The Truth About Dukes Page 12

  “Quinn will arrange the settlements so that my portion is safe from any meddling.” Constance wrinkled her nose and squinted at her sketch.

  “Prudent on your brother’s part. He should do likewise regarding Lady Althea’s funds as well. If Nathaniel should pre-decease me, God forbid, her finances and the ducal estate should be as separate as possible.” The bench was hard, the cat was hairy, and this was not how Robert had envisioned this discussion going.

  “Quinn said you’d understand about that part.”

  “Is there another part?”

  “Yes.”

  She went digging into her reticule again and came up with an eraser. “I am to tell you how I came to be a maid of all work.”

  “You had a falling-out with your family.” She’d told him that years ago. Everybody condemned to Soames’s establishment had also had a falling-out of some sort with family.

  “Not exactly. Keep looking at whatever you’re looking at. I was unhappy.” She glanced up as if to make sure Robert hadn’t moved. “I was wretched, in fact. I’d been raised until a certain age as Jack Wentworth’s get, good for nothing but the gutter, headed for a brothel or worse. Then Jack died, Quinn’s prospects improved, and without warning or explanation, our situation changed.”

  “But did your situation improve?”

  “Not to my way of thinking. Instead of freedom to roam where I pleased, I was confined the livelong day. My feet were stuffed into pinch-y little slippers that I was forever losing. My hair was trussed up in braids and ribbons and infernally uncomfortable pins. My time was spent incarcerated in a schoolroom, where I was supposed to cram ten years of learning into two. Quinn was never home.”

  And of all the tribulations she listed, that last was probably the most bewildering.

  “He was off pursuing his dreams,” Robert said, “while you were imprisoned with governesses and elocution teachers.”

  “Quinn was worried about Stephen, and with good reason. Then we started spending much of the year in London—the financial capital of the world, to hear Quinn tell it. The more Quinn’s purse thrived, the more miserable I became.”

  She bent to her sketching, and Robert let his imagination roam over the plight of a street urchin being made over into a young lady. All of her freedoms taken away, her friendships ripped asunder, and should she have the temerity to question her good fortune, she’d be told, as Robert had been so often told, “It’s for your own good.”

  Were there five more presumptuous, pontifical, preposterous words in the language?

  “You had no friends,” he said. “Your servants kept you at arm’s length, and your brother lost sight of you when he was home.” Robert knew what was coming, in the same way that an odd, detached sort of anxiety or peculiarity of vision sometimes told him a seizure was on the way.

  “I had no friends, but as we bided in York the summer I was fifteen, I engaged the affections of a handsome fellow whose parents owned the house across the alley from ours. The parents were traveling in the Low Countries, and Quinn was away for weeks at a time. The young man and I would meet in the mews. We talked about everything, and we traded notes that became increasingly ridiculous. He left me flowers, I gave him an embroidered handkerchief, and the inevitable soon occurred.”

  Robert’s heart broke for that quiet, serious, lonely girl. “Your brother found out?”

  “Nobody found out. I was careful, and people see what they want to see. I never had tantrums as Stephen did, never suffered the temper that plagued Althea. My governess told Quinn I was finally settling down and making peace with my lot.” Constance used the side of her pencil, scraping it against the page in a rapid back-and-forth motion. “I was planning to elope.”

  Scotland was much closer to York than it was to London. “But you were fifteen. The age of consent even in Scotland is sixteen.” The young people of England, by contrast, were not of age to marry until they turned one-and-twenty.

  “I know now that eloping to Scotland would have been pointless. Matters never reached that stage. Before I could run off with my handsome cavalier…”

  The pencil ceased moving. The cat leapt to the grass, and Robert risked a glance at Constance. “Before you could elope…?”

  She looked down at her sketch. “I didn’t think reciting ancient history would be difficult. It’s very difficult. This is not a story I’ve told to many.”

  “You need not tell it to me now.” Though he hoped she would.

  “I promised Quinn, the blighter.” She clutched her sketch pad against her chest and bowed her head. The moment became painful, even before she spoke. Robert slid closer to her, wanting to stop whatever unhappy words troubled her, knowing he must not.

  “Whatever you have to say, Constance, I want only for you to be happy.” What an enormous relief, to mean that, to be utterly committed to somebody else’s well-being and safety. A healthy man had those aspirations, a man competent in his mind and whole in his heart, if not his body.

  Constance looked out over the garden, eyes bright with unshed tears. “There was a child, Rothhaven. Somewhere, I know not where, I have a daughter, and I cannot find her. I have searched and searched, for years I have looked for my darling girl, and I cannot f-find my daughter.”

  Chapter Nine

  Maybe a seizure was a little like what Constance endured on that hard, sunny bench. Rothhaven took her in his arms, and try as she might, she could not maintain her composure. The tears had come, silent and messy, then loud and messy, and then in quiet shudders.

  Before Constance was through, her face ached, her nose stung, her eyes burned, and Rothhaven’s handkerchief was a damp ball of hopelessly wrinkled linen in her fist. Her dignity was a cause so lost she doubted she’d ever recover it.

  “I never cry,” she said, voice raspy. “I abhor tears.” A legacy from a father who’d delighted in tormenting any daughter stupid enough to let him see her cry.

  Constance sat beside Rothhaven on the bench, his arm around her shoulders, the solid, warm bulk of him against her side. Her straw hat had ended up on the grass along with her sketch pad, reticule, and pencil, and the cat was crouched beside her effects, chewing on her eraser.

  “I hate that you have suffered,” Rothhaven replied. “I gather the bounder never meant to marry you.” His hand stroking Constance’s hair was beyond gentle, while his tone presaged protracted torture for the bounder.

  “I told him everything, about Jack Wentworth, growing up without shoes, Quinn digging graves.…He listened so sweetly, called me his wild rose. When I told him I had conceived, I thought he would share my joy and we would tell our families of our impending nuptials.”

  Rothhaven remained silent, silence being one of his gifts. He was a quiet, patient, kind man, and Constance vowed to make him the best duchess she could possibly be.

  “He laughed.” For the first time, Constance recalled that memory with rage rather than sadness. “He laughed and asked me why I’d spread my legs if I hadn’t expected to conceive a bastard. Girls like me were supposed have ways of preventing that sort of thing, and he wasn’t about to be trapped by a streetwalker in muslin and velvet. In his version of events, I’d thrown myself at him, and he’d never breathed a word of marriage much less made me any promises. I’d also picked his pocket while plying my trade, stolen his dear grandpapa’s gold watch.”

  Her lover had threatened her with hanging, something Constance would likely never tell Quinn.

  Robert’s hand on her hair paused, then resumed its slow caresses. “I’m a fairly good shot. I practice in the gallery when the winter megrims threaten. Something about the loud noise revives my spirits. Even wounding this fellow would put me in a positively jolly humor.”

  “You are so dear.” Constance snuggled closer, while the cat curled up on her reticule and closed its eyes. “He died at university before the baby was born. I suspect somebody’s irate husband or brother called him out. The family put it about that he’d fallen prey to a sudden illness.”

  Robert kissed Constance’s temple, as if they’d been married for years. “Were you cured of your infatuation by then?”

  “By then, I had spent two months in a private madhouse on the moors, working as a maid for people who had lost much, but who yet retained their dignity. By the time Quinn found me, I had been cured of my infatuation and even of some of my self-pity. I explained to Quinn what was afoot, and he arranged for me to bide with a widow in the Nottingham countryside until my confinement had passed. I was at finishing school, as far as the world knew, and the experience did nearly finish me.”

  “A difficult lying-in?”

  “No, as those things go. I was young, strong, in good health, and had good care. I had a month with my baby. Only a month, and then, the day after she was christened, the couple who’d agreed to raise her came to take her from me. I kept her baptismal lines, and they are my most prized possession. Nothing, nothing you can conceive of on this earth, will ever be as hard for me as that day.”

  Though telling the tale from start to finish, no delicate evasions, no glossing over the details, came close.

  “I wanted to do what was best for my baby and for my family. I had no idea how hard that would be or how quickly I’d come to doubt my decision.”

  Rothhaven drew in a breath, and Constance realized she was breathing with him. The same slow, calm, in-and-out rhythm.

  “Walden insisted you share this truth with me. I’m not sure how I feel about that, for even the memories hurt you. I honor you for your honesty, though, and for the trust you place in me.”

  An enormous weight of self-doubt lifted from Constance’s heart. Quinn had been right to insist on this confession, not that Constance would tell him so.

  “I respect you, Rothhaven. I care for you. I want a real marriage with you rather than a superficial arrangement. I am no paragon, and you should know that in time to withdraw your proposal.”

  “Withdraw my proposal?”

  “I am not chaste, far from it. I have engaged in scandalous behavior. I have a bastard child, and I want very much to know where she is and that she’s well and happy. I am willful and hardheaded, stubborn and—”

  Rothhaven kissed her. “You are ridiculous. Will you marry me, Constance?” He hugged her one-armed against his side, the gesture both gently chiding and endlessly affectionate.

  Rothhaven had no reason to dissemble. He likely had no ability to dissemble, and thus his scold-cum-proposal did what reason, debate, and hope could not accomplish.

  He gained Constance’s trust.

  “Yes, Robert, Duke of Rothhaven, I will marry you.”

  “Good. We’ll get that part dealt with, see Althea and Nathaniel marched up the church aisle, wave your meddling brothers on their way, and then we will find your daughter. Tell me her name.”

  If Constance hadn’t fallen in love with Rothhaven before—and she had—she fell in love with him then. Such happiness coursed through her, a deluge of warmth and joy as torrential as the sorrow and anger that had come before.

  She recounted for him every detail she recalled about her daughter—perfect fingers and toes, a mop of bright red hair, and prodigious health, God be thanked—and every emotion and dream she’d carried for that small person, wherever she might be.

  The sun dropped behind the garden wall, the cat scrambled up over the gate, and still, Constance stayed in the arms of her beloved, sharing her dreams.

  “Explain to me the nature of your illness,” Quinn said, closing the door to the Lynley Vale estate office. Because Althea ran the property, the office was not as imposing as Quinn preferred a business venue to be. A bouquet of fading tulips sat on the sideboard, the curtains were lace rather than somber, heavy velvet. Worse yet, the color scheme was a cheery pink, green, and cream rather than a more imposing burgundy and blue.

  Quinn would have preferred to conduct this interview from behind an enormous mahogany desk of venerable pedigree. Instead he and Rothhaven shared a damned tufted pink sofa awash in green tasseled pillows, a delicate Sèvres tea service on the tray before them.

  Rothhaven took a leisurely sip of plain gunpowder. “I am epileptic. I have shaking fits and staring spells. The first of those occurred when I was ten, some days after I fell off a horse and took a severe blow to the head, the second such injury in the space of a week. In the nigh twenty years since, the seizures have never abated for more than a few months.”

  “And the most recent seizure?”

  “The most recent shaking fit was over a fortnight ago. The staring spells are harder to judge. I sometimes don’t know one has occurred.”

  A fat black cat emerged from beneath the sofa and sniffed at Rothhaven’s boots. His Grace had arrived at Lynley Vale in a carriage, all the shades drawn, though the distance between manor houses was only about a mile across the fields and the afternoon weather was gorgeous.

  “How can you not know that you’ve been staring off into space? Schoolboys are caught daydreaming, and Headmaster ensures they have occasion to avoid a repetition of that behavior.”

  Rothhaven set his tea aside and extended a hand to the cat. “Trust me, Walden, if corporal punishment could extinguish my staring spells, they would no longer afflict me. As it happens, a passing inability to attend a conversation bothers those around me more than it inconveniences me. I can often hear, see, smell, and otherwise perceive everything happening at the time. I’m simply incapable of reacting to it for a bit. What is his name?”

  At first Quinn thought Rothhaven’s mind had stuttered. Whose perishing name? Then he realized his guest referred to the presuming cat.

  “I have no idea. The beast does not belong to me.”

  “He belongs to your sister and to this house. He has privileges abovestairs, and he’s certainly friendly.”

  Though Rothhaven spoke mildly, Quinn sensed a reproach in the words, or perhaps teasing?

  “One doesn’t want to be indelicate, Rothhaven, but can you function?”

  Quinn did not trust cats, though his sisters favored them. He preferred dogs, and his duchess’s canine—a great black beast with lots of teeth and a properly intimidating growl—made a nice addition to an outing in the park.

  Cats, though…They slunk about, silent and hungry, pouncing from dark corners when they weren’t leaving hair—or worse—on every upholstered surface.

  Althea’s cat licked Rothhaven’s hand and then leapt into his lap.

  “Get down,” Quinn said, using the voice that made bank clerks wish they’d joined the overseas diplomatic corps.

  The cat squinted at Quinn and put two paws on Rothhaven’s chest, touching its nose to the duke’s.

  “Cats and siblings,” Rothhaven said. “Both intractably independent. To answer your question, I am capable of those acts which generally result in procreation. That said, if Constance marries me, I will doubtless embarrass her in public from time to time. In the churchyard, in the middle of the high street, or over dinner with guests, I will produce a spectacular fit with little or no warning. Then I will be dull-witted for a time, even sleepy. Nothing prevents the seizures, but intemperance, exhaustion, tobacco, and strong drink seem to aggravate them.”

  Quinn was torn between sympathy for the person bearing the affliction and frustration that his sister would marry herself to such a one. Rothhaven was deserving of every happiness, but both he and his wife would be the butt of whispers and curious glances.

  “So you avoid the churchyard,” Quinn said, “the high street, and dinner guests. Do you expect Constance to join you in this self-imposed exile?”

  The cat batted at Rothhaven’s chin. That rudeness was rewarded with a gentle scratching behind the beast’s ears.

  “Walden, if you think avoiding church, the village green, and rural dinner parties is exile, your imagination is wanting. Exile is not seeing your only brother for more than ten years, never receiving a letter from family in all that time. Exile is being told at the age of eighteen that you will never again see your sibling or the only home you’ve known, and that this deprivation is for your own good.

  “Exile is being denied access to the out-of-doors, never feeling the fresh Yorkshire wind on your face, never hearing a human voice raised in song lest it over-excite your delicate nerves. Try a few years of that, no privacy, no freedom, no manly exertions to work off your temper or your dismals, and then we will discuss what constitutes exile.”

  That recitation was made all the more alarming for the half-amused tone in which it was delivered.

  “Constance does not have epilepsy,” Quinn said, resisting the compulsion to toss the damned cat out the door. “She deserves to entertain callers, attend services with her neighbors, and frequent the busiest streets in Mayfair if she pleases to.”

  “Marriage to me precludes none of that.” Said patiently, as if the veriest dolt should understand the liberties a married woman enjoyed. “As your sister, however, the lady was made to endure each of those penances, will she, nill she. Her ladyship has told me about the child. What have you done to aid her to find her daughter?”

  Quinn was so absorbed watching the cat lick its paw, all the while perched on Rothhaven’s shoulder, that the question nearly eluded his notice.

  “Find her daughter? The point of the exercise, Rothhaven, was to ensure that the child never became a source of worry or embarrassment. Matters were dealt with appropriately, and Constance resumed the normal life of a young woman anticipating a bright future.” That much, at least, Quinn had been able to do for his sister.

  Rothhaven took up his teacup, sipped placidly, put the cup down, as if every proper duke took tea with a cat sitting on his shoulder.

  “Constance has been using her pin money for years to hire investigators. Because you insisted she dredge up her past for my benefit, I assumed you knew this. Am I mistaken?”

  When had Quinn lost control of this conversation?