Chapter 5
FLEUR WAS READING A STORY TO LADY PAMELA, although she knew that the child was not listening.
She had seen her father arrive more than an hour before from the nursery window, where she had been with Mrs. Clement.
But her nurse had not allowed her to rush downstairs to greet him and had sent her to the schoolroom soon after.
The child was torn between an impatient eagerness for him to come and a stubborn insistence that she did not care, that she did not wish to see him anyway.
Sullen and petulant as her charge was much of the time, sometimes Fleur ached to take her into her arms, to hold her close, to assure her that she was loved, that she mattered, that she was not forgotten.
She knew what it was like. Oh, she knew, though she had not known at so young an age.
And by the time it had happened she had been old enough to know that her parents were in no way to blame.
She had always been able to comfort herself with the knowledge that they had loved her totally, that she had meant all the world to them.
Perhaps Lady Pamela’s case was worse than hers after all. Her mother rarely visited her, though she showered her with love and endearments when she did. Her father had been away for many weeks.
But he did come at last. They heard a firm masculine tread in the corridor outside the schoolroom and a deep voice talking to Mrs. Clement.
And Fleur breathed a sigh of relief for Lady Pamela, whose face brightened into that rare expression of pretty eagerness as her governess got quietly to her feet to cross the room and put the book away in order to leave father and daughter some privacy.
The door opened and she heard a childish shriek. She smiled and arranged the book carefully on its shelf with the others. She was nervous, if the truth were known. The Duke of Ridgeway! She had always thought of him as a very grand personage indeed.
“Papa, Papa!” Lady Pamela shrieked. “I have made you a picture, and I lost a tooth—see? What did you bring me?”
There was a deep masculine laugh, the sound of a smacking kiss.
“Cupboard love,” his voice said. “I thought it was me you were happy to see, Pamela. What makes you think I have brought you anything?”
“What did you bring?” The child’s voice was still a shriek.
“Later,” he said. “You look lopsided without your tooth. Are you going to get a big one instead of it?”
“How much later?” she asked.
The Duke of Ridgeway laughed again.
Fleur turned, feeling foolish at her own nervousness.
She was the daughter of a baron. She had lived in a baron’s home, at Heron House, for most of her life.
There was no reason to be awed by a duke.
She held herself straight, folded her hands in front of her in what she hoped would look like a relaxed attitude, and raised her eyes.
He had his daughter up in his arms and was laughing as she hugged him tightly about the neck. The scarred half of his face was turned to Fleur.
She felt suddenly as if she were in a tunnel, a long and dark tunnel through which a cold wind rushed. She could hear the hum of it, though there was surely not air enough to breathe.
His eyes met hers across the room, and the coldness rushed into her nostrils and up into her head. The sound of the wind became a thick buzzing. Her hands felt cold and clammy and a million miles away from her head.
“Miss Hamilton?” The Duke of Ridgeway set his daughter down on the floor and took a few steps toward Fleur. He made her a slight bow. “Welcome to Willoughby Hall, ma’am.”
She knew that if she could just breathe deeply and evenly for long enough, her vision would return and blood would flow to her head again. She thought only of her breathing. In. Out. Don’t rush it. Don’t fight it.
“I trust you have found everything to your satisfaction here,” he said, indicating the schoolroom about them.
Breathe slowly. No, don’t give in to panic. Don’t faint. Don’t faint!
“Papa.” Lady Pamela was tugging at the leg of his pantaloons. “What did you bring me?”
Those intense dark eyes turned from her to look down at his daughter. He smiled, but the side of his mouth that Fleur could see, the scarred side, did not lift.
She felt a black terror, which had her gasping for air for a moment before she imposed control over her breathing again.
“We had better go down and see,” he said, “or I am not going to have any peace, am I? Sidney grumbled about it all the way from London. I only hope you like it.”
He held out a hand for his daughter’s—a hand with long, well-manicured fingers.
Slowly. In. Out.
“Sidney is silly,” was Lady Pamela’s opinion.
“I shudder to think what Sidney would say if he were ever to hear you say that,” he said.
“Sidney is silly, Sidney is silly,” she chanted, giggling and taking his hand.
Those dark eyes were on her again, Fleur could feel, though she kept her own resolutely on Lady Pamela.
“Miss Hamilton will come down with us,” he said, “and bring you back again before Nanny can send out a search party.”
Fleur walked through the door ahead of him and along the corridor beside him to one of the twin staircases that flanked the great hall.
“Ma’am?” he said at the head of the stairs, extending his free arm to her.
But she heard an inarticulate sound come from her throat, and she shrank farther away from him so that her dress brushed against the wall as they descended. He turned to listen to Lady Pamela’s chatter.
Fleur listened to the echo of their footsteps as they crossed the great hall, noted the smart way a footman sprang forward to open the double doors for them, felt fresh air and sunshine against her face, counted the marble steps as they descended them, and felt beneath her feet the cobbles of the winding avenue that led to the stable block.
She concentrated hard on immediate physical sensation. It was by far the best way to occupy her thoughts.
“Where are we going? What is it?” Lady Pamela tripped along at her father’s side, still clinging to his hand.
“You will see soon enough,” he said. “Poor Sidney.”
“Silly Sidney,” she said.
It was a puppy, a round, snub-nosed little Border collie with white fur about its nose and in a lopsided stripe over its head and about its neck. Two feet and its stomach were white. The rest was black.
It was protesting the fact that it had been placed in a makeshift pen with a pile of straw that it tripped on as it tried to walk. It was crying a loud protest, a demand for its mother.
“Ohhh!” Lady Pamela withdrew her hand from her father’s and stood staring speechlessly until she went down on her knees beside the pen and lifted the little bundle into her arms. The puppy stopped its crying immediately and licked at her face so that she wrinkled her nose and turned aside, giggling.
“Sidney traveled from London with a clean face and nipped fingers,” his grace said. “And frequently with wet breeches.”
“Oh.” Lady Pamela gazed in awe at her present. “He is mine, Papa? All mine?”
“Sidney certainly does not want it,” her father said.
“I am going to take him to my room,” she said. “I am going to sleep with him.”
“He is a she,” the duke said. “And your mother and Nanny might have something to say about a house pet.”
But Lady Pamela was not listening. She was playing with her puppy and laughing as it caught at her fingers with its sharp little teeth.
Fleur kept her eyes on the child and the puppy, her shoulders back, her chin high, her hands clasped together as she felt him turn to her and his eyes pass over her.
“You did not suspect?” he asked her quietly.
She could not move. If she moved a muscle, she would come all to pieces.
“You did not suspect,” he said, and knelt down beside his daughter.
It was arranged that the puppy would stay in the stables until it had been house-trained.
Pamela could visit whenever she wanted as long as doing so did not interrupt either her lessons or her rest. After that she would be able to take her pet into the house, provided it was never allowed to stray down onto the piano nobile to give her mother a fit of the vapors or to send Sidney into a roaring rage.
The duke remained in the stables as Fleur took his daughter by the hand and led her back to the house, chattering without pause.
The puppy was the sweetest little thing.
The Chamberlain children were going to be ever so envious when they saw him—her.
She was going to train it to sit up and beg and to walk at her heels.
Wasn’t her papa the most wonderful papa in the whole wide world?
Fleur took the child back the way they had come, up the steps, across the great hall, through the archway and up the stairs, along the corridor to the nursery, where Mrs. Clement was waiting. Lady Pamela’s chatter increased in speed and volume for the benefit of her new audience.
“Classes are at an end for today, Miss Hamilton,” the nurse said dismissively.
Fleur walked to her room without hesitation, closed the door behind her, and leaned back against it, her eyes closed, as if by doing so she could keep out the world.
And then she went rushing across the room to the closet, where she leaned over the closestool and retched and retched until her stomach was sore from dry heaves.
“HIS GRACE THE DOOK has left London,” Mr. Snedburg reported to Lord Brocklehurst on a sweltering hot day in May.
His face bore a distinct resemblance to a lobster.
“Taking his secretary, Mr. Houghton, with him. That seems to settle the matter. He was the very man who hired Miss Fleur Hamilton, sir.”
“It must be her and that must be her destination,” his client said, watching with frowning disapproval as the Runner mopped at his face with a large handkerchief. “What excuse can I find for going there? You have not discovered the whereabouts of Lord Thomas Kent by any chance, have you?”