Chapter Thirty-Six
Gentle fingers brushing the hair from her face woke Celine. The curtains had been opened, and late morning sunshine poured through the windows. Last night’s darkness had been banished. The world was restored.
She was in the duke’s bed. The duke leaned over her, hair falling across her forehead, those startling eyes melting-bright.
She wanted to fold her limbs around the duke’s, the way sleep-warm bodies yearn towards each other, towards a languorous coupling.
The duke’s nightshirt sheared off to one side, displaying a powerful shoulder.
She wanted to sink her teeth into it. She thought of the duke’s torso against hers last night, the duke’s thighs holding her.
She wanted to put her hand under the duke’s nightshirt.
But she knew the duke too well: She had been right that such intimacies wouldn’t be invited when the duke was awake. As soon as Celine opened her eyes, the duke put some distance between them and leaned her elbow on her own pillow.
“You stayed the night with me,” the duke said, her tone ambivalent. “You seem unharmed, but you will tell me if I injured you in any way.”
“Kate,” Celine said, a reprimand.
The duke’s eyes dilated sharply, and she looked down, hiding them.
Celine said, “Who’s Eleanor?”
The duke’s face drained of colour. “Did I talk about her in my sleep?”
“Mm.”
“What did I say?”
“It was difficult to make out, but you sounded very distressed. You asked about the letter, a number of times.” Asleep, there had been no hiding how deeply the letter hurt the duke, how her whole life turned on that hurt. How she would never be able to take it back and make it right.
The duke sighed. “I can imagine some of what I said. Who’s Eleanor?
Who’s Eleanor? God, what a question.” Her elbow dropped out from under her, and she flopped down onto her back then laughed, a deeply unhappy sound.
“She was my cousin. She was the daughter and heir to the Duke of Howard. She’s the person whose life I live. ”
It went clean through Celine. She had known last night she was glimpsing the reason the duke held back from her, and also that she didn’t understand it yet. She had been prepared to put them both through hell in order to see the full picture, but the duke was gifting her an answer.
The silence that followed was mutual somehow, as though the duke formed her thoughts within Celine’s listening ear.
“As a child,” the duke began, “I was second in line for the title. Aunt Anne was the duke at the time, and still in her prime. I had lived with her since birth. What I know of my own parents has the simplicity of a well-worn anecdote. My mother was beautiful and shy and died at seventeen birthing me. My father was Aunt Anne’s younger brother, a disgrace, and left on a grand adventure to Moscow, where he died of the pox.
By the time I was mature enough to want details, there was no one alive who knew more.
Well. Aunt Anne held family sacred and kept me.
She was the only mother I knew. I have never met a more commanding woman, and I desperately wished both to be her and to be her heir. To make her proud.”
Celine thought of the duke standing in the centre of the arena, facing down that monstrous horse. Her proud, straight frame; her powerful shoulders and impossible poise. The way she wore her title like it was her blood and breath.
She bit the inside of her lip to stop herself from saying, Anyone would be proud of you. You have become exactly the kind of woman you describe.
“I used to dream of doing something so heroic,” the duke went on, “so wonderful that my aunt would turn to me and say, ‘It is obvious to me that you, above all others, are worthy to be the Duke of Howard when I am gone. I name you my sole heir.’ No, I’m shying away from the truth by calling it a dream. It was an obsession.
“Sometimes I was satisfied by imagining, vaguely, a life lived by my aunt’s side.
Her teaching me to rule with supplicants on their knees before us, their foreheads pressed to the ground.
But more often I dreamed of her tragic death.
A skittish horse, the flu, shot by a highwayman.
I would feel grief—genuine grief—as I imagined it, but ultimately, I would do what must be done, and take up the mantle. ”
The duke sounded almost wistful, like she was recalling something impossibly innocent, but a child didn’t become obsessed with gaining a parent’s approval unless that parent had made it unattainable, and she didn’t obsessively dream of that parent dying unless there was some relief to be gained by it.
Anne Howard might have kept her, but Celine wasn’t so sure it had been a mercy.
Then the duke said in a hard voice, full of self-reproach, “Aunt Anne had an heir, of course. Her own daughter. It was never going to be me.”
The duke went silent, her throat working. The quality of Celine’s listening deepened, coaxing out this woman who confided in no one.
The duke at last managed to say, “Eleanor.” Merely, Eleanor. But in her voice, strangled nearly into silence, Celine still heard the way she had screamed it in her nightmare. The terror, the love, the unending sorrow. Her skin broke out into gooseflesh.
“She was three years younger than me,” the duke said, “ten when she died. It’s difficult sometimes as an adult to reconcile how young she was with who she was.
I think of Shaw’s nephew, who is ten, and I consider him unformed, still clearly outgrowing the baby.
And I suppose, if I could think clearly and unemotionally about Eleanor, I might see that she was just a child, too.
“But that”—the duke swallowed audibly—“that was the sum of her life. That was her fully grown, her complete self. She wasn’t waiting to become anything else.”
“You loved her.” It was such an awfully obvious thing to say, but she couldn’t help herself. Love ached in every word the duke spoke. “What made you love her so much?”
All sense of the house beyond this room had receded. She didn’t know if servants had come to tend the fire and seen her in the duke’s bed, or if her bath grew cold in her own room. She didn’t care.
“It’s … hard to explain,” the duke said.
“We were completely different. Royce and I were cast from the same mould, and in some ways that made us closer. From the time Royce came to live in Aunt Anne’s household, she attached herself to me rather than to our aunt.
But as much as it was our home—the only home we knew—it was first and foremost Eleanor’s, the heir and favoured child.
It made her impossibly compelling to me.
I envied and loved her, in no small measure.
But it was more than that. No one could follow my mind the way she could, and I hers. It felt beyond language sometimes.”
Celine swallowed an unwelcome throb of jealousy. “How were you different?”
“There were the obvious physical differences. It was clear from a young age that I would have all the physical stature I felt a duke should have, while she remained small and plain.”
The duke cut off suddenly and put her elbow over her eyes. It was a painfully inadequate measure if she meant to hide what she was feeling from Celine.
“Kate,” Celine said. She reached out but drew partway back, not knowing if she was allowed.
The duke released a pained breath and said, “Did you think it would be easy, then? Poking around at what surfaced when I was too wrecked to master myself?”
But the duke’s eyes were gentle when they touched on her again. Clear and brilliant. Celine felt a warm weight and realised the duke had put her hand within Celine’s, a sign of trust that made her blush all over with gratitude and love.
Perhaps the duke felt it, too, because she went on.
“I told Eleanor a thousand times that I would take the title from her. It was a game we played, one that pleased Aunt Anne. It started very innocently—we were young—but escalated. I began to play in earnest. One day when I was home over term break, I overheard Eleanor cautioning her mother, my aunt. She thought my aunt needed to check me; she said I didn’t know when to stop.
Aunt Anne said to her, ‘Then my money is on Kate. If you wish to speak to me about this again, you will play this game to the end and you will win.’” The duke swallowed loudly.
“After that, I would have done anything to win. I was nearly thirteen. I thought myself practically an adult. I had begun my education at Eton and was already taking the necessary steps to become king of those feral children. It was a world where adults exerted no influence and held no power. I overestimated myself.”
Silence fell with its soft heartbeat in the mantel clock. When the duke didn’t say more for a long time, Celine roused and said, “You sent a letter to Bastien, asking him to fabricate evidence of treason against your aunt. A move that was sure to get her attention.”
Privately, Celine thought it was more than that. A frightening, idolised parent with total control over the Howard cousins—Celine thought perhaps some part of Kate had wanted to end her tyrannical rule. Both things could be true.
The duke looked exhausted, beyond the toll of the past six weeks.
“It was so heavy-handed and overconfident. I remember how I felt after I sent the letter out. Like I had altered the course of history. Set my hand on the scales. I couldn’t eat for days, couldn’t settle and concentrate.
But this … this great important thing I thought I had done, I believe my aunt was—” The duke stopped, and her eyes screwed up.
“She was amused. That’s still difficult to say.
How utterly humiliating. It did get her attention, and she was amused by it. ”
The duke looked away. Her hand trembled within Celine’s. “It was clumsy, and wouldn’t have held up to any kind of investigation, but it was enough to generate gossip in England.”