Chapter Twenty-Seven
Celine woke feeling quiet and heavy. The sheets were clean, tucked crisply over her, as though she hadn’t moved in hours.
She stared up into the canopy, a delicate blue over which white patterns had been drawn by an exacting hand: floral curlicues within stern rectangles; ladies carrying amphoras; circles and starbursts and sheaths of wheat strung on ribbon.
Lamps glowed softly about the room in their scrolled fixtures.
After what might have been a minute or an hour, she turned her head to the left.
The duke had a warm hold of her hand and was slumped over it on the bed, her face turned away from Celine.
Her hair was messy, sticking up at all angles, like the moon had broken on the floor and been swept into a pile.
She wore no coat, and her creased shirtsleeves were rolled to the elbows, exposing muscled forearms. She seemed to take up most of the bed.
Celine felt a quiet shock.
She had seen the duke less than perfectly starched and pressed only once, and that had been an energetic, carnal shedding of clothes, not this quiet exhaustion. There was something about the duke’s unkempt hair that made Celine feel very odd.
Pieces of their last—Where were you—encounter fell in on her suddenly—when we couldn’t even afford to move her body and the gentlemen kept—like fragments of a dream, or another life. Surely that hadn’t been her, shrieking at the duke like a fishwife, crying in the hallway like a snotty child?
You left me.
She cringed with embarrassment, but where that deep, poisonous resentment had been, nothing remained. Perhaps because she had slept long and well. Perhaps because, in saying the words, she had pulled out the splinter that hurt her.
The duke hadn’t killed Bastien. The duke hadn’t starved her countrymen into a violent revolution. The duke had never misrepresented her intentions: She had told Celine she wouldn’t take her to England.
Celine freed her right hand from under the covers, and very gently, she stroked the duke’s hair, smoothing it into place.
The duke started up, her eyes dull and bloodshot. Her face filled with emotion, and she said hoarsely, “You’re awake. Thank God. Oh, thank God,” and pressed her face into Celine’s hands.
Before Celine could make sense of what the emotion meant, the duke stood and leaned in, her large body suddenly very present and vital, and touched the back of her hand to Celine’s forehead.
The state of the duke’s undress was even more shocking up close.
Without her coat, the shape of her breasts was well defined by her waistcoat; without her cravat, the shirt gaped, displaying the bare skin of neck and chest. A familiar, small pendant swung in her clavicle, the same pendant Lord Royston wore: a gold letter H that clutched a diamond between its feet.
Celine had been looking right at this pendant when she experienced some of the most searing, intense feelings of her life.
The duke slipped her fingers over Celine’s cheek and down to the pulse point in her neck. “You’re not hot anymore. How do you feel?”
Wary, now that the duke was conscious and exerting her will. Shy, in a way she didn’t understand. This was the same woman she’d blackmailed and laughed at, lectured and teased. Why turn shy now?
“Like a mountain fell on me,” she said, her voice coming out in a whisper threaded through with squeaks.
Her whole body ached, but in a heavy, pleasant way. Even breathing was an odd pleasure. Her room had turned into a garden while she slept, and she breathed the perfume in, with its disturbing threads of the duke’s scent.
The duke rang for tea, then sat back down and spoke with friendly concern. Whatever feeling had so agitated her on seeing Celine awake had been mastered, or perhaps imagined. “Miss Genet, the physician has said you must stay in bed another week at least, preferably three. You must rest.”
Another week? “How long was I asleep?”
“It has been twelve days since you collapsed.”
Twelve days? She had thought she’d slept a night and day at very most. The idea that she’d lost so much time was frightening.
“The doctor claims you have suffered a severe exhaustion of the nerves. If you don’t rest, the illness may become endemic, plaguing you the rest of your life.”
“I didn’t want to acknowledge I was sick,” she said, aghast. “It was stupid.”
Adele entered then, carrying a tray with tea and broth, and fussed and clucked over Celine with all the warmheartedness she was capable of.
“Miss, oh, miss, you’re awake!” The maid even cried a little, and Celine didn’t know what she’d done to deserve such affection.
Adele helped her sit up and even kissed both her cheeks, at which Celine started laughing, and the duke asked curtly whether Adele was quite done.
With one last happy flutter, the maid left the room.
The duke began making Celine a cup of tea. Celine asked, “Did Adele look after me while I was ill?”
The teaspoon paused in the cup, and then started stirring again. “Yes,” the duke said.
She drank the tea, feeling as though every parched cell in her body were opening, taking in the sweet nourishment. The duke stared intently at the cup—up to Celine’s mouth and back—as though accounting for every last drop.
The moment she was finished, the duke whisked the cup from her hands, raising the bowl of broth next. Celine made to take it from her, but the duke pulled the bowl away, just enough to communicate no. After Celine lowered her hands, the duke filled the spoon and raised it to Celine’s lips.
When I am married, I’ll have people who will come and sit with me when I’m sick, who will bring me broth. She blushed with a deep confusion.
The duke couldn’t mean to feed her? She had grown more accustomed to being waited on—allowing Adele to make a cup out of her stocking and, after she’d dipped her toes inside, to smooth it up her leg.
She had accepted the performance of childish incompetence as an unusual luxury the rich enjoyed.
But it was one thing to allow servants, whose paid work it was, to wait on her.
It was another to accept this act of service from a duke.
“Celine,” the duke said quietly, “let me.”
She shivered like velvet rubbed the wrong way, then opened her mouth. The spoon slipped inside.
Neither spoke as the duke continued to feed her: she, pliant and submissive; the duke, bringing all the focus to bear on feeding Celine that she would to bullying a bill through Lords or administering her enormous estate—the attentiveness she would bring to an audience with the king or the bed of a lover.
Celine’s gaze and the duke’s collided occasionally, a shared consciousness of what was happening.
Only the most fleeting glances could be borne.
In truth, what they were doing was very ordinary. But how awkward she felt, how vulnerable!
Perhaps because she was being cared for by someone who didn’t know how. And maybe, for all her longing, she didn’t know how to be cared for, either. Maybe that was why it felt so tender and embarrassing, a pleasure she had to hold herself inside of.
It couldn’t have lasted long—fifteen minutes at most—but when at last she had finished the broth, she felt blistered.
The duke put the dish aside, but still didn’t leave. Celine didn’t understand her continued presence. Casting about desperately for any topic of normal conversation, she asked, “Who turned my bedroom into a garden?”
It had taken some time for the observation to work its way into her conscious mind as a question. Every flat surface contained a vase, and every vase was bursting with flowers. Riotous, gorgeous, colourful flowers. Where there was no flat surface, standing vases had been placed on the floor.
In a stilted voice, the duke said, “I understand flowers are the appropriate gesture when someone is sick. When you woke, I wanted you to know … That is, I wanted you to wake to comfort.”
In their abundance, the flowers were neither appropriate nor comfortable, but she had woken to beauty, and she didn’t know what to make of it.
Casting about for another topic, she could no longer ignore that reality awaited her attention, an impatient queue of boulders, each requiring effort: Lord Burnley, Lord Seaton, the ball of the season, the letter, the blackmail, Markham …
There were grooves worn into her where each rested.
But the idea of picking a single one up made her feel nauseous and so weak she began to tremble.
But if she didn’t pick them up, she would be crushed anyway.
“Have you seen Lord Burnley? Twelve days is more than enough time for a man to lose interest. I’ll need to let him visit, as soon as I—”
The duke gently pressed her hand and said, “No.” Nothing more, just no, and yet it was spoken with such authority that Celine’s burdens seemed to recede; and she could breathe again.
“You will not see anyone, or make any plans, until you are well. I have locked the gate. The bridge is drawn up, and none may come within the walls while you are recovering. You will be well again. No, more than that, you will thrive.”
The sensation of the duke’s considerable power curling protectively around her, guarding her, being put to use on her behalf, was overwhelming. In contrast, she suddenly knew what a weak copy of the real thing it was she’d managed to wrestle for her own use.
The temptation to sink inside it and let the duke keep the world at bay was powerful. But she made herself stay vigilant, an urgency in her mind about what it would mean to cut Lord Burnley off—
“No, Celine,” the duke said with absolute authority.
“There is nothing for you to do. All is well. You see”—she gave a small, peculiar laugh—“I have finally understood why you wish to marry, and why Lord Burnley in particular. The Peckes are very good people—in fact I know none better—and with them, you will be loved and cared for. I have taken care of everything. I have spoken to Lord Burnley and given him leave to ask for your hand at the Demi Lux. You have three weeks to rest and recover, to prepare. But you need have no anxieties. You will have your ball, and by the end of it you will have your fiancé as well. There is nothing more you need do but rest.”
She should have felt overwhelming relief—the duke had finally understood her—but instead she felt pricked into unhappy agitation.
She said crossly, “You don’t wish to wait three weeks for my engagement.
Even with a quick wedding, it would be almost two months before the letter is returned to you!
” As mention of the letter passed her lips, she realised, “No! You are buying yourself time to find the letter and wriggle out of every—”
“Celine.”
“—commitment to me—”
“Celine.”
It was the ragged note in the duke’s voice that finally pulled her up short.
“Perhaps you won’t believe me, but I no longer begrudge you the marriage you wish for. I will happily be the instrument through which you achieve all your heart desires. I will do everything in my power to see you married to Lord Burnley.”
No, worse, that was worse.
Perhaps taking her silence for scepticism, the duke said calmly, “I haven’t even looked for the letter. You still have it. You still have the letter, so I must do what you say. You have the power here, not me.”
Yes, of course! She still had the letter; that was why the duke was doing all of this. The duke couldn’t afford to let her die. The duke had to see her married. She breathed a sigh of relief, and at last lay back into her welcoming pillow.
KATE MADE IT a couple of paces down the hall before her knees gave out and she leaned against the wall, turning her face and covering it with her hand.
Celine had woken up. She was awake. She was going to be all right.
On one of the first days of Celine’s illness—Kate couldn’t remember exactly when; those awful, raving, fevered hours had felt impossibly long—they’d had to change the mattress because it had become soaked through.
Kate had been sitting in the armchair, Celine cradled in her arms. She had been thinking about the degradations Celine had preferred to endure rather than come to her.
Why hadn’t Celine at least sold the sapphire ring to alleviate some of her desperate poverty?
And as two footmen lifted the mattress away, beneath it, Kate had spied something.
She knew, even without looking more closely, that it was the letter. The original.
There, within arm’s reach.
The letter that had been the keystone of her life, the beginning of all that pained her. There, for the taking.
But she couldn’t take it without putting Celine down.
So she sat with Celine’s head sheltered carefully against her shoulder, with Celine’s body wrapped safe within her own, and watched the footmen lumber in with a new mattress and place it on the bed frame, covering the letter.
It wasn’t, however, until that desperate hour when the doctor had held Celine’s wrist, feeling her pulse and slowly shaking his head, that Kate had finally understood herself. She had stared at the limp, sickly body in that bed, whom no one would miss.
What multitudes it contained! The polished young debutante dressed in the first stare of fashion.
The calculating, unscrupulous blackmailer with buttons undone and hair down to her bottom.
The society exquisite. The jaded streetwalker.
The trembling courtesan. The exhausted, artless strategist, laying out the path forward, step by step.
The child crying because she was hurt. The damsel charming the dragon.
A world without Celine in it was impossible to contemplate.
If Celine died, one person would miss her. Kate would miss her.
Kate had looked down at the body she couldn’t bully or buy or wrestle into living, the body without which Celine couldn’t exist, and she had known that the letter had become irrelevant.
It wasn’t that the consequences of it getting out were any kinder, or the pain of having written it was any less, but it could no longer overpower other considerations.
Celine wanted to be safe, loved.
And Kate was going to see that Celine got what she wanted.
She would deliver Celine safely into the bosom of the Farnsworth-Baxter family, who were everything Kate and her broken family were not.
This, she understood, was why she hadn’t taken the letter when she had the chance.
It was only by remaining in Celine’s power that she could give Celine the world.