Chapter Nine
They drove in silence for a minute or two, Celine turning her face up to search out fresh air and focusing on the houses they passed in an attempt to calm the dizzy nausea unfurling through her.
“Give it to me,” the duke said in a hard voice, her thin pretence at politeness done.
Celine handed the package over, and a moment later, felt a little better. There had been something wobbly and dense about the cake that had disturbed her. She hadn’t cooled down yet, but she began to feel steadier.
As the nausea subsided, she became aware in a new way of how close she sat to the duke, who seemed to radiate heat. She removed the shawl and threw it with her muff onto the seat beside her. If only she could remove her bonnet and lift her hair away from her neck.
It had been a disappointment not to meet Lord Burnley, but she would meet him soon enough.
She liked Lady Pecke a great deal; she could imagine the genuine warmth and familial loyalty she so craved, living among the Peckes.
More than a single romantic passion that time would erode, this was what she wished for.
“That went well,” she said, fidgeting with her clinging gloves. “Am I correct in understanding we will meet Lord Burnley in two days’ time, at Mrs. Johnson’s rout?”
“Yes.”
The duke was awful at polite conversation, but Celine was satisfied.
After overcoming her bout of nerves, she had endeared herself to Lady Pecke without the duke’s help.
Her mind was whirling with the new social vocabulary she was beginning to learn and which she would have to navigate: routs and teas, balls and musicales.
In the circumscribed view her bonnet allowed, she could see the duke’s thighs, clad in buckskin breeches that left nothing to the imagination.
From her body, and not her mind, came the memory of being cradled between those thighs.
She swallowed. The duke’s gloved hand tightened over the head of the cane.
She slowly became aware the duke was staring at her. Reluctantly, she looked up.
The duke’s gaze was a weight that became heavier the longer it stayed on her. The unsettling eyes seeming to glow brighter, their queer otherworldliness oppressing her, until she felt she might be crushed and looked away.
In all her plans, it had been easy to take what she wanted from the duke, whom she hated.
She had disregarded what she remembered about the duke’s searing presence.
After all, the overheated, lust-addled, worshipping young woman who had made those memories had not been given a chance to memorialise them.
The very depth of her feeling had been what ensured she would hate the duke when she woke alone and abandoned. The sting of rejection had sealed it.
But … she was not impervious. It was a humiliating realisation.
“I could buy you a husband,” the duke said suddenly.
“Tomorrow. If I put it about that your dowry is eighty thousand pounds, we should be able to find a lord desperate enough to cooperate. I’ll speak to the archbishop and get you a license.
” The duke was visibly warming to the idea.
“It need take no more than a day or two, and the thing is done. You married, and I receiving what you have promised.”
She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “No.” And then, more forcefully, “No!”
The duke had misunderstood her desires last night in this same way, and it had irritated her then.
But it was nothing to what she felt now, edging into panic.
Now, she had taken tea with a countess and knew beyond doubt that she had pleased her.
Now she had tasted the world, she wanted to make her own.
How could the duke think a grubby, underhanded deal with a desperate man would satisfy her?
“I want it all done properly,” she said, her voice harsh and nakedly angry.
“The courting, the ball, the banns, all of it. Eighty thousand pounds? For a French girl nobody’s ever heard of?
I want to belong, not become lifelong fodder for gossip.
Nothing underhanded and sordid, do you understand me? ”
Answering anger blazed into the duke’s face. “No blackmail, then?”
Celine felt it like a blow. She had forgotten—an extraordinary omission—what her own criminal part in all this was.
She was flushed with shame, and still she made herself say, “Everything is to be done properly.”
The rest of the drive passed in silence. When they pulled into the front yard of the duke’s house, the duke stepped down from the carriage before it had even stopped and, with a flash of her boots and a flick of her coattails, disappeared through the front door.
Chastened, Celine entered more slowly. She had thought she understood who the duke was in Paris, but while drinking tea in Lady Pecke’s far smaller house, she had realised her knowledge was incomplete.
The English ladies had transparently held the duke in awe.
They had feared her. But they hadn’t known her.
The curiosity about what was private—about a young woman like Celine living in the house of a tyrant—had been palpable.
What did they imagine might befall Celine, here in the duke’s clutches?
What did she fear?
When she reached her rooms, she collapsed onto the sofa and couldn’t rouse herself for some time. When at last she did, it was to call for wine.
She was more tired than she should have been from a simple outing. The longing to climb into bed and find oblivion parched her veins. But when Adele returned with wine and a plate of fruits and cold meat, Celine gestured the maid into a chair.
“Sit with me please,” she said in English. “Share my meal, and speak with me a while.”
She could sleep when she was someone’s wife.
Adele eyed the plate, looking a little dumbfounded. “You’re a duke’s ward now, miss. It wouldn’t be right. But I’ll gladly stay and talk, if that’s what you want. Besides, I’ll be eating with Miss Everett and Mr. Hill now, won’t I, and I’m that nervous. Better not to ruin my appetite.”
She felt some warm confusion. Her own place in the social hierarchy had long been ambiguous. In some ways higher than the mistress of the house; in some ways lower than the scullery maid.
Having refused her body sleep, she discovered she was ravenous, and began to eat. For a long time, she and Adele talked about this and that, and laughed over her English, and improved it. She asked Adele to model the way a young Englishwoman walked, and curtseyed, and sat.
Later, when she dressed and went down for dinner, only one place had been laid at the table. Six footmen attended her in the vast and lonely room.