A Secret Affair (23 page)

“We will remain with Barbara for as long as you need to see the view, Your Grace,” Mrs. Newcombe assured her. “Do take your time. All we have left to see is the dungeons, at the children’s insistence, and there is no hurry.”

The duchess took Constantine’s arm, and they climbed to the top of the White Tower together—the highest point apart from the four turrets at its corners.

“Tonight?” he asked as they went.

“Yes,” she said. “I will need it. I am to attend a dinner and reception at St. James’s Palace this evening and it is certain to be a dead
bore. But when one receives a royal summons, you know, one does not reply that it does not suit one’s purposes to attend, even if one
is
the Duchess of Dunbarton. Barbara is to dine with the Parks. You may send your carriage at eleven.”

They stepped out onto the battlements of the Tower to find that all the clouds had moved off, leaving blue sky and sunshine in their place.

The duchess opened her parasol and raised it above her head. She was wearing a bonnet today, tied securely beneath her chin. It was just as well. There was a significant breeze up here.

They walked all around the battlements, admiring the various views over the city and the countryside beyond before coming to a stop when they were facing the River Thames.

She tipped back her parasol and lifted her face to the sky. One of the ravens for which the Tower was famous was flapping about up there.

“Do you ever think,” she asked, “that it would be wonderful to fly, Constantine? To be all alone with the vastness and the wind and the sky?”

“The dimension man has not conquered?” he said. “It would be interesting to see the world from a bird’s perspective. There are, of course, hot air balloons.”

“But one would still be constrained,” she said. “I want wings. But never mind. This is quite high enough for now. Is it not
lovely
up here?”

He turned his head to smile at her. One did not often hear such unguarded enthusiasm on the duchess’s lips—or see her face so bright with animation. She had leaned her arms on the parapet and was gazing out toward the river. Her parasol was propped against the wall.

“Or perhaps I should sail away to some distant, exotic land,” she said. “Egypt, India, China. Have you ever longed to go?”

“To escape from myself?” he said.

“Oh, not
from
yourself,” she said.
“With
yourself. You can never leave yourself behind, wherever you go. It was one of the first things the duke taught me after we were married. I could never escape the girl I had been, he told me. I could only make her into a woman in whose body and mind I felt happy to be.”

And yet she acted as though she had escaped that girlhood. She would not even go back to the home and people she had left behind when she married Dunbarton.

“I briefly thought of going to sea as a young man,” he said. “But I would have been gone for months, even years, at a time. I could not be away from Jon so long.”

“The brother you hated?” she said.

“I did not—” he began.

“No,” she said. “I know you did not. You loved him more than you have loved anyone else in your life. And you hated him because you could not keep him alive.”

He leaned his arms on the parapet beside her. Some shallow woman she was turning out to be. What had made her so perceptive?

“Even now,” he said, “I often feel as though I had abandoned him. I will go a whole day—sometimes more—without thinking about him. I go to Warren Hall occasionally just to visit him. He is buried beside the small chapel in the park. It is a peaceful place. I am glad about that. I go to talk to him.”

“And to listen to him?” she said.

“That would be absurd,” he told her.

“No more absurd than to talk to him,” she pointed out. “I think he is alive in your heart, Constantine, even when you are not consciously thinking about him. I think he will always be there. And he is a
good
part of you.”

He leaned farther out to see down, and then looked toward the river again.

“This is foolishness,” he said. “I
never
talk about Jon. Why do I do it with you?”

“Did he know,” she asked, “about Ainsley?”

What
was
it about her? He never talked about Ainsley either. He heaved a deep sigh.

“Yes,” he said. “It was his idea—not the gambling, of course, but the purchase of a safe home for women and children who were not wanted anywhere else, a place where they could work and train for something more permanent in the future. He was so excited by the idea that sometimes he could not get to sleep at night. He wanted to see it all for himself. But he died before there was anything tangible to see.”

Her hand, he realized, had moved to cover his on the parapet—and she had removed her glove.

“Was it a hard death?” she asked.

“He fell asleep and did not wake up,” he said. “It was the night of his sixteenth birthday. We had played hide-and-seek for a few hours during the evening, and he had laughed so hard that I daresay he weakened his heart. He told me when I went to blow out his candle for the night that he loved me more than anyone else in the whole world. He told me he would love me forever and ever, amen—a little joke that always afforded him considerable amusement. Forever turned out to be a few hours long.”

“No,” she said. “Forever turned out to be eternal. He loved you forever, as the duke loved me. Love does not die when the person dies. Despite all the pain for the survivor.”

How the devil had all this come about, Constantine wondered. But thank the Lord they were in a public place, even though they appeared to have the battlements all to themselves at the moment. If they had been somewhere private he might have grabbed her and bawled on her shoulder. Which was a mildly alarming thought. Not to mention embarrassing.

He turned his head to look at her. She was gazing back, wide-eyed, unsmiling, minus any of her usual masks.

And he realized that he liked her.

It was not an earth-shattering revelation—or ought not to have been. And yet it was.

He had expected, perhaps, to have all sorts of feelings about the Duchess of Dunbarton when she became his mistress. Simple
liking
was not one of them.

He covered her hand with his own.

“I daresay,” he said, “Miss Leavensworth and her fiancé’s relatives have exhausted every conversational topic known to man or woman. And I daresay the young people are ready to climb the walls surrounding the crown jewels. We had better go and rescue them—and bear her off for her first ice at Gunter’s.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “How ghastly it would be to arrive there to find it closed for the day. Babs would be inconsolable. She would not admit it, of course. She would assure us both quite cheerfully that she did not mind at all, that the afternoon had been a delight even without her very first ice. She is such a
saint.”

He offered his arm as she pulled her glove back on, settled a large diamond ring—or
not
diamond—on her forefinger, and grasped her parasol.

I
T WAS ALMOST MIDNIGHT
when Hannah arrived at Constantine’s house. She had not meant to be late—the time for games with him was over, she had decided. But one could not rush away early from St. James’s Palace with the excuse that one had promised to be with one’s lover soon after eleven. Not especially when one had had a private conversation with the king himself for all of ten minutes just as the hands of the clock were crawling upward to that hour.

Constantine had not locked the door. He did open it himself, though, when his carriage pulled up outside. There was no sign of any servants. He must have dismissed them for the night. Hannah did not offer any explanation for her lateness—she would not go
that
far.
She merely wound her arms about his neck and kissed him, and he bore her off to bed without further ado.

A little less than an hour later they were in his sitting room again, he wearing shirt and pantaloons, she in his dressing gown. A tray of tea with plates of bread and butter and cheese stood on the low table between them.

She could grow accustomed to this, she thought—this cozy companionship after the exertion and pleasure of making love.

She could grow accustomed to
him
.

This time next year he would have a different lover, and perhaps she would too, though she was not sure she would wish to repeat the experiment. The thought popped unbidden into her head. There would be a different woman sitting here, perhaps wrapped in this very garment. And he would be there, looking at her with slightly sleepy eyes and relaxed posture and tousled hair.

She frowned—and then smiled.

“The king has not forgotten about Ainsley Park,” she said, “or about you.”

“Good Lord,” he said with a grimace. “You did not remind him, did you?”

“He was complaining about St. James’s Palace, which he heartily dislikes,” she said, “and wondering if Buckingham House might be made into a more imposing royal residence. I suggested the Tower of London and mentioned the fact that I had been there today with my dearest friend and with you as an escort.”

“Prinny as lord of the Tower,” he said. “The mind boggles, does it not? He would probably have Traitor’s Gate opened for business again, and parade all his enemies inside to the dungeons.”

“England would be an empty country,” she said. “There would be no one left to run the government, except the king himself. The halls of Parliament would be left to the bats and the ghosts. And the Tower would be bursting at the seams.”

They both chuckled at the thought, and Hannah, finished with her buttered bread and cheese and her tea, dug her hands under the
cuffs of the opposite sleeves and grasped her arms tightly. None of her dreams and plans over the winter had included them
laughing
together at treasonous absurdities.

He looked purely handsome when he laughed—especially when he was also sleepy.

“And how did the conversation get from the Tower to Ainsley?” he asked.

“He frowned in thought when I mentioned your name,” she said, “and then seemed to remember who you were. A dashed shame, he said, that you could not have been Earl of Merton, though he was inordinately fond of the current earl. And there was something about you he ought to remember. He dug
very
deep into his memory, Constantine, and then popped up with the name of Ainsley Park without any prompting at all. He looked just as pleased with himself as if he had pulled a plum out of the Christmas pudding. A wonderful man, he declared
—you
, that is, Constantine—and he fully intends to offer you some assistance in your charitable endeavors and to honor you personally in some suitable way.”

He shook his head.

“Was he inebriated?” he asked.

“Not to the point of making an idiot of himself,” she said. “But he did drink an alarming amount even when I was looking. I daresay he drank just as much if not more when I was
not
looking.”

“One must hope, then,” he said, “that he will forget—again.”

“He saw a plump and frumpish matron as he finished speaking,” she said, “and his eyes lit up and he went in pursuit of her. I was totally forgotten and abandoned. I might not have existed. It was very lowering, Constantine.”

“The king’s tastes in women were always eccentric,” he said, “to put a kind spin on them. Peculiar, to be a little less kind. Bizarre, to be truthful. Did everyone else ignore your existence?”

“Of course not,” she said. “I am the Duchess of Dunbarton.”

“That is the spirit, Duchess,” he said, and his very dark eyes smiled at her.

It was very disconcerting and very knee-weakening. None of the rest of his face smiled. Yet she did not feel mocked. She felt—
teased. Liked. Did
he like her?

And did she like him?
Like
, as opposed to lust after?

“If you had made off with the crown jewels this afternoon and presented them all to Babs,” she said, “instead of merely buying her an ice at Gunter’s, she would not have been half as delighted.”

“She
was
pleased, was she not?” he said. “Have you met her vicar? Is he worthy of her?”

“Among other lesser virtues,” she said, “he possesses a special smile, which he saves just for her. And it pierces straight through to her heart.”

They gazed at each other across the low table.

“Do you believe in love?” she asked him. “That kind of love, I mean.”

“Yes,” he said. “I would have said no once upon a time. It is easy to be cynical—life gives one much evidence to suggest that there is nothing else to be and remain honest. But I have four cousins—second cousins—who grew up in the country in genteel poverty and burst upon the social scene with the death of Jon. Country bumpkins, no less, whom I expected to be wild and extravagant and vulgar. I hated them even before I set eyes upon them, especially the new Merton. They turned out to be none of those things, and one by one they all made matches that should have been disastrous. And yet all the evidence points to the conclusion that my cousins have converted their marriages into love matches. All of them. It is unmistakable and extraordinary.”