Chapter 14
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“Duchess? Will you be taking a plate?”
Valentine looked up.
She had stopped just inside the door, and the look on her face was that of a woman who has walked into the wrong room.
She had not expected to find him here. That much was written all over her.
She was half asleep, her hair not properly pinned, and she stood quite still in the doorway with one hand on the frame like a hare that has come round a bend and found a man on the road.
I am never at this table, he thought. She has been eating her breakfast alone and has grown used to it.
“Yes,” she said, recovering. “Thank you. I shall have — whatever His Grace is having.”
Mrs. Fletcher inclined her head and went off toward the kitchens, and could be heard almost at once addressing the cook in the tone of a woman with news.
“Your Grace,” said Diana.
“Duchess.”
She sat down at the far end of the table, which was a great deal of table, and put her hands in her lap.
Valentine set down his paper and looked at her.
She is not sleeping enough, he thought, and she is beautiful anyway.
That was becoming a difficulty. She was beautiful every day of the week, that had been apparent from the first quarter hour in the carriage, but it was not that.
It was that every time he took her apart in the dark and watched her forget herself, watched the whole careful, competent, guarded creature come to pieces in his hands and want without knowing how to want, something in him got worse. Not better. Worse.
It came back at him the following morning with interest, when she was fully dressed, perfectly proper, and pouring out coffee. He found himself looking at her mouth across a breakfast table and thinking things that would have got him thrown out of any house in England.
And it shows on her, he thought, with a satisfaction he did not trouble to examine.
There was a mark on the side of her neck, low, just above the line of her collar.
She had powdered it. She had powdered it very carefully, and it had not worked in the least; she plainly had no idea it had not worked.
She was sitting at his table, drinking her coffee, with the thing showing like a signature.
He put it out of his mind. He did not entirely succeed.
“How did you sleep?” he said.
Diana went pink to her hairline.
“Very well,” she said to her cup. “Thank you, Your Grace.”
Valentine did not smile. It cost him something.
She had no notion. Not the smallest. He had known women who could have parried that with one eyebrow, making him regret asking.
She went scarlet, looked at the tablecloth, and answered the question as though it were about the mattress.
There was no sport in it whatever, and he found he did not care in the least, because she was the most artless thing he had ever encountered and it had begun to do something to him.
He folded his napkin and set it down.
“I am going to your father’s house this morning,” he said. “I shall come back with the child.”
Her head came up.
“Today?”
He nodded.
She was staring at him. Valentine stood.
He came down the length of the table, which took some seconds, and Diana watched him do it with her cup halfway to nowhere. He stopped beside her chair. He looked, with unmistakable deliberation, at the place on her neck that she had powdered.
Then he bent down.
“After this,” he said, quite close to her ear, “I believe I am owed a reward.”
Diana’s eyes flew round the room.
The girl at the sideboard had stopped moving. The footman by the door had developed a profound interest in the ceiling. And Mrs. Fletcher had come back in and was standing in the doorway with a plate in her hands and a look on her severe old face like the sun coming up over a wall.
“Your Grace,” Diana said. It came out strangled.
Valentine kissed her on the chin.
There was a small sound from the direction of the sideboard, hastily suppressed.
“I shall be back before dark,” he said, and went out.
A reward, he thought, going down the steps to the carriage, and it carried him the whole of the way into town in an excellent humor.
“Your Grace! What an unlooked-for pleasure.”
Octavia came out into the hall with her hands out and her face already arranged. “But how unlucky — my husband is not at home. He is gone into the City, and I do not expect him before four. Had you sent word I should have—”
“I know.”
Her hands stopped in the air. Then the smile came back on, quite smoothly. She recovered beautifully. He gave her that much.
“Well. Then I am entirely at your disposal. Will you take some tea?” she asked.
“There is no need to trouble yourselves on my account.”
“Nonsense, Your Grace. What sort of hostess should I be, to send a duke away without so much as a cup of tea in his belly.” She led him down the passage as she spoke. “This way, if you please. The drawing room catches the best of the light this time of day.”
She settled him into the best chair with a small proprietary flourish and took the seat opposite. Within a few minutes the footman returned with a girl behind him bearing a laden with cups so fine the light came through them.
The girl set it down and began to pour.
“That will do,” Octavia told her. “I shall see to His Grace myself.”
The maid curtsied and withdrew, and the footman with her, and the door was drawn half shut in the way of a well-run house. To all appearances, entirely alone.
Octavia lifted the pot and began to pour.
“I have come to ask you for the child.”
There was not a flicker. The smile stayed exactly where it was, warm and grieved and perfectly weighted.
“Oh, Your Grace.” She said it gently, as one does to a man who has misunderstood something.
“But I thought we had settled it between us. The poor lamb was asked, and said no. Whatever we may wish for, surely the child’s own choice must be the right thing?
I could not go against her. I should never forgive myself. ”
Valentine looked at her.
How does he not see it? It was the thing he could not get past. Levi Fernside lived in this house. He had a wolf sitting in his drawing room in Norwich silk, and he had never once looked at it properly.
Nothing about the woman was noble, not one thing, not when you knew to look.
The smiles were placed. The clothes were placed; she dressed a half step above her rank and always had, and she knew precisely what it bought her.
Even her eyes moved to a purpose. She had come at him three times in that quarter hour, and every attack had been chosen, adjusted, and abandoned with a coldness that a good many generals of his acquaintance could not have managed at Salamanca.
“Do you take it without sugar, Your Grace? Forgive me. I ought to have asked before I poured.”
“Black is fine.”
Octavia set the cup at his elbow and settled herself opposite. She was obviously a woman who has arranged a great many tea trays for a great many men and knew how to make the ritual of it last. Valentine sipped, watched her over the rim, and said, quite idly:
“Tell me about your life before you met Westleigh.”
Her hand paused on the teapot for the smallest fraction of a moment.
“Why, Your Grace, should that interest you?”
“You are my mother-in-law.” He set the cup down. “It seems a reasonable enough thing for a man to want to know something of his wife’s family.”
“How thorough of you.”
“I like to know my people.”
Octavia smiled and poured her own cup, unhurried. “There is very little to tell. I was married before, to a gentleman of good family. A quiet life. Nothing that would interest a duke.”
“And your first husband. What became of him?”
“He is late, Your Grace.” She lowered her eyes to her cup with exactly the correct measure of sorrow — enough to be seen, not so much as to require comforting. “These three years now.”
There it is, he thought. That little dip of the lashes. Timed to the half second. I have watched actresses at Drury Lane do the same thing with less art.
“That must have been very hard,” he said. “A widow, and young yet. No children to comfort you in it?”
“I was not blessed with any.” She said it lightly, and reached for the sugar though her tea did not want it. “Not until I met Levi.”
“And how did the two of you come to meet?”
“A chance meeting, nothing more.” She smiled at him over the rim of her cup.
“Tell me of it.”
“It is rather an intimate story, Your Grace, and not one I share readily, even with family.” Her eyes came up, warm and perfectly composed. “A lady must keep some small thing for herself, must she not?”
Valentine set his own cup down without drinking from it.
He was tired, he found, of the whole performance. He was tired of the lowered lashes timed exactly right, tired of sorrows produced and withdrawn like cards from a sleeve, tired of a woman who had not given him one true sentence in a quarter of an hour of trying.
“I confess I became curious about you, madam,” he said. “So I had a friend look into your history.”
She was quiet, so he continued.
“Madame Juno.”
Her smile did not fall; it froze. That was the thing — it did not go anywhere at all; it simply stopped being alive, the way a clock stops, and stayed on her face exactly as it was.
Phillip had not even had to work at it. He had sent out a note, which rather embarrassed them both. She is not a secret, he had written. She is only a secret here.
“That was the name you went by,” Valentine said, “at the Blue Cockatrice.”
“I have not the smallest notion—” Her voice caught. She began again. “I do not know what you are speaking of. I have never—”
“Have I got it wrong?” He inclined his head. “Then I apologize unreservedly, madam. My friend was able to confirm it from several gentlemen who sought your company there after their drink, but no doubt they are all of them mistaken.”
The room was very quiet.
Octavia’s chin came up.
“I never sold my body.” Her voice had changed.
It had dropped half its music and all of its warmth, and it was, for the first time, the voice of an actual person.
“Not once. Not to any man who ever asked, and a great many asked. I sold drink. I sat, and I talked, and I laughed at what wanted laughing at, and the gentlemen bought bottles they did not want, and the house took its cut, and I took mine. That is what I did. And I left that place years ago.”
“So you admit it.”
She looked at him steadily.
“There is no shame in labor,” she said. “Surely even a duke can grasp that much. Some of us were not left estates. Some of us worked.”
Valentine walked a few paces and sat down without being asked.
“I have no quarrel with honest work, madam,” he said.
“None whatever. I respect it a good deal more than I respect most of what goes on in the House of Lords, and I would lay money your husband would say the same if you gave him the chance. He is a fool, but he is not a snob.” He settled back.
“And I daresay the other gentlemen you have married would have said so too. The ones who came out of it penniless.”
Silence.
“So my difficulty is not the work,” he said. “My difficulty is the lying. Why lie about who you are — unless being who you are would cost you something you have not finished taking?”
Their eyes met.
The performance was gone. There was nothing on her face now at all, and it was, he thought, the first honest thing he had seen her do.
“What do you want?” she asked.
“Bring the child. I am taking her with me.”
“And what am I to tell my husband?”
She had already written off everything but her own skin, and she had done it in under a minute.
“Madam,” said Valentine, “you contrived to persuade the man to marry you. I cannot imagine this will trouble you.”
Octavia held his eye for a long moment.
Then she turned her head. “Fetch the young lady down. At once.”
The maid went. The door closed. Octavia turned back.
“And what guarantee have I,” she said, “that you will not repeat any of this?”
Footsteps in the passage.
The maid came back with the child, and behind the child came the older woman. She was a woman with gray hair and flat, watchful eyes, who had a hand on Arabella’s shoulder and was not taking it off.
Arabella stopped in the doorway. She looked at Octavia. She looked at the Duke. She looked, mostly, at the floor.
Valentine crouched down.
“You are coming with me,” he said.
The small head came up. “To — to Diana?”
“To Diana.”
He straightened and looked at the older woman.
“You are her maid?”
She dipped a curtsy without letting go of the child. “Betsy, Your Grace.”
“Pack her things. Everything she has and bring it to Rosewood this afternoon.” He glanced at Octavia. “She will give you the coin for a cart.”
Betsy’s mouth opened.
Octavia’s face had gone the color of the wall.
“Yes, Your Grace,” said Betsy, and turned, and went, and did not once look back at her mistress on the way out.
Valentine took Arabella’s hand. It was very small, and it took a moment to decide, and then it closed on two of his fingers and gripped.
He turned in the doorway.
“You have no guarantee,” he said. “But I am a man who finds gossip a great deal too tedious to trouble with. I should have to remember it. I should have to be interested.”
He did not stay to watch her face. He did not need to; he could feel it on his back the whole way across the hall, and it was, he thought, the most sincere thing about her.
He turned to Arabella.
“We are going to see your sister,” he said, as the carriage pulled away.
Arabella looked up at him. Her whole face came open.
“Thank you, Your Grace,” she said.
Valentine sat back against the squabs and watched London go by and was, on the whole, extremely pleased with his morning.
And tonight, he thought, I collect.
He had several ideas.