I Married the Duke (21 page)

Arabella’s stomach was tight. “You say it was recently redecorated?”

Ravenna moved into the chamber. “The duke sent instructions weeks ago, apparently.”

Weeks ago, before she had known she was a
comtesse
or a duchess-in-waiting. When she had still believed herself to be the widow of a merchant shipmaster.

“Look, Bella.” Ravenna opened a door and poked her head inside. “A dressing chamber bigger than Papa’s entire cottage in Cornwall. The duke could house his carriage team in here. And it’s bursting with gowns. You could wear a different one each day for a month, I daresay.” She looked across to the opposite wall. “Presumably that is the door to his chambers.”

Eleanor grasped her hand. “Now, Bella, I will ring for tea and you will tell us how this all came about.”

L
UC DID NOT
join them for dinner. The butler informed Arabella that his grace had been called elsewhere on the estate by pressing matters and wouldn’t her grace like to enjoy the 1809 Burgundy with her
cailles en sauce de la reine
?

Later, in a nightrail of the finest silk edged with soft lace, she curled up on her wide mattress and listened to the sighs of the fire and sounds of her husband in the next chamber. Finally his door closed and his footsteps receded down the corridor.

S
HE BREAKFASTED IN
her bedchamber alone until Ravenna scratched on the door. She wore a gingham skirt with large pockets, a shirt, and snug waistcoat. Her wild, silky hair was bound back in a ribbon.

“Can I share your chocolate?” Ravenna asked. “Cook hadn’t made any by the time I went out to the stables. It seems that servants don’t drink chocolate in ducal mansions.” She wiggled her black brows and took up Arabella’s cup to sip.

“Do servants drink chocolate where you live?”

“I certainly do. But the nannies spoil me because I spoil their dogs.” She smiled.

“Do you like them?”

“I do. And they adore me. I am the only person in England, apparently, that knows how to keep twelve pugs, three wolfhounds, and two parrots all healthy and happy at once. It’s quite a marvelous arrangement.”

“But you are not entirely happy there.”

Ravenna picked at the toast. “You have always seemed to know my thoughts, Bella,” she said. “But I will make do. If you want to worry, worry about Ellie, shut away in Cornwall doing Papa’s work for him.”

“Is she unhappy?”

“She says she is content.” She shook her head.

A maid came to the door. “Your grace, the duke wishes you to join him at the stable in three-quarters of an hour. He asks that you dress to ride. May I assist you?”

S
TANDING AT THE
grand entrance to the long, low-roofed complex of stables, he watched her with leisurely and undisguised appreciation as she approached across the drive.

He bowed. “That habit suits you.”

She smoothed her palms over the velvet skirt the color of the autumn sky. “It is almost as though it had been made with me in mind.”

“Isn’t it?” He smiled.

“I should be wearing mourning for your uncle.”

“Rather, you should be wearing diamonds for me.”

“You—”

“If you tell me that I mustn’t attempt to purchase your obedience with pretty gifts, I will probably say something to the effect that I fully intend the beautiful gowns for my pleasure without any regard as to whether they would bring you pleasure too, or indeed ensure me any sort of other advantage. Then you will glower at me—”

“I do not glower.”

“—and we will quarrel and you will stalk away—”

“I do not stalk away, except perhaps twice.”

“—and I shan’t be afforded the pleasure of enjoying the beautiful gowns after all. So do spare me the chastisement, duchess.” He bowed. “If you will.”

“I do not wish to chastise you.” She could not bear this teasing when her heart was so confused. “I only wish to thank you for the gowns. For my chambers. For all that you have given me. But especially for bringing my sisters here.”

He studied her face for a moment, his expression unreadable. “It is my pleasure.” He turned to the broad door of the stable from which a groom was leading two horses. She touched his arm to stay him, and he paused and looked down at her hand. She withdrew it.

“Luc, it is unseemly that the servants address us as they do, as though the matter of the inheritance were already settled.”

“I have mentioned this to them several times, to no avail. They seem to have made up their minds on the matter.” His gaze glimmered. “And I have been told that servitude does not always teach a person meekness.”

Her cheeks warmed.

“Now,” he said with a gesture to the horses, “I aim to show you about Combe.” He did not invite her; he expected her compliance.

“I would like that.”

He assisted her to mount, wrapping his hands around her waist and sending her heart into her toes. She longed for the closeness he had given her on the crossing and for his hungry gaze. But he gave her only the most cursory glance as she arranged her skirts about her legs and the horse’s rear, and then he moved to his own mount.

The October day was fine, bright and crisp with only the barest wisps of clouds above the river, and the path was well trodden. It skirted a copse of ash and oaks and cut across a field speckled with sheep toward a farmhouse far in the distance nestled in a nook in the hill. Spread out from the house, regular, carefully furrowed plots sat fallow beside budding crops of winter wheat.

“Combe has been in my family for four centuries, though the present house was built in the time of Elizabeth,” he said. “I thought you might like to pay a call on some of the tenants. The family that lives in the house there, the Goodes, is the most prosperous.” Atop his great black horse, surveying his family’s land, he was at perfect ease, just as he had been on the deck of his ship.

“You seem familiar with the estate. Did you visit here often before you went to sea?”

“Until I was ten years old I lived at Combe with my parents and my brother. My father had a house in the North, but my mother preferred to reside here, where news of France traveled more swiftly from London. It was rarely good news in those days. Not for her family.”

He was silent then, and only the horses’ hoofs in the grass and the chatter of birds and an occasional sheep’s bleat stirred the air.

“When you were ten, did your father move your family to that house in the North or to London?”

“When I was ten my father died in a carriage accident. In her grief, my mother fled to France to take comfort in retrieving her family’s lands from the Jacobins that had come into power. My brother and I were sent to live near London in the house of our aunt’s brother—our uncle the duke being something of an indolent pleasure-seeker and not wanting to be bothered with raising two young boys.”

“It was that guardian you spoke of at Saint-Reveé-des-Beaux, wasn’t it? The man from whom your brother later fled?”

“The very one.” He gestured to a man coming from the farmhouse. “There is Goode now. I knew his father, Edward, when I was a boy. Thatcher has precisely the look of him.”

Thatcher Goode greeted them with deference, then studied her with a shrewd eye. He was neatly dressed and well spoken, but his clothing was worn nearly to threads at the joints and his cheeks were lean. He took them into the house and made known to them his wife and three sons.

The house was bare, the walls stripped of decoration, and the floors cold wooden planks without benefit of rugs. Mrs. Goode offered Arabella tea. The brew was thrice boiled and the biscuits lacked sweetener. Mrs. Goode and the eldest boy watched her carefully and said little.

Riding away from the farmhouse, Luc seemed in a pensive humor and Arabella remained silent.

The next tenant family and their house were much the same.

“Luc . . .”

He lifted his head from a study as they rode toward the bridge that crossed the river. Away in the distance the enormous house on the hill gave no hint of the state of the estate’s residents.

“Duchess?”

“Are they all Quakers?”

His brow drew down. “No,” he said shortly.

“Forgive me. I thought perhaps it might explain the bareness of their homes, and their—”

“Poverty?” The reins were tight in his fist. “No. They are simply poor.”

“But the fields have all been harvested and there must be at least four hundred head of sheep and lambs—”

“It is the first I have seen of it.” He rubbed the scar beneath his hat brim. “But it is worse than I even imagined.”

“You knew of it before?”

“My uncle’s steward reviewed with me the estate’s books last night.” He looked at her. “I regret that I was unable to join you and your sisters for dinner.”

“I should say that Combe’s starving tenants are more important than quails in queen sauce,” she said. “Is Mr. Parsons dishonest?”

“He is frightfully honest. He simply does not know where the tenants’ income is going. He wrote to me monthly before my uncle died, pleading for me to intervene. I could not; I had no authority. And . . .” He paused. “Other matters kept me abroad longer than I intended.”

Matters about which he would not speak with her.

“They are afraid,” she said. “I can sense their fear. And suspicion. But . . . I do not believe it is directed at you.”

He regarded her carefully as their horses clopped across the bridge.

“I—”

“You mustn’t trouble yourself with it,” he said, and turned his face to the road. “I will see to it.”

“I haven’t anything else with which to trouble myself. You have taken me from a life in which I worked every day to a life of thorough leisure. I am unaccustomed to inactivity.”

“In time you will find sufficient diversion.”

He spoke then only of light matters, complimented her on her seat, and later on the gown she wore at dinner and the arrangement of her hair, and she wanted to seize him and shake him back to the moments of candid honesty he had briefly shared with her. Then she wanted him to hold her in his arms and make love to her as he had before, as though he needed her.

But she did not demand his honesty and he did not do as she dreamed. Neither did he invite her to ride out again. The moment of intimacy was gone. She saw him only at dinner when he was all charm to her sisters and all masculine appreciation for her. He was the lord of the manor and she was merely the ornament who shared his house.

Chapter 14

Enticements

A
rabella did find many activities with which to busy herself during the days.

“The house has been without a mistress for more than a year,” Mrs. Pickett explained while by the light of candles they sorted through piles of ancient laces and linens, separating the hopelessly threadbare pieces from those that could be salvaged. “I’ve tried to keep all in order, but I wouldn’t presume to make decisions that the lady of the house should.”

Arabella did not bother pointing out that she was not in fact the lady of the house, for she already knew it would have no effect, and instead stifled a yawn. But she was not yet exhausted enough to fall swiftly into sleep. Imagining even a moment lying in bed waiting in vain for him to come to her drove her hands again to the heap of musty table linens. Her sisters had gone to bed, but Mrs. Pickett seemed eager to pursue the project.

“I understand that my husband’s uncle was ill for some months before his death,” Arabella said conversationally.

“Yes, your grace. For fourteen months, in fact, though at the beginning he could still walk about the grounds, of course. It was only in the last months that he grew too ill to leave his chambers.”

“Fourteen months?” Her hands halted. “Did the duchess not live here during all that time?”

“No, your grace.” The housekeeper kept her eyes on the piles of linen, but her lips pursed. “Her ladyship chose to reside in the house in town.”

It was hardly uncommon for aristocratic husbands and wives to live separately for part of the year. But the duchess had clearly abandoned her ailing husband.

“I suspect she visited regularly, then.” Arabella knew Mrs. Pickett would think her a gossip. But she must know. “It isn’t such a long journey, of course.”

“No, your grace.”

No?

She could not ignore the opening the housekeeper was clearly offering her. “After he fell ill, did she ever visit Combe?”

“She is not fond of travel.” Mrs. Pickett’s eyes connected with Arabella’s for a brief, instructive moment.

Suddenly the servants’ insistence that Luc was the duke did not seem like impertinence. And the suspicious eyes and sunken cheeks of the Goodes and the other tenant farmer families became clear now. They did not fear Luc. They feared Adina’s unborn child, who they believed to be illegitimate.

Even so, why fear a helpless infant? Unless they actually feared the infant’s guardian.

“Mrs. Pickett.” She pressed a crease into a lace doily, set it on the pile, and turned to the housekeeper. “Do you know where I might find the comte now?” She was ashamed to admit that she knew nothing of her husband’s activities in the evenings after dinner. But Mrs. Pickett’s eyes gleamed with satisfaction.

“He is in the study, your grace.”

It required all of Arabella’s discipline not to run.

She knocked, then entered without waiting. Buoyed by her newfound knowledge, she refused to accept the distance that he had imposed on her.

Lit by a single lamp on the desk and a blaze in the hearth, and furnished with masculine elegance, the study was sunk in shadows along walls paneled in walnut and painted above in dark blue studded with silver stars. A pair of bookcases flanked the marble mantel, and he sat before one of them, books and journals at his feet and an open volume across his knee. On a table at his elbow rested a silver tray with a crystal bottle and glass of amber liquid. Another, empty glass sat on the tray.

He looked up and seemed to take a moment to focus.

“Duchess,” he only said. His voice was quite low.

“What are you . . .” Her courage faltered. The firelight cut dramatically across his scar and he looked very large, male, and forbidding. When she did not see him frequently she forgot how his nearness made her weak-kneed. “What are you reading?”

He closed the book and set it beside him, then stood. “Nothing, now that you are here. I imagined you long since gone to bed.”

“I was engaged in a project with Mrs. Pickett.”

“Industrious of you so late at night.”

“It is not particularly late.” She glanced at the gold and crystal clock on the desk beneath the darkened panes of the window. She moved toward it. “It is barely eight o’clock.” She drew the drapes closed. She knew he watched her, and it made her heart beat fast. She turned to him and he stood exactly as before, tall and broad and impossibly distant.

“Won’t you offer me a drink?” she said. “Or is that empty glass intended for another?”

“For whom else would it be intended? The butler is a Puritan and my valet turns up his nose at French brandy.”

She tried to smile. “Brandy?” Now her hands were shaking.

He lifted a brow. “Would you care for some?”

She nodded, and as he poured she moved to the other side of the hearth. She traced her fingers nervously along the gilded leather bindings of the books.

“It seems as though you are engaged in a research project.” She turned, and he caught her hand in his. His touch was warm and complete. He tucked the glass into her palm, wrapped her fingers around it and released her. But he did not move away. She’d not been so close to him since the Channel crossing.

“I was reading about crop rotation and corn yields,” he said close to her, the scents of brandy and leather about him. “Fascinating stuff. Shall I share what I have learned with you?”

She lifted the glass to her lips and sipped. “I would like that.”

He leaned closer. “While I would like instead to admire this fetching confection you are wearing. Very nice . . .” He lifted his glass and with the back of his knuckles stroked across the bared skin of her bosom above the tiny fichu. She shivered. “ . . . design,” he finished, and held her gaze as he raised the glass to his mouth.

“Are you drunk?” she whispered.

“Only on you, duchess. Only ever on you.”

She pressed a palm to her hot cheek.

“Too close to the fire?” he said. “You can step away if you wish.”

“I do not wish.” She wanted to plunge into it. “I want to help you.”

“With what?” His voice now hesitated.

“I want to help you with whatever it is you are doing to solve the mystery of the tenant farmers’ losses. Tonight I—”

“Tonight when you were sorting linens like a housemaid?”

“How do you know that was my project?”

“I make it my business to know what you are doing always, little governess.” He passed his cheek across her hair. “Mm.
Eau de
dust. Positively enchanting.”

“If you don’t like my
parfum
domestique
then do not stand so close to me,” she said without any conviction whatsoever.

His breaths stirred the hair that had fallen out of its combs and over her brow.

“Why are you laboring like a servant, Arabella? Do you believe that in this manner you are fulfilling your role as the dutiful wife, as you promised?”

“You . . .” she began, then made herself speak the words. “You haven’t given me the opportunity to be a dutiful wife in weeks.”

He seemed to go quite still.

“If I offered you the opportunity,” he said, “would you welcome it out of duty?”

“No. In fact I fear that if you made that offer I would prove a disappointing wife, for there would be nothing of duty about the welcome I would show you.”

He set down his glass on the mantel. Then his hand came around her waist and slipped up beneath her arm. He held her firmly and his thumb stroked beneath her breast. His touch, even so slight and teasing, made her tremble.

“Arabella?” His voice was husky.

She closed her eyes and felt his hands on her and never wanted him to stop. “Luc?”

He seemed to breathe her in. “Will you marry me?”

A sob rose in her throat. She knew it was ridiculous, but a ray of pure happiness lit her.

“I understood, my lord,” she said shakily, “that we were already married.”

“Will you marry me?” His other hand encompassed her waist and he spoke against her cheek. His thumb caressed again, stroking up the side of her breast. “Yes or no?”

She wanted to see his face, but he held her tight. “Yes.”

He cupped her breast and slipped his thumb across the nipple, and she felt her body open for him.

“You may have carte blanche in planning the wedding,” he said. “Anything you wish. But it must be soon. Three weeks.”

Only long enough for the banns to be read.

“Anywhere?” She could barely hear her voice or feel the books pressing into her back. His hands were on her, teasing her, and she ached for him.

“Where else but here?”

“London,” she said. “The Thames. On the deck of the
Victory
.”

His hands stilled and she wished immediately that she had not spoken. He drew back and his expression was inscrutable.

“Can it be done?” she asked unsteadily.

“Yes.” His smile was slow. “Yes, I believe that can be done.”

“Uh, ehm.” A man cleared his throat at the door she had left open. “My lord?”

Luc backed away from her, and Arabella thanked God for the darkness that hid her flaming cheeks.

“Arabella, this is Mr. Parsons, the land steward here at Combe,” Luc said without any suggestion in his voice that a moment ago he had been fondling her breast and proposing marriage to her. But he was a lord, and a lord could make love to his wife on the high street if he so desired and the traffic would be obliged to go around him. “Parsons, this is—” He glanced at her and a slight crease appeared beside his mouth. “My
comtesse
.”

Mr. Parsons bowed. “My lady.” He said to Luc, “Information has arrived from Mr. Firth—”

“Excellent, excellent.” Luc started toward the door. He gestured for her to follow. “My dear, this fellow’s dedication to the estate is untiring, but in good conscience I cannot keep him up past his bedtime doing business. I will see to this swiftly. Would you excuse us?”

His hand was on the door. He was dismissing her.

“Of course,” she only said, her palms cold but cheeks aflame with shame. Considering all, she had been astoundingly foolish. He wanted her in his bed; she had known since their first encounter that he wanted her like that. And their marriage must be validated by the Church of England. She was a foolish girl to dream for the first time in her life of a tender proposal and a fairy-tale marriage. She had been wrong to read what had just happened as anything but business. Nothing had changed. He would not give her his confidences.

“Good night, Mr. Parsons,” she said, and left the chamber without revealing the tempest inside her.

T
HE CANDLES WERE
guttering when Luc opened the door between their bedchambers. He came to her bed, pushed aside the gauze curtain, and shrugged out of his dressing gown. Then he took her hand and made her stand before him, her feet buried in the thick rug. First he removed the lace cap on her head, then the pins in her hair, then her delicate nightrail.

He touched her everywhere the glow from the embers of the fire touched her skin, and then everywhere it did not. He made her need him until she wished for nothing else but him, then he thrust inside her and made her need him more.

When it was over and she lay beside him, her body soft and damp with satisfaction, she watched the shadows flicker over his body glistening with sweat, and she touched him. With her touch she silently asked him for more.

He turned her onto her belly, pulled her hips off the bed and, with great skill and breathless force, gave her quite a lot more. She pressed her palms into the headboard and cried out his name again and again as she shattered.

He kissed her shoulders, her back, and the curve of her buttock as she sank into the mattress and into sleep. He left her without having spoken a word.

In the morning the maid brought breakfast. Arabella snuggled into the covers with her cup of chocolate and the glorious soreness of her body, and took up the note on the breakfast tray. The stationery bore the embossed crest of the Comte de Rallis. With a smile—then with sinking breaths—she read.

Duchess,

I am off to town. I will return to retrieve you in three weeks.

L.

Arabella had only cried when the man she did not yet realize she loved was dying, then again when she was grieving over him. Such a little thing as virtual estrangement and abandonment could not now rouse her tears, even after he had used her in a manner in which a man might use a harlot, and even if her heart felt as though it had been wrung out with the laundry. She had allowed him that use of her body, willingly and eagerly. And she had again unguardedly allowed her heart to hope. The emptiness inside her now was her own fault.

She rose from bed, dressed, and went to find her sisters. In the corridor outside her door a liveried footman sat in a chair. He was a large young man with sun-bright ringlets, tanned skin, and somber eyes. She recognized him, but not from the downstairs staff. He was from the
Retribution
and he had accompanied her and Mr. Miles to Saint-Reveé-des-Beaux.

He stood and bowed. “Yer grace.”

In the breakfast parlor she found her sisters. When she left them sometime later, the curly-headed footman was waiting outside the parlor.

He followed her from place to place for the remainder of the day.

“Bella,” Ravenna said as they walked in the garden, “did you know there are two footmen following us?”

“One is in fact ahead and one is following,” Eleanor corrected.

“I think I would much rather be a poor animal doctor than a duchess after all, never mind your spectacular stables,” Ravenna said with a glimmer in her dark eyes. “To be watched all the time would be positively unnerving.”

“I don’t think they are watching her, Venna,” Eleanor said. “I think they are protecting her.”

Arabella was not quite so certain. Luc wanted an heir, and she had nearly run away once before. But long before that, aboard his ship, he had assigned the cabin boy to keep a watch on her, so that he would always know where she was, he had said.

She chewed on the inside of her lip. “Ellie, Venna?”