A Secret Affair (26 page)

W
HY 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.”

She laughed.

“And have you tamed me too?” he asked.

“Oh,” she said,
“most
provokingly, Constantine, it has turned out that you are not the devil after all. And I cannot tame what does not exist.”

She turned her head to smile at him.

“Disappointed?” he asked.

Was
she? Life would be so much easier—so much more as she had planned it to be—if he really were the ruthless, dangerous, sensuous devil she had taken him for. There would have been all the challenge
of pitting her wits against his, of conquering him, of enjoying him. And leaving him and forgetting him when summer came would have been the easiest thing in the world.

But was she
disappointed
? Or was she being challenged in other ways? Challenged to conquer him, after all. And challenged to conquer herself and the person she had
thought
she had become.

She was no longer sure who she was. She was not the girl she had been, that was for sure.
She
was long gone. But she was not the person she had thought she had become either—not now that she was alone to live the life of that person.