Chapter 10
The goodbyes took nineteen minutes, and Leonora counted every one of them.
Emily held her by both shoulders and said a bracing sentence that she did not hear.
Sybella said, “Send for me if you want a person who will not be sentimental about it,” and meant it, and Leonora nearly cried on the spot.
Augusta had to be detached from her skirts by Alexander, twice. Her mother wept, which was expected, and her father did not, which was worse. He stood at the foot of the stairs with his jaw set like a man watching a ship leave.
Marina came last. She put her mouth against Leonora’s ear.
“Tuesdays,” she said. “Whatever else happens in this house, you come home on Tuesdays, or I shall come and get you.”
“Marina.”
“Say it.”
“Tuesdays,” Leonora agreed.
Then a maid she had never seen before led her up a staircase she had walked past once, and the noise of the gallery fell away behind them. By the second landing, the house had gone entirely quiet.
The Duchess’s chamber was at the front, looking over the drive.
Somebody had made an effort. There was a fire, candles—a great many more than she had seen anywhere else in the house—and a bowl of apple blossom on the table by the window that had certainly come from a Huntington hedge, which meant that her mother had put it in the carriage.
Her valises stood at the foot of the bed. And in the wall to the left of the fireplace, painted the same green as the rest of the room and fitted so neatly that she looked at it twice, was a door.
She looked at that door for a while.
“Shall I unpin you, Your Grace?”
She had forgotten the maid entirely.
“Yes, thank you. What’s your name?”
“Susan, Your Grace.”
“Susan.” Leonora sat down at the vanity and let the girl undo her hair, breathing deeply. “How long have you been in this house?”
“Four years.”
“Then you’ll know it far better than I do. I shall be asking you a great many stupid questions, and I should like you to answer them honestly. I promise not to be grand about it. I am not the least bit grand. My father made cloth.”
Susan’s hands paused half a second in her hair. “Yes, Your Grace.”
Leonora heard something in the maid’s voice that had not been there a minute before and thought, Good. That’s one.
The ivory silk came off. The stays followed. Susan brushed out her hair and asked which nightgown she wanted to wear, and Leonora heard herself say the black one quite calmly.
Then the maid stepped out and shut the door.
Leonora stood alone in a strange bedchamber, in a house she had never slept in before.
The black gown weighed nothing at all. That was the first thing she noticed. It moved when she moved. It lay against her like a held breath. She made herself turn and look in the long mirror, and for a moment did not recognize what she was looking at.
She looked like the woman in her story. The one who went to sea.
Colin had this made. He stood in a shop with three parcels under his arm and told the modiste what he wanted. He thought about me while he was doing it, and he has been thinking about it since Saturday.
She covered her face for the second time in three days.
Then she dropped them, rolled her shoulders back, pulled on the wrapper because there were limits, and began pacing up and down in front of the fire.
The clock on the mantel read twenty-two minutes past ten.
She had said things. That was the trouble.
She had stood in a corridor and told him she would not marry him because she wanted to fall in love, and then she had married him six days later in front of sixty people.
She had not the least idea what he believed about her now, and she had a horrible suspicion that he believed the whole speech had been a negotiating tactic.
It was not a negotiating tactic. I meant every word. I mean it now. I shall tell him so calmly, at once, before anything happens, and I shall be perfectly—
A knock sounded at the green door.
Leonora drew to a halt, her heart flapping like the wings of a bird.
“Enter,” she called.
He had taken off his coat. That was what she noticed first and could not afterward stop noticing.
He had taken off his coat, his neckcloth, and his waistcoat.
He stood there in his shirt and breeches, with no shoes and no stockings.
The top three buttons of his shirt were open.
The fire was behind him. The candles were in front of him.
She could see the muscles in his shoulders through the linen.
She looked him in the eye. She looked him in the eye with tremendous determination.
“Duchess.”
“Your Grace.”
“You’re not in bed.”
“I am not,” Leonora agreed. “And I should like to say at once that it was not polite of you to leave sixty people downstairs without a word to any of them.”
Colin shut the door behind him.
“The ton has never once been polite to me,” he said. “I’ve stopped keeping the account open on both sides.”
“They came.”
“They came to see the inside of the house, to look at my face, and to find out whether there was a baby.” He crossed to the fire and threw a log in it.
Leonora watched the muscles in his forearm flex and determinedly looked back at his face.
“They’ve had their evening. I’d rather not talk about them. ”
“What would you rather talk about?”
He straightened up and turned around. “You.”
The room was very warm.
“I have nothing to report,” Leonora said. “I was married this morning to a man I have met four times, and I have spent every hour since being congratulated by people who would not once look at him.”
“You have a great deal to report. You’ve been in my house for half a day, and my housekeeper has told me your name four times.” He came a step closer and stopped. “You told the maid your father made cloth.”
“How did you—”
“Because there are eleven servants in this house and nothing has happened in six years.” The corner of his mouth twitched. “Susan carried it down with your gown to be brushed, and it was round the kitchen before she had got to the bottom of the stairs.”
“And who carried it out of the kitchen?”
He stopped.
“You don’t go into your own kitchens,” Leonora pointed out. “You don’t know Susan’s face, and she’s been working here for four years. So nobody told you in passing, Your Grace. You specifically asked.”
The log popped.
“I shall have to be very careful what I tell Susan from now on.”
“You should be exactly as careless as you’ve been.” He was looking at her steadily. “They’ve been waiting a long while for somebody to be careless in this house.”
Leonora did not know what to do with that, so she said, “I liked your gift.”
The moment it was out of her mouth, she wished it back.
“I know.”
“You cannot possibly—”
“You’re wearing it.”
His eye slid down from her face to her throat and down the whole length of her, unhurried.
The wrapper was open at the front because she had been walking up and down for twenty minutes and had entirely forgotten.
She felt the look land on her skin like a hand held an inch above it, and she could not move at all.
She pulled the edges of the wrapper together and held them.
“That,” she scoffed, “was not gentlemanly.”
“No.”
“You should apologize.”
“I should.”
“Are you going to?”
“No.”
Leonora discovered, standing on a hearthrug in a black nightgown in front of a man she had married that morning, that she was not frightened at all. She was a great many other things, but frightened was not among them.
The discovery made her reckless in a way that she was going to have to think about later, at length, in daylight.
“May I ask you a question, Your Grace?”
“You may ask me anything, but I may not answer it.”
“Why didn’t you kiss me?”
He went still.
“At the altar.” She lifted her chin, because she had started it and she was not going to be the one to stop.
“The vicar said you may kiss the bride, and you cupped my neck, leaned in so slowly that I could feel your breath, and kissed my cheek. I have been thinking about it all day. I have thought about it throughout the wedding breakfast, and I could not tell you what I ate.”
“Neither could I,” he admitted.
“That isn’t an answer.”
“Forty people were watching you,” Colin said.
“Your mother was watching. Your father was watching, and he already dislikes me—he is quite right to. Half the guests came to Thorton to find out whether the Beast had backed a lady of one-and-twenty into a corner, and they were going to write about it either way.”
“So you kissed my cheek.”
“So I kissed your cheek.”
“For my sake.”
“Yes.”
“And now?” Leonora prompted.
“Now there’s nobody in this room but you and me, and I’m done being extremely well behaved for one day.”
“Then you had better—”
She did not finish.
He crossed the hearthrug in two strides, and his hand slid into the hair at the nape of her neck exactly as it had at the altar, warm and unhurried and absolutely certain.
This time, his head did not turn. Instead, his mouth crashed down onto hers.
Leonora made a sound she had never made in her life. Her hands came up between them and curled into his shirt, meaning to push. They did not push. They pulled him closer instead.
The entire day went out of her at once. The chapel, the newspapers, the nineteen minutes on the stairs—all of it gone.
He kissed her the way he did everything else, without hurrying and without asking, and she found that she was kissing him back. She had no memory of deciding to.
His other arm slid around her waist and took her weight. Her wrapper slid off one shoulder and down her arm, and neither of them did anything about it. She felt his hand trail down her back, and he made a low sound against her mouth that she was going to hear again in the dark for a very long time.
Her heart was pounding so hard that she thought he must be able to feel it through his shirt.
Then she realized that he could, that he had stopped breathing evenly a while ago, and that the Duke of Thorton, who had never once in four meetings looked as though anything at all had happened to him, was shaking.
He drew back an inch.
“Duchess,” he murmured against her mouth.
“Don’t,” Leonora said. “Don’t stop and be sensible. Everybody in my life has been sensible since Thursday.”
And then she pulled him back down by the front of his shirt.