Chapter Six
“Death’s head on a stick.”
He did not know why that should hurt so much. Perhaps just because she said it. He had always known about the Duke of Death nickname, and to her knowledge they had never met. But was he really such a joke to society? To her?
I am not dead. In the last month, I have felt more alive than ever in my life; and in the last week...
In the last week, he had hidden and lied.
Friends did not do that. Honourable men did not do that.
She owed him nothing, as a stranger or as Isbourne.
It mattered nothing that he was so magnanimously going to give Lily the chance to be his wife or not.
He was and would always be to both of them, this pitiable laughing stock.
The death’s head on two ducal legs, one of which was, presumably, finely balanced on a bar of soap by the grave’s edge.
He could not even laugh at himself.
At some point, he seemed to have sat down on the bed. It felt cold and faintly damp under his fingers. Nurse would be horrified. In truth, so was he, beneath the foolish humiliation of what he had overheard.
It took him some time to get all that hurt and idiocy back into proportion and remember the importance of what he had been doing in the cupboard in the first place. He had been making sure it was safe for Tabitha and Lily. That was his first priority. His second was to tell them the truth.
He got up briskly and returned to the cupboard. Though he was prepared to at least try to shut his ears, it seemed silence had fallen in the chamber next door. They must be asleep. He resumed his fingertip search around the walls.
He had just found a knobble in the wood of the ceiling, almost at the juncture with the back wall, when he heard the first swish of another movement and stilled.
It seemed to come from the other side of the cupboard wall. He held his breath, listening intently, and it came again, a definite, deliberate scratch. He placed his hand over the place the sound seemed to come from and scratched back in the same simple pattern. The scratch came again.
“Tabitha?” he whispered. “Are you in the cupboard?”
“Jack.” There was amused laughter, even in her breath, and in spite of everything, it made him smile.
“I think I can make the panel open. May I try?”
There was a pause. Perhaps she was looking back at Lily in bed, or at her own déshabillée. In the dark cupboard, his face heated.
“Try,” she whispered.
He found the knob again and pulled and pushed at it until quite suddenly, the whole back panel slid silently aside, and he was gazing at Tabitha in the candlelight.
Tabitha with her luxurious hair loose about her shoulders, wearing a light dressing gown tied around the middle.
She was flanked by two hanging gowns and travelling cloaks, and her cupboard door was closed.
Swallowing the sudden lump in his throat, he pointed out the knot in the ceiling and stepped back. She walked into his cupboard, and then into his chamber and closed the cupboard door.
“I don’t want to wake Lily,” she murmured. “But, Jack, what on earth...?”
“I think they hide in this room and use the cupboard entrance to rob the guests in the other.”
“That makes alarming sense.” She gazed around his room. “It explains why my room is aired and relatively clean and yours has not been touched in months. What a lucky escape to have you here.”
“You were probably safe anyway tonight, what with the brandy and the Smiths. Otherwise, they would have found somewhere else to stash me.”
She brushed past him and sat on the bed. “Your sheets are damp.”
“I know. I intend to sleep wrapped in my coat. And hat.”
Her eyes danced in the candlelight, and it felt like physical pain.
He lowered himself carefully onto the bed at a decent distance. “I need to tell you something.”
“About Smith?”
“I’ll follow him, make sure his presence in the country is known, along with the means.”
“Is that safe?” she asked, frowning. “If he is a foreign spy... And there are three of them.”
“It turns out I am good at hiding,” he said ruefully. “I have not been honest with you and I want to be.”
“You are going to tell me whether your name is De’Ath, or Johns, or something else altogether?”
“It’s De’Ath, that much is true. John is my middle name and as a child I was known as Jack. My full name is Rudolph John De’Ath, and I am the seventh Duke of Isbourne.”
Her eyes widened. She jumped to her feet, took a couple of paces toward the cupboard, and swung back before he could wipe the shame and pain from his face. Unexpectedly, she strode back and threw herself onto the bed beside him.
“You really have been escaping, throwing off the traces.”
“I have. I had to, just once.”
“Especially if you were expected to tie yourself in marriage,” she said shrewdly. “Were you coming to Sark when we first met?”
“I was thinking about it, wondering if I could introduce myself as a stranger to discover the lady’s true thoughts, or if I could divine them better as myself.”
“And what of your thoughts?”
He shrugged. “If she was against it, of course I would never allow the marriage.”
“And if she wasn’t? If she wanted to be a duchess?”
Of course she didn’t. No one wanted to be the Duchess of Death. But deliberately, he kept his face tranquil. “I will always do my duty.”
She searched his eyes. “I believe you will.”
“You see why I forced myself to keep my distance at the George,” he said in a rush. “It was the hardest thing I ever did.”
“But then, you have not been much tried, have you?”
“No,” he said humbly. “But I can recognize good fortune beyond any I could ever hope for.”
Her brow twitched as she continued to stare at him. In the flickering light, colour seemed to seep along the shape of her cheekbone. “Is that why you kissed me?”
“Yes,” he said honestly. “I apologize if it was insulting. I did not intend that. I was only so ridiculously happy it was you.”
She swung one foot back and forward as though deep in thought, but she said nothing.
“Is there a legal contract of betrothal?” he asked at last.
She shook her head. “There is an agreement of intent between her father and yours, signed long before either of you were born. Neither Lily nor I had ever heard of it before.”
“Neither had I,” Jack admitted.
“So why has it suddenly come to the surface now? Why is it so urgent?”
“In case I die.”
Shock sprang into her eyes. “You do not appear to be at death’s door to me.”
“No, I am much better. Which is why my uncles seem to have decided I am fit to marry and produce heirs for Isbourne.”
She was silent for a few moments, then, “Do you trust your uncles?”
“Yes.”
“Really? Then why are you escaping them?”
He drew in his breath, trying to find the words for the explosion that had been building within him before he left. “I have lived with a...a surfeit of goodness.”
“Smothering you,” she said slowly. “Layer after layer until you can’t breathe... And they are in control.”
More than the relief of her understanding, he grasped she was speaking from her own experience. Women were subject to family control, too, and especially to a husband’s. He remembered with fresh distaste that she had been married to an old man. Her surfeit was unlikely to have been of goodness.
“You are escaping, too,” he blurted.
“Oh, death was kind to me,” she drawled. “Now I’m looking for a purpose to it all. I’m not sure there is one. Apart from Lily.”
“You are discontented.”
“I am bored. Fortunately, it is fashionable.”
Without intending to, he reached up and touched her cheek. “You are looking for love. I hope you find it.”
For an instant she stared at him. He had the impression she was holding her breath. And then she rose fluidly to her feet and his hand fell away.
“How intriguing,” she drawled, and he understood he was unbearable.
“You are a romantic after all. I shan’t forbid you from courting Lily, but there will be no quick marriage.
As for the rest, do write and tell me if you learn anything about Smith.
I shall be at Hawthorn Court for the next fortnight.
After that, you may always reach me care of the Dower House at Sark Park. Good night.”
He followed her, capturing her hand when it already lay on the cupboard door. She turned to face him, and he bowed over her hand to kiss it gently, to inhale the scent of her skin. When he straightened, their eyes met, and just for an instant, she looked frightened.
And then she opened the door and was gone, stepping through her own cupboard. He closed the partition by pushing the same knob inward and carefully shut the cupboard on his side.
His heart was thundering with new excitement, and his head flooded with a hundred plans, impossible, terrifying, necessary plans.
***
TABITHA DID NOT SLEEP well. She should have been angry, disgusted and insulted by Jack’s deceit, but the truth was, these emotions had barely touched her. Along with a twinge of hurt, they had melted away in instinctive understanding.
In many ways, the man baffled her, but along with pity for the sickly child, so hemmed in by protectors that he had never climbed a tree or a fence, nor even been allowed to mingle with his fellow students at university, she was conscious of irritation with his guardians.
How dare they impose this half-life on such a spirited person, too sweet-natured to hurt them with disobedience?
For it was not weakness. She understood that too as she lay in bed in the dark. It had taken courage to strike out alone, to find out for himself how the world worked, and what his own limits were. But there was an inner steel to him.
“If she was against it, of course I would never allow the marriage.” There had been a quiet determination there, as there had been when he had refused the temptation she’d offered at the George.
He did the right thing, even down to pursuing the suspicious Mr. Smith and his entourage, which was hardly the work of a duke.