The Rusticated Duchess (6 page)

Always before, he’d been comforted by the image, by Sarah. Now, though, he felt distinctly alone, as if no soul had ever existed in this place and no comfort could be drawn from it. He was alone, and Sarah was not coming back. She hadn’t then, and she wouldn’t now. There would be no happy ending, no waking up from a bad dream and finding her sleeping soundly beside him in her linen nightgown, no soft laughter from her as he held her against him at the window and watched Arwyn toddle across the lawn with his nurse behind him. He’d long known it, of course, but now perhaps he accepted it without anger or resentment.

He was lonely, Clare realised, but his mind was not on his long-departed wife. It was on the blonde siren in her black gowns and dirty hems. He wanted to see her lure him to her side, instead of casting him away or running from him. Unconsciously, his fingers stopped moving over the carving of Sarah, and he lowered his head and kissed the expanse of smooth forehead. “Goodbye, Sarah,” he murmured very low, almost to himself, then smiled wryly.

Sarah had long been gone. It was long past time to let her memory settle in his heart and make room in his life for others. He couldn’t continue to resent the siren for the behaviour of his own mind and body, when she’d made no move even to draw his attention.

He would see his siren again, and apologise for his inexcusable rudeness. Then he would board his yacht and sail to England, away from the temptation of a young mother and a woman too newly grieving. If the lady wanted anonymity and solitude, then she deserved to have it.

Jamie did not return for dinner, so Clare ate in solitary state and went to bed, alone.

He dreamt again, this time of the blonde siren on the gleaming deck of the Lauderdale yacht. Her back was to the mast, her arms impossibly stretched over her head and clinging to the wood behind her, the sail billowing out behind her as the yacht raced along.

Disturbingly, she was again nude, and Clare thrashed about the bed in indignant agony, unable to touch her. Reality played no part in these dreams, so no other sailor stared down at her from the crow’s nest and no captain with a spyglass levelled an eye in her direction. Instead, she seemed to dare him to approach, arching up on pointed toes and with her slender form outward. She didn’t sing to him this time, but preened, her eyes wide with lust even from his position out of her reach.

She didn’t complain of the cold, or the salt water spraying over the deck. Her feet didn’t slip on the teak beneath her and she showed no signs of splinters or other bruising from the constant beat of the ropes in the wind. Her role was to call to forth his basest instincts, to test if he would coddle her or indulge an unspoken demand for wildness.

Her blonde hair whipped around her, smacking her skin with the violence of the wind. How had he known the colour, in his earlier dream? Her face had been set deeply in her hood, but his imagination had perfectly filled in the shade of her tresses. Now, having seen them covered by that scrap of black silk, Clare had filled in the weight and behaviour of her crown. A stray curl bounced against a bare, plump breast, drawing his eye. Another landed between those tempting globes. Clare couldn’t help but dream of his own fingers delivering such stinging attention to her, of seeing her pale green eyes sparkle with the same intense passion she’d angrily shown him earlier that day.

Clare awoke in response to his cock, once again unusually hard, his fingers wrapped around the throbbing organ in the manner of a schoolboy too young for a woman to ease it. Disgusted, he gave himself one heavy jerk and rolled from the bed, determined to forget about her for a few hours.

* * * *

Jamie strolled in just as Clare finished breakfast, looking rather disgustingly smug. Clare raised a brow at the steward as he sipped from his coffee, but Jamie simply shrugged and seated himself. After the butler poured a mug of the warm brew for Jamie and departed, Clare’s raised brow turned into narrowed eyes. “Well?” he said, at least more mildly than he had done one morning earlier.

“The owner of record—the owner who’s paid all of the taxes to date at least for the last fifteen years—is the Earl of Hanover.”

Clare paused, picturing the out of date
Debrett’s
in his study upstairs. He couldn’t wait until he got back to Norham—

“I stopped by your study. Hanover does have daughters.”

“She’s a niece,” Clare said absently, remembering her words about her uncle.

Jamie frowned, then. “Hanover has a brother with daughters, none titled but already married. And there’s a sister, married to the Earl of Winchester.”

Raising a brow, Clare threw his napkin onto the table. “My thanks, then.”

“As you say,” Jamie murmured, not hiding the speculative gleam in his eyes or the beginning of a smirk on his face. Clare nearly growled but settled for closing the dining room doors behind him rather harder than absolutely required. The footman, seeing his grim face as he topped the first landing on the main staircase, leapt to open Clare’s study door and closed it quickly behind him.

Jamie had left the pertinent volume on his desk, helpfully open to the correct entry. He quickly read about Hanover and his siblings, then pulled out the necessary book on Winchester and read.

Winchester had four girls, and Clare quickly calculated them to be between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. None had been married when the volume had been printed.

The thought that this regal angel might be a mere chit of eighteen—hardly old enough to be away from her parents, let alone cast aside while grieving—appalled Clare at first. However, Clare had married Sarah when she had been just nineteen. His son Arwyn was already fifteen and yet just beginning to emerge from childhood, but girls of such age were already preparing to lead adult lives with equivalent responsibilities of men twice their age. By twenty, many young women had been married and were becoming mothers.

“An earl’s daughter?” Clare murmured absently, to himself. “I would have guessed her mother to be a duchess, myself.” He read the entry again and frowned, his fingers touching on one name. “Lady Fiona Margaret, Lady Abigail Elizabeth, Lady Gloria Jane and Lady Genevieve Charlotte.”

The siren had said to call her Jane. She was Lady Gloria Jane, born an earl’s daughter. He smiled, hardly even realising he’d made the rare gesture. Even if he didn’t know what tragedy had befallen her, the name Gloria fit her well, at least as he imagined her in his dreams.

He was silent for a long time, staring at the words and committing them to memory before sliding the book back into its place on the shelf. He rang the bell, asked the footman for Jamie, then had him sit and levelled a serious and determined glance at the steward. “Tell the guards on harbour watch that I want to know the very instant that girl steps beyond the front gate. I need an afternoon walk.”

Jamie sighed and nodded his head reluctantly. “She’ll have a pistol-ready guard, my lord,” Jamie ventured after a long moment.

“I certainly hope so,” Clare murmured, and said nothing more when Jamie only shook his head again.

* * * *

Gloria was determined not to let her anxiety and anger ruin yet another day, or interfere with her daily outing. She dressed with brisk efficiency once Eynon was asleep and tilted her chin up proudly when both Colman and Brody met her in the front hall with disapproving frowns on their faces.

“What if he’s out there?” Colman growled.

“He’s hardly going to be lying in wait for me,” Gloria dismissed. “And if he is out there—as is his right, as I’m sure he owns the road we’re walking on—then he must have better ways to spend his time than by disturbing me.”

“We’ll both go with you,” Brody insisted.

“You will not,” Gloria disagreed, staring back at him with more authority and as much belligerence as he had dared. “Your duty is in the nursery.”

Brody looked thoroughly unhappy but could not argue.

Turning to his compatriot, Gloria continued, “And you will refrain from threatening any titled—or courtesy—lords with your pistol.”

Colman appeared uncomfortable, but nodded, murmuring the appropriate words of acquiescence, which Gloria was quite sure would be thoroughly forgotten if Clare showed his face. Instead of belabouring the point, she brushed past them and strode directly through the front garden, past the gate and onto the Shore Road.

She had largely calmed and collected her thoughts by the time the two had walked west nearly to the edge of Kilchet and back to the cottage gate. She glanced back at Colman, who looked longingly at the cottage but then shrugged when she shook her head and went on.

Gloria walked another five minutes before she saw him approaching, appearing suddenly on the road in broad daylight. He was still some distance ahead of her, but coming in her direction. She wondered wildly why she should recognise him at such a distance when they were hardly acquainted, but she couldn’t now turn away and hurry back to her haven behind the iron gate. Running away from him would be cowardly, and she refused to accept such a branding.

It was obvious to Gloria from the direction of his face—directly upon her—that he’d seen her already so she kept on, despite Colman’s growl or the way he drew closer up behind her.

At least on this afternoon there was no brisk wind blowing against her. It was cold, but the air was still, with the sound of the harbour lapping against the rocks. Gloria reminded herself that she had recently and regularly faced down disapproving duchesses and frowning
grandes dames
without a blink. One marquess was well within her power.

“If I direct, you will fall back, Colman,” Gloria stated stoically. Instinct was guiding her, but she was sure he hadn’t just seen her. He’d purposely intended to meet her. The conviction had no rationale, but why else would he be outside his bastion without a horse beneath him? Why would he be purposefully striding towards her, along the edge of Shore Road, and not in a comfortable carriage rambling along at a much faster pace?

“Brody will quarter me if you get yourself taken, milady,” Colman grumbled.

“I have my pistol,” she said softly.

He sighed but backed off until he was a yard behind her, holding to that distance when Gloria slowed and stopped as Clare approached her. He bowed briefly, accepted without even a raised brow her barest acknowledgement of a curtsy and offered her his arm in a smooth flourish. “Would you permit me to accompany you on the rest of your constitutional?”

Gloria considered his coat, a practical long cape over a well-fitting jacket, and asked directly, “Shall we commence with insults or accusations?”

Clare had the grace to look uncomfortable. “Neither,” he answered shortly, then breathed more deeply once she slid her arm within his. They faced the castle and walked a few steps before he spoke again, still stiffly. “Pray accept my apologies for my earlier lapse of manners and my ill-conceived presumption. I am myself a long-time widower, but I confess I was blinded by your age, momentarily forgetting that ladies are expected to attach much earlier than men. It seems like only yesterday, but my own Sarah was not yet twenty when we married, as you are now, and twenty-three when I lost her.”

Gloria faltered, forcing him to pause, but then resumed, her fingers tightening inside her cloak, gripping the little pistol. “How do you know my age?” she whispered after a fraught moment of silence.

He glanced down at the top of her hood, a glance she caught because she was watching the waves beyond him. “
Debrett’s
,” he eventually said. “You’re the only one of Hanover’s nieces with a second name of Jane.”

Gloria stiffened, her mind reeling. She would have stumbled, but his firm grip on her arm kept her upright. Inside her hood, her ears burned. Inside her chest, her heart thudded slowly.

When she did not speak, he added quietly, “And it’s Hanover who has paid the taxes on Blessing Cottage for the last decade or more. I told you I would find out soon enough, and I have the resources to get answers quickly when I want them. What I don’t know,” he finished quietly, “is why your identity is a secret—and who you are mourning.” He glanced at her again. “The volumes here at the castle are out of date.”

Gloria didn’t answer, her heart in her throat. “Who have you told?” she whispered fiercely, every muscle stiff with fear.

“No one,” he assured her. They came to the place where Shore Road turned to parallel the outer wall of the castle, well before it turned towards the gate, and he paused until she stopped at his side. “Yet.”

Chapter Four

Her gaze flew up to his face and she realised instantly that her expression must have revealed the terror that struck her. She smoothed her face into an inscrutable, closed façade but it was too late. Clare had seen it. His frown deepened and he shifted to wave his free hand at a trail in the grass that left the road and edged the outer wall before winding out of sight along the headland.

“We need to talk,” he said soberly. “You need to tell me why you are hiding. I can’t see you, an earl’s daughter—Lady Gloria Jane de Rothesay—as a fugitive from the law, nor less a man’s cast-off mistress masquerading as a widow with an infant. But neither do I believe you are adequately protected, with no gentleman in the household and no protection for your son, who village gossip claims to be a titled peer. You must tell me.”

“We’ll leave tonight—” Gloria rushed to say in a low whisper, but he shook his head, glanced back at Colman and countered her panic by covering her hand on his arm and trapping it to keep her from running.

“Come, there’s a bench along the wall a little way where we can sit in relative privacy and converse. Your watchdog can sit on a rock where he can see you.”

Gloria drew a breath, nodded, then fixed her eyes on Colman, who was inching closer in suspicion. “We’re going this way,” she said briefly in his direction, then turned and stepped out before Colman could leap in with any concern. She heard his unhappy noise but he kept back as Clare’s solicitous arm once again guided her along at his side.