Chapter 21
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
“Diana.”
He came in on the last of the dusk with the cold still on his coat and his hair wet from the ride. There was a look on his face she had not seen there before, troubled as though he had come up the stairs three at a time and had been told something on the way.
He sat down on the edge of the bed and gathered her in without a word.
Diana put her face into his shoulder and breathed him in, road and horse and wet wool and, under it all. One tear went down her cheek and into the cloth of his coat before she had the least idea it was coming.
“Diana.” His hand came up under her chin. “What is it? What has happened?”
She swallowed.
“I am with child.”
He went still.
Then he drew back and took her face in both his hands and held it. There was nothing in his own face at all, nothing she could read.
“Say it again.”
“I am with child.” Her voice would not stay level. “The physician came this afternoon. He said five weeks.”
“You are having our child,” said Valentine.
And something came up behind his eyes, she saw it come, saw it break over him. Diana looked at it, and the panic went through her like cold water.
“I am not ready for this,” she said. “Your Grace, I am not — I cannot — oh, this is a mess. What in heaven am I to do?”
What shall I do?
Not we. She had not said we. She looked at him as though a disaster had come into the house, and asked what she was to do about it.
He rose from the bed. “The child is our agreement, and it stands.”
The room went silent.
Diana’s head came up. “What did you say?”
“You heard me.”
“I did not.” Her voice had gone strange and thin. “Say it again.”
“You agreed to give me an heir.” He heard himself go on and could not seem to stop it; it was easier to keep speaking than to stand in the quiet.
“I did not force this upon you. You came to me twice this fortnight of your own choosing, and this is the result of it. It is the result we bargained for at the outset. I do not see what there is to discuss.”
What are you doing? Stop. Ask her. Ask her whether she is glad of it — ask her whether some small part of her wants this child as much as you have wanted it since the moment she told you — get down on your knees if you must, only ask her, his heart screamed.
He did not.
Diana stood very still by the bed, one hand pressed flat to her stomach, and looked at him as though he had struck her.
“That is all this is to you,” she said. “A debt I owe you. Collected.”
“It is what we agreed.”
“I did not ask you whether I was obliged to have it, Valentine. I am not asking you to release me from anything.” Her voice cracked in the middle of the word.
“I do not know what I am asking you. That is the whole trouble — I do not know what I feel, and I came to you frightened and confused, hoping you might — hoping there might be some comfort in it, some—”
“Comfort is not the same as an answer,” he said. “You wished to know what was expected of you. I have told you.”
Her eyes filled, and she did not bother to hide it, and something in his chest went tight and wrong at the sight of it — say something else, say the true thing. Instead he reached for his coat, because it was easier than reaching for her.
“I have business to see to before dinner,” he said. His heart was aching in a way it had never ached before. He was certain he couldn’t speak further without breaking down and what use was it to break down when things have come to this.
He walked to the door.
He did not look back at her. If he had, he was not entirely certain he would have found the strength to go through it. Some cold, frightened, long-buried part of him, the part his father had built, told him that going through it was the safer course.
The door shut behind him with a sound far too quiet for what it cost him.
“You are pouring that like a man who means to be carried out.”
“Then fetch a bigger glass,” said Valentine, “and stop remarking upon it.”
Phillip fetched a bigger glass, and filled his own besides. He down opposite with the decanter set companionably between them like a third party to the discussion.
The fire had been made up twice.
“I do not understand it,” Valentine said.
“That is my difficulty. I have turned it over the length of this bottle and I cannot make it come right. She looked sick to her stomach at the thought of it. I have seen her frightened, I know what that looks like on her. She looked like she felt sick. As at something spoiled.”
“Forgive me.” Phillip turned his glass. “But did you not tell me, a fortnight since, and at some length, that you had made your peace with having no heir at all? That you had settled it upon the little girl? I recall being told to mind my own business about it.”
“I did tell you that.”
“Well then.”
“It was true.” Valentine put the glass down.
“I did not want a child at that price. I was not prepared to buy one with her terror. She has watched her mother die of it and she believes it is waiting in her blood. I would sooner have handed Rosewood to a stranger in the street than have her lie awake nine months in fear of it. That is what I gave up. Not the wanting.”
“Ah.”
“I want a child with that woman, Stone. I did not know it until she said the words.” He heard his own voice change and could do nothing about it.
“It has come about against everything either of us intended and I cannot for the life of me see why that is so terrible a piece of news. Surely — surely it cannot be nothing but a calamity. Surely there was room in it for one moment of—”
He stopped.
“Perhaps she is only confused,” said Phillip. “It is a great deal to have arrive in an afternoon.”
“She was not confused. I have seen her confused.” He shook his head. “She was miserable. Simply and entirely miserable, and it was my child doing it to her. Even carrying something of mine causes her pain.”
Phillip drank.
“And what did you say to her?”
“I told her the child was our agreement and it would stand.”
Phillip set down his glass. “Tell me you did not.”
“I am a straightforward man.”
“You are an ass,” said the Duke of Kingsell.
Valentine turned the glass slowly on the arm of the chair.
“And the woman I love,” he said, “is disgusted at the notion of carrying my child. So there we are.”
The fire cracked. Phillip picked his glass back up and took a considered mouthful.
“So you love her,” he said.
Valentine did not answer. He drank instead, which was an answer, and knew it, and drank anyway.
Phillip began to laugh.
“Oh, this is very fine. This is worth the whole evening.” He wiped his eye with his knuckle.
“My dear Rosewood. There are a number of things a man is obliged to leave outside the door when he loves somebody, and the very first of them, before his money or his temper or his good sense, is his pride. You have brought yours in with you and set it in the best chair, now you are astonished that there is no room left for anything else.”
“Do not preach at me.”
“I shall preach at you a very great deal, because you have earned it.” Phillip leaned forward.
“Go home, tell your wife you love her. Tell her you want this child and tell her she is not an estate to be managed, Valentine. She is a woman of three-and-twenty who has just been told she is with child by a husband she has known eleven weeks. She wants reassuring. That is all. It is the cheapest thing you will ever be asked for.”
Valentine stared into the fire.
“And if she rejects me?” he said.
Phillip’s brows went up.
“If I go home and open my mouth and tell her the whole of it,” said Valentine, “and she looks at me and says she does not want it. That she does not want the child.”
He stopped.
“Then such is love, they tell me.” Phillip shrugged.
“You will have to listen to what she says and make of it what you can, like everybody else who has ever been fool enough to try. But I will tell you what is beneath you, Rosewood, and that is sitting in my drawing room drinking my claret like a coward.” He settled back.
“It is a little pathetic. I say it as your friend.”
Valentine sat quite still for a moment.
Then he stood up.
“I am going home.”
Phillip raised his glass. “And Rosewood — my congratulations. You are to be a father.”
Valentine paused in the doorway.
It ought to feel light, he thought. A man is told that and it ought to lift him. By why did it feel heavy?
The house was dark when he came up the drive, which was wrong; it was not late enough for that.
Mrs. Fletcher was waiting in the hall with a candle.
“Your Grace. Her Grace went out at noon, sir. She has taken Miss Arabella, and Betsy with her, and the small trunks. She is gone to her father’s house.” The old woman held the candle steady. “She said to tell you, a few days. She did not say how many.”
Valentine stood in his own hall and felt the floor go a long way down.
“I see,” he said. “Thank you.”
He had got as far as the foot of the stairs.
“Your Grace. Might I speak?”
He turned. “Say it.”
Mrs. Fletcher looked at him for a moment.
“Her Grace had tears in her eyes when she went out that door,” she said.
“She held them till the carriage. But they were there. And I will say one thing more, sir, and then I shall hold my tongue and you may dismiss me for it if you choose.” Her chin came up.
“Do not go chasing after her. Not tonight, nor tomorrow, neither.”
“Mrs. Fletcher—”
“She is a clever lady and a brave one, and I have not seen her equal in this house in my lifetime. But I have never in all my days met a person with so much dignity in her, sir, and folk like that do not thank you for running them down in the road. She would only close up. Give her the days she asked for.” Her voice softened by the smallest degree.
“And then go and fetch her home properly, and do it right when you do it.”
Valentine found, unaccountably, that his throat had closed.
“Thank you,” he managed. “Good night.”
He went up.
He did not go to his own chamber. He went along the passage past the nursery, into Diana’s chamber.
The door was standing open, the bed stripped, the wooden chest of marbles sitting on the mantelpiece where it had been left.
Then he lay down on her bed in his coat and his boots and put his face into her pillow and breathed in.
He lay in the dark with his hand on the cold pillow beside him.
Did you ever love me at all?
Or have I only been the least of the men who have had the disposal of you, the one who at least was kind about it?