Chapter Twenty-Two
He won’t be there, Kate told herself as she fought her temper in the evening traffic. He won’t.
But already her mind was testing the idea of Richard’s betrayal. It was as though her memories had been turned at right angles, revealing a new version of events.
Richard had pointed her towards Lord Burnley as a suitor for Celine. What if it hadn’t been out of a blindness to Burnley’s ugliness but because of it?
If it hadn’t been for Celine’s cleverness about Lord Pecke’s bill, Kate would no doubt have suffered a political embarrassment. If Celine hadn’t wished to wed Lord Burnley, Kate would have suffered a social embarrassment, too.
Yet the moment Celine had shown herself willing to be courted by Burnley, Richard had reversed course and begun courting her himself. Let me have her. Had it signalled a potential turning point, of which she had been unaware at the time?
What heartache might she have saved herself, had she agreed to the match? Would twenty thousand pounds and a beautiful, clever wife have satisfied Richard? No. The thought came to her wholly formed. His desire for consequence cannot be sated.
She urged her horse up onto the footpath, its metal shoes clattering and ringing, joining the evening din.
As though she’d admitted something, memories came faster, surer.
Richard standing beside Burnley at the rout, ensuring the comparison made Burnley appear even uglier.
Richard always probing, always prying, asking whether Celine might have presumed on Kate in some way, asking after Kate’s business in Paris, this powerful concern he had for her always turning up new pieces of information.
Richard’s awful, embarrassed consciousness of being discovered in her seat at the club.
How, for all his railing against injustice, he never risked his own consequence like Pecke did.
And Royce …
He always wanted you to himself. He poisoned you against me before I ever met him.
When Kate met Richard at university, Royce had only been back in England for six months.
She’d come back wild, destructive in a way Kate didn’t understand, and angry all the time.
But Kate had been ready to go toe-to-toe with her.
She’d followed Royce into gambling dens and alleyways, out of married countesses’ bedroom windows, and one memorable time, onto a sloop all the way to Bergen.
She had picked up after Royce, paid her debts, washed her, expected her for dinner, talked to her about what was in the papers.
And … Royce had been getting better. So slowly it was barely progress. Growing less wild, spending more time in the rooms Kate rented back then, above a coffee shop in the Strand. She had begun talking about the future; she had sometimes seemed on the brink of confiding in Kate.
Then Richard had introduced himself to Kate and made himself indispensable.
He had made his thousand innocuous comments about Royce’s misdeeds, his thousand exhortations for Kate to find it within herself, somehow, to forgive Royce.
When Royce leapt off a cliff soon afterwards, Richard’s steady hand had been on Kate’s shoulder, stopping her from leaping off after.
She rode blindly past her own club, and on to Lord Wroth’s.
She was not a member, but she was only distantly aware of the majordomo considering and then discarding the idea of refusing her entry.
Chairs scraped as members stood to greet her.
She ignored them. In one of the quieter rooms she came upon Richard, seated in a cosy trio with Lord Wroth and his daughter Lord Vespasian.
She had expected it, and yet on a primal level she must still have thought Richard wouldn’t be here.
It was as though she saw not only Richard now, nearing his midthirties, a seasoned politician in a fashionable black coat, but also Richard as a bewildered boy in a too-tall chair sitting outside the duke’s study.
Richard at twenty, in a coat that didn’t cover his bare wrists, making himself known to her in the university dining hall with a tremble in his voice and a light in his eyes.
Richard at twenty-five, breaking his hand on a wall when he failed his first bar exam.
Richard at twenty-eight, nearly falling off London Bridge as he crowed his happiness out over the sleeping Thames because he’d won his seat in Parliament.
They had travelled so much of the way by each other’s side, and yet he was here, meeting with Lord Wroth, right where Royce had said he would be.
When he saw her, his face went red, then white. He shot to his feet. He looked for a moment like he might flee, and then like he might faint.
She didn’t have a constitution that could feel the pain of his betrayal. What she felt was cold—a dense, unnatural cold forming a wall around her that nothing could penetrate. This morning, Richard had lived within that wall, beside her. Now, from one breath to the next, he was outside it.
She turned from him and focused on Lord Wroth, who had gained the decisive upper hand. With Richard, and all Richard knew, Lord Wroth now had the means to pass his Inheritance Bill. She could no longer doubt that Celine had seen his plan clearly.
Lord Wroth wore the comfortable morning dress of a gentleman and was relaxed in his leather armchair, one leg crossed over the other, the newspaper set down temporarily over his knee.
His handsome face showed none of the amused superiority with which he normally regarded her, and no sign of discomfort at being discovered with Richard.
The enmity between them, which for the past fifteen years had fallen into something of a bureaucratic lull, had at last come fully into the open.
In his eyes was only a satisfied consciousness of having raised his fist to squash her.
“I know how you plan to pass your bill,” she said, breaking the silence. “I have no patience for a mutual pretence at ignorance.”
“Oh?” Lord Wroth said mildly, waving an invitation for her to continue.
“Richard has told you something about my ward, Miss Genet, and you have believed him. You plan to use that information to turn public opinion so thoroughly against me, none will dare be seen to support me in the matter of your bill.”
His brows rose in a genuine show of surprise. His steepled hands came up beneath his mouth, where he rubbed them to and fro. He smiled. “You are quick,” he said at last. “Quicker than I expected.”
He wouldn’t believe her if she told him who must be credited for that.
“Whatever Richard told you,” she said carefully, “isn’t worth much when you’re giving him my title in exchange for it. It makes him into rather a biased witness, wouldn’t you say? It discredits the information, as well as himself.”
Lord Wroth pursed his lips. “But when the facts are true, as I believe in this case they are, they can be proven. You left yourself open, Duke.”
A derisive snort called Kate’s attention to the third member of the party, Lord Vespasian. “Not a duke for much longer.”
The Wroth heir wore unrelieved black, her coat buttoned up beneath the chin, her hands covered by leather gloves, and her hair tied severely back.
Her crossed legs pivoted on a single, wicked boot heel.
Her hand was buried in the fur of the huge black wolfhound that was her near-constant companion.
Its long face swung towards Kate, fixing her with eyes the same bright blue as its mistress’s.
Vespasian said, “We have more than one count of moral degeneracy to lay at your door. The mine manager Mr. Buttle is willing to publish an account of how you destroyed his innocent family when he wouldn’t falsify the evidence you wanted against my father. Tsk, tsk. Politically corrupt and a bully.”
Kate had forgotten—it had been a small, irritating detail—how Richard had taken the Buttles under his wing and housed them.
She had thought it proof of his good heart then, taking bread from his own table.
But Lord Wroth had surely been bankrolling the whole thing.
It had been a conscious move against her.
Richard had known the report on the mines would fail.
The cold surrounding her intensified.
“If only I’d had a daughter,” she said, “to offer Richard in marriage.”
“You could’ve offered yourself,” Lord Wroth said with a small smile.
Vespasian, whose hand had been the price of this alliance, remained coolly composed.
She was a striking woman and very difficult to read. She took after her mother in colouring: skin of palest white, hair jet black, and eyes a piercing blue. Her beauty was a warning, like a python’s sleek skin: Touch me and die.
It was a far cry from the awkward child she’d once been.
They’d overlapped for one year at school—Vespasian’s first, and Kate’s last. Vespasian had been a nasty, pale child, with haughty manners that endeared her to nobody. But in Kate, she had inspired an irrational tenderness.
Kate had wanted to spare Vespasian the burden of the enmity that had malformed her own character. But what chance had she had against that child’s own splendid parent? Vespasian had come to school determined to hate her and had only hated her more for every kindness shown.
“I have some experience,” Kate said tightly, “of the lengths a child will go to for a parent’s approval.
But Vespasian, it’s not going to be enough.
You’re giving up everything you are, and it still won’t be enough to make your father love you more than he hates me.
” Then, incredulously: “You’re going to be a Howard. ”
Vespasian’s only reaction was a slight, sneering curl of the lip. “Richard will take the Wroth name, naturally.”
She almost reeled back. The end of her family name. The end of the Howards holding the Howard title, as they had done for six centuries.
“Actually,” Lord Wroth said, “I must thank you; it was you who gave me the idea. You were only able to take the mines from me because you were willing to give them up yourself. I have applied the same theory here, though to rather more devastating effect, I hope you’ll agree.
” The friendly, almost fatherly tone dropped from his voice, and all that was left was a powerful man, older than her, more experienced than her.
He said, “You must have known there would be consequences when you threw that childish fit and gave my mines to a lunatic.”
A thousand responses came to her lips, and none of them would win her a reprieve. How familiar it felt, this gathering up of arms against her. She would bear it, as she always had. She would fight back harder, and dirtier, and worse.
She gave a short bow and turned to leave, but she was stopped by a hand on her elbow. “Kate,” came Richard’s quiet voice. “Let me explain.”
She had always hated his use of her given name—the suggestion of intimacy, of an unprotected flank—but she had overcome the instinct, because it was Richard. Slowly, she turned to him, her tall, stalwart friend, and the icy wall that had been protecting her cracked.
Everything I have given you. Everything I hoped you would become.
“I cannot possibly imagine what you could have to say to me.”
He didn’t have as much experience in betrayal as she did; he took a long time to meet her eyes. “I would say my piece in private, if you will do me this last courtesy.”