The Truth About Dukes Page 8

  He slouched back against the wall. “That last part gives me pause. You never ask for anything, Con. You simply take what you need, do without, or demand your due. You are asking on Rothhaven’s behalf. This troubles me.”

  Stephen was being protective, for which Constance wanted to smack him with her reticule. “He will never ask for himself. He’s too much like you.”

  That salvo merited a raised eyebrow. “Stoic? Long-suffering? Self-sufficient? He’s cowered behind his castle walls for years, needing his brother to play the dress-up duke in his stead. We are nothing alike.”

  She tried angling her hat the other way. “Some people need walls to feel safe, some people lean on a sword cane for the same purpose.” She pulled on her gloves, then took them off again. One did not call upon a duke with one’s bonnet ribbons trailing.

  “My bad leg isn’t my fault, Constance.”

  “Your lame leg is only part of your problem. Jack Wentworth is the other part. What if Jack hadn’t been your father, but rather, your jailer, and your own father put you into his keeping and then had you declared dead? Would all the walls in England be enough to keep you safe?”

  “They would not be enough to keep me sane,” Stephen said with uncharacteristic gentleness. “Rothhaven was kept at that asylum for more than a decade, Con. A place for crazy people.”

  Althea must have let that slip. Unwise of her. “Where do you think I went all those years ago, Stephen? A nunnery?”

  He became fascinated with the painting hanging behind Constance’s left shoulder, a dull landscape of sheep and hills under a sky of puffy white clouds.

  “You went to finishing school,” he said. “Young ladies from well-to-do families attend finishing schools.”

  “I went to finishing school after I came back. Where do you think I was when I went missing?”

  A hint of the vulnerable adolescent showed in Stephen’s eyes, though he was well past twenty years old. “Quinn said you could take care of yourself, and you apparently did.”

  Quinn would investigate Rothhaven simply because Althea was marrying into the Rothmere family. Constance could save her brother a bit of time and provide Stephen some worthwhile intelligence.

  “I did not take care of myself. I could not. I’d been too long away from the streets and I’d grown too well fed and well kept. My instincts dulled, my looks improved. I found work as a maid at a private madhouse. Rothhaven took care of me.”

  The consternation in Stephen’s gaze was as gratifying as it was rare. “He kept you?”

  “Do men think only of swiving? He kept me safe. He warned me which staff to avoid, when to stay off the back steps, how to hide my coin. He played the violin when he knew I was faltering. He read to me. Poetry, drama. He was barely sane himself but he kept me sane until Quinn found me.”

  “But how did you…?” Stephen’s gaze narrowed. “You were a maid at the private hospital out on the moors. Rothhaven was apparently an inmate of the same establishment where you were a menial. You worked from dawn to midnight, slept in a cold garret on a straw pallet, and nearly starved. Why? I don’t understand why.”

  And Stephen must understand every puzzle even if he had to destroy the puzzle to find its secrets. “Will you teach a horse to stand when the rider has a shaking fit in the saddle?”

  “Give me a fortnight.”

  “Thank you.” She tied her ribbons off-center, pulled on her gloves, and prepared to dine al fresco with a gentleman for the first time.

  “Does Quinn know about Rothhaven’s role in your past, Con?”

  “He will have guessed. You can confirm his hunches, or not.” She marched over to Stephen, looked him squarely in the eye, and deftly pried his cane from his grasp. He was braced against the wall and in no immediate danger of toppling, but his eyes filled with veiled panic.

  “How you feel now is how Rothhaven feels, all the time, every waking and sleeping moment. No canes for balance, no handy weapon, no means of safely crossing so much as an empty room, and yet he asks no quarter of anyone. He can be felled at any moment by a foe no one has ever vanquished, with no warning, no parlaying terms. You don’t know what he’s endured. You and anybody else in this family mock him at your peril.”

  She held Stephen’s cane between them at eye level for one more moment, then shoved it at his chest and let herself out the front door.

  Nathaniel was off admiring the figurative potting shed at Crofton Ford with his intended, and Robert had seized the opportunity to be unsupervised with Lady Constance. This was doubtless not the done thing. An unmarried lady on a neighboring estate, even a lady with whom Robert was acquiring a family connection, should reject an invitation to dine with him privately.

  Lady Constance would not come because he’d asked her to, she would come for his garden—if she came at all. Robert paced before the hearth in the library, ignoring the stack of correspondence piled on the blotter. For the first time in his adult life, he was listening for the sound of coach wheels with something like anticipation.

  Though as rutted and weedy as the drive was, how could a coach or even a gig navigate the path?

  A tap on the door had him almost jumping out of his skin. “Come in.”

  “Lady Constance to see you, Your Grace.” Thatcher pulled off that bit of formality very creditably.

  “Thank you, Thatcher. You may tell the kitchen we’ll have our luncheon within the half hour.” Thatcher bowed, jacket for once neatly buttoned, the tufts of white hair at his temples combed.

  “My lady.” Robert remembered to bow. “Welcome.”

  Lady Constance strode into the room. “No lovebirds in the library today?”

  “Nathaniel took Lady Althea over to Crofton Ford, where they will doubtless spend every moment on such pressing matters as landscaping, wallpaper, carpet, and furnishings.”

  She’d worn a soft rose walking dress that fell in graceful folds from an embroidered bodice. The hems swished a little as she examined the room’s paintings one by one.

  “Our siblings will spend every spare moment on a bed, you mean,” she said, pulling off her right glove. “And who is this fine fellow?”

  “That’s Great-Uncle Ingleby. He was a favorite with the ladies but he never married.”

  Her ladyship swiped a finger over the artist’s signature and leaned closer to the frame. “Was he fond of drink? His nose is a bit too red.”

  “I have only a few memories of him. I believe the pigmentation to be accurate. Without a wife to moderate his appetites, he might well have been a sot.”

  Lady Constance turned the same inquisitive gaze on Robert. “Did he have the falling sickness?”

  “I do not know.” Though Robert had speculated about every relative whose portraits graced the ancestral walls. “If he was epileptic, that might explain why he never married.”

  She looked away, as if noticing a fortune in books for the first time. “I did something.”

  Robert waited. Whatever she’d done, it had made the quietly dauntless Constance Wentworth uncertain.

  “I asked Stephen to train a horse for you. A steady, sensible mount who will stop if the rider trembles in the saddle.”

  “Thank you.” Robert would never so much as sit on the horse, but her impulse had been kind.

  “You’re not offended?”

  “I am epileptic. I must accommodate myself to that fact or risk aggravating the condition needlessly. If I were ever to climb on a horse again, only such a mount would do.”

  He’d apparently passed a test of some sort. Her ladyship’s posture relaxed and she tugged off her second glove.

  “I did something else.”

  “You’ve been busy.” He opened the French doors and gestured her toward the garden.

  She crossed the library and stood before the open door. “I like to stay busy, but this was…I told Stephen I’d met you at Soames’s hospital, that I’d been a maid there. He will ponder that revelation for a few days, then tell Quinn, which means Quinn will tell Jane.”

  “You had a reason for this disclosure?” For himself, Robert didn’t care if Nathaniel’s in-laws were privy to the whole sordid Rothmere family tale, but Constance’s privacy mattered. She had been so young and so upset. So alone.

  She stepped out onto the terrace, and Robert followed her.

  “I wanted the truth known on my terms,” she said. “Quinn will pry into your family’s past. There aren’t that many private respites in the West Riding. He will recognize the name of the facility where you…stayed.”

  Where Robert had been imprisoned. “There are more asylums, spas, and walled estates out there than you think. Some for females, some for consumptives, some for the violently insane. My father researched them all, and I have read his diaries.”

  “He researched them?”

  “Not pleasant reading, but enlightening. To the old duke’s credit, he sought a facility that purported to treat the falling sickness and other mental disorders, not merely warehouse cast-off relations. My malady has no cure, of course, but one cannot blame even a rotten father for hoping.”

  Lady Constance scowled at him. “You are more forgiving than I will ever be. He had you declared dead, he deceived your family and all of society, committed fraud upon the Crown. If he were still alive, would you yet be in Soames’s institution, playing your violin and reading holey newspapers?”

  How ferocious she was. “You would recall that.”

  “As if week-old articles about York’s latest society ball could upset anybody’s humors. Walk with me to the orchard.”

  Across the terrace, two new footmen were setting up the noon meal, aided by a very young kitchen maid. Staff generally did not like employers hovering, and new staff were probably even more self-conscious.

  “I have not been to the orchard in years.” Robert inventoried his reaction to this prospect, and found dread, anxiety, and resentment. Next to those predictable nuisances was a growing impatience with his own limitations. “I might well fail to complete the journey.”

  “This time you might not, but eventually, you will.” Lady Constance marched to the end of the garden where the door in the wall had once upon a time loomed in Robert’s mind like a portal to the edge of the world.

  She kept right on going, and once again, he followed her. Months ago, on a foggy autumn morning, he’d begun experimenting with what lay beyond the garden door, navigating as far as the river. He left the garden only when the mist was so heavy as to obscure anything like a horizon. The thicker the fog, the better he liked it.

  A world where he could see only a dozen feet ahead—and could not be seen himself beyond those dozen feet—had suited him splendidly. This sunny spring day, with damned birds chirping and an arrogant hare loping off toward the river, had no appeal at all.

  “Come,” Lady Constance said, extending her hand. “We will speak of the project you invited me here to discuss.”

  Robert winged his elbow at her—that was the conventional gesture offering escort, if memory served—but she instead took his hand in hers, her grip warm and firm.

  “We have missed the cherry blossoms,” she said. “But the plums should be in their glory. Tell me of your project.”

  Constance was humoring him, jollying him into taking the first few steps on the path to the walled orchard. Robert knew it, she knew it. He went with her anyway, because he had at least as much right to be on that path as the wretched hare did.

  Make small talk. Distract yourself. “I would rather return to the garden. We can discuss the project there.”

  “I would rather wear breeches. I often do, when I paint. Skirts get in the way.”

  Picturing Constance Wentworth in breeches was, indeed, a distraction. “I have decided that if I’m to be the Duke of Rothhaven, I must behave as a duke. I must look like a duke, speak like a duke.”

  “Quack like a duke?”

  “Don’t be impertinent.” He failed utterly to suppress a smile. “I can no longer indulge my eccentricities, confident in the knowledge that my brother will carry on in the ducal role. A duke sits for the occasional portrait.”

  The path angled up slightly, which slowed Constance not one bit. “You’d like me to recommend a portraitist for you? Somebody who will mind his own business and not turn your nose purple?”

  “No, thank you. I do not need a recommendation.”

  “Then you’d like me to confirm the choice of portraitist you’ve already made. Offer reassurances that he—for only the male gender is suited to rendering portraits, of course—is passably competent.”

  Constance picked up the pace as they climbed, and Robert had the sense she was annoyed. He did not turn loose of her hand, but rather, lengthened his stride to keep pace with her. She was by no means a tall woman.

  “Passably competent will not do. This portrait must convey to the world that I am in every way appropriate to execute the duties of my station.” The traveling coach had been sent into York for a complete refurbishment for the same reason.

  Appearances mattered.

  “You are competent to execute the duties of your station,” her ladyship retorted. “Let us not belabor the obvious. That you have handsome features, a compelling gaze, and a fine masculine figure means any half-skilled apprentice could fashion a decent likeness of you.”

  “Do you mean that?”

  “Perhaps not an apprentice, but anybody half skilled. You’ll probably let him talk you into painting you wearing coronation robes, the usual castles and churning seas in the background. He’ll try to suggest you have blue eyes instead of green, but you must stand firm. Eye color is not a detail and your eyes are lovely.”

  They had reached the orchard gate, which her ladyship yanked open and charged through.

  Robert stood for a moment outside the walls.

  “Well?” Constance said, holding the gate open. Her question, a single syllable, demanded something—an explanation or justification of some sort, for the human condition, for the evils of the day, for the imponderable mysteries of life itself.

  Robert knew he ought to dash through the gate, slam it closed behind him, and refuse to budge until the comfort of darkness descended. Instead he marveled at the view of the Hall amid the fields below. The dread and resentment and whatnot were still lurking in his mind, but they slept like winded hounds, and let him look on his home—his home—from a distance for the first time since he’d been sent away.

  “Rothhaven is not so dreadful when seen from this perspective.” The Hall looked peaceful, in fact, mellow old stone settled on a quilt of green. “Not so bleak.”

  Constance re-joined him just outside the gate. “It’s a fine old place. Perhaps whoever does your portrait would be willing to paint a few landscapes. The portraitists are a snobby lot, generally, but we all pass through a landscape phase, once we leave the still lifes behind.”

  He took her hand this time, a very bold overture on his part. She was not terrified of the out-of-doors, after all.

  Though at the moment, neither was he. Uneasy, a bit anxious, possibly even agitated, but not terrified.

  “I would like to leave my still-life phase behind,” he said. “What could I offer you that would induce you to paint my portrait?”

  Constance studied him in that serious way of hers. “Do you mean that? You want me to paint your portrait?”

  “I’m told as subjects go, I’m not hideous. I want no strangers under my roof strutting about and acting artistic. You are beyond half skilled, and I know you won’t turn my nose purple. I am offering you a commission to paint the portrait of the present Duke of Rothhaven.”

  In Robert’s mind, until that moment, the Duke of Rothhaven had been his father, or a role inhabited by Nathaniel. He, himself, had been Robbie, or to old familiars, Master Robbie. Soames had called him Robert, for last names were discouraged at such an establishment.

  Watching Constance inventory his features, her gaze roaming from his brow to his nose, to his mouth, to his hair, he felt himself becoming the Duke of Rothhaven. Standing a little taller, adopting a slight air of hauteur the better to withstand her perusal.

  “Sitting for a portrait is boring,” she said, brushing his hair back from his temple. “You will grow testy.” She eased a finger under his cravat and ran it around his neck. “I will grow testy.” She gently steered his chin a half inch to the left, then a half inch to the right. “We will disagree.”

  “I trust your judgment.” He would somehow trust himself to withstand her touch too.

  She smoothed his lapels, fluffed his cravat, and made another adjustment to his hair. Her smile said she knew his compliment extended beyond her ability with paints and brushes.

  “Let’s have a look at the trees,” she said, leading him through the gate. “I adore the scent of plum blossoms.”

  She prattled on, about light and seasons, how many different types of green could shine forth from a single tree branch, and why coronation robes were too trite to be endured. Then she shook a branch and showered herself with petals, and Robert knew himself for a doomed duke.

  She adored the scent of plum blossoms, and he adored her. He simply, completely adored her.

  “I am making a fool of myself,” Constance said, as the last of the petals drifted down from the branch above her. “Acting like a child.”

  His Grace stood just inside the orchard walls, the gate open beside him. Constance knew she ought to be saying something more, making conversation, but she’d never seen quite that expression on a man’s face before.

  Rapt, sweet—there was a word for this sort of regard, just as there was a color for every object to be rendered on canvas. Rothhaven’s gaze was respectful, also intimate. His eyes conveyed…She searched her mind for the term that applied, a sort of rosy, soft, deep word. A special word not often used out loud.

  “So what if you are acting like a child?” he said. “You were never allowed to be a child, or not allowed to be enough of a child. I at least had ten years of genuine childhood, and they stood me in very good stead.”

  Constance brushed plum blossoms from her sleeves. “Childishness stood you in good stead? In that place?”