Chapter 27
Chapter
Twenty-Seven
Windsor
We did not discuss the kiss.
We did not discuss it as I helped her onto the dock, her hand cold and wet in mine.
We did not discuss it as I retrieved my waistcoat, shirt, and boots while she stood dripping in her chemise, her arms crossed, lake water pooling around her bare feet on the bleached boards.
We did not discuss it as I wrapped her in my coat without comment, the shoulders falling past her elbows, the hem brushing her knees.
We did not discuss it because there was nothing safe to say.
What had happened in the lake was not ambiguous.
It did not lend itself to the polite fiction that one of us had stumbled, or been startled by a fish, or momentarily taken leave of our senses.
We had kissed before—more than once, and not always with restraint—but this had been different.
This had been the kind of kiss that did not stop on its own.
The kind that required interruption from a third party with a telegram, because the two parties involved were no longer capable of interrupting themselves.
Another minute. Perhaps less. Had the footman not appeared on the bank when he did, I would have carried her out of the lake, laid her on the bleached boards of the dock, and put my mouth on every part of her the wet chemise had taught me to want.
And she would have let me. I knew it as surely as I knew my own name.
There would be costs to such action. A man of my position did not lay a woman of hers down on a dock in the open air without consequence—not to her reputation, not to her future, not to whatever fragile thing the two of us had been building over months of careful proximity.
Had we crossed that final line, we would not have crossed it for an afternoon.
We would have crossed it for the rest of our lives.
There would have been no other honorable course.
I would have married her, and she—proud, independent, fiercely guarding the freedom she had purchased at the cost of her youth—would have had her choice taken from her by an act of her own will, and mine.
“The summons,” Rosalynd said, while she retrieved her garments. “Was it from the Queen?” She had read my face with her usual efficiency.
“Yes.”
“Then we need to move.”
The practical problem announced itself the moment we reached the house.
My own situation was manageable—I kept a full wardrobe at Richmond and could be bathed, dressed, and presentable within twenty minutes.
Rosalynd’s situation was considerably more complicated.
She had her dress, which was dry, having been left on the dock.
But everything beneath it was soaked, and one could not reasonably board a train smelling of lake water and pondweed.
“Mrs. Harding,” I said to the housekeeper, who had appeared in the hall with the imperturbable composure of a woman who had served this household for fifteen years and had long since ceased to be surprised by anything.
“Lady Rosalynd requires a bath drawn, and dry undergarments—a chemise and whatever else is necessary. Her dress will need pressing while she bathes. I am expected at Windsor and time is not generous.”
Mrs. Harding’s gaze moved from me—dry shirt and waistcoat, wet trousers, boots in hand—to Rosalynd—wearing my coat over a transparent chemise, barefoot, dripping on the marble—and back to me. Her expression did not change. Not by so much as a flicker.
“Of course, Your Grace. If my lady would follow me?”
Rosalynd followed her upstairs without looking at me.
I bathed and dressed in fifteen minutes. Dark suit, fresh linen, my hair still damp at the collar but otherwise acceptable. Then I waited.
I stood in the front hall and consulted my watch.
Checked the letter again, though I had memorized it in a single glance.
Consulted my watch once more. Paced the length of the hall, stopped, and reminded myself that I was a man who had waited out far more consequential delays with perfect composure.
Twenty-three minutes. I was contemplating whether to send a maid up with a polite enquiry when Rosalynd descended the stairs.
She was wearing her own dress—the light cotton she had worn for the shooting lesson, freshly pressed, not a crease in evidence.
Her hair had been pinned into something approximate, tendrils escaping at her temples and the nape of her neck in a manner that suggested haste rather than art.
Her bonnet hid most of the disarray. She looked, if not precisely as though nothing had happened, then at least as though whatever had happened was now firmly under her control.
She also looked beautiful. But that observation was not useful, so I set it aside.
“The undergarments,” I said, because the question seemed relevant to our departure. “Were they adequate?”
“They serve their purpose.” Her tone closed the subject with the efficiency of a door being latched. “Shall we go?”
We went.
The carriage took us to Richmond station in twelve minutes.
The one o’clock train to Waterloo was mercifully prompt.
We found a first-class compartment to ourselves—a small mercy, given that we both carried a faint mineral scent of lake water beneath the soap, and neither of us looked entirely as we ought.
The train pulled out of the station. The Surrey countryside slid past the windows, green and gilded in the afternoon light. Rosalynd sat across from me, her hands folded in her lap, her gaze directed at the passing landscape. I sat opposite and pretended to read the summons again.
The silence between us was not uncomfortable.
It was charged. Every glance that landed and was redirected.
Every shift of position that brought a knee fractionally closer or moved a hand to a new resting place on the seat.
The compartment was small. The air was warm.
And the memory of her mouth against mine was so immediate and vivid that I could feel it like a phantom limb.
“Steele.”
I looked up from the telegram I was not reading.
“The Queen,” she said. “What will you tell her?”
A safe topic. I seized it.
“Progress. The arms trafficking, the consortium, Davenport’s death. The intelligence we have and the gaps that remain.”
“And the Prince?”
The Prince of Wales. Whose relationship with the murdered man’s wife was the match that could set the whole powder keg alight.
Chrissie had heard the whispers at the lending library.
Rosalynd had shared that news with me. If the rumors had reached young women browsing novels, they had already traveled further than any of us wanted.
“It has not reached the press,” I said. “As far as I am aware. But that is a matter of time, not certainty.”
“Then you know what she will ask you to do.”
The Queen would want the investigation concluded swiftly and quietly.
She would want whatever was personal in her son’s connection to the Hale household kept well away from public scrutiny.
And she would expect me to accomplish this because I was a duke and she was the Queen, and that was how the arrangement worked.
“I will manage it,” I said.
Rosalynd studied me for a moment, then let it rest. I appreciated this. There were aspects of my service to the Crown that did not improve with discussion.
Waterloo station was crowded and loud. We hired a cab to Grosvenor Square. My own carriage was at Steele House, and in any case, a hansom attracted less attention than a ducal crest.
The cab delivered us to the mews entrance behind Rosehaven House. The back gate, the servants’ path, the kitchen garden door. All to avoid detection. The neighbors at Grosvenor Square maintained a surveillance network that would have been the envy of any foreign intelligence service.
“I will call on you tomorrow,” I said, as she stepped down. “To tell you what the Queen has said.”
She paused at the cab door and looked at me. The afternoon light caught the copper in her hair where it had escaped its pins.
“Tomorrow, then,” she said.
I watched the garden gate close behind her, then directed the cab to Paddington Station where I would board the train to Windsor. No need for a three hour carriage ride. Not when the Queen was expecting me.
Windsor Castle in summer was a fortress pretending to be a country house.
The Long Walk stretched behind me as I was escorted through corridors I knew well enough to navigate in darkness.
The equerry who met me at the entrance had the strained expression of a man who had been instructed to produce me hours ago and was already composing his excuse.
“Her Majesty is in the Oak Drawing Room,” he said, walking at a pace that suggested urgency without quite achieving a trot. “She has been expecting you since noon.”
“I was in Surrey when the summons arrived.”
“Yes, Your Grace.” His tone conveyed that Surrey was not an acceptable excuse.
Queen Victoria was seated in a high-backed chair by the window, dressed in black as she had been every day since the Prince Consort’s death twenty-eight years ago.
“Steele.” She did not invite me to sit. This was not a good sign.
“Your Majesty.” I bowed.
“You are late.”
“I came as quickly as I was able, ma’am. I was at my Richmond estate when your summons arrived.”
“Richmond is not the Hebrides. You might have managed it in less time.” Her eyes—sharp, dark, missing nothing—fixed on me. “Sit down. I am tired of craning my neck.”
I sat in the chair opposite. The window behind her framed the East Terrace garden, the light softening in the late afternoon.
“There are rumors,” she said. The word emerged with the distaste she reserved for things she considered beneath her notice. “Concerning my son. And the wife of the murdered man.”
“I am aware of the rumors, ma’am.”
“How far have they traveled?”
“They have not reached the press. But they are circulating in society. I cannot say how widely.”