Chapter Seventeen
Before taking his seat at the table, Lord Burnley spoke quietly to a servant, who repositioned the screen so the fire’s warmth wasn’t quite so oppressive.
Lord, he was kind.
“Your father is very interested in politics,” Celine said once he was seated beside her. “Are you also?”
“You have my father exactly,” Lord Burnley said with a little laugh.
He nodded discreetly towards the lower end of the table.
“You see he has monopolised the duke’s attention all evening, I am certain regarding his latest bill.
I daresay we won’t hear a sensible word from either of them for the rest of supper. ”
Celine looked out of politeness only, but her gaze caught and lingered.
The duke was tall and exquisitely dressed, her powerful stature set off by the tailored coat.
Her diamond pin and cufflinks flashed in the candlelight, her eyes no less bright.
Mr. Howard might have some likeness to her, some echo of the force she exerted on the world around her so effortlessly, but as Celine beheld her, his seemed but a very pale echo, fading into nothing.
Here was the Howard quality, distilled. And all that power and vigour was turned with serious contemplation on Lord Pecke as she listened to him.
The duke made a sudden retort, at which Lord Pecke reddened and responded in kind. The duke fell back into listening, and after a time, too low for Celine to hear the substance, spoke. Lord Pecke, in turn, listened.
Those hard lips … The decisive shapes they made …
Not the smallest admission of doubt as the duke spoke.
She couldn’t hear the duke’s voice, but such was her focus she could almost understand what the duke was saying, like a blind and deaf child holding her naked palm in front of the duke’s lips as they moved, learning the shape of words.
The duke shook her hair back, revealing the brutal plane of her cheek.
“Miss Genet?”
She turned back to Lord Burnley, her heart pounding, and for a moment, beholding him, she felt absolutely nothing.
She made herself take him in, detail by detail—the slight concern in his eyes, the equable line of his brow, his soft mouth that she couldn’t imagine ever speaking a hard word—and all at once she felt a rush of relief.
Here, before her, was a good man who wished to have her in his life. A dream of her, a carefully cultivated version of her, yes, but every relationship had an element of dreaming, an element of cultivation. She was comfortable living with that.
This man would not devour her and spit her out again. He would be solicitous when she was ill and mindful of her comforts. And he would not regret it, if he chose her. She would please him until the day he died.
“The duke and your father look angry,” she said in a confiding tone, “but I think they’re happy actually.”
That made him smile. “It’s true, nothing makes Father happier.”
“Tell me about your father’s bill.”
And so, as the supper progressed, he did. More than the content of his conversation, she listened to the phrases he used. The punctuative rather. The declarative I daresay. The anonymising subject one. Her English was improving.
And all through the conversation, she couldn’t quite shake her awareness of the duke which, once woken, was difficult to stuff back into the box.
I daresay one would rather prefer to lose one’s mind.
Wine flowed freely, and the mood around the table became informal. Once, Lord Burnley made her genuinely laugh, and she was aware in her peripheral vision how the duke turned to look at her.
When dessert was being laid on the table, she asked, “And does the duke support your father’s bill?”
Lord Burnley looked at her incredulously. “Support it? No. No one does. My father hasn’t passed a bill in decades.”
“But … The duke seems so much interested. She has listened to your father all evening…”
“I hope,” Lord Burnley said delicately, “perhaps she has some other reason for listening to him that didn’t exist before.”
It was what she’d been angling for all evening. An honourable man like Lord Burnley wouldn’t make his interest so clearly known unless he planned to pursue it. It was the chance at a bed to sleep in for the rest of her days.
And yet all she felt was a curious blankness. A goal accomplished. An item checked off the list. She had caught his interest, and now he would court her.
“I hope so as well,” she said, and made her voice a warm promise. I might not love you, but I will be grateful. I will please you so well you won’t know the difference.
WHEN THE GENTLEMEN removed for brandy, Richard performed a minor miracle and extricated Kate from Lord Pecke’s clutches. She wasn’t entirely certain how he’d managed it, only that she could have kissed him in gratitude.
Until they were in the empty billiards room, smoking, and he made no bones about the reason he’d got her alone.
“Let me have her,” he said bluntly.
She didn’t need to ask who he meant. He’d orbited Celine all evening. She groaned and tipped her head back, letting out clouds of smoke. “Trust me, cousin,” she said. “You don’t want her.”
Richard shook his head. He stubbed out his unfinished cheroot in a glass bowl.
When he looked up, his eyes were bleak, and in them was a slow, banked fire.
“I want you to say why you won’t let me have her.
I want you to say it. Is it because I have no rank?
You yourself told her I’ll be prime minister someday. Are those empty words?”
Her voice loosened immediately into an affection that was rare for her. Vanishingly rare. How had he misunderstood her so badly? “Richard, no.” She stepped toward him and cupped his face with her free hand, her fingers around the back of his skull, obliging him to look at her.
Those dark, steady eyes, full of uncertainty.
There was a vein of insecurity in Richard, well hidden, invisible to most people.
It had to do, she thought, with what he’d been born to, and what he deserved.
She sometimes thought it went all the way back to the small boy sitting in a duke’s house, staring in bewilderment at the treasures one branch of the family possessed, when he had nothing.
Waiting among treasures while his mother was inside begging.
The duke, Kate’s aunt, had been cruel about it. She’d laughed at the presumption of this small, obscure woman and her sickly-looking son trying to gain some consequence through her. Not like you, she’d said, raining warm approval down on Kate. My brave, strapping Howard girls.
But her aunt was dead, and the Howard girls had come to nothing: a murderer, a wastrel, and a corpse.
Kate brought her forehead to Richard’s. They were almost exactly of a height. “No,” she said again, even more gently.
“Then why?”
She turned away from him, groaning. “You can’t tell anyone else, I mean it. Swear to me you won’t.”
“I swear it,” he said, bemused.
She rubbed a hand down her face and said with a small, wretched laugh, “She’s a prostitute.”
“She what?”
“Is a prostitute.”
“Christ. How— What—” The last of the fight went out of him, and he dropped into an armchair. He swore several times in a shaky voice. Then, a spark of incredulous humour returning, “Well, you’ve already sworn me to secrecy. You’d best tell me the rest of it.”
She smoked the last of her cheroot, prevaricating.
When she’d smoked it to the stub, she disposed of the end and sighed.
“Three years ago, I went to Paris. It was foolish, I didn’t know how bold the revolutionaries had become.
She saved my life.” Saying the words, she blushed suddenly, an unpleasant sensation.
She made herself continue. “She wanted a life, in return.” She spread her hands, indicating the two of them. Mayfair. London. “This life.”
Was she speaking lies, or truth? The two felt uncomfortably entwined.
“Kate, this is…” Richard shook his head and tried again, a little hoarse.
“My God, a prostitute!” For a moment, they both simply absorbed the enormity of it.
He didn’t question her judgement or list all the reasons it was a catastrophically bad idea, and she loved him for it.
Then: “Why did you go to Paris? You didn’t tell me you went. ”
“I went—”
Careful.
Even now, alone with the last real family she had left, she couldn’t let herself go. She wrestled with it, tried to overcome this worst part of herself, and failed.
“I had a friend, Bastien du Ponte,” she said at last. “I hoped to spirit him out of the country before he was guillotined. I was too late. He was already in gaol when I arrived.” It was a distasteful lie. She hadn’t tried to save him. She hadn’t even considered it.