Chapter 10
CHAPTER TEN
Diana made to follow them.
“I see you and the Duke get along famously.”
She stopped. She did not turn at once.
“I am blessed,” she said, and did turn, and smiled. “I must thank you for it. After all, you arranged this good fortune.”
Octavia’s mouth curved. “Do not be in haste with your gratitude. There are few creatures on this earth as fickle as men.”
“Your advice is invaluable.” Diana inclined her head. “Thank you. I shall keep it by me.”
She turned to go.
“You could make yourself useful to your father.”
Diana stopped again.
“Instead of cooking up trouble where there is none.” Octavia came down the passage toward her, unhurried, the silk shawl trailing from her elbow. “You might apply the Duke’s assistance to matters of some actual importance.”
She stopped close. Close enough for Diana to smell her scent.
“New clothes for Arabella will make a considerable dent in the running of this house,” she said. “And your father has one or two concerns of his own that a little of His Grace’s generosity would resolve very neatly.”
Diana looked at her.
How, she thought, with something almost like wonder. How is a person shameless to this degree? You stripped her press on Tuesday and sold the clothes, and here you stand on Friday asking me to bill my husband for their replacement, and you do not blink.
She smiled wider.
“You sold—” She stopped. She let it hang exactly one second too long. “Forgive me. You donated perfectly good clothes. I am quite certain a woman so thorough already has a plan for replacing them.”
Octavia’s eyes flickered.
“And as for my father’s concerns,” Diana went on pleasantly, “believe it or not, I have no say whatever in where the Duke’s generosity goes.”
“You could hint.”
“I am afraid not.” Diana’s smile did not move. “I happen to have a husband who sees through things. And as you said yourself, I ought to attend to the pleasing of my husband and speak less.”
She walked away.
“Diana.” Behind her. “Diana. Come back here this instant—”
He was in the drawing room, drinking tea with her father, looking for all the world as though he had been settled there comfortably his whole life.
“Your Grace.” Diana curtsied. “With your permission, I should like to spend a little time with my sister before we go.”
He set down his cup. “Is she coming with us?”
The door opened behind her.
“Do not tell lies, Diana.” Octavia swept in, breathless and bright. “We shall have the child down and let her say it herself, shall we? Let us all hear it from her own lips.”
“No,” said Diana. “She does not wish to come.”
There it was. The smirk, then it was gone.
“Very well then,” said the Duke.
Diana looked at her father.
He had not heard a word of it. His eyes were on his wife, following her across the room, soft and vague and adoring, watching her arrange herself in her chair as though it were the only thing happening in England.
Diana turned and went up the stairs to her sister.
“Diana — stop — I shall be sick — Diana—“
Arabella cried laughing. She was past speech and into shrieking, both hands clamped uselessly over her ribs, twisting on the nursery rug like a landed fish. “You are entirely at my mercy,” said Diana. “This is what comes of insulting my singing.”
“I didn’t—”
“You said it frightened the dogs.”
“It does—,” and then she was gone again, gasping, kicking her heels, and Betsy in the window seat with a stocking over her darning hand smiled down into her work and said nothing at all. It was the first noise of that kind the house had heard in a fortnight. The door opened.
Everything stopped. Arabella scrambled up so fast she nearly took Diana’s chin off with her head, and got behind her, and gripped two fistfuls of her skirt, and went absolutely silent.
The Duke of Rosewood filled the doorway.
He cleared his throat.
“Forgive me.” He was, Diana realized, addressing the small pair of eyes at her waist. “I have come to make myself known to Miss Arabella. Properly. It seems I have married her sister without ever being introduced.”
Diana blinked.
You came up here for that? She could not fit it into any picture she had of him. A duke did not climb two flights to present himself to a child of eight. A duke summoned children downstairs to be looked at, if he thought of them at all.
She reached back and put her hand over her sister’s.
“Bella,” she said gently. “Come and say how do you do.”
The grip on her skirt tightened. Then, slowly, Arabella came out. One shoulder, then the rest of her, and stood in the open with her arms straight down at her sides and made the deepest, most correct curtsy of her entire life, staring hard at his boots the whole way down.
“How do you do, Your Grace,” she whispered.
Valentine smiled.
Arabella got behind Diana again.
“Well.” He inclined his head. “That is done, then. I shall leave you to—”
“Don’t you want to play with us?”
He turned around.
Diana’s mouth came open. Bella! This child!
“What game?” said the Duke.
Arabella emerged a second time, cautiously, and pointed at the rug, where a battered ring of marbles sat scattered in a chalk circle. “Ring-taw,” she said. “You knuckle down there, and you shoot, and if you knock one out of the ring you keep it and you go again.”
“I have not heard of it.”
“You’ve not?” She forgot, briefly, to be frightened. “But everyone plays it. What did you play? When you were little like me?”
“I did not play.”
It came out perfectly level, the way he might have said the road was long. Arabella looked at him.
“Not — ever?”
“No.”
The child was quiet for a moment.
“That’s sad,” she said.
Diana watched something go across her husband’s face and vanish before she could name it.
“I’ll teach you,” said Arabella.
He looked, for the first time since Diana had known him, entirely at a loss. He glanced at her, as though asking leave, and Diana, who had no idea in the world what her own face was doing, gave him a small, helpless nod.
So the Duke of Rosewood took off his coat, and got down on the nursery floor.
He was terrible at it.
He knelt like a man being lowered by a rope.
His hand was too big for the shot, and his knuckle would not sit down flat, and Arabella had to take his fingers and physically fold them into the right shape, tutting all the while, which she did without appearing to notice that she was touching him.
He listened to every word she said. He did not once correct her, or hurry her, or look over her head at Diana with that indulgent expression grown men wear when they are humoring a child.
When Arabella told him he was doing it wrong, he said, “Am I,” and did it again the way she said.
Diana sat back on her heels and watched them and felt something in her chest slowly come apart.
He is so careful with her. He was awkward. A man of thirty and six feet, with his shoulders hunched over a chalk ring, mouthing the rules back to himself, but every bit of it was gentle. He handled her sister like something breakable that he had not been given instructions for.
And in the lamplight, with his head bent and his hair falling forward and the hard lines of his face gone soft with concentrating on a marble, he was so handsome that it was actually unfair.
You would be a good father.
The thought arrived without permission, and she could not get rid of it. You would. You have no notion of it, and you would be terrible at the beginning, and you would be good. Somebody ought to have told you that.
He shot. The marble cracked out of the ring and rolled to the skirting board.
“Oh,” said Arabella, in real dismay.
He shot again. And again. When it was done there were four marbles on his side of the chalk, and one on hers, and Arabella sat back on her heels with her arms folded and her lower lip out.
“You cheated.”
“I did not.”
“You must have.” She scowled. “Beginners don’t win.”
“And what becomes of the winner?”
Diana laughed before she could stop it.
“Well, Your Grace,” she said, “in this house the winner tickles the loser.”
Valentine’s head came round. He looked at her with an expression of such total blankness that she nearly laughed again.
“Oh,” he began.
But Arabella had already got up and gone to the corner and was rummaging in a wooden box, and came back with a boiled sweet in a twist of paper, sticky at the edges, and held it out to him with both hands.
“You won,” she said.
He took it.
“Thank you,” said the Duke of Rosewood. And smiled.
The window had gone dark. Diana knelt and smoothed her sister’s hair back off her forehead.
“Bella. Are you certain?” she said quietly. “Quite certain? You need only say the word, and I shall have you in that carriage before anyone in this house can draw breath to stop me.”
Arabella looked at the floor.
“I’m certain,” she said.
Diana closed her eyes.
I thought this would do it. That had been the plan for the afternoon; if she was honest, she thought an hour of her playing with Arabella would make the child’s resolve go soft.
That she would say yes and it would be finished.
She had been so sure. She had watched her sister laugh until she could not breathe, and it had changed nothing at all; there was nothing more Diana could do, and she had never in her life been so completely without a plan.
A hand came to rest on her shoulder.
“Do not fret.” His voice was low, just above her. “I shall see to it.”
She looked up at him.
“Trust me,” said Valentine.
And the strange thing, the thing she would turn over later in the dark, was that she did.
She nodded. She gathered Arabella up and kissed her hard on both cheeks and on the top of her head, and Arabella held on for a long moment and then let go.
“Don’t you fret either, Your Grace,” said Betsy from the window seat, not looking up from her stocking. “I’ve got her.”
They went down through a house that had gone quiet and dim.
Her father and Octavia were in the hall. Both of them bowed and curtsied as the Duke passed, and Valentine gave them a nod and kept walking.
Diana passed Octavia. She did not look at the woman’s face. She could feel the glare land between her shoulder blades and travel the whole way to the door.