Chapter 7
CHAPTER SEVEN
“Duchess?”
Diana went perfectly still.
She had walked the length of that corridor eleven times, and was no braver at the end of it than at the start.
Behind the study door was the Duke; she had watched him go in over an hour past. There were two matters to put to him, both of them perfectly reasonable.
The household books, which Mrs. Fletcher said he wanted relief of.
And Arabella, she wished to write to her father about her intention of her being brought to Rosewood in the future.
She had every right in the world to knock.
And she could not make herself do it.
Because you are a coward, she told herself, pacing, and because you cannot look him in the face.
For that was the shameful truth of it. She had lain awake half the night with that dreadful, wicked heat still pulsing between her legs, an ache she had no name for and no notion how to quiet.
And when at last she slept she had dreamt of his hands buried in her hair, of his mouth on hers, of the two of them together upon that very bed doing things her waking mind could not properly picture.
She stopped before the door one final time, and lifted her hand, and lost her nerve, and turned to go.
And the latch opened behind her.
She felt the warmth and the bulk of his presence at her back.
“What might be the matter?” he asked again.
Diana swallowed, and shut her eyes for the space of a breath, and turned around.
He stood filling the doorway, and he was perfectly, maddeningly composed.
There was nothing in his face at all, no smirk, no knowing glint, no trace whatever of the man who had held her by the throat not twelve hours past and kissed the sense clean out of her.
He might have been greeting a stranger in a receiving line.
He looked at her with mild, unhurried inquiry, and waited.
Of course, she thought, and something in her chest sank absurdly. Of course it is nothing to him. He told you himself, he is no green boy at this. Whatever it was to you, it was nothing to him. A few, he had said. She was, she supposed, merely one more.
“Your Grace.” Her voice came out thin, and she hated it.
“I—forgive me. I did not mean to disturb you. I only wished—that is, there was a small matter—” She stopped, gathered herself, and began again with as much steadiness as she could scrape together.
“Mrs. Fletcher gave me to understand that the household accounts have fallen to you, for want of a mistress to keep them. I wondered whether—if it would not be an imposition—whether you might permit me to take them up. She says it is a great deal of work for you, and it is a wife’s province by rights, and I should be glad to be of some use in this house. ”
He regarded her a moment.
“Of course,” he said. “Come in.”
He stepped back and held the door, and Diana’s stomach turned over.
To be shut alone in a room with him, this room, where it had all happened, when she could still feel the ghost of his hands on her.
But she had asked, and he had granted it, and there was nothing for it now but to go in.
She lifted her chin and passed him at the threshold, careful that not a fold of her skirt should brush him, and the warm scent of him reached her all the same and set her heart to knocking.
The library looked different by day. The fire was gone, the curtains drawn back, the settee where she had come undone sitting there in the morning light as innocent as any other piece of furniture. She fixed her eyes upon the great desk and would not look at it.
He crossed to a cabinet, drew out two heavy leather-bound ledgers, carried them to the desk, and laid them open.
“These are the household books proper,” he said, turning the pages.
“Wages here, tradesmen’s accounts here, the running costs of the house.
Ainsley keeps the estate ledgers separate; you need not trouble with those. Sit.”
She sat. And he came round behind her chair and leaned over her shoulder to turn the pages and point out this column and that entry, and from that moment on Diana did not hear a single word he said.
He was too near. His arm came past her to lay a finger on the page, and the whole warm length of him bent close at her back, and she could not attend to any of it.
She caught the clean scent of him, soap and linen and that dark undernote that was only him, the same she had tasted on his mouth, and it filled her head and drove out everything else.
His voice went on above her, low and even, saying things about quarter-days and settlements and the butcher’s reckoning, and it was only a pleasant rumble to her, a warmth against her ear, entirely without meaning.
She stared hard at the ledger and saw nothing but a blur of ink.
Her every sense had gone to the man leaning over her, to the six inches of air between his chest and her shoulder blade, to the memory his nearness dragged up whole and shining, his hands, his teeth, the grip of his fingers at her throat—
“—Duchess.”
She started so violently the chair scraped. “Yes—Your Grace.” She said it far too fast, and did not turn her head, and fixed her burning gaze upon the middle of the page.
He did not straighten. He stayed exactly where he was, bent close beside her, and she felt him look at her.
“Are you attending to me at all?”
“Yes. Of course.” She kept her eyes averted. “Every word.”
A pause. And then he leaned in closer still, so close now that his breath stirred the loose hair at her forehead, and said, very quietly, “Are you quite certain you are not distracted?”
A laugh escaped her, high and awkward and utterly unconvincing. “No. No, not in the least, I assure you—I am perfectly—no.”
“Good.” She could hear the smile in it, though she would not look to confirm it. “Because I have no intention whatever of repeating myself.”
He let the silence draw out, and Diana sat rigid, her heart going like a hammer, willing him to straighten up and be a duke and let her breathe.
“The keeping of this house is no small charge,” he went on, and his voice had dropped into something lower, something that curled warm down the back of her neck. “The accounts must be exact. An error in these pages is not a trifling thing. Mistakes, Duchess—”
He bent the last inch, until his lips were nearly at the shell of her ear, and the word came soft and dark and unhurried.
“—will have to be punished.”
The shiver ran the whole length of her spine before she could stop it, and she knew, with a fresh hot rush of blood to her face, that he felt it.
And the worst of it was that it was not fear.
She wanted him to do it again. That was the plain and shameful truth.
She wanted him to take her chin in his hand and turn her face up and put his mouth on hers as he had done last night, here, now, in the cold morning light with the ledgers open before her and the ink still wet on the butcher’s account.
The thought went through her like a struck match. Her whole face flamed with it.
Diana stood up so fast the chair scraped back and nearly took her with it.
“I wish to write to my father.” She said it to the window. “Today. To tell him my sister is to come and live here.”
“Of course.” He straightened, unhurried. “It was part of our agreement.”
“Yes.” She gathered her skirts in both hands. “Yes. Thank you.”
“Duchess. Why are you scarlet?”
“I have taken a cold,” said Diana, and fled.
She did not stop until she had turned the corner of the passage, and then she leaned against the wall with her hand pressed flat over her heart and waited for it to slow. But it would not.
The next day, she poured herself into the accounts as a drowning woman pours herself into a plank.
She had found her corner. It was a small writing table in the alcove off the great hall, and from it she could see the sweep of the stairs, the front doors, and the long passage to the kitchens, which meant she could see very nearly everything that happened in the house.
This was, she had decided, what a proper mistress did.
She could not tell the housemaids their business, for they knew it far better than she did, and the whole place had been running without her, and it went on running now with perfect indifference.
But she could sit where they might all see her sitting.
She could look up when a footman crossed the hall, and nod, and look down again.
It was a performance of mistress-ship rather than the thing itself, and she knew it, and she did it anyway, and in between she kept the books.
That was at least honest work. She was at the ledgers when a shadow fell across the page.
“Will you take anything, Your Grace? It’s gone two, and you’ve not eaten.”
Mrs. Fletcher stood with her hands folded and her keys still. Diana set down her pen. She had been waiting all day to ask, and had put it off a dozen times, and now heard herself ask it anyway.
“Mrs. Fletcher, I have not seen His Grace. He was not in his study this morning.”
“Oh, he’s away, Your Grace. Went off early this morning with the Duke of Kingsell.
” The housekeeper said it comfortably, as one states the weather.
“There’s business between them, up at the works — some matter of the canal, I believe, though I’m sure I don’t understand the half of it.
He’ll be back tomorrow, most likely. He generally is. ”
“I see.”
“Was there a message wanted?”
“No.” Diana picked her pen back up. “No, nothing at all. Something light, please, whenever it suits.”
Mrs. Fletcher curtsied and went, and Diana sat looking at a column of figures she had stopped seeing some while ago.
He did not tell me.
The thought was small, and she was thoroughly ashamed of it.
He had gone off on his own business, as he had every right to do, in his own house, in his own life, in which she had occupied a place for the total of four days.
He was not obliged to account to her for his movements.
He had told the housekeeper, and the housekeeper ran his house, and that was as it should be.
We are strangers, she reminded herself. You have known the man less than a week. He owes you nothing.
And then, on the heel of that, with a sourness that surprised her: and how, pray, does he mean to make me yield to him from thirty miles away?
She put her pen down again and pressed her fingers to her eyes.
A letter came at four.
A maid brought it up on a salver, and Diana knew her father’s seal at once and had it open before the girl was well out of the room.
It is improper for the child to live with you. Do not trouble the Duke on the subject. You would do better to attend to the pleasing of your husband. Arabella will be raised here.
That was all. There was no direction, no greeting, no signature beyond the scrawl of Westleigh at the foot of it.
Diana read it three times.
She was not aware of standing. She was not aware of her hand closing until she felt the paper crumple in it, and the tears came stinging up hot and furious behind her eyes, and she blinked them back savagely. She was already halfway to the door before she knew where she was going.
I shall go and get her. Now. Today. I shall take a carriage and go to that house and walk in and take my sister out of it and let them try to stop me—
She stopped.
She stood in the middle of the hall with the letter in her fist and felt the whole thing collapse under her, quite calmly, the way a bridge collapses.
And then what? She had no legal claim to the child.
None. Arabella belonged to her father as surely as his horses did; a daughter’s affection weighed nothing at all against a father’s right.
To take her would be to steal her. They would send men.
They would fetch her back within the day, and Diana would have gained nothing but the certainty that Octavia would make the child pay for it.
She sat down slowly on the bottom step of the great staircase, which was not at all where a duchess ought to sit, and smoothed the letter out on her knee, and looked at it properly for the first time.
And went very still.
This is not his hand.
She knew her father’s hand. The heavy leaning strokes, the way he crossed his t’s halfway up. This was small and neat and upright, with a pretty tail on the y, and the signature at the foot was a copy, and not even a very careful one.
Octavia.
Diana’s hands began to shake with rage, pure rage, of a kind she had never in her life felt before and did not know what to do with.
She did not even trouble to have him write it. She has my sister, and she knows I can do nothing.
She put her face in her hands.
“Your Grace?” Mrs. Fletcher’s voice, near and careful. “Are you unwell?”
“No.” Diana did not look up for a moment. Then she did, and her face was perfectly composed. “No, I thank you. It is nothing.”
She stood. She folded the letter into four crisp squares and put it in her pocket, because a thing folded is a thing decided.
Very well. I will find another way in. Hen was watching.
Betsy was watching. Between them the child was fed and warm and had somebody in that house who loved her, and that would hold for now.
And if it did not hold, then Betsy would take her out of that door in the dark, and Diana would meet the consequences afterward, whatever they cost her, and gladly.
But she does not grow up under that woman. Whatever else happens. She does not.
Her hands were still shaking. She closed the ledgers and went up to bed.