Chapter Nineteen
Grace stole through the front door just as the hands of the longcase clock in the foyer struck three with a merry little chime. She hadn’t cried on the ride home in the hack she had found just down the street from the tavern. But, Lord, she had wanted to.
It was only now, in the safety of the house that had been her home during the Season these last several years, that it seemed permissible at last to be just as miserable and wretched as she felt.
The house was dark and quiet, still far removed from sunrise and the chaos that would no doubt erupt once the children had woken.
But the time didn’t truly matter—there had never been a time at which she could not have knocked upon any of her sisters’ doors.
No time too late, nor too early. They had never failed to be there when she had needed them.
She trudged up the stairs, weaving a path toward the master suite in the rear of the house, which Charity shared with Anthony. A long, lonely path, but there would solace at the end of it. Comfort. Sisterly affection.
She needed all of those things at this particular moment. And something else besides.
Grace rapped upon the door at the end of the hall and dashed at her eyes with the back of her hand as she listened through the door to the telltale sounds of Charity rising from bed and slipping into her wrapper.
A few moments later the door opened, and Charity muffled a yawn in her hand. “Grace?” she asked. “Whatever are you wearing?”
Grace gave a jerky shrug. “It’s quite a long story,” she said, her voice tight and strained. “Suffice it to say, I need some tea.”
A chiding half-smile curled the right-hand corner of Charity’s lips. “And you couldn’t have rung for a maid?”
“No.” Grace wrung her hands awkwardly. “That is to say, I need some of your tea.”
“Oh. Oh.” Charity touched her fingers to her lips. “I see,” she said. “Yes, of course, dear. Right away.”
A sob sneaked out of her throat, and Grace pressed her palm to her mouth to smother it a second too late. She had known, of course that Charity would not heap judgment upon her shoulders for a sin that most would say put her beyond redemption.
A ruined woman. One who needed to be saved by a man who would inevitably resent her for the sacrifice of his name and his title. One who thought her a mistake.
But Charity would never. “Oh, sweetheart,” Charity said, and in a swish of silk she had wrapped Grace in her arms. The sweetly-floral scent of her perfume was a welcome contrast to the sour ale smell that had been stuck in her nose all evening.
And from the salty-spicy scent of Henry’s skin, with which she was now intimately acquainted.
“Lockhart?” Charity asked gently, with a soothing stroke down her back.
Grace nodded miserably against her shoulder. “I don’t want to marry him,” she said.
“Darling, you don’t have to marry anyone. Ever, if you don’t wish it.” Her hand stilled just briefly. “He didn’t…take liberties which you did not permit?”
Grace shook her head. “No, nothing like that. He said—he said it was a mistake.” A shuddering breath burned her lungs on its way out.
“He said he was going to the Archbishop for a special license, but it was clear he was displeased about it. I told him I wouldn’t marry him but—he’ll likely turn up in the morning anyway. ”
“You won’t have to see him,” Charity said, and her voice shifted to a dark, threatening inflection. “Anthony will handle his lordship. I promise you that.”
A little hiccough slid over Grace’s lips. “I really do need that tea,” she said.
“You’ll have it,” Charity said as those soothing strokes resumed. “Do you want to tell me the whole of your story? We could sit in the library while you drink your tea.”
“I really don’t think I can just now,” Grace said. It was too raw; too fresh still. The humiliation of it still wrenched at her heart. “I’m sorry.”
Charity made a comforting noise near her ear and crooned, “Would you like me to instead wake Mercy and Felicity so that we can all get incredibly drunk together and invent terrible new epithets for his lordship?”
Grace choked on a flutter of laughter and drew in what felt like the first full breath this evening.
How lovely it was to have sisters like hers.
Sisters who loved her no matter how she had come into their lives.
Who loved her precisely as she was, and who had never thought of her as a mistake.
Scrubbing at her eyes with the cuff of her sleeve, she said, “Yes. I think I would like that very much.”
∞∞∞
Henry had been welcomed—if one could call it that—into the Duke of Warrington’s study at half past eleven.
It was still far too early for a proper morning call, but this wasn’t a proper morning call, exactly.
A fact of which the duke, who sat across from Henry at the vast expanse of his gleaming mahogany desk, was no doubt already acutely aware.
The man had only one eye from which to glare, but by God, he did it expertly.
Exactly the right amount of malice shimmering within the depths of his lone dark eye.
Precisely the correct curl of his lips in the sneer he wore only too easily, the old scar that bisected his lips creating an even more imposing image than he suspected the duke knew.
“Speak,” the duke ordered, in the commanding tone of a man accustomed to obedience.
Henry swallowed, his throat gone suddenly dry. “I want to marry Grace,” he said.
“Do you?”
“I have got a special license,” Henry said, “issued by the Archbishop himself only this morning.”
“A special license,” the duke repeated, that sneer creeping up his face to twitch at his nose.
“It is…a matter of some urgency.”
“For you,” the duke said snidely. “It is a matter of some urgency—for you.”
“And for Grace. If she is with child—”
“If she is with child, it is because you couldn’t keep your cock in your trousers where it damned well belongs,” the duke snarled. “Better men than you have come to me to ask for Grace’s hand in marriage, and not a one of them had the goddamned gall to compromise her in advance of it.”
Henry stifled a wince. “Your Grace, I know I have behaved badly. But I am here to rectify matters.”
“Grace is not in need of your charity, Lockhart. Whatever happens—which my wife has assured me will be nothing—Grace has got her family around her.” The duke placed his hands upon his desk and shoved himself up from his chair. “You, Lockhart, are a feeble, puling invertebrate.”
“A what?”
“You lack a spine,” the duke replied stonily as he stalked around the desk. “You’re here to do the thing you think you’re meant to do only because you’re meant to do it, with no regard for Grace’s feelings on the matter. As I’ve said, I have refused better men on her behalf. I’m refusing you, too.”
Henry surged to his feet. “I would like to speak with her first,” he said.
“No.” Just a tight, derisive refusal. That unflinching glare burrowed into Henry’s soul.
“Please,” Henry said. “I have apologies to make. I gave her a mistaken impression, which I would welcome the opportunity to correct.”
“As it was told to me, your exact words were ‘I own up to my mistakes,’” the duke said. “For future reference, Lockhart, when one is tendering a proposal of marriage to a woman, one is best served not to give the impression he does so against his better judgment.”
Henry’s stomach clenched. Slowly he sank back into his chair—like the invertebrate the duke had accused him of being. “I was…overwrought,” he said. “I do want to marry her. I regretted only that I had made it a necessity.”
“Not a necessity, as it happens, Lockhart,” the duke said lightly, mockingly.
“You must know as well as I do who it is that suffers the judgment of society for an illegitimate child,” Henry said.
A man could always walk away, reputation intact.
No matter how many bastards he sired, a child born out of wedlock had always been viewed as a moral failing on the woman’s behalf.
His mother had been proof enough of that.
“I don’t want Grace to suffer that,” he said.
“I should not have put her in such a position. That was my mistake.” But not Grace. Never Grace.
“Yes,” the duke said, “it was.”
“So I may see her?”
“No,” the duke scoffed. “You broke her damned heart, you wretched son of a bitch. What, did you think she would blithely give you another go at it?” The duke stopped before him and sneered down into his face.
“She’s worth a dozen of you, Lockhart. A hundred.
And what’s more, she knows it. She’ll get over you soon enough. ”
Over him? He didn’t want her to be over him.
“She had all three of her sisters in stitches evening last when she made it home,” the duke continued. “They were drinking in the library until nearly dawn, concocting new and eloquent appellations for you. I’m particularly fond of pigeon-livered arse-licker, myself.”
Henry blinked, astounded. “What the devil does that mean?”
“Haven’t the faintest, but it does roll off the tongue. Not one of them is in a fit state for company this morning, needless to say, and I wouldn’t force Grace to see you even if she was. So, Lockhart—kindly get your sorry arse out of my goddamned house.”
Henry rose to his feet, his heart thudding in his chest. Invertebrate, the duke had called him.
Spineless. Weak, he supposed, he had meant to imply.
Not his own man at all, but one driven by the expectations of others.
By the opinions of others more so than his own.
And it was true that Grace’s family was large and intimidating.
That probably he’d been judged and found wanting by most of them already.