The Truth About Dukes Page 7

  The meal concluded seven eternities later, with Nathaniel declaring that he wanted to show Lady Althea plans for landscaping Crofton Ford. Robert was once again thrown into the company of a woman before whom he’d committed a serious faux pas.

  “I must have a tour of your walled garden,” Lady Constance said, rising. “I’d like to spend the rest of the season out there painting the joy you’ve created.”

  “I will not abandon you in my flower garden, not unless you’d like to be abandoned. I am sorry.”

  Nathaniel and Althea had all but sprinted down the corridor for the library, and thus Robert’s apology was made privately.

  “I would like to be very abandoned in your garden,” Lady Constance replied. “With pastels, oils, watercolors, even charcoal. I could have an orgy out there with mere pencil and paper, as you’ve had an orgy with your flowers.”

  She was being polite, giving him an opportunity to avoid further mention of his odd behavior. From her, he did not want that courtesy.

  Robert escorted her ladyship into the corridor, glad to be away from the cozy parlor. “I was not allowed out of doors for several years at one point. I look like my late father, and Soames was concerned that some gardener or village child might see me and note the family resemblance.”

  “He told you that?”

  “Of course not. His only explanation was ever and always concern for my terrible condition. One of the attendants made a comment about my resemblance to my father, another resident made another. I reached the obvious conclusion based on available evidence, though Soames wasn’t above withholding basic pleasures for the bloody-minded hell of it.

  “As the old duke aged,” Robert went on, “Soames and I negotiated various truces. This began not long after you left. I was eventually allowed out for short periods, but only into the walled garden—the small walled garden, not the kitchen garden—and only for short periods. At the sound of carriage wheels, I was to return to my room immediately. We all were, or we would lose the privileges of the house.”

  He ushered Constance out onto the back terrace, trying to view the irises, tulips, and daffodils before him as an orgy. Perhaps a riot of color? But no, he’d planned the color scheme of the garden very carefully.

  “‘Privileges of the house’ meaning,” Lady Constance said, “the right to leave your rooms?”

  “And to dine in company, though meals were to be silent but for basic requests. ‘Pass the salt,’ ‘May I have the butter.’ Soames purported to believe calm kept the seizures at bay.”

  Lady Constance stood at the top of the garden steps and took in a deep breath. “Did it? Keep the seizures at bay?”

  “Nothing keeps them at bay.” Robert wanted somebody to know that. Nathaniel never asked, and Mama’s timid and vague questions never ventured close to that topic.

  Lady Constance slipped her arm through his. “Walk with me. Does anything bring them on?”

  As Robert wandered the paths with his guest and stopped to sniff the occasional bloom, he explained to Constance what he had learned about his affliction: Calm and order did seem to help, insofar as they guaranteed regular and ample rest, regular and modest meals, a very limited intake of spirits, and only modest exertion at any one time.

  “Gardening is perfect, then,” Lady Constance said. “It’s physical, but doesn’t result in all-out sweating and panting like fencing or hill running. You might enjoy riding horseback for the same reasons. One can daunder along, enjoy a canter, or exhaust oneself in a hard gallop.”

  “I do not ride.”

  She stopped with him beside a bed of rosebushes still more thorns than leaves. “But you could.”

  “And if a seizure occurs while I’m in the saddle, then I take another fall, suffer another injury to my head. I had never had a seizure until I came off a damned horse as a boy.”

  She patted his lapel. “So fierce. Stephen can teach your horse to halt the instant you begin to tremble, and he can show you how to fashion a brace, such that you cannot fall from the saddle. He needed that brace to learn to ride, and now he’s happiest in the saddle. It’s very discreet. A belt around your thigh.” She drew her hand across the top of her leg. “Here, where your riding jacket obscures it.”

  He seized her by the wrist because he could not conduct a proper argument when she was petting him, much less mentioning thighs.

  “My lady, it’s not that simple.”

  “It’s not that complicated either.”

  “I cannot ride in a walled garden. You saw me on the drive. A common, everyday sound, one heard a dozen times a day in any village, and my dignity deserted me.”

  They had not put their gloves back on after their meal, and thus when Lady Constance laced her fingers with Robert’s, he and she were hand in hand.

  “From what I can see, Your Grace, your dignity is still very much intact. Your instinct for survival is too. They simply need to learn to converse on different terms.”

  With anybody else, even with Nathaniel, Robert could have continued the argument. You have no idea what you’re asking of me. You speak from well-intended ignorance. Constance, however, had survived the slums, survived a violent father, survived months away from the sheltered life her family had eventually been able to give her.

  What else had she survived?

  “I’m not ready to ride,” Robert said. “I might never be.”

  “Fortunately, one need not ride to be a duke or to be happy. Tell me where you acquired these gorgeous tulips, the ones with the interesting variegation? I find the usual tulip rather boring, but these catch my eye.”

  They meandered along, talking about flowers, until they returned to the statue of Saint Valentine at the foot of the steps.

  “Conversation tires you,” Lady Constance said, smoothing a hand down the saint’s granite robes. “Talk tires me too. Some people have the knack of monitoring a discussion with half an ear, dropping in and out as they would call upon a neighbor of long-standing. I cannot do that.”

  “There’s something Lady Constance Wentworth cannot do? I am agog at the very notion.”

  “There’s much I cannot do, but I noticed your attention wandering at lunch. I do the same thing. If the conversation is trivial—and other people’s flirtations are always trivial—my imagination instead fixes on some bouquet that died a week ago. I see how the pattern of the plaster molding and the paisley of a lady’s shawl echo each other. I have a reputation for being not very bright as a result.”

  “You like that reputation.” Robert set aside the intriguing possibility that his periodic inattention was not always a symptom of illness.

  “Boring people are left in peace.”

  Lady Constance was not boring, and yet in her company, Robert did feel a certain peace. More than anybody, she knew what his imprisonment had been like. He loathed that she knew, and he was tremendously relieved to have had a witness to his suffering.

  Unwitnessed suffering could come to feel like imagined suffering, after all.

  “You have divined my plan for assuming the duties of the dukedom,” he said, watching her hand on Saint Valentine’s cold stone robes. “I will be boring. I will look like a duke, talk like a duke, and comport myself like a duke. I will do nothing to draw attention to myself or to my household.”

  “You will be a wallflower duke?” She surveyed his garden, awash in color and imported blooms, appointed with trellises and espaliered greenery, not a wallflower to be seen. “Good luck with that. I am happy to aid you.”

  “I was hoping you would be, but you must tell me what I can do to aid you in return. Perhaps something to do with the dream of your heart, the one dearer than a year spent painting in Paris?”

  She turned her blue-eyed gaze on him. “How do you know I aspire to anything more ambitious than pursuing my art in Paris?”

  Because in some way, he knew her. Not from long acquaintance, but from shared experience. “I was hidden away, lest my family be shamed by my condition. For at least a brief time in your youth, you hid yourself away. I was hidden because my father’s dreams for me as his heir turned to dust. What lost dream sent you into service at a private madhouse?”

  “We weren’t to speak of that. We agreed.”

  No, they hadn’t. They’d danced around an overt pact, and agreed not to acknowledge the past when others were present.

  “People who dwell in the shadows have dreams,” he said. “We need them or we go truly mad. What is your real dream, Constance? The one you never allow to see the light of day?”

  She paced away, taking a seat on the old wooden bench between the Cupid birdbaths. “I have spent years in London on the edges of ballrooms, at the backs of the theater boxes. I have watched polite society as one watches a pantomime and I have noticed something.”

  She had doubtless noticed far more than anybody would ever realize. “What have you noticed?”

  “Much of what happens in polite society is based on connections, on who is neighbors with whom back in Shropshire, whose auntie went to school with whose mama. The Wentworths have few such connections.”

  Robert took the place beside her. “You want a connection with me?” The notion flattered, it did not please. “I have some influence through my mother, or I will if she ever returns from France. I am happy to exert—”

  “No.” Constance sat up very straight and appeared to become fascinated with the rosebushes across the walkway. “I want a friend, Rothhaven. I want somebody who is truly my friend. Not a sibling, not a fellow wallflower, not another artist seeking to curry favor with my wealthy brother. I want a friend of my own.”

  Her ladyship was clearly poised to flee, and for less provocation than the sound of approaching coach wheels. The wrong word, the wrong smile, and she’d withdraw as surely as if she’d removed across the water to Paris, never to be seen again.

  Robert studied the roses, the jewel in this little floral crown, though they looked like so many angry weeds now. “How curious that you should harbor that aspiration, for as it happens, I am in need of a friend too. I am once again in need of a friend.”

  He had embarked on that reply meaning to appease her worries, to assure her that her request was reasonable and welcome. He’d completed those few sentences wishing with all his heart that he could be the friend she longed for.

  They sat side by side in a comfortable, introspective silence. When Nathaniel and Althea came laughing out onto the terrace from the library, Robert was still sitting beside Lady Constance—beside his friend—in the sunshine.

  The ladies left shortly thereafter, electing to walk home with Nathaniel as their escort. Robert remained in the garden pondering, for he was certain that Lady Constance, for all her honesty, had not yet confided to him the dream of her heart.

  “Rothhaven likes my sister.” Althea made that observation while watching Constance stride off down the path to Lynley Vale’s stables. “I am amazed.”

  Nathaniel tugged Althea by the hand away from the front drive and around to the side of the house where the formal garden lay.

  “Why amazed?” he asked. “Constance seems likeable, if a bit…”

  “Exactly. She seems likeable. She’s perfected the art of seeming. Seeming sweet, biddable, agreeable…but with her family, she can be quite blunt and often is.”

  “Can’t we all?”

  As soon as they were around the corner of the house, Althea pulled Nathaniel in close for a kiss. The sheer wonder of being free to share affection with a man she desired, the glory and joy of it, left her with a sense of chronic inebriation.

  “We must be married soon,” she said. “Promise me.”

  Nathaniel made no reply, but instead held her a moment longer.

  “What is it?” She drew away enough to study him as she hadn’t studied him in the library, the potting shed, or over lunch. “Something troubles you.”

  “A detail, merely a detail. I’m sure it will soon be sorted out.”

  “You are sure of no such thing. Tell me, Nathaniel.”

  He took her hands. “You know I love you.”

  “And I love you.” Althea had never said those words to anybody else, not to her siblings, not to her reflection. She said them to Nathaniel as often as she could without sounding foolish.

  “I love you and I will marry you as soon as possible, but Rothhaven has pointed out a potential issue. He raised this issue with His Grace of Walden, and your brother is in agreement that the problem must be resolved before we speak our vows.”

  “A pair of dukes are deciding when you and I will be married?”

  “I suspect a duchess was also consulted. I can ignore my brother’s good intentions, I could probably reason around your brother’s inherent caution, but Her Grace of Walden has been brought into the discussion.”

  And all of this had transpired without anybody speaking a word to the bride? Althea stepped back.

  “The news must be terrible indeed if you discuss the situation with your brother, my brother, and my sister-in-law, but not with me.”

  “I am discussing it with you now. I am not the Duke of Rothhaven.”

  “God be thanked.”

  “But the proper duke, the real duke, has not yet observed the usual courtesies involved with a titular succession, nor can he.”

  Althea sank back against the cold granite wall of the manor house. “Robert cannot observe the courtesies because he cannot heed the parliamentary writ of summons. He nonetheless can and has succeeded to the title.” Why must polite society be afflicted with so many inane rules?

  “I succeeded to the title as well. In error—because I believed Robert dead—but I did. If the wrong names and titles appear on our marriage lines, our union could be invalid. Our issue could be illegitimate, and assuming Rothhaven has no sons, the title could revert to the Crown.”

  “This is tedious.” Frustrating, infuriating, and bloody stupid.

  “That’s all it is—tedious. Walden is using his influence with the College of Arms to address the matter. He’s already sent a pigeon south, with directions to send another north when a decision has been made. The king is usually quite attentive to matters involving the peerage.”

  “My happiness rests in the hands of a self-indulgent, lazy, supercilious…” Althea let the tirade die aborning, because beneath her temper lay the more honest emotion. “I am afraid, Nathaniel. I finally find you, I wade through years of arcane social conventions, and yet another pointless convention stands in my way. I know who you are, you know who I am. What do I care if at the time of our wedding you are still officially wearing some dusty old titles that have nothing to do with us?”

  He kissed her, a swift, “That’s my Althea” sort of kiss. “I want the matter resolved for us, but also for Rothhaven. If he ever thinks to marry, his union must be unassailably legal.”

  “I would like to know Robert has a companion in life,” Althea said, running her fingers through Nathaniel’s hair. “She’d have to be a woman of extraordinary tolerance.”

  “Or she’d have to be extraordinarily in love. It happens, you know. The most unlikely people—”

  Althea smacked his arm. “If Rothhaven is to take his place as duke, he needs the dullest, most blue-blooded, unremarkable, conventional duchess ever to wear a tiara. His past must fade under a cloud of boring decorum and his illness must become an insignificant footnote at the bottom of a monotonously ducal life.”

  “I believe you have divined his strategy, or part of it. He’s already set about creating a proper façade and front drive for the Hall, and I expect he will soon be receiving callers.”

  Althea pushed away from the wall and prepared to bid her fiancé a temporary farewell. “And where will he find that dull, conventional, unremarkable duchess, Nathaniel? Yorkshire society is not exactly awash in blue-blooded young ladies.”

  “I know of at least one who excels at seeming conventional and biddable. She also happens to be the sister of a duke.”

  Oh, dear. Oh, no. “Nathaniel, we must not let that happen. Constance isn’t suitable, and Rothhaven isn’t either.”

  “We weren’t suitable, Althea, and if they make each other happy, who are we to gainsay them? Kiss me, and then send me on my way, please.”

  Althea kissed him—and he kissed her—and all thoughts about unsuitable dukes and even more unsuitable sisters flew from her head.

  Chapter Six

  The undersigned invites your ladyship to a meal al fresco to discuss a project of mutual interest. I remain, your most obed serv,

  R

  Was the R for Rothhaven or Robert? His Grace had not overtly offered Constance leave to use his given name, but he had used hers. What is your real dream, Constance? Perhaps someday she might tell him. Today she would join him for a meal al fresco.

  A ducal picnic. Her first, and probably his first as well.

  “You look pretty.” Stephen made that observation as if puzzled by his own conclusion. “Rose is a good color for you.”

  Constance selected a plain straw hat from among the choices hanging on pegs in the foyer. “Thank you. Are you about to follow up with one of your damning-by-faint-praise insults?”

  “Such as, what a shame your fancy has been caught by a man who doesn’t often leave his own property?”

  She fashioned the bow of the bonnet ribbons off-center, then untied the ribbons and left them trailing. “What a shame my younger brother is a snob. Could you teach a horse to stand whenever his rider trembles in the saddle?”

  Stephen shifted his grip on his cane—he was using only one today, a sign his leg wasn’t paining him too badly. “Of course. It would take a few days, possibly a fortnight, and the right horse, but I could do it. Why should I?”

  “Because you are bored, because doing a good turn for a neighbor is gentlemanly, because I ask it of you.”