Chapter Twenty-Three
“I’m sorry,” Richard said quietly in the cobbled mews yard.
He pulled a cheroot out of his coat, raised the top off a lamp with his hanky over his hand, and lit it.
He drew on it deeply and blew the smoke away from her before angling to face her.
“I couldn’t pass up the hand of Vespasian bloody Wroth. ”
She turned her face up to the sky. Nothing but smog and fading light. “How long have you been in his pocket?”
“He first wrote to me a year ago when I started looking into the mines, but I had nothing to do with him until after Christmas, I swear it.”
She believed him. His shock at her sudden appearance had shown the nerves of a man in the first throes of betrayal.
He said, “I won’t make the offensive suggestion that I hope to see you taken care of once I have assumed the title.
But Kate”—both hands went up, appeasing—“Duke. With this kind of influence and money, there is nothing I can’t achieve, no heights I can’t scale. I would be a simpleton to pass it up.”
“Not even for love?” she said, her voice singed with bitter irony. “Not for loyalty, or friendship?”
What Richard didn’t know was that she’d tried to take the title for herself once, too. She understood, as he couldn’t, the cost of succeeding.
He scuffed the ground, then huffed out a breath.
A laugh, perhaps. “I knew you would be this way about it: I may have the title, but never you. I wonder if you even realise what you ask of us, every one of us. That to be loyal to you means giving up every personal ambition that doesn’t align with yours.
I suppose it’s hardly surprising, given who raised you. ”
“I bought you your seat!” she cried, her feelings getting the best of her at last. “I have sided with you in every political fight, introduced you to everyone to whom you ever asked me to introduce you! There wasn’t a doubt in my mind you’d be PM someday, and I have done everything in my power to see you rise to the position.
As my particular friend, you have been invited into the highest circles.
Yes, Richard, what poor servitude I have made you endure. ”
He drew on his cheroot, the end flaring bright, bringing warmth to his pale, unhappy face. He tipped a foot up against the wall, and he looked less urbane than he usually did, more like the uncertain young man who’d introduced himself at university.
She wondered if he’d approached her with hatred in his heart. She wondered if it had hurt him, that he’d come to love her in the years since.
“I’m already eight years older than Pitt was when he became PM,” he said.
“I don’t want to wait till I’m an old man.
And I have other responsibilities. Other people to consider, besides you.
My mother has only me in the world to see she has every comfort she deserves—only me—and she has lost faith that I can—”
He broke off, turning his face away.
“When I am duke,” he said quietly, “I won’t have to borrow anyone’s consequence.”
He had no idea what devil’s bargain he’d entered into.
It was astonishing. He was intelligent and loved social gossip, and yet some blindness to his own limitations, or perhaps some overestimation of his own usefulness, had kept him from seeing that he would only ever have what consequence Lord Wroth saw fit to give him.
He would become duke and yet he would still feel cheated.
He would still be on the wrong side of the door.
She had the sudden, uncanny sense of her own limitations as well.
She was sick at heart about Royce. The picture had become clearer in the back of her mind: She had thrown Royce a line and slowly, patiently, carefully reeled her in.
And just when Royce had finally lifted her hand up for Kate’s hand, Kate had heard Richard call her name and turned; she had let the line slip through her fingers. Ten years, lost.
But for all it would be very neat to blame everything on Richard, she wasn’t quite so cowardly as to avoid her own part in it.
It had been a relief to meet him: straightforward, dependable, eminently likeable. A member of her own family whom she didn’t have to grieve or worry over, with whom she could celebrate greater successes than a night without drink or another lucky escape from the pox.
There was a reason, she thought, that the one member of her family she’d kept by her side was the one she didn’t confide in, and didn’t rely on, and couldn’t hurt.
Suddenly exhausted, she let herself fall against the wall beside him. “Got one of those for me?” He paused in surprise, then lit and passed her a cheroot without comment. She took a deep draw, then exhaled.
Despite everything, she hurt for him. Not for his ambitions, which Vespasian Wroth was going to grind beneath her high-heeled boot, but for what he was doing to himself, wilfully.
Love and loyalty and friendship might seem too ephemeral for him to bet his life on, but regret would teach him to fear them.
They smoked in silence, side by side, both knowing it was the last time they would do so.
But a cheroot only burned so long. When the end was so short she could barely hold it, she stubbed it out on the wall behind her, wondering how she would say goodbye. Putting it off, she said, “When will the rumours begin? You might at least tell me that much.”
Richard busied himself stubbing out his own cheroot and wouldn’t meet her eyes.
She said sharply, “What is it?”
“The rumours have already begun,” he said, looking up at last with those pretty, dark-lashed eyes.
“I visited Lord Seaton this morning and recounted to her my conversation with you the night of the rout. She was even more outraged than I expected when she heard the truth about Miss Celine Genet, society’s darling. ”
Fuck.
“And—” Richard hesitated.
Christ, what more could there be? “And what?”
“Lord Seaton is known to visit the circulating library on a Monday afternoon. We have sent Celine a note—she will think it from Lord Seaton herself—asking to meet her there. I need hardly tell you what will happen when Celine approaches her, uninvited.”
No, she could picture it all too clearly.
Lord Seaton would cut Celine direct, if she didn’t do worse.
Perhaps she would have her thrown out; perhaps she would publicly decry her for indecency.
It would cause a stir in the busy library, whose patrons crossed the full spectrum of political and social clout, and Lord Wroth’s campaign against Kate would have started with a bang.
She checked her pocket watch, and her palms prickled with a sudden cold sweat. After five o’clock. Surely they hadn’t already met—
“Kate,” Richard said gently. “You’re too late.”
She stared at him, feeling slow and stupid.
So even this last conversation between them had not been without its ulterior motive.
He had been keeping her so that she wouldn’t be able to intervene in time.
And there was excitement in his eyes. He hadn’t told her as a last gesture of love, but because he wished to witness her realisation that he had bested her.
That he, at last, had the upper hand.
She didn’t say the final goodbye she’d intended.
She didn’t see the rooms or faces as she half ran back through them.
Lord Wroth’s laughter chased her out into the street and onto her horse, and even when every other sound was lost to the thud of her horse’s hooves and the wind rushing past her ears, she could hear him laughing still.