Chapter 16
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“Idid not know my uncle had it in him.”
Her uncle’s letter had come on Tuesday. It was a great sprawling thing, three pages of it, and every page more delighted than the last.
He had found a new business partner. A Manchester man, cotton and canal shares both, and the terms were better by half than anything Levi Fernside had ever put his name to. And to mark the occasion, Mr. Edmund Fernside was giving a ball.
A ball, with an orchestra, and four hundred cards of invitation sent out across the whole of London — one of which had gone to his elder brother and his wife.
He means to make them come and watch, Diana chuckled, sitting on the edge of her bed with the letter in both hands. Her uncle invited her and the duke. She folded the letter and began to prepare to write to the duke.
She had not seen her husband in seven days.
That was not the ache it might have been, and she had noticed that too. He had told her he would be gone the morning after the bath. He was standing in the passage with his hat in his hand. He business in the north, ten days at the outside, and he would send word if it ran longer.
She was writing to him about the ball. Only to inform him. She read the note twice over, before she sent it, to be certain there was nothing in it that could be mistaken for a summons.
His Grace need not trouble himself; I shall go with my cousin and return before midnight.
He had a great deal to do. She had no wish to be one more thing on the list.
On the night of the ball, she put Arabella to bed herself. And then she had come down the great staircase in her best gown with her gloves half on, expecting the footman and the carriage. The carriage door stood open. And in it, quite at his ease, sat the Duke of Rosewood.
Diana stopped dead on the bottom step.
Her heart did something so foolish and so entire that she was glad of the dark to hide it.
He had not shaved since the road, and his hair wanted cutting, and he was in black and looked precisely as he had looked at the head of an aisle; when the sight of him had emptied her lungs with fear.
She was smiling before she knew it.
“You are to be in Lancashire,” she said.
“I am and it has been most inconvenient.” He came down and held out his hand for hers. When she gave it he did not hand her up at all, he drew her in, close against him, one arm going round her waist. “I have missed you, wife.”
“Your Grace—” Her face was on fire. “We are outside.”
“Mm.” He bent his head to her ear, and she felt the smile in it. “Then perhaps the Duchess would prefer somewhere more private.”
“Stop teasing me.”
“Very well.” He did not sound in the least repentant. But he let her go, and took her hand properly, and turned toward the step.
“I thought you were busy,” she said.
“I am extremely busy.”
“Then why?”
“Because my wife is making her first appearance before the ton,” said Valentine, “and she will not do it alone.”
Something behind Diana’s ribs came apart very quietly.
He came back for that. He rode God knows how many hours.
She let him hand her into the carriage and did not trust herself to speak at all.
They had gone perhaps a mile before she said.
“Might I lay my head on your shoulder?”
He turned to her.
“It is only—” She stopped, and then decided, recklessly, upon the truth. “I have missed your scent.”
There was a pause.
“I must warn you, wife,” said the Duke, in an altered voice, “that you are making me lose my composure.”
“Then are you refusing me?”
“My dove.” He shifted, and drew her under his arm, and settled her against his chest as though he had done it a hundred times.
“Were I fitted out with a thousand nerves, I could not refuse the fairest lady in London — whom it is the great good luck of my life to have married. My shoulder is yours. So is the rest of me, though I will thank you not to test the point before we arrive.”
What a dreadful, shameless, silver-tongued creature you are, Diana thought, and pressed her smile into his coat where he could not see it.
He stroked her hair. Slowly, and without appearing to think about it, the way a man strokes a cat that has settled in his lap. That, she thought, was the thing about him. Not the pretty speeches but the absent-minded hand.
“And the little one?” he said. “How does she go on?”
“She is very quiet.” Diana turned it over.
“She has not broken a single thing, nor been late to a single meal, nor asked for anything at all in seven days. Bella has never in her life gone seven days without asking for something. I think she is playing good at us. I think she believes she is a guest, and knows that guests may be sent home.”
“Then she will learn otherwise.”
Diana closed her eyes. “I cannot thank you enough for bringing her to me. I do not think I ever shall be able to.”
He kissed the top of her head and he tipped her face up with two fingers. Her heart turned over like a struck coin.
“It is my honor to please my wife,” he said. “And where the child is concerned, you will tell me what she wants. Do you understand me?”
Diana lifted her head to thank him.
He kissed her. It was unhurried, one hand coming up beneath her jaw. He caught her lower lip between his teeth as he drew back and let it go slowly; she made a sound she was not at all proud of.
“Duchess.” His thumb moved across the place he had bitten. “No more thanking me. If you must repay me, repay me in this coin.”
The carriage was slowing down.
Diana sat up and put both hands to her hair and inhaled.
Diana felt eyes on her the moment she came through the door.
It was not that the room went quiet, the orchestra sawed on and four hundred people went on talking. It was that a great many of them began talking about something else.
She saw fans come up. She saw two heads bend together by the pillar and one of them tip, very slightly, toward her.
“Your Grace,” she said, low, on his arm. “Am I imagining it, or is there a great deal of attention upon me?”
“What have you to fear?” said Valentine, without looking down. “I am here.”
And that settled her entirely.
“Diana!”
Henrietta came through the crowd. She stopped short before the Duke and dropped a curtsy, and then turned and began upon a second one—
“Do not you dare,” said Diana, and caught her by both arms. “I am your cousin, and if you curtsy to me I shall put a frog in your reticule.”
Henrietta abandoned the curtsy and flung both arms round her instead.
“Oh, Diana. Oh, I am so happy I could burst. We are not going. We are not going to the country. Papa has it all settled, the debts and the rest of it, and he has been singing since Thursday, which I promise you is worse than the debts.” She drew back, and her eyes were shining and wet at once. “How am I ever to thank you?”
Diana blinked.
“Thank me?”
“Well — yes.” Henrietta’s brows came together. “You asked His Grace to make the introductions. To the Manchester gentlemen. Did you not?”
Diana turned her head and looked at her husband.
The Duke of Rosewood examined the middle distance and shrugged one shoulder, as at a matter of no interest whatever.
“Ah — there she is! There is my niece!”
Her uncle came at her with both hands out and his face scarlet with heat and happiness. Edmund Fernside was a shorter, rounder, altogether kinder-looking edition of her father, and he had been drinking his own champagne with enthusiasm.
“Your Grace.” He bowed. “Your Grace, you are very welcome, very welcome indeed.” And then he turned to Diana and all the merriment went out of his face at once. “And you, my poor child. You poor child. We have every one of us sinned against you, and I not the least of them.”
“Uncle—”
“Married off in a week, and not a soul lifted a finger—”
“Uncle.” Diana shook her head, and meant it.
Because it was not true, and she would not have it said.
When her mother died and her father went to pieces, it was Uncle Edmund who had sent Henrietta around with a basket twice a week for a year.
It was Uncle Edmund who had put money in her hand every time her father went away.
He pressed it on her in the hall, for the little one, mind, not for the household — and never once asked what became of it or told anyone he had done it.
He had not saved her. But he had been the only person in the whole of London who had noticed she needed saving.
“You are the last man alive who owes me an apology,” she said. “And you know it perfectly well.”
Her uncle blew his nose.
“Well,” he said. “Well. I owe this ball to you, my dearest girl, and that I will say.” He turned and seized the Duke’s hand and shook it far longer than was proper. “And to you, Your Grace. To you. I shall not forget it.”
“We are family,” said Valentine.
“So we are. So we are.” Her uncle looked at Diana, and his eyes were wet again. He patted her cheek. “You have got yourself a good man, my dear. My heart may rest now.”
Indeed I have, thought Diana.
He promised to come back to his particular guests directly, and went off to be merry at somebody else.
Before Diana could begin her queries. A man detached himself from the crowd and came toward them, and their eyes met.
“Well,” he said. “Greetings, Duchess.” And he bowed.
She looked to her husband.
“Kingsell,” said Valentine. “My wife. Duchess — Phillip, Duke of Kingsell.”
Ah. The friend.
She saw at once why they were friends. He had the same manner exactly. The same flat unhurried gaze, the same stillness, the same face build. Two great cold blocks of men standing in a lit ballroom, and heaven help whoever had to negotiate with either of them.
“I have heard a great deal about you, Your Grace.”
“Good things, I hope.”
The Duke of Kingsell looked at the Duke of Rosewood for slightly longer than the question required.
“Good things always,” he said.
“Then I shall leave you both to it.” Diana inclined her head, and could not tell in the least whether she had just been mocked.