Chapter Nine
CHAPTER NINE
PATIENCE ALMOST ASKED Charlotte what she thought she should ask the Duke of Nothshire for in return for her silence.
Almost.
But she had never told Charlotte about any of it, and she didn’t think she could really rally herself enough to get into the whole story with her friend. She hoped that Charlotte would not judge her, but in all truth, the fact that she had kept quiet about it for so long warranted some kind of judgment.
They were violent men.
They were thieves.
They were terrorizing the ton.
They needed to be stopped, and Patience had kept their secret all along because she felt as if she had somehow been tacitly brought into it when they had dispatched Balley, and she didn’t feel as if she could tell anyone that.
So, she just tried to puzzle it out herself.
She could ask for money, she supposed. There was always something to spend money on, and she could always have more money. But she didn’t know where that money would come from. The Lords of the Crossroads seemed to have ceased to stop carriages, but that didn’t mean that any funds that Nothshire would present to her wouldn’t be ill-gotten in some way. She didn’t want that sort of money.
So, she dismissed that notion entirely.
What she really wanted was a child. That was why she’d come to town in the first place. Of course, her conversation with Charlotte had muddied her thinking about it all. Did she want to raise a child who would be trapped between worlds, neither one of the gentry nor one of the working classes? It did seem cruel and difficult in some way.
And furthermore, she could not imagine how it was that the duke could assist her in that way. She had a sneaking suspicion, however, that if a duke went to ask for an orphan, he’d be treated differently.
Perhaps not. He was a young man on his own and she couldn’t think that there wouldn’t be objections to his taking a child himself. People might do a duke’s bidding, but they would think it just as highly irregular as her position.
So, she thought that through inside outside and sideways and couldn’t quite see a way through on it.
She tried to think of anything else she might want, though, and she could think of nothing, really.
She stayed up half the night thinking, coming to no real conclusions. She sat up at breakfast, gazing off into space, a furrow in her brow, feeling more and more frustrated.
By the time the duke called at her small house, she was no better off.
“I need more time,” she announced to him as she poured his tea. They were sitting in her sitting room, him on the end of one couch and her on a tufted chair. The servants had been quite excited that she had a caller, a gentleman caller, and Charlotte had given her a look of shock.
She was going to have to tell Charlotte something, she supposed. She simply didn’t know what.
“Well, perhaps you could have sent me a missive to that effect before I came all this way,” he said.
“All the way from Albermarle Street,” she said, faintly mocking him. “Yes, quite a journey, I am sure.”
He smirked at her. “You’re funny,” he said. “You’re, um, you’re different than other women.”
She thought about this. Was she that different? “What do you mean?”
“I just mean, you’re so intelligent,” he said. “And you’re a bit ambitious and willing to seize on whatever advantage you have presented to you.”
“I don’t think that makes me much different than other women,” she said. “Anyway, I’m not ambitious. Truly, Your Grace, if this is the way you typically speak to women, it is no wonder you have such a low opinion of them, for they are likely always simply trying to be rid of you.”
He let out a guffaw, smiling as he looked away. “I never said I had a low opinion of women.”
“Pardon me,” she said with a shrug. “I mean no offense. How do you take your tea? Two sugars?”
“Just milk,” he said.
She prepared it. “I understand you intended it as a compliment, but you must see that it does denigrate my entire sex.”
“I do not see that,” he said. “As it happens, I have a high opinion of women.”
She handed him his tea. “You think so?”
He accepted it. “I’m quite devoted to my mother.”
“Who you think is unintelligent?”
He winced, looking away, and she could see that, yes, he quite did think that about his mother. Well, then.
“I should not have defended women, I see. I should have used your ignorance of the collective intelligence of womankind to my advantage. I could have pretended to be as stupid as you think all women are, and then run circles around you,” she said.
“I don’t think women are—” He cleared his throat, thinking better of this statement, apparently. He set his tea cup down in its saucer. “You’re speaking this way to me because you don’t like me. You don’t have any reason to like me, it’s true. I won’t insult you by trying to convince you otherwise.”
Was that it? No, he was wrong. It wasn’t that she disliked him. She couldn’t rightly say that she liked him, she supposed, but there was something about him that produced the strange, thrilling, not-fear emotion within her. But he was correct that she would not usually speak this way to a man, especially not a duke. The reason she did now? It was power. When one had power over another person, one could get away with speaking her mind. It was intoxicatingly addicting, actually. She could quite get used to it. She didn’t correct him, however. It might serve her purposes to have him think she disliked him.
Unfortunately, she didn’t have any purposes. That was the real problem.
He sipped at his tea, eyeing her as he did so. “So, then, how much more time would you like to consider what you wish to extort from me in exchange for your silence?”
She really did not think more time was going to make anything occur to her, which was the other problem. “I don’t know. Perhaps you must simply call upon me, from time to time, listen to me insult you, and wait until I sort myself out.”
He smirked again. “I must say, it’s strange, but I can’t say there’s a part of me that isn’t keen on the prospect of being insulted by a woman like you on the regular.”
She laughed. She was enjoying herself far too much. “I thought about asking for money, but then I decided I don’t want money from you, because I can’t be sure how you are getting it. I suppose you’ve already spent whatever you took from my late husband, haven’t you?”
“Who says I took anything from your late husband?”
“Well, someone did,” she said. “He brought a ransom out into the wilds and it never came back. You kidnapped me for the precise purpose of getting him to pay you. You expect me to believe that was all just coincidental?”
“You’re the one who said he would never pay for you.”
She busied herself with putting sugar in her own tea. “Yes, that’s curious. I didn’t think he would.”
“Because it didn’t seem to you that he put much value in you, I suppose, not with the way he treated you.”
She lifted her gaze to his. “I never told you anything about the way he treated me.”
“You didn’t have to,” he said. “That bruise on your face told the whole story. Also, your insistence in his indifference. I know about that sort of man, you see. The sort of man who collects people like possessions and then treats them that way, like things .”
Oh, that might explain the mournful look in his eyes, might it? That pain? He had been badly used by someone. But he was a duke, and there was no one who could have— “Your father, then?”
He straightened, looking shocked. “I never said—”
“You didn’t have to,” she said.
He eyed her with renewed respect. “You’re a formidable woman, Lady Balley.”
She looked back into her tea, unsure how to respond to that compliment. She stirred her tea, thoughtful, and then she took the spoon out and set it on the saucer. “So, that’s why you did it.”
“Did what?”
“We both know what,” she said. “You rid me of him.”
“What happened to your husband was a tragedy.”
“Yes,” she said. “And don’t think to get me to admit that I’m grateful, or then you might start thinking I owe you something, and I do not. I never asked you to do that, and also, you were well paid already.”
“I didn’t do it for you,” he said.
She drank her tea and leveled her stare at him.
“I didn’t,” he protested, though she’d said nothing further. “It was expedient at that point, and anyway, I don’t do things like that for people.”
“No, of course,” she said. “It doesn’t do to go about doing murderous favors for women you’ve barely met.”
He smirked. “It does not indeed.”
“Why were you even doing it? Robbing people on the highway? You don’t need the money. I know that your holdings are perfectly adequate.”
“That’s none of your affair.”
“You said you didn’t have a choice, I seem to remember,” she said, because it was all becoming clearer to her now. Bits and pieces of the conversation were coming back to her with startling clarity. She hadn’t thought about it, but she did remember it. She remembered it very well.
“What happened to your dog?” he said.
She wrinkled up her nose, thinking of little Dash. “He dearly loves it in the north. He has doggy friends there, the hunting hounds who live at my late husband’s estate, and he has so much space to run and gambol, and I couldn’t bring myself to confine him to the indoors here. Besides, I didn’t think I’d be here for very long.”
“Why did you come to town?”
“That’s none of your affair,” she echoed sharply.
He sipped his tea and smiled at her. “Well done, my lady.” He regarded her. “Shall I guess?”
“No,” she said.
“I suspect you’re here to find a husband.”
“No!” She looked at him as if he were an imbecile. “Why would I seek a husband now, in half-mourning, wearing washed-out grays and dark blues all the time? Who could I possibly attract?”
He shrugged. “All right, then, you came to town to take advantage of your widow status to have a raft of affairs with any number of men, all of whom you would cajole into giving you expensive gifts.”
“You have a horrid opinion of me,” she said, shaking her head at him. “Oh, no, it’s women in general, that’s right. I forgot.”
“I’m sorry. What else do women want?”
“Besides men? Oh, dear, is this a sincere question?”
“Perhaps you came for another dog. A companion to that awful yappy bit of a thing you had. Perhaps you’re going to breed them.”
“If you really must know,” she exploded, “I was trying to adopt a child!”
He drew back, quite stunned at this answer.
“Oh, dash it all,” she said. “I don’t know how you needled me into revealing that. The truth is, I had thought to ask for your assistance in an adoption, but I discarded the idea as impossible. I had thought that no one refuses a duke anything, but then it all seemed so irregular that I thought it must draw questions and it would not do.”
“A child?” he murmured, shaking his head.
Wait a moment. She was having an idea. She set down her tea cup, thinking it through, nodding to herself. Yes, perhaps it might work if they did it that way. “Perhaps you could help, though. We’d have to go elsewhere. Some city, some distant city where neither of us are known and where they also have those sorts of places for women who cannot keep their babes. But if we did, we might pretend to be husband and wife, not a duke, no, but just some respectable couple, perhaps in trade, and I don’t know, if there are documents one might need to forge to prove such things, I rather imagine you have connections with the sorts of underhanded people who could create such things. If I went there with a man, if I were married, they would not say no to me, not the way they have been. No one will give a young, unmarried woman a child, it seems.”
He set down his own teacup. “You were saddened when it turned out you weren’t carrying Bally’s child, then.”
“How do you know that? ” She was horrified.
“But not because of wishing to use the child to prop up your own station. I shouldn’t have even suspected that. Just because you wish to have a child of your own. Of course. I should have realized. What do women want besides men?”
“Look here, it is not as if the only things that women want are husbands and children,” she said.
“Clearly, you do not wish to have a husband,” he said.
“There are other things that women want, all manner of things,” she said, though she was beginning to realize that she had not much considered anything else for herself. She certainly had never entertained any idea that she could write operas like that woman she’d spoken to days before. Why had she never thought such things? Why had she never even considered anything like that?
“Why not?” he said.
“Why not what?” she said.
“Why don’t you wish to get married again?”
She was flustered. “It’s too much risk, of course. Can we come back to the matter at hand? This is what I wish from you, to pose as my husband so that I can adopt a child. And perhaps I do wish for a bit of money, just enough to put away for the child to make her life easier when she is grown. And perhaps I don’t care how you get it, as long as you promise no one has died in order for you to get it. It would not be for me, so I suppose it’s excusable.”
“Too much risk,” he said, nodding. “You and Rutchester should compare notes, perhaps.”
“The Duke of Rutchester? He’s one of your compatriots, I gather,” she said. “Agree to do this for me, or I shall run about shouting from the rooftops that you are all four The Lords of the Crossroads and that you killed my husband. Agree and purchase my silence. That is why you are here.”
He raised his eyebrows. “All right, my lady, all right. It is why I’m here. And you are certain this is what you want from me?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Well, I am in no position to refuse you,” he said.
“You are not,” she said, picking up her teacup again. “Good, then.”
He picked up his own teacup. He nodded, slowly, as if he was thinking it over. “And if I do this, you promise never to tell anyone what you know?”
“I do,” she said.
“Good, then,” he said.