Chapter Four
Celine hadn’t planned to ever see the duke again, but over a span of years, her choices had inexorably whittled down to just two: the duke, or death. She had swallowed her pride in the end and chosen to live.
It was even more unpleasant than she had anticipated.
The duke strode into the room, larger than Celine remembered and almost humming with vitality. Everything about her was a shock. Her eyes. Her hair. The muscled, elegant way she moved. Indefinably, she had matured in the intervening years.
The moment she recognised Celine, her whole body stilled and her eyes flared bright with emotion.
Celine knew better than to expect anything from the duke, and yet, hatefully, her heart leapt in response.
She smothered the feeling even as the duke’s eyes cooled, and the duke’s mouth hardened with distaste.
She looked at Celine as at a stranger. No, worse—as at a tramp come intolerably into her home.
“I assume you’re here for money,” the duke said in French, without greeting. “There are lists you can enrol in. I’ll see your name is added without undue delay. I believe the going rate is about a shilling a day, which is more than you’d earn sweeping out fireplaces.”
Searing contempt wiped Celine’s heart clean. Of course the duke thought she had come begging. As if she were stupid enough to throw herself on the duke’s mercy a second time.
“In a way, I am here for money,” she said, “but it’s going to hurt a lot more than that.”
The duke frowned, not understanding. She couldn’t conceive of someone so far beneath her being able to hurt her.
Celine’s pulse began to race with anticipation.
She said, “I suppose you know Bastien lost his head. He took your secrets with him, the poor, loyal idiot; he never breathed a word. But I am smarter than Bastien, and I am still here.” She reached into a hidden pocket and pulled a letter out.
She waggled it between her fingers. “You were a very naughty child.”
Infuriatingly, the duke controlled her response too well for Celine to read her. Celine was sure the duke must understand what she held. There was only one letter it could be, if she had come all the way to London with it.
The duke took the letter from her, turning and examining it. Bastien’s name and direction were written on the front in a bold, childish hand that would be unmistakeable to the duke, as it was the duke’s own writing.
The duke had told her in Paris, Bastien helped me with a prank when I was twelve and precocious. If he’s destroyed the letter I sent him, then he’s the only person besides myself who knows what was in it.
The duke’s eyes widened slowly, and the hand that held the letter began to tremble.
And no wonder. The contents of that letter were so shocking, Celine still almost couldn’t believe it.
She said with relish, “You betrayed your aunt, the Duke of Howard. You betrayed your country and your king. You instructed Bastien how to place your aunt’s papers among the possessions of a French lieutenant who you knew would be captured by the English.
Their discovery would make it look like your aunt was passing along state secrets.
You see, I have read it. There is no mistake. ”
But again, the duke stymied her. Despite being visibly shaken, she only said, “Yes, I see.”
Then she moved all at once, crushing the letter inside her hand.
The paper crinkled and buckled. She strode to the fireplace and threw it in.
It caught flame quickly and was reduced to a fine web of ash, and then to nothing.
The duke stayed some time watching the fire.
Every now and then, a shiver would pass over her whole body.
Eventually she straightened and fixed her gaze on Celine.
She showed naked emotion at last, an excoriating anger.
“You dare to come here,” she said, “to my home—”
Oh, it was too good. Whoever said revenge didn’t satisfy had never hated.
Leisurely, Celine pulled another letter from her pocket. On the front was Bastien’s name and direction in the same writing. It was a copy, as the other had been. The duke stilled, and for the first time, wariness entered her face, perhaps the first dawning realisation she was in serious trouble.
“You can burn this one, too, if it will make you feel better,” Celine said sweetly. “I have more. The original will fall into the wrong hands, of course, should anything happen to me.”
The original was safely hidden, too precious to risk.
Yes, the duke was starting to realise now.
All the blood had left her face, and she had put her hand to the back of a chair to steady herself.
She was unaware, Celine thought, of having done so.
There was no need to point out the consequences to the duke of this treasonous letter being made public; it was only too clear the duke knew.
Perhaps even better than Celine, she knew.
And she was going to have to fulfil Celine’s every desire to stop that from happening.
The duke looked up. She was no longer looking at Celine as an inconvenience beneath her notice, but as an adversary she took very seriously indeed. Now, at last, they were playing on an even field. At last.
The world seemed to pitch around Celine, but she didn’t let herself relax any more than the duke had.
In those unearthly eyes, Celine could almost see the emotions cooling, the reserve returning, the manner becoming civil and unhurried. The blackmail had been accepted. Thus they would enter the next phase: an agreement on terms.
Delicately, Celine said, “Won’t you ring for tea?”
“Of course.” The duke matched her tone, crossing the room to pull the cord and murmur instructions to a footman.
The duke gestured Celine to one of the chairs arranged around a small table in the centre of the room and took a seat herself.
She leaned her chin on her fingers and baldly considered Celine.
Celine looked back, unabashed. After perhaps three minutes of total silence, Celine smiled.
“Is it hurting yet?” she whispered. The duke’s face contorted.
Two footmen entered, arranged the tea things on the table, and left.
The duke said in a hard voice, “What is it you want?”
The moment Celine had risked everything for had come. She hid her shaking hands. “I want you to launch me on society and help me make an excellent marriage. To that end you will stand as guardian and settle a dowry on me of twenty thousand pounds.”
“Launch you on society?” the duke repeated with open astonishment. “You are joking.”
“I am not.”
The duke looked her over from foot to forehead.
Celine had an idea what she must look like.
Her face bore the queasy remnants of makeup.
Her dress—a cut and colour that would probably make an English debutante faint—gaped lewdly at the breast, her fingernails were dirty, and she smelled.
She looked the furthest thing from respectable.
She was the furthest thing from respectable.
“It won’t be possible,” the duke said at last.
She heard a bark of laughter that she realised a moment later was her own bitter, disbelieving voice. “Must I remind you of the letter I hold?”
The duke frowned. “I am willing to be very generous indeed. Somewhere in the vicinity of eighty thousand pounds. Don’t tell me I’ve encountered the one whore in Christendom who can’t be bought.”
Celine’s vision blacked out for a moment. Eighty thousand— She could buy her own house with— No, a row of houses.
But a row of houses wasn’t what she wanted.
She wanted what she’d always wanted and had been stupid enough to think a tender lover might one day give her: a good marriage that would mean an end to her deprivations.
An accepted position in society, so that she would never be looked down on again.
Her own home. People she would matter to, who would mourn her when she died.
She couldn’t buy any of that, not even with eighty thousand pounds.
And yet there sat the duke, expensive, exquisite, shaped in every way by the knowledge she was welcome in any room she entered, barring Celine entry. Her hatred writhed and contracted in her stomach. It was how she knew she was alive.
(The only whore in Christendom who— Laughable. She’d heard worse.)
“No. You’ll give me what I asked for.” Her voice sounded odd, almost like it was made up of three voices speaking together. She tried to clutch the seat harder but could no longer judge the tension in her fingers.
“At least drink some tea, Miss Genet,” the duke bit out. “You must put something in your stomach, or you’ll be ill.”
She wanted to refuse. It was almost more than she could endure to follow this woman’s orders.
But she didn’t want to die. If that was what she wanted, she would’ve lain beside Mathilde on the floorboards and just …
let go. Watched the light twinkle in through the gaps in the roof until she was ready to close her eyes.
She was going to live. She was going to be warm, and comfortable, and loved.
She let go of the chair and, for a moment, fought the dizzying sensation she was falling up. She managed a sip. “I want—” she said, and stopped. The walls, the table, the cup in her hand all felt very strange, like she was in a dream. No, no! She couldn’t faint now.
“With the money I’m offering, you could make a very good match even without my aid,” the duke said. “Throw a lavish party or two and your countrymen-in-exile will welcome you with open arms into their society.”
The duke had understood nothing about what she wanted.
The duke, before her, seemed the most unreal of all.
“Miss Genet,” the duke said more sharply, and when still no response came, the duke straightened out of her slouch and spoke a flurry of angry English words.
The duke came to stand before her so that she could make out every detail of the lowest button of the duke’s waistcoat—ivory, with a tiny fleet of ships carved into it. It was beautiful.
“Pay attention!” the duke said in French. “You’re going to come out of this very badly if you don’t pay attention. Must I pinch you awake?”
She looked up at that. All the way to the duke’s severe face, her drowned-god eyes.
Faithless. Liar.
The duke’s fingertips landed on her collarbone and traced lightly down to meet the low hemline of her bodice. And then, without warning, a deep, painful twist of flesh.
She gasped. Not as though she had been pinched, but as though she had been brought back from the dead. Brought back into a body half starving.
Celine’s heart (she imagined her heart like a ripe fruit that had shrivelled and dried and admitted almost no life) opened up and began pumping blood around her body in earnest. To her hands, her cheeks, her throat. She could feel her heartbeat in her eyelids.
She grabbed the duke’s hand in her own, intending to push it off. Skin. Heat. She looked down at the long fingers with their elegant knuckles and squared-off nails. Such unspeakable things these fingers had done to her. Grabbing turned to holding.
The duke jerked her hand away and stepped quickly back.
Celine stared down at her empty hand, her heart pounding. Her fingers flexed around nothing. An aching nothing.
Forget that. Don’t think of it. If she could marshal herself for one more bout, she might sleep in a bed tonight. It seemed deeply unrealistic, but she told herself it was true. Think only of that.
The duke had seated herself again. Her right hand hung over the chair arm, forefinger and thumb held subtly apart from the rest of her fingers, as though she’d dipped them in gunpowder.
“You think you can outmanoeuvre me,” Celine said, dragging her voice up from somewhere, “because you are a duke. You cannot. You know you cannot.”
Three years ago, the duke had washed her hands of Celine—left her behind and never thought of her again.
And the worst of it was that Celine had done nothing but think of the duke, who could have saved her and had chosen not to.
On those long, grim nights when she had no light to read by—and was sometimes being had, in the dark, Louise grumbling at her to keep it down—her hatred had been the only living thing she could hold on to.
She had done everything in her power to win the duke over, including cutting her own heart open on the blade of honest feeling. It hadn’t been enough—and that, she could never forgive.
She looked into the duke’s painful-bright eyes and said with every fibre of her being, “You. Cannot.”
The duke’s face became utterly devoid of everything soft—the true face at last. “You will live to regret this, Celine,” the duke said. Her name shivered over her skin, cold and dark and potent. “You will live to regret this very much indeed.”
“So long as I can live.”