch a vicar’s daughter, “that you should care for the good opinion of your lover’s relatives?”

“I do
not
care—” Hannah began, and stopped. “I am not in love, Babs. How ridiculous. Just because
you
are, you think
I
must be too?”

“You said just now,” Barbara said, “that you were always rumored to have lovers even when it was not true. Was it
ever
true, Hannah? I never have believed it of you. The Hannah I used to know could never dishonor her marriage vows even if the circumstances of her marriage were … unusual.”

Hannah sighed. “No, of course there was never any truth in the rumors,” she said.

“Then Mr. Huxtable is your first lover,” Barbara said. It was a statement, not a question. “I do not believe the Hannah I once knew
or
the Hannah I know now can be simply blasé about that fact. And I saw you together at the Tower and at Gunter’s. You are fond of him.”

“Well, of course I am
fond
of him,” Hannah said crossly—goodness,
when had she last allowed herself to be
cross?
“I could not dislike or despise or even be entirely indifferent to any man who was my lover, could I?”

But why not be indifferent, at least? It was what she had expected to be, was it not?

“I know very little of gentlemen of the
ton
and really nothing whatsoever of Mr. Huxtable,” Barbara said, “except that I liked him far more than I expected to do when he took us to the Tower. I
thought
he seemed fond of you too, Hannah. But I do not know. And I am afraid for you. I am afraid you will end up hurt. Heartbroken.”

“I am never
hurt
, Babs,” Hannah said. “And never,
ever
heartbroken.”

“I would hate to see you either,” Barbara said. “But I would hate even more to believe that neither was possible. It would mean that you had not got the point at all of why the Duke of Dunbarton married you and loved you.”

Hannah fixed her eyes upon her friend. She felt suddenly cold. And afraid to move so much as a muscle.

“The point?” The words came out in a whisper.

“So that you could be made whole again,” Barbara said. “And ready for love—
real
love—when it came along. The duke did not see just your beauty, Hannah. He called you an
angel
, did he not? He saw all your essential sweetness and your shattered joy on that day when you discovered the truth about Dawn and Colin. Even now you have not seen how very special you are, have you? The
duke
saw it.”

Barbara went suddenly out of focus, and Hannah realized that her eyes were swimming in tears. She got abruptly to her feet, almost tipping her chair in her haste to push it back.

“I am going out,” she said. “I am going to call upon the Countess of Sheringford. I would rather go alone. Will you mind?”

“I did not have time yesterday to write more than a few lines to either Mama and Papa or Simon,” Barbara said. “I need to write longer letters this morning. I am starting to feel selfish and neglectful.”

Hannah hurried from the room.

To call upon the Countess of Sheringford? Whatever
for?

T
OBIAS
—T
OBY
—P
ENNETHORNE,
Sheringford’s eight-year-old son and Margaret’s too by adoption, had developed an insatiable interest in the geography of the world, and Constantine had spied the perfect gift for him in a shop window on Oxford Street, though his birthday was nowhere on the horizon. No matter. He bought the large globe anyway.

And because he could not show favoritism to one child when there were three, he bought a gaudily painted spinning top for three-year-old Sarah and an impressively loud wooden rattle for one-year-old Alexander.

He bore his offerings off to the home of the Marquess of Claverbrook on Grosvenor Square, where Margaret and Sheringford lived when they were in town—Sherry was the marquess’s grandson and heir. And he spent a pleasant hour in the nursery with Margaret and the children, Sherry being from home. He began to have doubts about the rattle, though, when Sarah appropriated it and decided that shattering everyone else’s eardrums as well as her own was to be the game of the morning. The baby meanwhile was fascinated by the top, though he spoiled the lovely spinning and humming each time someone set it in motion by grabbing the toy before it stopped. He howled in cross protest every time.

Toby found every continent and country and river and ocean and town in the known world, not to mention poles and elevations and lines of latitude and longitude, and insisted that his mother and Uncle Con come and see each new discovery. The globe began to look like an instrument of torture.

It all made the tea parties in the conservatory at Ainsley seem very tranquil events indeed, Constantine thought cheerfully. And it struck
him as an unexpected revelation under the circumstances that he liked children.

But had he not played endless games of hide-and-seek with Jon, that eternal child?

A knock on the nursery door, which they miraculously heard, preceded the appearance of a footman with the announcement that her grace, the Duchess of Dunbarton, had come to call on Lady Sheringford, and that his lordship had had her shown into the drawing room.

The duchess?
Here?

“Oh, goodness,” Margaret said, “Grandpapa never admits visitors. Oh, this is very vexing.”

“Vexing?” Constantine raised his eyebrows, and she flushed and did not quite meet his eyes.

“She invited us to spend four days at her home in Kent,” Margaret said, “and we sent back a refusal—with regrets.”

“Because—?” Constantine asked as there was a crescendo from the rattle, accompanied by a beatific look on Sarah’s face, a wail of protest from Alex as the top stopped its spinning yet again, and an excited invitation from Toby to come and see Madagascar.

“We do not wish to leave the children for so long,” Margaret said, setting the top to spinning again while Sarah went to see Madagascar, the rattle poised at her side.

And the duchess had responded to the refusal by coming here in person? She really did not take well to rejection, did she? And she did not often have to suffer it. Would she win Margaret over after all? Was that why she had come?

Sarah was spinning the globe under Toby’s watchful eye, and the baby had spied some other potential toy and was waddling about the furniture toward it, his bad temper—and the top—forgotten.

“Constantine.” Margaret met his eyes at last. “We cannot live your life for you—I would not even wish to try. But we can refuse to condone your association with a woman who is an utterly heartless …
predator.”

He clasped his hands behind his back.

“Those are harsh words,” he said.

“Yes,” she admitted, “they are.”

“I can remember a time,” he said, “when words of equal harshness were being bandied about over Sherry. But that did not stop you from taking up with him and betrothing yourself to him and ultimately marrying him.”

“That was different,” she said. “He was not guilty of any of the charges that had been made against him.”

“Perhaps,” he said, “the Duchess of Dunbarton is not either—guilty of the charges against
her
, I mean.”

“Oh, come, now,” she said.

He was in danger of losing his temper, he realized. He looked away from her. The baby had hold of one of Toby’s books and was about to make a meal of it. Constantine hurried across the room, rescued the book, and prevented the imminent protest by swinging the child up onto one of his shoulders.

“You
must
be besotted if you believe that,” Margaret said. “And we are all quite right to be concerned for you.”

“We,”
he said. “Were any of the others invited to Copeland too?”

“Not Nessie and Elliott,” she said. “But the others, yes.”

“And tell me,” he said, “have they all refused their invitations too?”

She had the grace to look away from him again.

“Yes,” she said.

Alex was pulling Constantine’s hair and shrieking with glee.

“Now let me see,” he said, disentangling his hair from the baby’s fist and setting him down beside a box of wooden bricks. “Monty was England’s most notorious hellion. I could vouch for that—I knew him. Katherine married him. Sherry we have already talked about. You married him. Cassandra was believed to have murdered her first husband—with an axe, even though it was a bullet that was found in Paget, not an axe wound. Stephen married her. And yet you all believe everything you have heard of the Duchess of Dunbarton without any objective proof at all?”

“How do you know we have no proof?” she asked.

“Because there
is
none,” he said. “She loved Dunbarton, even if not in a romantic way. She was true to her marriage vows until the day of his death, and she was true to her widowhood throughout the year of her mourning. I
know
, Margaret. I have had proof.”

Anger was making him speak quite rashly.

She was biting her upper lip.

“Oh, Constantine,” she said, “you
do
care for her. It is what we have most feared. But—are you
sure
you have not just come under her spell?”

He did not answer her—or look away from her.

“Proof.”

She closed her eyes and then opened them and looked herself again—in charge, as she always had been, the eldest sister who had brought up her siblings almost singlehanded and done a really rather splendid job of it too before going in search of some happiness for herself.

“I had better go down and see her,” she said. “Oh, goodness, Grandpapa will have eaten her whole by now. She is just the sort of frivolous person to set his teeth on edge. And is
that
too an illusion? Her frivolity?”

“I had better let you make some discoveries for yourself,” he said.

She was pulling on the bell rope, and the children’s nurse came almost immediately. Toby demanded that she come to see India, Sarah raised the rattle toward her and shook it with a flourish, and Alex banged one wooden brick against another and chuckled.

Constantine left the nursery with Margaret. He half thought of taking his leave altogether, but he could not resist getting a glimpse of Hannah up against one of the gruffest and grimmest old aristocrats in all England. And a near-recluse at that.

He rather hoped she had
not
been eaten alive. But his wager was on her.