Текст книги "A Secret Affair"
Автор книги: Mary Balogh
сообщить о нарушении
Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 23 страниц)
Only a wordless cry.
And a shivering, shuddering descent against his body and a shoulder to cradle the side of her head and an irresistible urge to sleep.
He held her close until she had almost completed the descent, and then he disengaged from her and lifted her in his arms, somehow managed to wrap his dressing gown about her like a blanket, and carried her through to his bedchamber.
He kissed her before setting her down.
“Tell me it was as good for you as I think it was,” he said.
“You need compliments?” she asked him sleepily. “It was good. Oh, Constantine, it was good.”
He chuckled.
She curled up on the bed and was already well on her way back to sleep before he joined her there and covered them both with the blankets.
Jewels, she thought just before she fell over the barrier into sleep.
The crown jewels she had joked about his stealing for Barbara.
Her own jewels, sold for funds with which to finance the dearest wish of her heart.
His half-stolen jewel converted to cash with which he had gambled and won Ainsley Park.
Whose jewel had it been? Jonathan’s?
To have been sold for what? For the home for unmarried mothers and their children that had been Jonathan’s idea?
Had Jonathan and Constantine between them been up to the same thing as she had? Not just with the one jewel, but perhaps with more?
Was there that degree of similarity between her and Constantine?
All things happen for a purpose, the duke had told her, and she had come to believe for herself.
There are no coincidences, he had also said more than once. She had never quite believed that.
Love would find her one day when she was not looking, he had told her.
She did not expect it. She was afraid to expect it.
But her mind could not cope with so many apparent non sequiturs tumbling about in it.
She slept just as Constantine’s arms came about her and drew her close.
13
HANNAH WAS FULLY AWARE that the ton had long ago come to the conclusion that the Duchess of Dunbarton’s newest lover was Mr. Constantine Huxtable. They would have thought it even if it were not true, as they had thought it of the many men, mostly her friends or the duke’s, who had gone before him. She was aware too that it was expected she would tire of him within a week or two and cast him off in favor of someone else.
Her reputation did not bother her. Indeed, she had almost deliberately cultivated it during the years of her marriage. It was part of the cocoon inside which she hid and nurtured her real self.
She did not believe that on the whole the ton was actively hostile to her, even the ladies. She was invited everywhere, and her own invitations were almost always accepted. She was taken into any conversational group to which she chose to attach herself at the various entertainments she attended.
It was with some surprise, then, that she greeted the refusal of her invitation to join her brief house party at Copeland Manor first by the Earl and Countess of Merton, then by Lord and Lady Montford, and last by the Earl and Countess of Sheringford. The only members of that family who did not refuse were the Duke and Duchess of Moreland, and that perhaps had something to do with the fact that they had not been invited.
Never believe in a coincidence, the duke had always said. Hannah would have had to be an imbecile to believe this was a coincidence.
Constantine had confessed to a fondness for his second cousins. They seemed fond of him. That was why she had invited them, though in retrospect it probably had not been a great idea, even if they had accepted. Or perhaps especially if they had accepted. He was not courting her, after all. They were lovers.
It must be that fact that had caused them all to refuse. She could almost picture them all putting their heads together and deciding that the invitation was in bad taste. Or that she was in bad taste. Perhaps they were afraid she would corrupt Constantine. Or hurt him. Or make a fool of him.
Probably that last point.
Hannah had been taught-and had taught herself-not to care what anyone thought of her. Except the duke, of course. He had frowned at her perhaps two or three times in all the ten years of their marriage, though he had never raised his voice against her, and each time she had felt that the world had surely come to an end. And except the servants at Dunbarton House and their other establishments in the country. Servants always knew one for who or what one really was, and it mattered to Hannah that they like her. She believed they did.
And now-annoyingly-she discovered that she did not like being shunned by three families that had meant nothing whatsoever to her until she had taken their second cousin as her lover.
Why she did not like it she did not know, except that they had inconvenienced her and she was going to have to invite other people to take their place.
“The third refusal,” she said, holding aloft the note from the Countess of Sheringford at the breakfast table. “And now none of them is coming to Copeland, Babs. It makes me feel a little as though I must have leprosy. Is it because I always wear white, do you suppose? Do I look sickly?”
Barbara looked up with blank eyes from her own letter. It was a long one-it must be from the Reverend Newcombe.
“No one is coming?” she said. “But I thought you had already had several acceptances, Hannah.”
“No one from Constantine’s family,” Hannah explained. “His father’s side of the family, anyway. They are the ones to whom he appears to be closest. But they have all refused.”
“That is a pity,” Barbara said. “Will you invite other people instead? There is still time, is there not?”
“Do they believe it would be distasteful to come to Copeland because Constantine and I are lovers?” Hannah asked, frowning at the offending piece of paper in her hand. “I was always rumored to have lovers, even when it was not true, but no one ever shunned me. Even when I was still married.”
Barbara set her letter down, resigned to the interruption.
“You are upset?” she asked.
“I am never upset,” Hannah said. Then she set down her own letter and smiled ruefully at her friend. “Well, a little, I suppose. I had looked forward to having them there.”
“Why?” Barbara asked. “When one is to have one’s lover at a house party, Hannah, why would one want his family there too?”
It was a good question and one she had been asking herself just a few moments ago.
“Is it a little like inviting one’s family to join one on honeymoon?” Hannah asked.
They both laughed.
“But we will, of course, behave with the utmost discretion,” Hannah said. “Good heavens, the very idea that we might not. You will be there and all sorts of other respectable guests.”
“Then the cousins will be missing a pleasant few days in the country,” Barbara said, laying a hand on her letter again. “It will be their loss.”
“But I wanted them there,” Hannah said, hearing too late the slight petulance of her tone. And there was that word again that she had been warned against-wanted, but could not have.
Well, you cannot always have what you want, she expected Barbara to say before returning her attention to her vicar’s love letter. But she said something else instead.
“Hannah,” she said, “you are not behaving at all like the jaded aristocrat with a new lover you like to see yourself as. You are behaving like a woman in love.”
“What?” Hannah half screeched.
“Is it not a little peculiar,” Barbara asked-and she looked suddenly every inch a vicar’s daughter, “that you should care for the good opinion of your lover’s relatives?”
“I do not care-” Hannah began, and stopped. “I am not in love, Babs. How ridiculous. Just because you are, you think I must be too?”
“You said just now,” Barbara said, “that you were always rumored to have lovers even when it was not true. Was it ever true, Hannah? I never have believed it of you. The Hannah I used to know could never dishonor her marriage vows even if the circumstances of her marriage were… unusual.”
Hannah sighed. “No, of course there was never any truth in the rumors,” she said.
“Then Mr. Huxtable is your first lover,” Barbara said. It was a statement, not a question. “I do not believe the Hannah I once knew or the Hannah I know now can be simply blase about that fact. And I saw you together at the Tower and at Gunter’s. You are fond of him.”
“Well, of course I am fond of him,” Hannah said crossly-goodness, when had she last allowed herself to be cross? “I could not dislike or despise or even be entirely indifferent to any man who was my lover, could I?”
But why not be indifferent, at least? It was what she had expected to be, was it not?
“I know very little of gentlemen of the ton and really nothing whatsoever of Mr. Huxtable,” Barbara said, “except that I liked him far more than I expected to do when he took us to the Tower. I thought he seemed fond of you too, Hannah. But I do not know. And I am afraid for you. I am afraid you will end up hurt. Heartbroken.”
“I am never hurt, Babs,” Hannah said. “And never, ever heartbroken.”
“I would hate to see you either,” Barbara said. “But I would hate even more to believe that neither was possible. It would mean that you had not got the point at all of why the Duke of Dunbarton married you and loved you.”
Hannah fixed her eyes upon her friend. She felt suddenly cold. And afraid to move so much as a muscle.
“The point?” The words came out in a whisper.
“So that you could be made whole again,” Barbara said. “And ready for love-real love-when it came along. The duke did not see just your beauty, Hannah. He called you an angel, did he not? He saw all your essential sweetness and your shattered joy on that day when you discovered the truth about Dawn and Colin. Even now you have not seen how very special you are, have you? The duke saw it.”
Barbara went suddenly out of focus, and Hannah realized that her eyes were swimming in tears. She got abruptly to her feet, almost tipping her chair in her haste to push it back.
“I am going out,” she said. “I am going to call upon the Countess of Sheringford. I would rather go alone. Will you mind?”
“I did not have time yesterday to write more than a few lines to either Mama and Papa or Simon,” Barbara said. “I need to write longer letters this morning. I am starting to feel selfish and neglectful.”
Hannah hurried from the room.
To call upon the Countess of Sheringford? Whatever for?
***
TOBIAS-TOBY-PENNETHORNE, Sheringford’s eight-year-old son and Margaret’s too by adoption, had developed an insatiable interest in the geography of the world, and Constantine had spied the perfect gift for him in a shop window on Oxford Street, though his birthday was nowhere on the horizon. No matter. He bought the large globe anyway.
And because he could not show favoritism to one child when there were three, he bought a gaudily painted spinning top for three-year-old Sarah and an impressively loud wooden rattle for one-year-old Alexander.
He bore his offerings off to the home of the Marquess of Claverbrook on Grosvenor Square, where Margaret and Sheringford lived when they were in town-Sherry was the marquess’s grandson and heir. And he spent a pleasant hour in the nursery with Margaret and the children, Sherry being from home. He began to have doubts about the rattle, though, when Sarah appropriated it and decided that shattering everyone else’s eardrums as well as her own was to be the game of the morning. The baby meanwhile was fascinated by the top, though he spoiled the lovely spinning and humming each time someone set it in motion by grabbing the toy before it stopped. He howled in cross protest every time.
Toby found every continent and country and river and ocean and town in the known world, not to mention poles and elevations and lines of latitude and longitude, and insisted that his mother and Uncle Con come and see each new discovery. The globe began to look like an instrument of torture.
It all made the tea parties in the conservatory at Ainsley seem very tranquil events indeed, Constantine thought cheerfully. And it struck him as an unexpected revelation under the circumstances that he liked children.
But had he not played endless games of hide-and-seek with Jon, that eternal child?
A knock on the nursery door, which they miraculously heard, preceded the appearance of a footman with the announcement that her grace, the Duchess of Dunbarton, had come to call on Lady Sheringford, and that his lordship had had her shown into the drawing room.
The duchess? Here?
“Oh, goodness,” Margaret said, “Grandpapa never admits visitors. Oh, this is very vexing.”
“Vexing?” Constantine raised his eyebrows, and she flushed and did not quite meet his eyes.
“She invited us to spend four days at her home in Kent,” Margaret said, “and we sent back a refusal-with regrets.”
“Because-?” Constantine asked as there was a crescendo from the rattle, accompanied by a beatific look on Sarah’s face, a wail of protest from Alex as the top stopped its spinning yet again, and an excited invitation from Toby to come and see Madagascar.
“We do not wish to leave the children for so long,” Margaret said, setting the top to spinning again while Sarah went to see Madagascar, the rattle poised at her side.
And the duchess had responded to the refusal by coming here in person? She really did not take well to rejection, did she? And she did not often have to suffer it. Would she win Margaret over after all? Was that why she had come?
Sarah was spinning the globe under Toby’s watchful eye, and the baby had spied some other potential toy and was waddling about the furniture toward it, his bad temper-and the top-forgotten.
“Constantine.” Margaret met his eyes at last. “We cannot live your life for you-I would not even wish to try. But we can refuse to condone your association with a woman who is an utterly heartless… predator.”
He clasped his hands behind his back.
“Those are harsh words,” he said.
“Yes,” she admitted, “they are.”
“I can remember a time,” he said, “when words of equal harshness were being bandied about over Sherry. But that did not stop you from taking up with him and betrothing yourself to him and ultimately marrying him.”
“That was different,” she said. “He was not guilty of any of the charges that had been made against him.”
“Perhaps,” he said, “the Duchess of Dunbarton is not either-guilty of the charges against her, I mean.”
“Oh, come, now,” she said.
He was in danger of losing his temper, he realized. He looked away from her. The baby had hold of one of Toby’s books and was about to make a meal of it. Constantine hurried across the room, rescued the book, and prevented the imminent protest by swinging the child up onto one of his shoulders.
“You must be besotted if you believe that,” Margaret said. “And we are all quite right to be concerned for you.”
“We,” he said. “Were any of the others invited to Copeland too?”
“Not Nessie and Elliott,” she said. “But the others, yes.”
“And tell me,” he said, “have they all refused their invitations too?”
She had the grace to look away from him again.
“Yes,” she said.
Alex was pulling Constantine’s hair and shrieking with glee.
“Now let me see,” he said, disentangling his hair from the baby’s fist and setting him down beside a box of wooden bricks. “Monty was England’s most notorious hellion. I could vouch for that-I knew him. Katherine married him. Sherry we have already talked about. You married him. Cassandra was believed to have murdered her first husband-with an axe, even though it was a bullet that was found in Paget, not an axe wound. Stephen married her. And yet you all believe everything you have heard of the Duchess of Dunbarton without any objective proof at all?”
“How do you know we have no proof?” she asked.
“Because there is none,” he said. “She loved Dunbarton, even if not in a romantic way. She was true to her marriage vows until the day of his death, and she was true to her widowhood throughout the year of her mourning. I know, Margaret. I have had proof.”
Anger was making him speak quite rashly.
She was biting her upper lip.
“Oh, Constantine,” she said, “you do care for her. It is what we have most feared. But-are you sure you have not just come under her spell?”
He did not answer her-or look away from her.
“Proof.”
She closed her eyes and then opened them and looked herself again-in charge, as she always had been, the eldest sister who had brought up her siblings almost singlehanded and done a really rather splendid job of it too before going in search of some happiness for herself.
“I had better go down and see her,” she said. “Oh, goodness, Grandpapa will have eaten her whole by now. She is just the sort of frivolous person to set his teeth on edge. And is that too an illusion? Her frivolity?”
“I had better let you make some discoveries for yourself,” he said.
She was pulling on the bell rope, and the children’s nurse came almost immediately. Toby demanded that she come to see India, Sarah raised the rattle toward her and shook it with a flourish, and Alex banged one wooden brick against another and chuckled.
Constantine left the nursery with Margaret. He half thought of taking his leave altogether, but he could not resist getting a glimpse of Hannah up against one of the gruffest and grimmest old aristocrats in all England. And a near-recluse at that.
He rather hoped she had not been eaten alive. But his wager was on her.
***
WHY EXACTLY WAS SHE HERE? Hannah asked herself as she was admitted to Claverbrook House by a footman, and an elderly butler almost elbowed the poor man in the stomach in his haste to move him out of the way when he heard her name. He bowed to her and actually creaked. Foolish man to wear stays at his age, which must be anywhere from seventy to a hundred.
Why was she here? To grovel? To demand an explanation? To try to persuade Lady Sheringford to change her mind?
She did not have long to wait. The footman who had narrowly avoided getting elbowed was sent upstairs to see if Lady Sheringford was at home, and he performed his task with nimble speed. He reappeared within moments of disappearing and murmured to the butler that her grace was to be shown up to the drawing room.
Hannah followed the butler up at a speed that was approximately half that of a tortoise by her estimate.
She was glad she had worn the full armor of a white muslin dress with a white spencer and a white bonnet. She was even wearing some of her real diamonds in her ears and on her fingers. It was all something to hide behind. Though if she wished to impress the countess, perhaps she should have dressed more simply, even more colorfully.
It was too late now for such thoughts.
The drawing room had just one occupant, she saw when she was admitted to the room after the butler had announced her in solemn, ringing tones as though he were addressing thousands. And that occupant was not the Countess of Sheringford.
“Yes, yes, Forbes,” the old gentleman seated in a wing chair close to the fire said impatiently, “I know who she is. Bindle told me. Where is she?”
Hannah had been gathering as much of her famed dignity about her as she could in preparation for confronting the countess. But she abandoned it at the sound of the voice and hurried across the room to take up her stand before the Marquess of Claverbrook’s chair. She extended both gloved hands to him and smiled warmly.
“Here I am,” she said. “And there you are. It must be years.”
He had been one of the duke’s friends. Hannah had met him a few times before he shut himself up inside this house after the great scandal involving his grandson and became a virtual recluse, neither going out nor receiving visitors. He had been a gruff, frequently impatient man, but never with her. There had always been a twinkle in his eye when he had looked at her and spoken with her. She had always believed he liked her. And she had liked him.
He took his hands off the silver head of his cane and took hers. His fingers were bent and gnarled, she could see. She curled her own warmly about them but was careful not to squeeze them. She was careful not to touch him with any of her rings.
“Hannah,” he said. “There you are indeed. Looking even more lovely than you looked as a girl when old Dunbarton snatched you up from some godforsaken place in the country and married you. The old devil. No other woman would suit him all his life, and then you came along when he was close to doddering.”
“Some things,” she said, “are meant to be.”
“Hmmph,” he said, shaking her hands slightly up and down in his own. “And I suppose you married him for his money. Of which he had more than his fair share.”
“And because he was a duke and was able to make me a duchess,” she said. “You must not forget that.”
“I daresay I would not have stood a chance with you, then,” he said, “even if I had seen you first. I was only a marquess.”
“And probably not as rich as the duke was,” she said.
She smiled at him. His white hair was sparse. His white eyebrows were not. He had a deep vertical temper line between his brows, eyes that tended to glare, and a beak of a nose. He looked like a thoroughly bad-tempered old man.
“I loved him,” she said. “And I still grieve for him. If I had ever had a grandfather that I remembered, I would have wanted him to be just like my duke. But since I did not, and since I did have the good fortune to meet the duke, I married him.”
“Hmmph,” he said again. “And you led him a merry dance, I daresay, Hannah?”
“Oh, very merry indeed,” she agreed, “though he would not dance after his seventy-eighth birthday, which was very poor-spirited of him. We found something to laugh at every day, though. Laughter is better than medicine, you know.”
“Hmmph,” he said. “But he died in the end anyway.”
“I have heard,” she said, “that your medicine came in the form of your granddaughter-in-law. I have heard that she takes no nonsense from you and that she is your favorite adult in the world. And I have heard that you dote upon your great-grandchildren, who actually live here with you during the Season. What sort of a recluse is that? A rather fraudulent one, I would say.”
“You used to be a timid thing when Dunbarton first married you, Hannah,” he said. “When did you become so saucy?”
“After I married him,” she said. “He taught me that people like you are really just pussycats pretending to be lions.”
He barked with laughter, and Hannah’s eyes twinkled down at him.
“Dunbarton was a devil of a fellow when he was a young man,” he said. “Did he ever tell you? There was no pussycat there, Hannah. Walsh-he is long gone now-slapped a glove in his face right in the middle of the reading room at White’s one morning and challenged him to a duel for cuckolding him with his wife. They met on some barren heath-I can’t remember exactly where. That is what age does to the mind. But I was there. Walsh’s hand was shaking like a leaf in a hurricane, and his shot missed by a mile. Dunbarton lined him up along the barrel of his pistol, taking his time, his hand as steady as a rock, and then at the last possible moment he bent his arm at the elbow and shot into the air. We would all have been vastly disappointed if it had not been so neatly done. Poor Walsh had to retreat to the country for a year or three with his tail between his legs. He would have been happier, I daresay, if Dunbarton had blown a hole in his shoulder or winged the tip of his ear-and he could have done it too, by Jove. He was a deadly shot.”
“He was too kindhearted to shoot the man,” Hannah said.
“Kindhearted?” The marquess had roused himself into some sort of passion. “He did the most cruel thing any man could have done, Hannah. He showed his contempt for Walsh. Humiliated him. Even suggested that the surgeon lay him out on the grass and administer smelling salts. It was splendidly done. And everyone knew that it was Jackman who was making free with Lady Walsh’s favors, not Dunbarton. Even Walsh must have known it, but Jackman was a little, weedy fellow, and Walsh would have been the laughingstock if he had slapped a glove in his face. So he waited until Dunbarton danced with his wife one evening and made his move at White’s next morning. The man must have had a death wish. Or a rock for a brain. Probably the latter.”
Hannah continued to smile at him.
“Ah, those were the days,” he said with a sigh. “A man’s man was Dunbarton, Hannah. The very devil. All the girls wanted him-and not just because he was a duke and indecently rich, let me tell you. But he would have none of them. You ought to have known him then.”
“I daresay,” she said, “even my father and mother did not know each other then.”
He barked with laughter again.
“You got him in the end, though,” he said. “You tamed him, Hannah. He was besotted with you.”
“Yes,” Hannah agreed, “he was. But does one forget manners as well as the location of old duels after one passes the age of eighty? Am I not to be offered a seat and a cup of tea?”
He half shook her hands again.
“You may have any seat you like,” he said. “But first you must haul on the bell rope if you want tea. If you were to wait until I got to my feet to pull it, you would probably be ready for your luncheon too.”
“I have already given the order for a tray to be brought in, Grandpapa,” a voice said from the doorway, and Lady Sheringford came into the room.
Constantine was standing in the doorway. Hannah had no idea how long either of them had been there. She seated herself on a sofa.
“I am sorry to have kept you waiting, Your Grace,” Lady Sheringford said, addressing Hannah. “I was busy in the nursery with the children.”
“It is about the children I came,” Hannah said. “I suspect that I did not make it clear in the invitation I sent you a few days ago that your children were included too. That applies to all the guests I have invited. I would not wish to be responsible for separating any parents from their children for even as long as four days. And Copeland has a long gallery on an upper floor that was surely made for the use of children on a wet day. And rolling parkland and woods and water outside to make for a child’s paradise when it is not raining. And several of my neighbors have children of their own who would doubtless go into transports of delight if there were others to play with at Copeland. Indeed, I have been quite busily planning a children’s party while I am there. It will be vastly amusing. I am not begging you to reconsider. I daresay you have other engagements on those days that you cannot in all conscience neglect. However, if it was your children that were your main concern, then please do feel free to reconsider.”
“Copeland,” the marquess said. “I do not remember that property, Hannah.”
“It is in Kent,” she said. “The duke bought it for me so that I would have a home of my own after his passing.”
“You are very kind,” Lady Sheringford said. “May I talk it over with my husband?”
“And perhaps with Katherine and Monty and with Stephen and Cassandra too,” Constantine said as he came farther into the room. He took a chair some distance from Hannah’s. “You were telling me, Margaret, that they too hated to leave the children behind.”
“I will,” she said just as the tea tray was brought in. “You know Constantine, Grandpapa.”
“Huxtable?” he said. “Merton’s grandson? I knew your grandfather. A fine man. Didn’t much care for his son, though. Your father, I suppose that was. You don’t look like him, which is fortunate for you. You must take after your mother. Greek, was she not? Daughter of an ambassador?”
“Yes, sir,” Constantine said.
“I went to Greece in my youth,” the marquess said. “And Italy and everywhere else a young man was supposed to go in those days before the wars spoiled everything. The Grand Tour, you know. I fancied the Parthenon. Can’t remember much else except great expanses of blue sea. And the wine, of course. And the women, though I won’t pursue that topic in the ladies’ hearing.”
They all chatted amicably for half an hour before Hannah rose to take her leave.
“You must come to see me again, Hannah,” the marquess said. “It does my heart good to look at your pretty face. And never let that ancient fool of a butler of mine try to tell you I am from home.”
“If he should ever attempt anything so foolish,” she said, going to take one of his hands in both of hers, “I shall sweep by him and run up the stairs and burst in upon you unannounced. And then when I have left, you may scold him to your heart’s content and threaten him with dismissal.”
“He would not go,” he said. “I have tried retiring him with a hefty pension and a home to go with it. Duncan has tried. Margaret has tried. There would be no point at all in dismissing him. He would refuse to be dismissed.”
“Looking after you and guarding your home from invasion is what keeps him active and alive, Grandpapa,” Lady Sheringford said. “Your Grace, it has been very good of you to come here this morning. I will send you a definite answer by tomorrow morning, if I may. We all will.”
Hannah bent over the old man’s chair and kissed him on the cheek before straightening up and releasing his hand.
“Thank you,” she said to Lady Sheringford.
“I will escort you home, if I may, Duchess,” Constantine said. “Though I am on foot.”
What was he doing here? The countess had been in the nursery with her children. Had he been there too? With the children?
“Thank you, so am I,” she said and swept out of the room ahead of him.
She took his arm when they were out on the pavement, and they walked for a while in silence. What a strange morning, she thought. She was still not quite sure why she had come. But oh, how lovely it had been to see the Marquess of Claverbrook again. One of the duke’s contemporaries.
“The marquess told me about a duel the duke fought years and years ago,” she said, “over the other man’s wife, with whom he had been accused of committing adultery. Funny, is it not? The marquess told me he was the very devil in those days.”
“But you tamed him,” he said. “I heard that much.”
“That is funny,” she said. “When I decided to have you for a lover, Constantine, I told myself then that I would tame the devil. I did not realize that I had already done it-with another man.”
