When the Duchess Said Yes (37 page)

“I am no knave, Hawkesworth, nor have I dallied with your wife,” he began. “Though if I had, I—”

“Hawke, please,” she said, her own voice raised to be heard. “Please! This gentleman meant neither of us any ill. Look at him, Hawke, at his face and manner. He is your own
cousin
, the Duke of Sheffield, and he has absolutely
no
designs on me.”

Hawke glared, while Sheffield took a deep gulp of a sigh and bowed again.

“Forgive me, Hawkesworth, if I have caused you any offense,” he said. “I intended neither harm nor dishonor.”

“There now, Hawke,” Lizzie coaxing, coming closer to his horse and lowering her voice. “Everything is resolved. Now please, I beg you, climb down so I might welcome you properly.”

Still his expression did not soften, though she could sense him wavering, love battling with pride. Oh, she knew him so well, and loved him more!

“Please, my love,” she said, looking up to him. “Please.”

He looked away, drawing his horse sharply to one side.

“Stand clear, Duchess,” he ordered brusquely, and in the next instant he was gone, riding from the yard and away from her.

“I’ll go after him,” Sheffield said, already halfway to his horse.

“Oh, don’t, I beg you,” she said, still staring after Hawke as her heart plummeted. “That is, I thank you, Sheffield, but perhaps it would be better if you left now.”

“As you wish, ma’am,” he said somberly. “You are sure?”

“I am.” She sighed forlornly, her mouth twisting as she fought her tears. “His Grace will return to me this night. I am certain of it. He has come all the way from London, and not even he is sufficiently stubborn to turn around and go back tonight.”

Sheffield nodded, and after bidding her farewell, he left, too, his dog trotting after him.

Slowly Lizzie forced herself to climb the stairs and enter the house. Both Margaret and Mrs. Short were waiting to offer comfort in their own way, Margaret with a dressing gown and warm water for washing, and Mrs. Short with hot tea and supper on a tray to follow. But as tempting as such comforts were, Lizzie was too distraught to accept them. Instead she stayed in her habit and claimed a tall-backed armchair in the rear parlor, beside the window that overlooked the stable yard, watching and waiting for Hawke’s return.

She sat with her hands over her belly, over their child. Again and again she told herself that she’d done nothing wrong, not one thing, and yet all the rightness in the world would mean nothing if her husband did not return to her.

The light faded with the day, and Mrs. Short lit the candles, leaving a pot of tea on the table beside Lizzie in
case she relented. She didn’t, instead watching as the grooms followed her orders, lighting the lanterns in the yard and leaving the gate open. Yet as vigilant as she intended to be, at some point in the evening she fell asleep, nestled against the chair’s tall back. She knew not because she was aware of sleeping, but because she knew exactly when she awakened, at the sound of Hawke’s horse entering the yard.

Without pause she ran from the room. She’d known he would come back. She’d known he wouldn’t stay away. She hurried from the house and down the stairs, to where the head groom held Hawke’s horse, its flanks flecked with sweat and its head hanging low.

The saddle was empty.

“The horse come back in this state, ma’am,” the groom said, his wrinkled face reflecting the worry of the others who were gathering. “His Grace weren’t with him.”

She would not cry or think of how her father had died after being thrown by his horse. She would not panic or wail with fear. She’d be of no use to Hawke that way, and he needed her now.

“Then His Grace must have suffered an accident or other mishap,” she said, surprising herself with her calm. “We must search for him. We need lanterns, and dogs. How many of you can come out with me?”

“Not you, Your Grace!” exclaimed Mrs. Short beside her. “You cannot mean to go out into the night. Let the men go, and you stay here.”

But Lizzie only shook her head. “No,” she said softly. “His Grace needs me, and I will not rest until I find him.”

Again Hawke tried to put his weight on his twisted ankle, determined by will alone that it would support him, and again it crumpled beneath his weight, pitching
him face-first into the low brush. He swore, long and hard, the only way he had now to fight against the pain.

Two pains, really. He could even diagnose the first one, the pain that felt like a sharp blade attempting to sever his arm from his shoulder. That was where he’d landed when that hell-born beast of a horse had thrown him, square on the same shoulder he’d already dislocated once before. It had taken a surgeon and two helpers to hold him down and push it back to rights the last time it had happened, also when he’d fallen from a horse. He was not looking forward to having the procedure repeated, and intended to make sure he was dead drunk before he so much as let any surgeon within his sight.

The second pain, the one knotted around his ankle, was more inconvenient, if less serious. He’d landed on his shoulder, but he’d also managed to twist his foot beneath him when he’d hit the ground. A bad sprain and nothing was broken, at least not that he could tell. A small mercy, but it still made for a sizable, damnable agony.

He rolled over onto his back, breathing hard from the effort as he stared up at the half-moon. He’d already been heading back to the Abbey, back to Lizzie, back to eat whatever crow she’d accept if she’d only take him back. Who would have guessed that Sheffield had become a man (Hawke had only the vaguest memory of him as a gangly young whelp) or that he’d appear here, of all places, to ogle his wife? Not that it was his cousin’s fault. Hawke knew he’d been the one who’d behaved like an idiot. He’d fully intended to apologize. So why, then, had the gods laughed and toyed with him like this? Why had they let him choose to travel the path through the woods instead of keeping to the road? And why, why had they let him trust his neck to a wretched post horse that’d bucked him off for no reason at all?

With an extra oath for hired nags, he reached inside
his jacket, fumbling with the inner pocket until he found the small box tucked deep within. With a sigh of relief he pulled it out and opened the lid, tipping it carefully toward the moonlight.

Brecon had advised that diamonds sweetened every apology, and before Hawke had left town he’d stopped at Boyce’s shop for the proper tribute. The little brooch seemed particularly apt tonight: a small besotted (or wounded by a fall from his horse) gold Cupid, haphazardly plunging his arrow into a diamond-covered heart. For a long moment he held it in the moonlight, watching the stones wink back at him as he thought of Lizzie. He was sure she’d love the brooch, but considerably less certain about her feelings for him.

He tucked the box back into his pocket and grunted as he cautiously sat upright. He’d found a thick branch in the bushes beside him, and with that to bear the weight that his ankle couldn’t, he finally stood and tried one lumbering, lurching step, cradling his dislocated arm to keep it from swinging.

So this was what he’d come to, he thought with black humor: one good leg, one good arm, and a stick. In the distance he could just make out the arched chimneys of the Abbey, silvered in the moonlight. Another staggering step, a long pause to collect himself, and another step after that. At this rate, he’d be lucky to reach the house in a fortnight.

But Lizzie was there, and he couldn’t keep her waiting. He leaned on the stick heavily, and felt it crack beneath him. He pitched forward, unable to catch himself before he once again hit the hard, unyielding ground. But this time the ricocheting pain in his shoulder was matched by a roaring in his head, and he felt himself falling again, slipping away into the pain and the darkness and.…

“I found him.”

He’d know her voice anywhere, even here in the darkness, and somehow he managed to drag his eyes open to see her. She had a lantern on the ground beside her, and she was kneeling over him and crying as she used her handkerchief to wipe his face.

“Oh, my poor love,” she whispered, her tears falling on his cheek. “My poor, dear Hawke!”

This would not do, having her cry over him as if he were dead. “Don’t cry, Lizzie,” he mumbled. “I’ll be well enough.”

But that only seemed to make her weep all the more. “You
will
be well, Hawke. You must. We’ll take you back to the house and send for the surgeon and you will be
fine
. You must. I could not bear to lose you on account of your own wretched stubbornness.”

That sounded more like his Lizzie, and he tried to smile.

“I’m sorry,” he said, relieved he’d gotten the words out. “Sorry for being such a stubborn bastard.”

“You’re not a bastard, Hawke,” she corrected, sniffing and snuffling. “You’re a duke.”

She was blotting her tears and her nose on her sleeve and saying nothing of his apology, which he took to mean she’d accepted it. With his good hand he managed to pull the little box from Boyce’s from his pocket.

“Here,” he said, exhausted from the effort. “That’s for you, Duchess, to show I won’t ever leave you. That’s my heart.”

He frowned, because he was sure he’d planned to say something far more clever than that. Not that it mattered. She opened the box and gasped, and the tears began all over again as she pinned the brooch to the front of her habit.

“You like it?” he asked, shameless.

“Oh, Hawke,” she said through her tears. “I’m with child. Your child. Ours.”

“Ours.” He let the magic of what she’d just said settle around them, magic enough to make him forget his shoulder and his ankle and everything else but her. “Ours, Duchess. No wonder I love you.”

Somehow she laughed, even through her tears. “And I love you, Hawke, oh, so much, so much.”

He could see other lanterns bobbing toward them, and hear the voices of the men who were coming to help. He wouldn’t have much more time alone with her, time to say one last thing that needed saying.

“Lizzie,” he said. “Promise me you’ll never run away again.”

“Yes,” she said, bending to kiss him. “Yes to that, Hawke, and to everything else besides.”

Bella Collina, Naples
April 1764

Hawke sanded and folded the last of his letters, and pressed his signet into the hot blob of wax to seal it. He’d spent all the morning putting his affairs in order, sending final instructions to the various dealers, agents, and artists in Rome and Florence from whom he’d made purchases for the new gallery in London. He had been buying paintings and shipping them back to England ever since he’d returned to Naples more than a year ago, and now he was eager to see what Sir Lucas had done with what he’d sent. The new gallery was set to open by the end of the summer, and Hawke intended to be there when it did.

With a sigh of accomplishment, he pushed his chair back from the desk and strolled out onto the balcony. In the courtyard below, servants were busily carrying trunks and crates from the house to load into the waiting
wagon in preparation for the voyage. In the harbor lay HMS
Theseus
, the stout warship that was the destination of all those trunks and crates. She was an impressive vessel even with her gun ports closed as she sat at anchorage—impressive enough, hoped Hawke, to frighten away any pirates from Tripoli and to make an uneventful and swift voyage back to England. Being able to claim passage on a Royal Navy ship was one of the better privileges of being a duke.

No, decided Hawke, it was likely the very best privilege, especially when he thought of how all he held most dear in his life would be on board that ship tomorrow.

He heard the carriage and horses come up the cobbled drive, and eagerly he leaned over the railing. Sitting like a queen in the open landau was Lizzie, the red ribbons on her hat tossing in the breeze and little Jack in her arms. Hawke didn’t have to call down to her; she automatically looked up to the balcony, her smile brighter than the sunshine when she saw him. She turned Jack on her lap so he’d look up, too, and as soon as he’d spotted Hawke, he began to wave his plump baby arm with furious enthusiasm. He’d just passed his first birthday, celebrated with all the pomp due to the young John Charles St. George Halsbury, Earl of Southwell and heir to the dukedom of Hawkesworth. But to Hawke and to Lizzie, he was simply their perfect little Jack, with ruddy cheeks, unruly curls, and sticky baby fingers.

He watched as Lizzie passed Jack to his nurse only long enough for her to climb down from the carriage seat and the small mountain of parcels and provisions she’d bought in town for their journey. Then she took the boy back in her arms and hurried into the house to join Hawke, who met them on the staircase.

“Did you say good-bye to the monkeys at the palace’s menagerie?” Hawke asked, kissing Jack on his forehead
and Lizzie, a little longer, on her lips. “I’ll wager they’ll be very sorry to see you leave.”

“We did,” Lizzie said, handing Jack to Hawke. “All the keepers came out to bid us farewell, and wished us to return to Naples as soon as was possible.”