The Duke's Disaster (R) (24 page)

“This is…not how I thought you’d want to spend this hour.”

Perhaps Thea had expected Noah to make another round watering the bouquets.

“We have until tea,” he said, “and I have few worries. Quit stalling.”

“I am worried about this follower of Maryanne’s.”

That surprised Noah, because maids would have followers, the smart ones, anyway.

“Shall I forbid her to see him?” he asked. “I should think her spirits would be raised by the occasional flirtation.”

Thea rested her forehead against Noah’s chest, which let him continue his quest for the roughly four hundred pins in her hair.

“Erikson is right,” Thea murmured. “He says Maryanne is not attending to her charges as she should, and Davies says the man is wellborn. A wellborn man won’t marry a mere nursery maid, Noah.”

“We don’t know that,” Noah said. Wellborn could mean some squire’s son had taken an interest in her. “You aren’t primarily worried for Maryanne, are you? She’s a grown woman and knows what’s what.”

“Nobody knows what’s what when they become enamored of another.” Thea said this with some acerbity, and Noah wanted to ask who had taught her about infatuation and losing track of one’s common sense.

“You’re worried about the girls,” Noah said instead. “You’re worried this swain will spirit Maryanne off to holy matrimony, and while you’d be happy for the maid, you’d worry for the girls, who are attached to her.”

Noah had demolished Thea’s coiffure, so he started unraveling her braids.

“What you say is true, Noah. Maybe more true than I realized.”

The duchess had admitted her duke was right. Dukes didn’t gloat—out loud.

“Maryanne is a local girl,” Noah said. “She’ll want the banns cried and a fuss made and so forth. We’ll encourage her to remain at her post until the new governess is settled in, by which time one maid will suffice in any case.”

“How will we encourage her not to leave before then?”

Noah would simply order—

He was a
married
duke. He knew better now. “We’ll ensure her compliance with our preferred schedule through a wedding present, Wife, for Maryanne has no one to dower her. My turn to share a worry with you.”

Perhaps Noah’s imagination was overly optimistic, but against his chest, Thea felt more relaxed.

“Will this worry involve your manly whatevers?” she murmured.

“Alas for me, my manliness is fatigued by a host’s duties these days. This worry has to do with my duchess.”

“Her.”

And without planning to, Noah launched into a description of Harlan’s note. He left out mention of Eggerdon’s attempt to provoke Grantley, because that might be unrelated and truly the product of inebriated young manhood at its most stupid.

Or not.

“Who might wish to sully your reputation, Wife? Were other women pining for me of whom I took no notice?”

“Of course.” Thea was clearly worried all over again, which had not been Noah’s intent.

“I can hear you thinking.” Noah could, almost, hear Thea’s heart beating right next to his own.

“Three or four ladies cast Marliss envious looks,” Thea said, “and went off in corners to whisper and start spiteful rumors. I made sure Marliss’s mama knew about them, and the viscountess took countermeasures.”

Thea’s hair was the softest thing Noah had ever rubbed against his cheek. Softer than Sheba and more fragrant.

“The warfare of women never ceases to amaze me,” he said.

“Don’t discount it, Noah. I stumbled into the crosshairs of another lady’s companion, for what trespass I know not, and it led to my ruin.”

“Tell me.” More a request than an order, Noah assured himself. Besides, Thea was not ruined; she was the Duchess of Anselm.

The topic of her misfortune was a digression, but Noah needed to understand Thea’s past, and this way, this casual-aside way, was likely the only means he’d find of prying the truth from her.

“A woman, another companion, took me into dislike,” Thea said, drawing a pattern on Noah’s chest with her fingertip. “She convinced a gentleman to go to my room after everybody, including myself, had gone to sleep.”

“To commit rape on a whim?” Putting the question civilly when Noah wanted to commit multiple acts of violence took every scintilla of his self-restraint.

“The man wouldn’t have known I was unwilling,” Thea said. “This is conjecture on my part, and the other woman probably thought I’d merely create a mortifying scene, turning a man away from my door.”

Noah waited. There was more to the story, but would Thea entrust the whole of it to him?

“I wasn’t awake to create any sort of scene, and apparently no one saw him come to my room,” she said softly. “And for that I was thankful. I’d gone to bed with a headache, probably from too many glasses of wine punch, and when I couldn’t fall asleep, I took a few drops of laudanum. When I awoke, it was dark, and I did not grasp the situation quickly enough to prevent what happened. The man who came to my room treated me to glances of abject pity the next day when he acknowledged me at all.”

Noah held his wife in his arms, wanting to destroy those who had hurt her and wanting to protect her from all harm.

Also wanting to thank her for trusting him with this piece of a sordid and sad puzzle.

For long moments, he stroked his hands over Thea’s hair, her back, and shoulders. The breeze lifted the curtain, and a fat bumblebee landed on the windowsill.

“Now I have another worry.” Thea’s voice was calm, and that reassured Noah, but when he recalled the conclusions he’d jumped to on their wedding night, he knew the urge to do violence to himself.

“Tell me this worry, dear Wife, for I have title to it as well. This is nothing less than the law of the land.”

“I’m worried now, that my husband will think me stupid,” Thea said, “for not locking my door, not foreseeing my own ruin in another woman’s spite, for taking even a drop of laudanum in such circumstances or a single glass of wine. For not understanding what was happening until it was too late.”

Thea was weeping, but she’d been so stealthy about her tears, Noah knew she cried only because of the wetness on his chest.

“Your husband—” He had to start again, because something had caught in his throat. “Your husband thinks you were brave beyond telling to suffer this assault without doing violence to those who deserved your wrath. He thinks you might have lost your reason, were you a weaker person, and gone into a protracted decline. He holds your resilience, your wits, and your fortitude in highest esteem, Araminthea, and he vows to never allow another to harm you thus.
Never.
”

The tears came more freely then, until Thea was boneless and spent on Noah’s chest. He’d passed her a handkerchief at some point, and she’d fallen asleep with it still tucked in her fist. Carefully, he extracted the white linen from her grip and dabbed at his own cheeks.

When Thea rose some time later, she offered Noah a tentative smile, and he kissed her nose. After they’d helped each other dress, they went down to tea, hand in hand.

* * *

“Now you’re
not
going north?” Giles Pemberton’s handsome features showed confusion and irritation by the light of the rising moon.

“Now I can’t go north,” Meech said. “Things are becoming too complicated.”

“You’re making them too complicated.”

“Walk with me, Giles.”

They moved off, through the flowers and moon shadows of Meech’s back garden, and away from the ears and eyes of servants.

“All those years ago,” Meech said, “when there was that awful little contretemps at Amberson’s house party, people took note.”

“There was nothing to take note of,” Pemberton said, sinking down onto a bench. “Just the usual nonsense and the usual gossip.”

How easily Pemmie ignored looming tragedy. How did he think Meech afforded this lovely house, and the servants who tended the garden?

“People saw Joanna Newcomer damn near plant me a facer in the conservatory,” Meech said, taking the place next to Pemberton. “Annabelle Handley wasn’t much more subtle.”

The help would have gossiped too, all the maids, companions, footmen, and valets. The help always gossiped and was occasionally paid to gossip in the right ears. Then, too, the Carter woman had created far more mischief than even she could have foreseen, and she was still very much in the pockets—or beds—of several notorious club gossips.

Pemberton snapped off a late rose and tucked it into his lapel. “So we can admit to staring down somebody’s bodice a little too long, or flirting too obviously with somebody’s wife. Typical harmless nonsense. No one should think anything of it.”

Meech was not a violent man—though he’d been a violent young man. Right now, he wanted to plant Pemmie the facer Joanna Newcomer had denied herself.

“Nothing of any moment—until Noah is issuing challenges at twenty paces,” Meech said. “Then nobody will forget we left the party a week early, nor will they forget who was companion to Besom and Bosom all those summers ago.”

The barest zephyr of gossip had come to Meech. On the winds of malice, that breeze, particularly when it wafted near the duchess’s own brother, could blow a spark of bad fortune into a conflagration of scandal.

“If the duchess has any sense, she’ll let sleeping dogs lie,” Pemberton said. “They’ve been married for weeks, and we’ve yet to recruit seconds.”

“Giles…” Meech scrubbed a hand over his face and thought of Janine and Evelyn, whose ponies Meech would likely never admire. “You know how much your company means to me.”

Pemberton was off the bench, hands jammed in his pockets. “You’ll turn up sentimental after all these years, Meecham?”

“Some things need to be said.” Meech rose as well. “There needs to be a journey north, and perhaps even to the Continent, but first I should explain the situation to my nephew.”

“Meech, you insist on making issues where there are none,” Pemberton said. But his gaze slid away, like the small creatures who kept to the moon shadows.

“What do you know, Giles?” Meech crossed the walkway to stop Pemmie from sidling off to the mews. “You know something, and you’re being reticent, and I would allow you your privacy, but my situation is in enough jeopardy as it is. I depend on my nephew for every last groat, which means you benefit from his generosity too.”

“It’s nothing,” Pemberton said, turning away. “Nothing of any import whatsoever.”

Meech resumed his seat on the bench, for he had the sense that his knees might turn up unreliable in the immediate future.

“No more posturing, Pemmie. Out with it, and we’ll deal with it, the same as we’ve dealt with everything.”

But as Pemberton gradually admitted what he’d overheard, Meech knew this situation was one they wouldn’t deal with easily.

Twenty-three

“We’ll practice then,” Noah said, nuzzling his wife’s neck. “I recall leading you out at Moreland’s ball when I was squiring Marliss about. You’re a fine dancer.”

“That was an allemande,” Thea wailed, pulling from his embrace. “A slow, stately old dance my grandmother would have managed, particularly with you as her partner.”

“I know you can waltz, Thea.” Noah regarded her in puzzlement, because the more she told him of her past, the more successfully her little family gathering proceeded, the more nervous she became.

And the less interested in him, even when, as now, they shared the privacy of Thea’s former bedroom.

“So waltz with me now,” Noah said, holding out his hand. “We have only to start the dancing, and participate in the supper waltz. We’ll be forgiven for sitting out the rest of the evening, because we’re host and hostess.”

“We haven’t music.”

“We’ll have James play for us.”

The look Thea gave Noah was for a very foolish duke, or a husband whose cajolery was falling utterly flat.

“James is with his wife, Noah. You can’t interrupt their rest.”

“You are being very contrary, my dear.”

Her shoulders slumped, and Noah knew profound relief. They hadn’t had a real row yet, and he didn’t want one now, not with family lurking in every corner, and Thea feeling exhausted and uncertain.

She seemed to want a fight, though.

Noah stored that insight away in some new, husbandly part of his brain, and went to Thea’s music box, the sole remaining evidence that she’d ever inhabited the room.

“Just a few turns around the room,” he said. “Then we can find our bed and settle our nerves. How would that be?” He wound the mechanism rather than see her fret over even this, but something about the action of the little screw wasn’t right.

“What ails this thing?” He opened the lid to see…nothing. The entire guts of the music box were missing, simply not there.

“What is it?” Thea came over to peer at her music box. “It’s…empty?”

“So it is.”

“Who would do this?” Thea backed away, as if Noah held a rocket with a lit fuse. “Who would destroy my only keepsake?”

“It might be a prank,” Noah said, but he felt as if his own vitals were missing as he stared at the pretty, empty box. “One of the maids might have broken it and hoped you didn’t notice for some time.”

“Somebody had to be in here,” Thea said, looking around her sitting room. “Somebody came in here and broke it. The mechanism was screwed to the box, Noah. This was deliberate.”

Noah examined the maple wood box, particularly the underside, and saw tiny scorings, where somebody had inexpertly loosened the screws that held the mechanism in place.

“From now on,” Noah said, “I want you to avoid this room unless I’m with you, or someone from the family.”

“Because you don’t think I’m safe here,” Thea concluded. She crossed back to him, took the empty music box from him, and slipped an arm around his waist. “We’ll say nothing about this.”

“I do think you’re safe,” Noah replied, “because a clumsy housemaid is hardly a threat, but your approach is probably wisest. We’ll watch for whoever seems intent on catching our reaction.”

“Just so,” Thea said, resting against him. When Noah had anticipated she’d fly to pieces over a waltz, she’d marshaled her nerves to deal with what was possibly a real threat.

She’d also come to Noah and sought his embrace of her own volition, which almost made the vandalism of the music box worthwhile.

Thea pulled back, her expression considering. “I don’t suppose you’re interested in having a lie down now?”

“Well, in truth…” Noah was interested in having a lie down with his wife, any damned minute of the day or night.

“Perhaps we might take your mind off this disconcerting development by getting out your bullwhip?” Thea asked.

“My bullwhip?” Peculiar images began to percolate through Noah’s male imagination.

“You’ll feel fewer of those husbandly insecurities if I have some rudimentary grasp of how one wields such a thing,” Thea said, patting his lapel. “It’s a pleasant enough afternoon, and we have no other duties at the moment. What better use could there be of our time?”

A duke went graciously to his fate. “None at all, my dear.”

For the next hour, Noah used his whip-wielding stout right arm to demolish bushes, shrubs, and small tree limbs, and to show his wife how to do likewise, all in aid of marital bliss.

* * *

Between Noah’s moods, sheer fatigue, ghosts rising from house parties past, and the strain of being constantly around family, Thea was losing her mind.

And possibly her husband. Noah hadn’t initiated intimacies in days, and when Thea had thought he’d been about to, he’d lain beside her and started prying all manner of secrets from her instead.

Trading worries.
Hah.

Tomorrow’s ball was a worry. Every neighbor and acquaintance from the entire shire would be in attendance to inspect the new Duchess of Anselm. A country ball was a huge undertaking, particularly so far from Town, where everything from ice to flowers was in shorter supply and had to be brought out from Town by wagon.

And now this—rain, which Noah said the corn would appreciate, but if it didn’t stop soon, the roads wouldn’t dry, even by tomorrow evening. That frustration was enough to make a woman pitch her dagger into the portraits surrounding her.

And why not?

Oh, not at the portraits, but the gallery was enormous, the light adequate, and just perhaps…

“Here you are.” Patience stood in the high doorway to the long gallery, looking like she’d found the prize at a royal scavenger hunt. “Noah said you usually practice with your knife before tea. How enterprising of you. May I see this knife?”

“I usually practice behind the stables,” Thea said, turning to hike her skirt and untie the dagger and its sheath. “Be careful—it’s very sharp.”

Noah kept the blade sharp for her, the sight of it in his hands as he slowly drew it along a whetstone having a curious impact on Thea’s wits.

Patience took the dagger from its leather casing. “Where did you find such a thing, and how did you learn to use it?”

“Noah found it for me and showed me how to use it. I think he might have had it made for me.” On one of his trips to Town, while Thea had mentally accused him of disporting with mistresses.

Patience traced the dragon inlay on the handle. “I am impressed. You practice with it daily?”

“I try to.” Thea accepted her weapon back and retied the sheath at her knee.

Patience made a face, for an instant resembling Nini. “As little attention as my husband spares me these days, I might spend some time practicing with a weapon.”

“James doesn’t seem the negligent sort,” Thea said, letting herself be guided into strolling arm in arm past the ancestors. “James seems like a wonderful husband, in fact.”

“Oh, he is.” Patience’s smile became a smirk. “But James has his ways. For example, he distracts me in the morning, so it gets ‘too late to ride in the heat.’ He asks me to try this or that tidbit from his plate, for ‘he can’t possibly finish all this.’ He’s a very managing man, but it works out, because I am a very managing lady. Just as she was.”

They stopped before a portrait of a panniered and bejeweled Elizabethan woman, one of the previous ladies Anselm, and Patience began to offer a family history. The entire line had been lusty, naughty, and canny as hell, apparently, for despite occasionally backing the wrong royal faction, the Anselm earldom and then dukedom—they’d backed the right faction that time around—had more or less prospered for centuries.

“But many of the more modern exponents are in here.” Patience opened a door all but hidden in the oak paneling, and ushered Thea into a small side gallery.

“I never knew this was here,” Thea said, though clearly, the servants kept the tall windows clean and the room free of dust. The sconces had been lit, as if the staff knew family might want to pay a call on this less public collection.

“These are the most recent additions to the family tree,” Patience said, stopping before a portrait of three young men, all handsome, two dark, one blond, and all sporting dashing smiles and the exquisite, colorful tailoring of the previous century.

“They look like Harlan and Noah,” Thea observed, focusing on the darker men. “Though Noah’s and Harlan’s looks are more refined.”

“You think Noah’s appearance refined?”

“Compared to these three,” Thea said, but then she inspected the third man in the portrait, the blond, and her insides went abruptly queasy.

“These three are the previous generation,” Patience said. “The former Duke of Anselm on the right, Noah’s father, who was duke only briefly before his death, and Lord Earnest Meecham Winters Dunholm, known to one and all as Meech. This was probably done right before Meech married the lady who appended her name to his.”

“Meech?” Thea’s ears were roaring, her own voice sounding far, far away.

Meech? This was Uncle Meech?

She stared hard at the portrait, hoping she’d find some detail of eye color, a birthmark, a quirk of the lips, anything to suggest she was wrong. But no, this was the same man, the one who’d offered her pitying expressions over breakfast, and fine manners—when anybody was looking on. He’d flirted with her shamefully—she’d thought nothing of it at the time—and then he’d disported with her more shamefully still.

“Thea, are you well?”

“A little light-headed for skimping at luncheon,” Thea said, easing her grip on Patience’s arm. “Shall we move on?”

“Let’s. We can order an early tea. I always seem to be hungry these days.”

They ambled to the door, spending a particularly long time before a portrait done as Noah had approached his majority. His sisters were still girls, and Harlan a babe in his brother’s arms. Noah might have been a particularly youthful papa with his brood around him, except for the absence of a wife.

“He did very well, I think,” Patience said, studying the portrait. “I never felt deprived of both mother and father, not in any real sense. Noah was there, and he found us the best tutors and governesses, and kept a close eye on all of us.”

“You’re saying he’ll make a conscientious papa?”

“I’m saying he’s a good man. Let’s find that tea.”

Thea went along, but in her head, she was standing before the portrait of Lord Earnest Dunholm, a man she’d never wanted to see again, never wanted to hear of again, and God help her, he was now dear old Uncle Meech.

Noah was not the sort of duke to believe in chance, fate, and vile coincidences. His world was an orderly, rational place, unlike Thea’s.

Noah would have every reason to think Thea had known that the charming, blond Earnest Dunholm was in fact a male of the Winters line. Most daughters of earls knew
Debrett’s
page by page, but then most daughters of earls were focused on making a fine match, while Thea hadn’t had that luxury.

Noah could easily believe she’d kept her connection with his uncle secret, and Thea wouldn’t blame her husband for his mistrust. Still, had Thea’s dagger been plunged into her own heart, it could not have brought any more pain than she already felt.

* * *

“You women have all day to visit and plot and sneak off to the parlors together, and then after dinner, it’s more of the same,” Noah grumbled to his wife. “I thought the ladies would never turn you loose.”

Thea looked positively peaked, and all the lascivious, husbandly thoughts Noah had been harboring went scampering off to some mental parlor of their own, there to plague him all the worse for being banished yet again.

“Your sisters haven’t had a family ball before,” Thea said. “They each had their come-outs and engagements and so forth, but not a ball for family. They’re very excited.”

“While you just want it over with?” Noah came up behind Thea as she stood at their bedroom window and began taking pins from her hair. He’d be a properly credentialed lady’s maid soon, at the rate his marriage was going. “What can you possibly see on such a dreary, damp night?”

“The moon’s up,” Thea said. “The sky is clearing off, and the roads will have a day to dry out.”

Noah put his stash of pins on the vanity and came back to stand behind Thea, slipping his arms around her waist.

“I appreciate that you’ve orchestrated our first family gathering in years, Thea.” He squeezed her shoulders gently, for a great weight rested upon them. “You’re unhappy, Wife, and I know not how to repair it.”

“I’m preoccupied,” she said, turning and sliding her arms around him. “Hold me.”

“With pleasure.”

Except, hell and damnation, Thea must have really meant she wanted mere holding, because she tucked in close and held Noah for so long he was almost sure she was crying again.

“Wife? Shall you plead an indisposition tomorrow? The Furies would take over, I’m sure.”

Thea shook her head and gripped Noah more tightly.

“You’re tired,” he said, hoping that was a safe bet. “Let’s get you into bed and off your feet.”

Even more alarming than Thea’s fatigue was her docility. She let Noah take down her hair without even once treating him to that brisk visual inspection that had him on mental alert. She stood still while he divested her of every stitch, stood even more still while he used the wash water on her, a liberty he hadn’t taken previously. When he deposited her on the bed, she rolled to her side and merely watched as he went through his own nighttime routine.

“You must be exhausted,” Noah said, climbing into bed. He pulled Thea into the curve of his body. “Wife, some fool forgot to put you into a nightgown.”

“Not a fool.” Thea angled a leg up over Noah’s hip and an arm over his shoulders. “My dearest husband.”

Dearest?

Noah began to count days and weeks, because such excesses of sentiment from his duchess might suggest she was breeding already. That ought to please him—it did please him, vain, shallow, insecure ducal beast that he was—but it didn’t seem to be pleasing Thea, and that…

Noah made love to her, slowly, tenderly, without regard for her exhaustion or her odd bout of quiet, and to his endless relief, Thea made love to him too. She met him caress for caress, sigh for sigh, pleasure for pleasure.