Chapter 24
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Diana opened her eyes to see that she was in her mother’s bedchamber. She knew the plaster rose above the bed before she knew anything else in the world; she had lain under it with a fever when she was nine.
The market.
It came back all at once, the clatter on the cobbles, the white eye, the child with the wooden top standing quite still in the road. Her hands went to her stomach and she heard her own voice come out of her, thin and cracked and utterly beyond her control.
“My baby—” She got a fistful of her nightgown. “My baby—”
“The baby is fine.” Betsy was at her shoulder in an instant, both hands pressing her back down. “The baby is fine, Your Grace, do you hear me? Fine. Not a thing wrong. Lie still, lie still now.”
Diana lay still. She turned her head.
Arabella was sitting on the edge of the bed with her knees drawn up and her face swollen and scarlet. She had both fists jammed against her mouth to keep the noise in, and she was failing entirely.
“Diana—”
“Oh, my darling. Come here.”
She got one arm up, it hurt a great deal more than she expected. She pulled her sister down against her shoulder and held on.
“Do not cry. Bella, look at me. Look at me, dearest, I am perfectly well. I am well. It was only a great deal of noise and a great deal of fuss. I have a bruise the size of Kent, and that is all, I promise you. I promise.”
Arabella did not stop crying, but she stopped fighting it, which was better.
Beyond the bed, her father stood by the window with his hands hanging at his sides.
Octavia by the foot of it, still in the gray silk, which had a long dirty scrape down one side of it from the hem to the hip.
“Come along, Miss Arabella.” Betsy got her hands under the child’s arms. “Your sister wants quiet and you want your face washed, and I want both, so we shall all be satisfied. Come.”
She bore her off. The door shut.
Levi came forward a step.
“The surgeon has not been gone a quarter of an hour,” he said. “He says you fainted from the shock of it. You have taken a knock on the head and a bad bruise across the back but there is nothing broken anywhere. And the child—” His voice caught, and he cleared it roughly. “The child is unharmed.”
Diana let her breath out and shut her eyes.
Octavia sat down on the edge of the bed.
“Why,” she said, “did you go running out into the middle of a public road like that? Are you an idiot?”
Her voice was not steady at all.
“I—”
“Where is she?”
The voice came from the hall.
“Where is my wife?”
Diana’s whole body went still.
“I sent for him,” said Octavia. “This afternoon, from the market. Before the surgeon came.” She stood and shook out her ruined skirt.
“Whatever is between the two of you is nothing to me. But a man ought to be told when his wife has been knocked down by a horse in the street. I would have wanted to know.”
The door came open.
“Diana.”
She had not seen him in eight days.
And whatever she had spent those eight days telling herself, all of it simply came off her at the sight of him standing in that doorway.
Levi looked at his wife, Octavia inclined her head. The two of them went out and closed the door.
Valentine sat, reached out and took her face in both his hands.
“What happened?”
His palms were cold from the road and warm underneath. She could feel them shaking very slightly against her jaw.
“There was a horse loose in the market square,” she said. “A trace broke, I think. There was a child standing in the road. I pulled her out of it and I did not get out of the way quite fast enough.” She swallowed. “It was an accident.”
“Are you hurt?” His hands went down — her shoulder, her arm, her ribs, quickly, not gently. “Where? Tell me where.”
“Valentine—”
“Where are you hurt?”
“I am fine.” She caught his wrists. “My back is black and blue and my head aches. But the surgeon says the child is perfectly well. I am fine. Look at me.”
He looked at her.
And then he pulled her in and held on to her so hard that her bruised shoulder complained. But she did not say a word about it as he put his face into her hair.
They stayed like that for some while.
“Why did you leave me so long?” he said into her hair.
Diana went rigid.
“Why did I—” She pushed back off his chest. “Why did you not come? Eight days, Valentine. Eight days and not a letter, not a word, not so much as a servant sent to ask whether I was alive—”
“I was told to give you space.”
“You were what?”
“Mrs. Fletcher,” he said it flatly. “The night you went. She stood in my own hall and told me I was not to come chasing after you. She said you would only close up if I did, and that I should give you the days you asked for, then come and fetch you home properly.” His jaw moved.
“I have never in my life taken advice about anything from a servant. I took hers because I could not think of anything better. I was afraid of making it worse.”
“I did not want space.” Her eyes had filled and she let them. “I wanted you to come and console me. I wanted you here.”
He looked at her for a long moment.
“So that you might tell me to my face,” he said, “that you do not want our child?”
Diana’s mouth opened.
“What?”
“You never wanted this marriage. I have never once held it against you.” His voice had gone low and rather rough. “And you did not want a child, and I gave that up. I meant it and I do not take it back. But I thought—”
He stopped.
“I thought that your heart had warmed toward me a little,” he said. “That is all, perhaps you might want this one. Even a very little.”
Diana stared at him.
“Is that why you were so cold?”
“You looked as though you had been handed something spoiled. You looked sick to your stomach at the thought of it, and you asked what you were to do. Not what we were to do. I was angry and I was hurt. I said the coldest thing I could reach, because it was that or say the true thing. I could not say the true thing.”
He was angry.
You cannot be that angry about a person you do not want.
“Why on earth,” she said, and her voice came apart in the middle of it, “would I be disgusted at carrying your child? You are the man I love.”
Valentine heard the words perfectly clearly and did not believe he had heard them.
“What?”
“I am in love with you.” She was crying now and did not appear to have noticed. “I was shocked, and I was frightened. It came a great deal sooner than either of us intended, and I did not know the first thing about how to be anybody’s mother. That is all it was.”
She caught his hand and gripped it. “I was never going to be rid of it. Not if you had ordered me. It is the only piece of you I have ever been given that nobody arranged.”
He could not make his mouth work.
“You love me,” he said.
“Have I not shown it?” She gave a wet laugh. “Valentine, what on earth have I been doing these eleven weeks?”
She leaned in.
“I love you,” she said. “I love you, Valentine.”
“There is something you must know first.”
His voice had gone rough. He held both her hands in his and made himself say it before he lost the nerve for it, because he had lost his nerve for a great many truer things in his life and did not intend to lose it for this one.
“When I told you it was our agreement, that you must have the child because we had bargained for it, that was a lie, and a cowardly one, and I have hated myself for it every hour since I said it.” He drew a breath.
“I offered you a debt because I did not know how to offer you the truth. The truth is that I have wanted this child since the moment you told me of it, and I wanted you glad of it too, and when you were not I did not know what to do with the wanting, so I made it into a business arrangement instead, because a business arrangement cannot break a man’s heart the way the truth can. ”
Diana’s eyes did not leave his face.
“I was raised by a father who believed a boy did not require warmth, only instruction,” he said.
“And a mother who was gone before I was old enough to remember her voice properly. I do not think I was held more than a handful of times in the whole of my childhood. I grew up believing that was simply what a man was, a ledger of duties, kept and discharged, with nothing warm at the center of it. I built my whole reputation on being exactly that sort of man. It cost me nothing, because I had never known the other thing well enough to miss it.”
Her eyes looked at him with tenderness that felt like it would melt him. “Oh Valentine—”
“Let me finish.” His hands tightened on hers.
“I am telling you this so that you will understand what I am promising you. The house we build — you, I, and Arabella, and this child, and whatever children come after, will not be cold. I swear it to you. I do not know yet how to be the sort of father who gets down on a nursery floor without feeling a fool, though I have made a beginning of it with your sister and I mean to go on making it. I will learn. I will not stop learning it as long as I live. No child of mine will ever stand in a room not knowing whether he is wanted. I swear that to you on whatever is left of my honor after tonight.”
Diana looked at him for a long moment, and then she nodded. Her face came loose and gentle.
“I believe you,” she said.
He sighed. He had not slept a full night in eight days. He had lain in her bed with his boots on for the first three of them and worked through the days like a man doing sums in a burning house. And then a rider had come up the drive at four in the afternoon with a note in an unfamiliar hand.
Valentine had read, the Duchess has been struck down by a horse in the market square, and had been in the carriage before he had finished the second line.
He did not remember calling for it or going down the steps. He remembered a great deal of road.
“Diana.”
His voice had gone somewhere unreliable and he let it.
“I cannot live without you,” he said. “I have made the attempt for eight days and I am not able to do it. Come back to me. Come home — you, and Arabella, and the child, and the dog, and every last thing in this house that belongs to you.” He took both her hands.
“And I will be with you. Every step of it. The whole nine months and the day itself and every day after it. You will not do one hour of it alone, I give you my word upon my honor and my name and anything else you would like to name.”
She was looking at him with the tears standing in her eyes.
“And you will never look at me like that again,” she said. “As you did that night. As you did on the day we married.”
“Never.” He said it as flatly as he had ever said anything. “That was a coward’s face and I put it on because I could not bear what was underneath it. You will not see it again as long as you live. I shall spend every day of the rest of my life loving you and that child.”
Diana laughed and it came out as a sob.
He leaned in and kissed her, mindful of the bruise, and drew back just far enough to see her face.
“I love you, Diana,” he said.
Her eyes spilled over.
“I love you, Valentine.”