I Married the Duke (25 page)
“No. Yes.” She faced Christos directly. “You and he have not seen each other in a great long time.”
“A half dozen months only. But”—he waved his hand dismissively—“months and years matter nothing when there is affinity of spirit and great affection,
non
?”
Ravenna nodded.
Arabella’s hand twisted in Christos’s and broke free. Desperate words that had been caged inside her rushed to her tongue. “Would your brother make plans to divorce his wife without telling her of that plan?”
“Not the brother that has been writing me letters in praise of her for the past many weeks,” he said without hesitation.
“I found letters to him, written by his man of business. They spoke of preparing a petition for divorce, and of an heiress whose portion could restore the fortunes of Combe.”
“Oh, Bella.” Ravenna’s dark eyes went wide. “Did you ask him about them?”
“She did not,” Christos said, nodding thoughtfully. “There is great fear where there is uncertain love, I think.”
Ravenna’s brows rose. Arabella could not meet her sister’s gaze.
“This heiress,” Christos said, tilting his head. “Was she named?”
“Miss Gardiner.”
His face relaxed into a smile. “Ah, then the mystery is solved,
ma belle
. It was my uncle who wished to make her my wife.”
Air flooded Arabella’s lungs. “Your uncle?” She tried to picture the letters. They had lacked dates and Luc’s name. “When did your uncle tell you this?”
“A twelvemonth ago.”
“But what about the divorce?”
“To excise Combe from the grip of his wife’s brother,” Christos said immediately.
Arabella sat forward. “What do you know of this?”
“What my aunt told me a year ago when I paid a call upon her, that her brother required her to remain in London while my uncle died alone in Shropshire. She is a weak soul, though benevolent. Her innocence is to my brother’s disservice, I fear.”
“But what does either have to do with the other?” Ravenna demanded.
“Ah,
mon chou
,” he said with a shake of his head. “You know little of the greed of men, I think.”
“Happily.” She squinted. “What’s a
chou
?”
“A cabbage.”
Arabella’s thoughts sped. “Why didn’t he divorce Adina if he intended to? Her child is not his.”
Christos offered an elegant shrug. “Perhaps he did not know she was with child.”
“He must have. Why didn’t you wed Miss Gardiner?”
“Ah.” He lowered his chin. “Though I would like it very much, I think—the affection and companionship of a woman with whom to share dreams—it is not for me. I am not fit for such a gift,
ma belle
.”
Not fit
.
“Christos?” She took up his long, beautiful artist’s hand. “How exactly are you unfit?”
With a crease of his lips that shaped them into a wave, he turned their hands over together. “I have peaks, and I have valleys.” He drew back the lacy cuff of his shirt. His wrist was crisscrossed with thick, straight-edged scars, overlapping one upon the next. “The valleys, they are oftentimes quite low. No gentle lady deserves to be bound to that.”
There was a silence between them in which the shuffling of feet on the deck above, the muffled conversations of four hundred people, and the muted delights of violin and flute could be heard.
Ravenna lowered herself to a chair and placed her palms on her knees. “What can we do, Bella, so that with a mind free of burdens you can marry your duke again?”
“
Oui
,
ma belle
. Your sister—though she speaks of the mind where I would speak of the heart—we shall help. For I believe as surely as I am a man that my brother has no ill intent toward you. Rather, the contrary.”
“The tenant farmers of Combe are being extorted, I believe,” Arabella said, “but they offer me only fearful hints. No proof. I believe that the Bishop of Barris, Adina’s brother, is behind this. But I have little upon which to base this.”
“Except his hatred of my brother and his manipulation of my sweet aunt. And, unless my brother becomes the duke, he is the principal trustee of Combe.”
“That isn’t enough to prove a crime,” Ravenna said.
“Then she must find the proof,” Christos replied.
“Where?”
“In his private chambers.”
“Do you truly believe that a man who commits crimes involving thousands of pounds would hide proof of those crimes in a drawer in his study?”
“I do.” He blinked his intense green eyes. “For I have seen it done. The fools.
Pft!
”
“Where is Barris?” Ravenna said, abruptly eager. “We will go there and—”
“Barris is a speck of an island in a far off northern sea,
mon chou
.”
“Does he usually live in London, then?”
“When I was a child, he had a house near Richmond. We lived there, my brother and I, for some years.”
“He still has this house,” Arabella said. “Adina mentioned it.”
“You could pay a call on him,” Ravenna said, “and when he is in the other room you can search his desk. I read a lending library novel in which the hero did that.”
“Ah,
oui
. And the art, it always reflects the reality,
non
,
mon chou
?” he said with a lift of a brow.
“I think you should stop calling me your cabbage, or our siblinghood will swiftly become uncomfortable for you.”
“But it is too far to go to Richmond,” Arabella said, “and then to sit and wait to enter his house after he has gone out.”
Ravenna’s lips screwed up. “With all his servants, presumably.”
“Then she must go while he disports himself in London.”
“How would she know when he’d be doing that?”
“Is he not doing that at this very moment, above our heads,
mon
—”
Ravenna glared. He laughed.
“Perhaps . . .” Arabella’s heart raced. She wanted to help Luc. She needed to help him. This was the trouble that he was hiding from her. She did not have all the pieces: why he would not share it all with her, nor why Christos’s arrival today had transformed his distress into ease.
Her fists bunched. “He refuses to allow me to help him protect the people of Combe.”
“Ah,
ma belle
,” Christos said. “My brother seeks always to protect. To share that burden is a foreign thing to him.”
She stood up. “I could go to the bishop’s house now, while he is here. I might not have this opportunity again. My footman Joseph could go with me. You two would remain here and make excuses for my absence.”
“From your own wedding?” Ravenna hopped out of her seat.
“Immediately after it. I must go, Venna. When I arrive, the servants will ask me to await his return, then they will forget about me, and I can look around at my leisure.” She bit the inside of her lip. “I hope.”
“This seems far-fetched.”
“
Non
. It is not. The house, it is plain and empty. The places to search are few. The servants are aged, their interest in guests poor.”
“In a bishop’s household?”
“In his household.” Christos rose to his feet like a cat, slender and graceful. “I know this, you see. For it takes a madman to recognize a madman.”
C
HAMPAGNE HAD FLOWED
freely during Arabella’s sojourn below, and conversation was lively atop.
Just like her imagination
. It was pure foolishness to consider running off to Richmond to search a bishop’s house for documents that probably didn’t even exist. The same sort of foolishness that had taken her to a dark alley in a port town she did not know and began the series of events that led her here.
There remained but half an hour until a small party of guests and family were to leave the ship with her and Luc to go to the church nearby for the ceremony. They would return to the
Victory
afterward for supper, dancing, and fireworks. Adina had spared nothing in her plans.
Arabella could not wait half an hour. She needed to see Luc. She searched between clusters of guests. Her nerves were twisted to rawness, and as much as she feared his distance, she wanted only to be alone with him now.
At first she thought those strained nerves were the cause of the peculiar glances some of the guests were throwing her way—ladies, especially, ducking behind parasols to avoid her gaze while the gentlemen turned their heads away when she passed. She was imagining it, of course. No one would cut a bride at her wedding.
Wending her way between people under the main canopy spread across the front of the ship, she found Eleanor.
“Bella?” Her sister’s brow creased. “I have something to say to you that I think will be difficult for you to hear. But you should know it.”
Luc?
“What is it, Ellie?”
“I have just heard an unsavory rumor—for rumor I know it to be—told to me by a woman because I think she did not know that I am your sister.”
“Tell me, please, quickly.”
“It seems that it is being said that you have been unfaithful to the
comte,
that you have taken a lover or perhaps several already, and are eager to make him the father of a bastard.”
The air flattened out of Arabella’s lungs and heat flushed through her body and into her cheeks.
“It is a rumor.”
“Of course it is. It is perfectly obvious to me that you adore him, and even if you did not, you have too much integrity to do such a thing.” Eleanor looked about. “But someone is telling this tale here today. Just look at that pair of women over there, staring at us like we are a curiosity at an exhibition.”
She must not allow gossip to hurt her. She had held strong against unkindnesses and cruelties her entire life. That this unkindness hurt Luc was the only source of her misery.
“The woman who told me said the news was to be believed because its source was within the family,” Eleanor said. “But not the duchess; her brother, the bishop. Isn’t it the most astounding thing you’ve heard?”
“No.” Her heart racketed. “He hates Luc. I think he would do this to hurt him.” As he would extort money from Luc’s tenants. But only to hurt him, or to ruin him entirely? Or for some other purpose?
It was all too much
. Desperation snatched at her reason again, the plan that Christos and Ravenna had laid out seeming less like foolishness and more like her only hope.
As she lifted her head to search the crowd again for Luc, a hush descended over them. Oh, good heavens. Were they to go in solemn procession to the church now? With her head awhirl and nerves frayed, she doubted she could bear it.
But no one was looking at her. They had all turned to another. At the head of the gangway in a ray of sunlight cut with shadow lines from the rigging above, the Bishop of Barris stood with his hands folded over his enormous gold pectoral cross. His amethyst ring glittered.
“It is with great solemnity that I share news now that affects my family deeply,” he said with the measured confidence of a man accustomed to the pulpit. The guests went silent, all mouths closed. Even the ladies’ tiny parasols stilled. Sick heat crept from Arabella’s womb into her throat and to the tips of her fingers. He would declare her to be a Jezebel before everyone. He would shame Luc irreparably.
“My sister, the Duchess of Lycombe, has just now given birth.” He paused and Arabella’s eyes closed. “To a healthy boy.”
“M
y only regret is that Theodore,” Fletcher continued, “whom we all admired, and whom his wife loved deeply”—he offered a rare, rueful grin—“though it was of course shockingly unfashionable for her to do so”—titters of amusement from the crowd—“I regret that my dear friend Theodore cannot see with his living eyes his son and heir. But I have faith that his spirit rests happy knowing his wife and child are well. If you will, raise a toast with me to the new Duke of Lycombe. And to Lucien, whose wedding we honor today, who will so ably remain heir until we all attend another wedding two decades or so from now.” More laughter. The clinking of crystal.
Luc didn’t care. Arabella was nowhere to be seen. The malicious gossip circulating throughout the party must have reached her.
He lifted his glass, accepted the sympathetic nods of his actual friends, and bowed. Then everyone began talking. He set down the champagne and wove his way through the guests, searching, his limited field of vision never more frustrating.
She might be devastated.
No
. Not his sharp-tongued little governess. She would be more likely to throw the incivility back in a gossip’s face than accept an outright lie spoken about her.
He knew it was a lie. Rational thought fled when he was with her, but he knew her all the same.
“Looking for your stunning bride, Westfall?” A shipmaster he’d known during the war stepped into his path. “P’raps she’s flown the coop now that she’s heard she’s not to be a duchess after all, hm? Poor sod, losing your title and wife on the same day.” He laughed and clapped Luc on the back. He was drunk. Luc saw it in his reddened eyes. He was roasting him. All in fun. Tasteless and callous, but innocently so.
But accurate?
Aloof. Evasive. Unavailable. She had been all of these since coming to town. And before that . . . In France she had tried to escape him.
He could not believe it
. She must know that wherever she ran, despite his blindness he would find her.
G
IVEN HER RAW
nerves, it was with considerable energy that Arabella descended from the carriage before the Bishop of Barris’s modest house on the edge of Richmond. It sat alone at the back of an extensive park far from the main road and another quarter mile from the next house, which seemed to be a school of some sort. The river came close behind the house, offering a natural border at the property’s rear.
Buoyed by determination, she went toward the door. “I should not be too long, Joseph. An hour, I suspect.”
“I’d like to come in there with you, milady.”
“No. This is an errand of extraordinary delicacy. If you come in with all your imposing size and glower, it will alarm the bishop’s staff.”
His brow descended over his serious eyes.
“Wait here in the carriage for me. The
comte
would be perfectly happy with you if he knew of it.” The
comte
would turn Joseph off if he knew of it, then throttle her soundly. Verbally, of course. He had never touched her violently, not even roughly when she had not begged for it.
With heat high in her cheeks, she went toward the door, tugging her cloak about her shoulders. She had not paused to change from her wedding gown; she wasn’t quite ready to discard it yet. She wanted Luc to remove it, slowly, on their wedding night. Rather, tonight. The church ceremony was supposed to have taken place an hour earlier, and she had not been present. So tonight would not be his wedding night either.
But they could pretend it was . . . if he ever spoke to her again after being abandoned at the altar just when he learned he would not be the duke.
What had she done?
But the tenant families must not continue to suffer. The bishop was now trustee to the little duke and in control of Combe. She wouldn’t have this chance again.
She banged the plain brass knocker. Despite the bishop’s elegant dress, his house lacked ostentation. An elderly thin woman in gray muslin opened the door.
“Inform his excellency that Mrs. Bradford is calling.”
“His excellency’s not in. You’ll have to come back later.” The woman made to shut the door. Arabella stopped it with her hand.
“I shan’t mind waiting.” She slipped through into the whitewashed foyer.
The housekeeper gave Arabella’s fine gown and cloak and the ruby and gold earrings peeking out from her hair a perusal. Then she gestured her toward a door. “You can wait in here, mum,” she said, opening it to a parlor. “I’ve no idea when he’ll return. His nephew’s getting married today in town.”
“Yes.” Arabella ran a fingertip along an unadorned table in the center of the room. “I think I had heard that. I shall read while I wait. What a marvelous collection of books.”
“I don’t know, mum. Not a reader myself. Will you have some tea?”
“Oh, you’re very kind. No thank you.”
The housekeeper nodded and closed the door behind her.
Arabella sprang up and went to the door. But there was no key in the lock. She searched about the room for a drawer that might hold a key, but the only furniture were the bookcase, table, and three straight-backed chairs upholstered in faded red velvet. If the bishop was siphoning money off Combe’s tenant farmers, he certainly wasn’t using it on his house.
She peered between books. It seemed the most obvious place to hide precious papers. She found nothing except dozens of tomes on religious matters marked with endless margin notes taken in an exceedingly neat hand.
She looked behind the two pictures hanging on the walls.
Nothing. But she had never imagined the parlor would offer up treasures anyway.
She opened the door as though she wished to recall the housekeeper then stood very still, listening. No footsteps sounded anywhere. The house was quiet.
Removing her shoes, she shut the door behind her. At least the hinges were well oiled. On silent feet she padded to the next door and went completely motionless again. No sound came from within. There was nothing like creeping around someone’s house in one’s stocking feet to rouse suspicion; in the event that the room was in fact occupied, she donned her shoes again.
It was a dining chamber, immaculately clean like the foyer and parlor, but likewise small and plain, without even a closed sideboard in which to hide a chamber pot.
Useless
. And her nerves were a quivering shambles. Skulking around had never been her forte. She preferred to meet matters head on.
Except lately. Since reading Luc’s secretary’s letters she had been in hiding, running away from what he might tell her if she allowed him opportunity.
No more
. When this unwise adventure was over and she returned to London, she would beg his forgiveness and finally tell him everything.
Slipping off her shoes again, she backed out of the dining chamber and shut the door, this time with a creak in the hinge, quiet as a mouse’s squeak but it may as well be a gong banging in the silent house. She flinched and listened.
Thirty seconds became a minute. Nothing stirred. The housekeeper must have fallen asleep somewhere.
She crept toward the stair, praying they were as uncompromising as the rest of the bishop’s home. Her prayers were answered: the steps did not squeak. She mounted the landing and pressed her ear against the first door. No sound. She put her shoes on yet again and opened the panel.
Success.
She slipped into the bishop’s study and left her shoes at the door. The floors were plain wooden boards covered with an equally plain red carpet that masked the sound of her steps. A massive desk occupied at least half of the chamber. The only objects atop it were an inkwell, pen and blotter, and a single sheet of blank paper. The was another bookcase like those in the parlor, a small table, and two straight-backed chairs. The only object to disturb the drabness was a picture on the wall of an impressively austere building set on a broad park. The caption read:
W
HITECHAPEL
S
CHOOL
R
EADING,
B
RITAIN
E
ST. 1814
The curtains were partially drawn, the afternoon sun slanting directly into the chamber. Anyone outside would see only reflection from the pane.
She went around the desk and tried the center drawer. It opened smoothly. Within, she saw a stack of plain stationery, a letter opener shaped like a long, slender cross, a knife to sharpen pens, and a small pistol. Without pause, she grabbed up the knife and pistol and dropped them into her cloak pocket.
The drawers to either side of the chair were locked fast.
Of course they were
. Without locks on the doors the bishop must have some way of keeping his private matters private from prying servants. She reached up under the center drawer, her fingers searching for a hidden key but without hope of finding one. She pushed her arm deeper into the back of the drawer and her fingertips brushed metal. She drew forth a key.
The bishop was an odd man indeed. Or he had the dullest, least curious servants in England. Or servants with very short arms.
The key opened the drawers to either side easily. Her fingers sped through files as her frustration mounted. Nothing looked especially odd; it was all correspondence to church officials and records of the Whitechapel School. She had no idea what she was looking for. She had been phenomenally foolish to do this. She’d left Luc standing at the altar and would have nothing to show for it but a furious husband who had just lost his dukedom to a bastard child.
She slid the drawers shut and replaced the key in its hiding spot. Then she took a deep breath. It would be the worst sort of weakness to admit defeat so easily.
Nothing stirred in the corridor so she repeated her earlier stealth and went to the next door. It was a bedchamber, this time with a lock on the door, and sparsely furnished but not currently occupied; the surfaces were bare of personal belongings, and the small bed was not made up. The next was another bedchamber, also with a lock and likewise empty.
The third bedchamber included a shaving stand, clothes press, and dressing mannequin garbed in a complete set of richly brocaded, embroidered clerical robes. Their opulence was at thorough odds with the rest of the house. Arabella had been imagining the Bishop of Barris and Reverend Caulfield like two peas in a pod. This dashed that notion from her head. The Reverend could sermonize for a month of Sundays on the sinful excess of these robes alone.
She stood in the middle of the bishop’s bedchamber, arms folded, and thought about all the lectures on vanity that her adoptive father had given her over the years. A man who exalted personal appearance but who seemed to care nothing for domestic luxury . . . What had the Reverend always said about her vanity and pride? That she could hide her hair and pretty face, but beneath them would be the same sinful girl?
She dropped to her knees on the polished floor and looked under the bed.
It seemed too simple; like the key in the desk drawer, beneath the bed was a cedar chest. She pulled it forth, cringing at the scraping sound across the floor, and opened it.
Her shoulders dropped. More papers on Whitechapel School. Exhaling tightly, she flipped through them.
Her fingers stalled.
Last names of Combe’s tenant farmers with pound figures beside them covered one sheet, including first names, all male, certainly the heads of the households from which he was extorting their income.
She frowned. Mr. Goode’s name was Thatcher. But the name beside Goode on this list was Edward. She closed her eyes, picturing Mrs. Goode’s kitchen on her second visit to the farm, the chipped teapot, the plate of tasteless biscuits, and the smiles of the Goodes’ three sons when Arabella gave them the sweets. John, Michael, and the youngest Teddy, named after his grandfather, Edward.
“Well, well. A lady in the bishop’s bedchamber. Never thought I’d see the day.”
Arabella’s head snapped up.
The man standing in the doorway was large, thick in the chest, and somewhat heavy in the belly where the fabric of his waistcoat strained, with squinting eyes and slick, well-combed hair. With the two first fingers of his left hand he wiggled a toothpick between his lips; the thumb on that hand was missing.
Arabella released the papers, stood and brushed imaginary dust off her skirt. Her shoes dangled from her other hand. “This is not as you imagine it, sir.”
His lips pinched around the toothpick and he nodded thoughtfully. “Actually, I ’spect it’s exactly as I imagine it,” he said with an unhurried grin, “
comtesse.
”
T
HE
A
RCHBISHOP OF
Canterbury gestured Luc to collect his lady and hasten to the church for the ceremony. Luc could not, however, tell him that his lady was nowhere to be found; it would expose her to yet more gossip.
Fletcher stood beneath the wedding canopy like a bridegroom, serenely accepting congratulations as though he were head of the family, and in no apparent hurry to shorten this moment of glory. Far to portside, Arabella’s sisters huddled close together, removed from the other guests. Ravenna cast Luc a quick glance then turned away abruptly.
Heart in his throat, he started toward her.
Christos stepped in his way. “
La jolie brune
had nothing to do with it.
Eh bien
, very little.”
“Nothing to do with what? Where is my wife, Christos?”
Christos turned about and headed toward the companionway. Servants rushed up the steps bearing trays laden with delicacies. He made way for them then hurried down. Luc followed along the low deck lined with cannons.
“Why the devil can’t I find my wife?” he demanded when his brother finally led him into the captain’s quarters. “And what the devil do you have to do with it?”
His brother peered at him intently. “Do you not know, then? Of the birth of the boy of our aunt?”
“Of course I know.”
“And you have no unhappiness with it?”
“Of course I have unhappi— Of course I’m unhappy about it. And disappointed. But I am rather more concerned with how Arabella has taken the news.”