Chapter 18
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“Duchess—”
Valentine stood with the carriage door still open behind him and the words simply would not come. Are you well?
He had faced down a committee of the Lords with less trouble. But she had come down out of that carriage with her face perfectly composed and her back perfectly straight, exactly as she had crossed her uncle’s ballroom. Something about that composure sealed the question in his throat like wax.
She was at the steps. Then she stopped, and turned back.
“I shall look in on my sister,” she said. “If Your Grace does not object.”
“I will come with you.”
She nodded, went in, and he followed.
He watched her go up the stairs ahead of him and thought that he had never in his life met anyone so entirely without the habit of being upset.
And now I know how you came by it.
Any other woman in England would have gone to pieces in that ballroom. Her name had been dragged through four hundred people; her stepmother had wept and lied in front of the whole of the ton.
She laughed, and made her speech, and did not shed one tear where they could see it.
He sighed. He had not intended to be there at all.
He had been standing under the pillar with a glass he did not want while Phillip watched her walk away on her cousin’s arm.
“She is the fairest woman I have seen in London in a twelvemonth,” Phillip had observed. “I begin to see why you are smitten.”
“You have a very smart mouth.”
“I have been told so.”
And then the two of them, Diana and the cousin, had gone out along the edge of the room after a pair of ladies in the direction of the terrace doors. Phillip’s glass had stopped halfway to his mouth.
“I sense,” he said, “that something interesting is about to occur between your wife, her friend, and those two women.”
Valentine had turned his head.
Phillip sighed and set the glass down.
“I cannot help hearing these things, Rosewood. It is not a talent I asked for.” He straightened his cuff. “It is the talk of the town. It has been these ten days or so. Apparently the Duchess of Rosewood forced you into marriage.”
Valentine’s hand had closed until he heard the stem of the glass creak.
“Come,” he had said.
And he had gone out onto that terrace and arrived, by the grace of God, at precisely the right moment. In time to hear his wife weeping tears she did not mean and speaking in a voice that was not her own, because it was the only weapon anyone had ever left her.
He had not much cared for the sound of it.
There was a noise on the other side of the nursery door. It was small, and muffled; unmistakably a bark.
“Sshh.” Arabella, in a whisper that would have gone across a parade ground. “Do not be so loud. We shall be caught.”
“You will both of you be in your beds this instant.” Betsy. “His Grace and the Duchess are like to be back any moment, and then where shall we be—”
Valentine looked at his wife. Diana closed her eyes, drew one long breath, and opened the door.
The scene inside arranged itself in an instant. Betsy on her feet with her cap askew, going white. Arabella sitting bolt upright in the middle of the rug in her nightgown, with both arms clamped round a small brown puppy that was industriously trying to lick her chin.
Nobody moved.
“Is that,” said Diana, “a puppy?”
“Forgive me, Your Grace.” Betsy had her hands twisted in her apron.
“It’s mine to answer for, not the child’s.
She found the creature in the stable yard at his lordship’s house, the day we came away, and there was no getting it out of her arms. I’ve never seen her hold to anything so hard in all my life—”
“And so you smuggled it into this house?”
Betsy said nothing at all, which was an answer.
Diana turned. “Arabella, give me the puppy.”
“Please, Diana—”
“Give me the puppy.” Her voice was quite level. “Seven days you have been silent as a mouse and I could not think why. Now I know.”
“I shall take care of it, I promise, I shall do everything, you shall not have to do a single—”
“Bella.” Diana pressed two fingers to her brow. “What did I tell you? We cannot be too much of a—”
“Let her keep it.”
Three heads came round.
Valentine did not care for dogs. He disliked the noise of them and the smell of them and the way they arranged themselves across doorways expressly to be tripped over. He had kept none at Rosewood since his father’s old pointers were put down.
But he had been looking at his wife’s face when she pressed her fingers to her brow.
She was tired. She was so tired that it had got past her guard at last, here, at midnight, in a nursery, where she had thought no one was looking.
She had been about to take a puppy from a child because she was afraid of asking him for too much.
You have been in my house for weeks and you have not asked me for one thing. You asked for a room, and you have been living inside the walls of that room ever since.
Diana let out her breath. “Arabella, thank His Grace.”
“Thank you, Your Grace!”
Valentine inclined his head.
“There are conditions,” he said. “You will help Betsy see to it. You will feed it and walk it, and you will clean up whatever mess it makes. You will not leave that part to anybody else in this house. Do we understand one another?”
Arabella’s whole face lit like a window. “Yes, Your Grace!”
And she scrambled up, still clutching the animal, and padded across to her bedside table. She came back and pressed a boiled sweet in a twist of paper into his hand.
Valentine looked down at it.
“Thank you,” he said and put it in his waistcoat pocket.
Diana gathered up her sister and carried her to the bed.
“Good night, dearest. No more tricks.”
“Good night.”
Betsy dipped a curtsy as they went out, and looked, Valentine thought, rather as though she might weep.
Her chamber was dark but for the fire.
She went straight to the corner beyond the press and put both hands behind her, feeling along the row of hooks at the back of the gown. Her elbows came up, she twisted, and she got about a third of the way and stopped.
He crossed the room, took her wrists and set her hands gently down at her sides.
“Allow me.”
She went still.
He went down the row of them and it took some time, because the fastenings of a lady’s evening gown were not designed with a duke’s hands in mind but he seemed like he was in no hurry whatsoever.
The silk parted. The line of her back came out of it, warm from the fire, and he could not have said afterward how long he stood there looking at it.
Then he stepped up close behind her and put both arms round her, rested his face in her hair and breathed her in.
“My duchess,” he said. “You have not spoken a word since the ball.”
She turned slowly in his arms.
“I owe you a thank you,” she said.
His hands found her waist. “Do you wish to pay it?”
She smiled and it went through him like a spike. “This is our last night, Your Grace.”
He said nothing.
She lifted her chin the way she did. “I agreed to give you a child. I agree to it still.”
Valentine looked down at her for a long moment.
“Diana,” he said. “Is your father one of the reasons you did not want one?”
Something crossed her face. “Is it so obvious as that?”
“One cannot help but wonder.”
“I do not want a child who cannot be loved and defended fiercely by both its parents. Not one. Not either. You may see from my own case what comes of it. I had a mother who loved me and it was not enough. When she was gone there was nothing behind her but a man who could not be troubled to look up. One parent’s love is not enough. I have the whole of my life as proof.”
Valentine stood very still.
And what have I to offer against that?
He thought of a house with three hundred rooms and one small boy in it.
Of a mother who had come to the schoolroom twice a year and once asked him his age.
Of his father at the head of a table the length of a barge, saying sit up.
He could not remember being held. Not once, not by either of them, not in thirty years and he had built a perfectly serviceable life on the assumption that this was ordinary and that a man did not require it.
I did not love anyone. Not my mother, not my father, not one living soul in this world until Diana.
I want to protect her. I want to put everything I own between her and the world. That much I know how to do.
But a child. A small helpless thing that will need me to be warm, every day, for twenty years. I have never once in my life been warm at anybody. I do not know that I have got it in me. And she is right. Half of it is worse than none.
And so he said the thing that surprised him more than it surprised her.
“Diana, we do not have to have a child.”
Her head came up.
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“But—” She stared at him. “Your Grace, you will have no heirs.”
“We have Arabella.”
Diana’s lips parted and no sound came out.
“I shall adopt her as my own,” he said. “Not a ward. A daughter, in law and in fact, with my name upon her.”
“But—” Diana put her hand out and caught the bedpost. “What about your Estate?”
“Do not worry about that, Duchess. I will find a way.”
“Your Grace, you cannot—”
“I am the man who decides what becomes of that estate,” said Valentine. “I have decided.”
She was quiet a moment. When she spoke again her voice had gone unsteady.
“Is this because of me?”
He looked at her.
At her mouth, still red from the wine and the cold and his own doing; at the question standing plain and frightened in her eyes. At the fire moving on her bare shoulder where he had unfastened the gown.
He leaned in.
“I find,” he said, “that I do not ever wish to see you sad, or bewildered, or afraid. I discover my heart has no arrangement in place for bearing it.”
And it came back at him as he said it, the look on her face across that ballroom when she turned to her father.
He could have borne anger. It had been hope; she had looked at the man and hoped, one final time, and Valentine had watched the hope go out of her in front of four hundred people.
He pulled her in and held on to her, hard, with his face in her hair.
After a moment her arms came up around his back.
They stood there a while, neither of them speaking.
Then she drew back just far enough to look up at him — and reached up, and took his face in both her hands, and kissed him.