Chapter Twenty-Eight #2
“THERE’S SOMETHING I wanted to ask you,” Celine said after supper, when she and the duke were alone.
Supper had been broth, of course. She might be tempted to tip the next bowl of the stuff down the duke’s shirtfront.
“I wonder if you can help me find someone in France?” The question, from her own lips, was a surprise.
She’d been thinking of Louise and Marie but hadn’t known she’d decided on a course of action.
“Two people, actually. Two women. I’d say the chances of them already lying in an anonymous grave are high, and the chances of finding them if they’re alive are minuscule, but do you think you could… ”
The duke looked up, seeming to catch at once the import of the question. “Yes,” she said without hesitation. “Only tell me and I’ll see it done.”
So, in that quiet room where wax candles burned, Celine told the duke about Louise and Marie.
They’d seemed much younger than they were.
Childishly consumed with their personal grievances and petty triumphs, they’d spent every spare coin on ribbons and drink and sat on the floor with Celine and Mathilde, expecting to be fed.
It was difficult to talk about, and far more exposing than she’d expected.
In her fevered ranting she’d told the duke about Paris—awful things—but that had been about what she’d suffered.
Circumstances, political context. This was showing the duke the things she’d carried out with her, carefully, and with hope.
The duke listened, her steepled hands pressed into her lips, eyes cast down, and occasionally asked a question. What Celine knew of Louise and Marie’s actual lives—parents, places of birth, family names—was depressingly thin, given she’d shared a room with them for nine months. She began sweating.
“It’s enough to go on,” the duke said firmly after perhaps half an hour. “Leave it with me.”
“But maybe I can remember something else if I just try, something—”
“Celine…” The duke looked away, then sighed and spread her hands wide, almost in supplication.
“It does you great credit that you are prepared to look back at what you escaped from and not shy away from the responsibilities you have to the people you left. But you have done the best thing you could possibly do: You have put it in my hands. If there is any worldly way to find them, it will be done. You, yourself, cannot do any better than that. So, Celine”—the duke leaned forward, her eyes full of emotion—“save some energy for looking to the future as well. Rest. Get well. Live.”
It resounded in her, that word, that plea.
She thought about what her future held: her amicable marriage to Lord Burnley, built on loyalty and respect, built on omission and playacting.
Three weeks ago, she had been so sure of it.
A satisfying, full life, its compromises chosen with open eyes.
She would make sure Lord Burnley wanted for nothing, and she would enjoy all the status, affection, and safety that came from a partnership with him.
But as the duke’s passionate plea rang through her she wondered: If the woman who lives is Lord Burnley’s perfect, untarnished society wife … then where, in my future, am I?
A WEEK LATER, the flowers and the company had spilled over into Celine’s sitting room, and the subject of a dancing instructor had been raised.
“I know how to dance,” Celine said.
“But you don’t know the English dances,” Mr. Shaw said dismissively.
“You don’t want to embarrass yourself at the Demi Lux.
Three years ago, Miss Maria Bell botched the minuet—turned away from her partner just when they were supposed to return to one another and touch hands, if you can believe it—and she never quite recovered.
Still unmarried three years later, isn’t she, Everett? ”
Margot didn’t look up from her newspaper and said in a tetchy voice, “I haven’t the first notion who Miss Maria Bell might be, nor whether she has married.”
“No,” said Mr. Shaw after a moment’s thought.
“Nor have I, really. Her mistake was noted in The Dancing Gentleman’s Monthly News and Milady’s Minuet Monthly, but no mention has been made of her since.
I suppose my impression of her not marrying was formed by the manner in which these newsletters spoke of her mistake. ”
The duke’s ornery secretary had an unexpected passion for dancing, and all the gossip that went with it.
Adele, who was comfortably embroidering a petticoat, put in that she was familiar with Miss Maria Bell, and knew for a fact that the young lady in question was being courted, quite seriously, by a baronet.
Adele and Mr. Shaw fell into comfortable chat, both being subscribed to a number of the same newsletters.
Margot was left in peace to read her newspaper, and Celine turned back to the garden.
She sat with her knees up in the open window.
Spring had well and truly come while she slept, and the magnolias were bursting with thick greenery.
Birds sang and darted, and the air filled with butterflies.
The beautiful, walled garden had been the site of her gentle reentry into the world. It looked small from up here.
The duke was not present, having gone to attend Lords. It was the first time the duke had left the house since Celine fell ill.
Lord Wroth’s Inheritance Bill hadn’t gained undue support, and no unsavoury word had been breathed about Celine. As far as society was concerned, she was even more in favour now that she was known to be a relation of Lord Seaton, and even more sought after for her absence.
But Mr. Shaw had thought it prudent that the duke show her face in Lords before it let out for Easter recess, and the duke had eventually been made to see sense and agree.
Celine had also been turning more and more to thoughts of the world outside the gates of Howard House.
Strength had been flooding back into her this past week, and she had begun to chafe at the duke’s cautious, overbearing restrictions on her.
The externalisation of the duke’s care—flowers, in ever more abundance—was literally pushing her out of her room, even as the duke forbade her leaving it, except for her daily walk.
Both things were true in herself as well: the desire to sink back into the shelter the duke had offered her and a chafing impatience to bound back into the world.
But to what? In two weeks, she would attend the Demi Lux and receive her proposal of marriage. Three weeks after that, she would become Lady Burnley. The ambivalence she felt about these things was at war with her energy, her desire to return to the world.
Ever more present in her mind, too, was the threat Markham represented. Was the Wroth bastard really so easily vanquished? Had Celine, in winning herself the protection of Lord Seaton, truly made herself untouchable?
She had checked the hiding place where she kept the letter and felt pure relief at finding it still there. Under the mattress. That she had hidden it somewhere so obvious should have alerted her to how sick she had become.
She looked again to the door, but there was no sign of the duke.
She sighed. “How quiet it is,” she said, watching some birds dive into the broad river. “One would hardly know we were in the heart of the city.”
An interesting silence greeted this statement, and she turned towards the fireplace, where Margot and Mr. Shaw were looking askance at each other.
“What?” Celine asked, with a sinking feeling. “What has she done now?”
Margot shook her head and raised the newspaper again, saying grimly, “I’m not telling her.”
“Adele?”
“I haven’t a clue, miss.”
“Mister Shaw—”
Throwing his hands up, Mr. Shaw said, “Her Grace had all the traffic on the Thames stopped the day you woke up so that the noise wouldn’t disturb you.
The city’s been losing ten thousand pounds a day, and the guilds have tried to break in at the gates.
To say Westminster’s in an uproar is underplaying it. ”
“She has,” Celine gasped out, “what?”
At that moment a footman came in the door, edged carefully around two standing vases of flowers while holding a tray high above his head, missed a third vase, which toppled with great inevitability to the floor, tripped over it, landed on his knees in a puddle of water and roses with the tray still balanced on his hands, then cleared his throat and intoned, “Your broth, miss.”
Nobody moved for one long moment.
Then Celine got to her feet and did the only reasonable thing she could think of: She started dropping vases out the window.