Chapter 24
“Take it away,” Diana said, before the maid had even finished pouring the tea, and the sharpness in her own voice startled her less than the fact that she no longer cared whether it startled anyone else. “No, leave it. I beg your pardon. Leave it there.”
The maid froze beside the small table, her eyes widening for one brief, guilty instant before she lowered her gaze again. “Yes, Your Grace.”
Diana pressed her fingertips to her temple and shut her eyes for a moment that felt far too much like surrender.
“You may go,” she said more quietly, hating herself a little for the abruptness, hating him most of all for turning every harmless domestic moment into a fresh humiliation.
It had only been a week since she had stood in his study and watched the warmth she had begun to trust vanish from his face. Only a week since he had looked at her with that old coldness and informed her that she had been foolish enough to mistake borrowed tenderness for permanence.
And yet the week had stretched like a season.
The maid slipped away.
The door closed, and Diana stood alone in the pale morning light of her private sitting room, the untouched breakfast tray laid out before her with absurd elegance, as though beauty and silver and fresh jam could remedy the fact that she could no longer meet his eyes.
No longer taking meals together had been her own decision, or so she told herself, though it had hardly required declaration.
After that night, they had moved around each other like enemies confined to the same battlefield, determined to survive without offering the other the satisfaction of injury.
She knew how to survive without him, but the trouble was that for a little while, she had ceased to want to.
That was the most wretched part of it.
No matter how fiercely she tried to preserve her anger, her body continued to remember him with a loyalty her pride found despicable.
There were unwanted moments, when she would pause at a window and think of the breadth of his chest beneath her palm, the way his green eyes had darkened when he wanted her.
The recollection would move low and hot through her with such traitorous intimacy that she wanted to throw something breakable merely to hear another sound besides the one her heart kept making when his name crossed her mind.
By noon, Diana had thrown herself so thoroughly into her duchess duties that even the servants had begun to relax, reassured by her calm efficiency. If only they knew how fragile it was.
A letter arrived within the hour.
It bore Emma’s hand, neat and graceful. Diana nearly tore the seal open with gratitude, because Emma was warmth, the sort of friend who asked questions with love and sat with one’s sorrows without trying to arrange them into something tidier than they were.
But as soon as Diana read the invitation—a small tea party with only Emma and Georgina—she knew she could not go.
Emma had clearly sensed that something was wrong and wanted to draw her out gently, but the thought of sitting beneath their kindness and answering questions, or worse, avoiding them, felt unbearable.
She pulled a fresh sheet of paper toward her and wrote back at once.
Dearest Emma, I fear I am a poor creature indeed today and must beg to be excused, as I am feeling rather under the weather. Pray forgive me, and believe that I shall make amends as soon as I am able.
She sealed the note before she could change her mind and handed it to a footman.
This was humiliation mixed with desire, resentment poisoned by longing, rage threaded through with that most degrading of all truths: if Alexander were to appear in the doorway at that very instant and speak to her not as the man who had consumed her, some weak, broken, romantic part of her would still turn toward him.
That was the wound beneath all the others.
“Good heavens,” said a voice from the doorway, sharp with disbelief and unwanted familiarity. “Have you taken to receiving callers while looking as though the house has just informed you of a death?”
Diana turned.
Her aunt stood there in plum silk and offended importance, her gloved hands clasped too tightly around her reticule. Lady Cliffhall had the gift of entering any room as though it existed primarily to affirm her own importance. Today was no exception.
Diana closed her eyes briefly. Of all days.
“Aunt,” she said, every syllable pressed flat. “I do not recall sending for you.”
“No,” Lady Cliffhall replied, sweeping fully into the room without waiting to be invited, “which is precisely why I came. One cannot depend upon you to be sensible. You have been absent from two engagements, and your note to Mrs. Pembroke was worded so vaguely that she sent to ask whether you had taken ill in earnest or merely grown temperamental.”
Diana felt something cold beginning to rise through her grief. “The entire city must be relieved to know you have undertaken the duty of monitoring my disposition.”
Her aunt stared at her. “There is no need for insolence. I came because your uncle and I are worried. The last time we visited, things were quite…strained.”
“Strained,” The word made Diana laugh softly, and this time there was enough bitterness in it to startle even herself. “Then what should I call the years of coercion, humiliation, abandonment, and interference at your hands?”
Lady Cliffhall stiffened. “I shall pretend not to have heard that.”
“I’d like to pretend you have been affectionate towards me, but that is not the truth, is it?”
“Diana—”
“No.” She turned fully then, and something in her face must have altered, because her aunt actually fell silent. “No, Aunt. Not today. I have spent too many years listening while other people decided what my life ought to be. You will not do it to me today.”
Color rose in the older woman’s cheeks. “Your life, as you call it, was arranged for your benefit. You were a girl with no fortune of her own beyond what your name could secure. We made a brilliant match for you.”
“You sold me.”
The room went still.
Lady Cliffhall recoiled as though struck. “How dare you?”
“How dare I?” Diana’s voice shook now from the violence of finally saying aloud what had sat like a stone in her chest for years.
“How dare I speak plainly of the thing you and Uncle did with such polished ease? You measured me, displayed me, rejected every decent man whose chief fault was that he might actually have chosen me for myself rather than for advantage, and then handed me to a duke as though my life were no more than a negotiation to be concluded over brandy.”
Her aunt’s mouth parted. “We did what was necessary.”
“For whom?”
“For you.”
“No.” Diana stepped closer. She was feverish now, full of barely held tears. “For yourselves. For your ambitions. For the delight of being connected to a greater rank than your own. You never once asked whether I wanted him. Whether I was frightened. Whether I was lonely. Whether I was happy.”
“That is an ungrateful interpretation of years of care.”
Diana gave a short, unsteady laugh, but there was no real humor in it, only hurt worn thin.
“Care?” she repeated softly. “Is that what you call it? You decided what I should wear, what I should say, what I should want, and all the while I was expected to be grateful for it. If that was care, Aunt, it did not feel like kindness.”
Lady Cliffhall drew herself up, aghast, the very picture of outraged propriety. “You are overwrought.”
“Perhaps.” Diana’s throat tightened, but she did not look away. “Perhaps I have been overwrought since I was nine years old and no one in your house had the decency to notice that I was a grieving child.”
That landed, and for the first time, the older woman’s expression faltered.
Diana pressed on, because if she stopped now, she would never say it.
“Do you know what I wanted?” she asked, more quietly now, and the softness of the question was sharper than all that had preceded it.
“I wanted to be loved in peace. I wanted someone to care whether I was afraid. Whether I was hurt. Whether I was lonely. I wanted, absurdly enough, the very ordinary happiness you made me feel ashamed for desiring.”
Lady Cliffhall swallowed. “You are a duchess.”
“Yes,” Diana said. “And for a year, I was a duchess abandoned on my wedding day. Tell me, did the title keep me warm?”
Her aunt’s fingers tightened around her reticule until the knuckles showed white through the kid gloves. “If your husband has disappointed you, that is scarcely my crime.”
“No,” Diana replied with terrible calm. “Your crime was teaching me, long before he ever had the chance, that what I wanted did not matter if enough prestige could be obtained in exchange for my silence.”
For several seconds, Lady Cliffhall said nothing at all. Then, with visible effort, she gathered herself again, drawing dignity around her like a cloak she believed was still capable of defending her.
“I see,” she said stiffly. “You have become theatrical in your marriage.”
Diana’s lips parted in disbelief.
And then, suddenly, she was calm. She had, at last, found the center of the wound.
“If you say one more careless thing to me in this house,” she said, each word clear and quiet and utterly without tremor, “I shall ring for the footman and have you shown out.”
Her aunt stared, and Diana held her eyes.
At length, Lady Cliffhall rose. “You are not yourself.”
“No,” Diana said. “I believe, for the first time in many years, I am very nearly myself indeed.”
A flush of outrage darkened the older woman’s face, but perhaps there was enough truth in the room by then to make even her cautious. She drew herself up, muttered something about tempers and ingratitude, and swept toward the door.
At the threshold, she paused. “You will regret speaking to me so.”
Diana looked at her steadily. “I have regretted my silence far more.”
Then her aunt was gone. The door closed, and the room fell quiet again.
Diana remained where she was for a long moment, her whole body trembling with the aftermath of release.
Nothing in her felt victorious. She still ached, but beneath all that misery lay a strange, exhausted steadiness. She had said it, at last. She had looked one of the designers of her life’s unhappiness in the face and refused to play the grateful, well-married niece any longer.
Outside the window, the late afternoon light had begun to soften over the gardens.
Diana crossed slowly to the chair beside the fire and sank into it, her limbs heavy, her eyes stinging anew, though no fresh tears fell. Her hands rested loosely in her lap. The house murmured around her in distant, ordinary sounds. Somewhere far above, a door opened and closed.
Her heart gave its foolish little leap again.
She shut her eyes and leaned back, one hand pressing lightly over the place beneath her ribs where hurt and want, and anger had all tangled themselves together so tightly she no longer knew what to do with them.
She did not know how many more days this house could contain both herself and Alexander without breaking one of them entirely. She only knew that something had begun—whether ruin or freedom, she could not yet tell.
And that, for the first time in her life, even in pain, she had chosen her own voice over everyone else’s design.