Chapter 12
CHAPTER TWELVE
“Poor creature. She cannot so much as keep her own sister out of an apron.”
Phillip said it into his glass, that was rather the trouble with Phillip. He said the plain thing and let it lie where it fell.
“Will you do it or not?”
“You know perfectly well I shall do it.” He reached for the decanter. “One does not decline a commission from the Duke of Rosewood and go on being invited to dinner. I am only wondering why you want it done.”
Valentine said nothing.
“You are not,” Phillip went on, “in the general way, a man who is much exercised about helping people. I have known you twenty years. I have watched you step over a man in the street.”
“When have I done that?” Valentine snapped.
His friend laughed. “Well, you would.”
Philip filled his glass and set the decanter down. “It feels nearly eerie that you are engaging me to make inquiries into a viscountess on behalf of your wife.”
Valentine drank. He was thinking, because he had been unable to leave off thinking of it since a quarter past midnight, of her face last night.
Scarlet to the roots of her hair and her mouth open and her breath gone entirely to pieces, and the sounds she had made.
It was as though every one of them had been dragged out of her and she was appalled at herself for making them.
He had known women who performed that. She had not been performing anything.
She had not the smallest notion how, and it was the least practiced thing he had ever seen in his life, and it had very nearly finished him.
And then he had left her. That was the part that beggared belief. He had gone out and shut the door.
He had got as far as the study and no further.
He had stood against the door with the whole house quiet and his blood roaring and taken himself in hand there in the dark like a boy of seventeen, with his eyes shut and her voice going in his head, and it had taken no time at all.
It was a matter of a minute, perhaps less, which was, he had reflected afterward while he cleaned his hand on his handkerchief, a thoroughly humiliating piece of information about the state he was in.
I gave her my word for five nights. Three are gone. I am doing this to myself.
And he thought of her smile, this morning at the top of the stairs, which she had not known he had seen.
Valentine set down his glass.
“If I am to persuade her to bear my child,” he said, “I can hardly do it while she lies awake worrying over her sister. A woman must be satisfied in her mind before she is good for anything else. It is a practical measure.”
“Mm,” said Phillip. “I cannot argue with that.”
“Then do not.”
“I only observe.” He examined his wine against the lamp. “You are a great deal lighter of late. Do you know that? You have scarcely scowled all morning. I looked for it particularly. Twice, perhaps, and both times at me, which hardly signifies since everyone scowls at me.”
Valentine glared at him.
“There,” said Phillip, pleased. “You want the stepmother looked into.”
“I want to know where she comes from.”
He had turned the thing over a dozen times since the drawing room, and it would not sit right.
The woman was too quick. She had come at him three times in a quarter of an hour, and every one of the three was a serviceable move.
Flattery, then pity, then the appeal to propriety.
She read the room and changed her line each time she was blocked.
That was not a lady’s education. Ladies did not learn to fight like that, because ladies never had to.
And by way of contrast, he had his wife.
Diana was clever. He had no doubt whatever on the point; she had not said one foolish thing nor done one foolish action since she had entered his house.
She knew when to speak and precisely when to hold her tongue, which was rarer by far.
The household books had come back to him last Thursday balanced to the penny and in a hand like copperplate, and there had been an error in his own figures from the previous quarter that she had corrected without once mentioning to him that she had done it.
And underneath all of that, she was innocent. Not stupid. Innocent — sheltered, unmarked, the way even the sharpest women of the ton were unmarked, because the world had been kept off them by walls and money and other people’s hands.
Octavia had none of it. Not a trace.
“There is a kind of naivety,” he said slowly, “that comes of being kept from the worst of the world. Every gently born woman I have ever met has it, whatever else she has. It is not a virtue. It is simply a mark, like a callus.” He turned the glass.
“She has not got it. There is not one place on that woman where the world has been kept off her. I do not believe she is of gentle birth at all. I do not believe she has ever been.”
Phillip was quiet a moment.
“I have heard of her, you know,” he said.
“Since the ball. The word is rather good, in point of fact. Her manners are excellent, her table is excellent, and she is reckoned an uncommonly fine hostess. Lady Harcourt is quite taken with her.” He shrugged.
“It is possible, Rosewood, that you have simply married into a family with a cruel stepmother in it. It has been known to happen. There are novels about it.”
“Possible.”
“But I shall look into it,” Phillip said, “since you will only sulk if I do not.”
He refilled both glasses.
“And how,” he added, “do the trial nights progress?”
“Mind your drink.”
“Ah.” Phillip settled back with the air of a man who has been paid in full. “Then I take it I am to expect a nephew or niece before very long.”
Valentine did not answer.
She didn’t reject him. That was what came to him, and it came whole.
God help him, the sounds. Her face turned up to his in the lamplight and the small slow nod she had given him when he asked whether he might, when she might have said no and he would have gone.
She had let him. She had trusted him enough to let him.
And it came to him, quietly and completely and rather too late to be prevented.
This is not about an heir.
I want her.
He shut it off at once, the way a man shuts a door on a room he has no business in.
Nonsense. He drank. It is Stone. It is Stone talking, and the drink.
“Be quiet,” said Valentine.
Phillip looked up, genuinely startled.
“I did not say anything,” he said.
“Your Grace! You’ve a visitor come — and I’ll not say who, but you’d best come quick.”
Mrs. Fletcher’s severe old face was doing something extraordinary. It took Diana a moment to identify it as a smile.
Henrietta was in the hall. She had her bonnet still on, and she got both arms around Diana’s neck before Diana had come the last three steps down.
“Duchess,” she said into her ear.
“Do not.”
“Your Grace. Shall I curtsy? I ought to curtsy—”
“Hen!” Diana giggled.
“I am curtsying—”
They were both laughing so hard by the time they reached the drawing room that a passing footman had to look very hard at the opposite wall.
“Oh, how I have missed you.” Henrietta took both her hands and would not let go. “You cannot imagine. The house is a tomb.”
Diana felt her throat go tight and covered it by squeezing back.
Eleven years old, she thought. Both of us up an apple tree at Fernside and Hen’s stocking torn to ribbons, swearing blind to my mother that we had been in the still-room the whole afternoon. Every scrape of her childhood had Henrietta somewhere in it, usually holding the ladder.
“And I you,” she said. “More than you know.”
A maid came in with the tea things, set them down, poured, and withdrew. Henrietta watched the whole performance with her eyebrows climbing steadily toward her hairline.
“Well,” she said, when the door had shut. “You are a Duchess now, aren’t you?”
Diana laughed.
Henrietta leaned forward at once, tea abandoned, voice dropped.
“Now. How does he treat you? Truly. Is he as dreadful as they all said?”
Diana opened her mouth.
And found, with some surprise, that she had to stop and think about it.
Dreadful.
She turned the word over, and it would not fit anywhere.
She thought of him getting down on a nursery floor in his shirtsleeves and letting an eight-year-old fold his fingers into the right shape.
She thought of him saying, Do not thank me; I have not done anything yet.
She thought of him carrying her out of a room full of broken glass.
“He is direct,” she said slowly. “He says exactly what he means and nothing else at all, which I find I like a great deal more than I expected to. He can be — intimidating.” She turned her cup on its saucer. “He is very dutiful. And he is gentle. Much more than anyone would believe.”
“Gentle,” Henrietta repeated.
“Yes.” And then, because her mouth ran ahead of her, and because some warm and traitorous thing had risen in her chest: “He is also very good at a great many things.”
The silence lasted about a second and a half.
“Oh,” said Henrietta.
Diana looked up.
Her cousin’s whole face had transformed. It was the most delighted, most scandalized expression Diana had ever seen on a human being.
“You did it with him. The thing that happens on wedding nights. I hear it makes married folks softer with each other.”
“Hen!” Diana’s head whipped round to the door. “Be proper, for heaven’s sake. Someone will hear you and we shall be in the most fearful trouble—”
“No, we shan’t.” Henrietta was serene. “Who exactly is going to scold you? You are the lady of this house. Have you forgotten?”
Diana opened her mouth and shut it. Hen was right, and she laughed with her hand over her eyes.
“I keep forgetting,” she admitted.
“I am so glad.” Henrietta’s voice had gone soft and quite serious.
She reached over and took Diana’s hand again.
“Truly, dearest. I have been sick with it since the wedding. I have thought of nothing else, and he has turned out to be quite different from what they said, and now you may have a family of your own. After everything. You of all people deserve it.”
Diana’s smile stayed exactly where it was.
Something in her chest went down like a stone in a well.
A family. Which meant a child. Which meant the thing she had never told a living soul except the man who had made a bargain out of it.
Not Hen, not anyone. She does not know. How could she know?
She has just wished me the kindest thing she can think of, and I cannot tell her that the wish is the thing I am most afraid of in all the world.
“Of course,” Diana said.
And could I? Could I truly make a family with him? The thought sat there and would not be answered.
Henrietta’s eyes had begun to sparkle again. “Now. What exactly did you—”
“What of you?”
“Diana—”
“No, truly.” She turned it firmly. “You have said nothing of yourself. How are your mother and father?”
And she watched her cousin’s whole face come down.
“Ah,” said Henrietta.
She set down her cup.
“We may have to leave London.”
Diana went still. “What?”
“Papa’s arrangements with your father.” Henrietta’s chin was up, but her voice had gone flat and careful, the way it did when she was refusing to cry.
“They have had business together for years. And a fortnight ago Uncle Levi pulled out of all of it. Every arrangement. No warning, no letter, nothing. When Papa went round to the house to ask why, he was not received. He has gone three times now. He is not received.” She looked at the window.
“It has done for us rather thoroughly. We are in debt. Papa has not said how much and I have not asked, because I do not think I want to know the answer.”
Octavia.
The name arrived in Diana’s mind with the finality of a key turning.
Of course. Of course it is her. Levi has not made a single decision since she came.
She has been cutting him off from everyone who has known him longer than she has—his own daughters and now his brother.
There is no one left in that house to tell him he is being robbed.
“Hen.” Her voice would not come out right. “I am so sorry. I am so terribly sorry—”
“Do not.” Henrietta squeezed her hand hard. “Do not you dare apologize for anyone.”
She let out a breath and made herself smile, and it was almost successful. “And I am tired of London, if I am honest with you. I am tired of being paraded about a ballroom at two-and-twenty like a horse at Tattersall’s. The country might suit me very well. Fewer people. More books.”
“Hen—”
“But I shall not go yet.” Her cousin’s eyes came up, and there was nothing light in them at all.
“Not while Bella is in that house. Betsy is good, but Betsy is one woman, and she has her work besides. So I shall keep calling. I shall be perfectly charming to that creature, and I shall drink her tea. I shall keep my eyes open, and if anything happens in that house you shall know of it inside the hour. I promise you that.”
Diana could not speak for a moment.
The door opened.
Henrietta was on her feet before Diana had turned her head, and down in a curtsy so deep and so hasty that she nearly went over.
“Your Grace.”
“Please. Sit.”
He had come in from riding. He was in a coat of dark red that Diana had not seen before, his hair disordered, the color of the ride still in his face, and the whole of him took up rather more of the room than seemed reasonable.
“Duchess?”
And Diana, with her cousin two feet away and a teacup in her hand, was undone entirely, because the sound of his voice saying that word did something to her now.
What came into her head utterly without her permission was last night.
His hand. What his hand had done. What she had done, and the noise she had made when she did it.
The heat went up her throat and into her face like a struck match.
“Your Grace,” she managed.
He looked at her a moment longer than he needed to.
“I shall leave you ladies to your visit,” he said, and went out.
Diana watched him go.
She was still watching the door when she heard it: a small, gleeful, wicked giggle from the other end of the sofa.
She turned around.
Henrietta was looking at her with her chin propped on her hand, her eyes dancing, and an expression of the purest triumph.
“You don’t even know it, do you,” she said. “Diana. My dearest darling fool. I think you are falling in love with your husband.”