The Secret Pearl (17 page)

No, she would not have known.

For some reason that she could not begin to explain to herself, she felt like crying.

“My pre-Waterloo days,” he said. “When I thought the world my oyster with a priceless pearl within. I suppose we all believe that when we are very young. Did you?”

“No,” she said. And yet there had been Daniel and her love for him and his for her and the prospect of an endless future in which she would be wanted, in which she would feel needed. “Oh, perhaps once, a long time ago.” Was it only a few months? Not a lifetime ago?

“You had a late night and have had a busy afternoon,” he said abruptly. “You will want to return to your room to rest for a while.”

He opened the door and allowed her to precede him into the great hall. But they arrived there at the exact moment when the front doors were being opened to admit a large number of the guests returning from their walk.

Fleur would have stepped back into the gallery, but his grace was in the doorway directly behind her.

“Ah, Ridgeway,” the voice of Sir Philip Shaw said, “and the delectable Miss Hamilton.”

“Ridgeway, you dark horse,” a jovial, florid-faced gentleman
said. “While the rest of us have been baking in the sun, you have been entertaining the governess indoors, where it is cool.”

“Sometimes,” Sir Hector Chesterton said, “I almost wish I had some daughters of my own.”

“May I present Miss Fleur Hamilton to those of you who did not make her acquaintance last evening?” his grace said, a hand at the small of her back. “Miss Hamilton is Pamela’s governess.”

“You are dismissed, Miss Hamilton. Tea in the saloon immediately, Jarvis.” The light, sweet voice was that of the duchess.

Fleur turned and fled without more ado and half-ran up the stairs and along the corridor to her room. How unspeakably embarrassing!

She stood at her open window, enjoying the breeze, unwilling to lie down despite her tiredness. Sleep would only bring the nightmares again.

Once he had been young and handsome and carefree. Once he had thought the world to be his oyster, life a priceless pearl. In his pre-Waterloo days, as he had described them. And yet he had spoken sadly, as if those dreams had proved to be empty, worthless ones. What could possibly make the Duke of Ridgeway less than satisfied with life? she wondered. He had everything.

She still felt like crying, she realized suddenly. Her throat and her chest were aching with a nameless something that made her feel indescribably sad.

“C
ONFOUND IT,” THE
D
UKE
of Ridgeway said, “I am not going to a royal banquet, Sidney.”

“I’ll be finished in a twinkling if you will just keep your chin from clacking,” his valet said, putting the finishing touches to
the folds of his master’s neckcloth. “You do have guests for dinner, after all, sir.”

“Damn your impudence,” his grace said. “Are you finished now?”

“And thankful to be, sir,” Sidney said. “I’ll take myself far away from your temper as soon as I have tidied up in here.”

“You wouldn’t have to be anywhere near it at all,” the duke said sharply, “if that shell had just bounced three inches closer to you at Waterloo.”

“That I wouldn’t, sir,” his valet agreed, turning away to tidy scattered garments and brushes. “But then, neither would you have had to dress for your guests if your shell had bounced half an inch closer to you.”

Sidney wisely ignored his master’s retort. His sensibilities had grown immune to far worse blasphemies and obscenities during his years with the British army.

His grace gazed irritably at his reflection and at the skillfully knotted neckcloth that he was about to display for the admiration of his wife’s guests. He hated to be a dandy at any time and in any place. But in his own home! And for two nights in a row. Last night’s ball had been enough formality to last him a month.

He had neglected the guests during the day. Most of them had not been up before noon, and he had made an excuse about business keeping him at home during the afternoon rather than join them on their walk. Confound it, he had a right to some privacy.

But they were his guests.

Of course, he owed something to Pamela too. She was a child and entitled to his time and company. He had been giving her both while Sybil was preoccupied with entertaining her guests and enjoying herself. At least, that was what he had told himself earlier.

He was going to have to stay away from her more often. Or else he was going to have to take her out more—it was high
time she learned to ride, though she had always shown a reluctance to do so.

What he was really going to have to do was stay away from the schoolroom. If he was strictly honest with himself, it was not just—or even mainly—Pamela who was drawing him there, or to the library at the crack of dawn each morning lest he be too late and miss her.

Sidney had commented only that morning, as the duke rose from bed, yawning after the late night, that he must be touched in the upper works to rise so early. Perhaps Sidney was right.

And he had woken up suddenly in the night and caught himself in the act of dreaming about waltzing on a deserted path with a woman whose eyes were tightly closed and whose fire-gold hair was loose and spread like a silken curtain over his arm.

It would not do. It just would not do. He should have had Houghton send her elsewhere. It had been madness to have her sent to Willoughby.

The door of his dressing room opened suddenly, without warning, and the duchess stood there, one hand still on it, looking lovely in pale pink lace and considerably younger than her twenty-six years.

“Oh,” she said sweetly, “are you still busy? Is it possible for Sidney to leave?”

The valet looked to his master with raised eyebrows, and the duke nodded.

“If you please, Sidney,” he said, rising to his feet. “What may I do for you, Sybil?”

She waited for the door to close. “I have never been so humiliated in my life,” she said, looking at him with large hurt eyes. “Adam, how can you do this to me, and in front of our guests, too?”

He looked steadily at her. “I gather you are referring to the incident with Miss Hamilton,” he said.

“Why did you bring her here?” she asked, clasping her slim white hands together at her bosom. “Was it to hurt me beyond endurance? I have never complained about your long absences in London, Adam. And I have always known why you must go there. I have borne the humiliation without reproach. But must I now endure having one of your doxies in this very house? And in close communication with my daughter? You ask too much of me. I cannot bear it.”

“It is a shame you have no audience beyond me,” he said, his eyes fixed on her. “Your words are very affecting, Sybil. One might almost believe that you cared. We were coming from the long gallery into the great hall. Does it not seem peculiar to you that we would have chosen such a very public setting for a clandestine rendezvous?”

“It pleases you to use sarcasm,” she said, “and to walk roughshod over my feelings. I suppose it will please you to lie too. Do you deny that you are having an affair with Miss Hamilton?”

“Yes,” he said. “But you have already labeled me a liar, Sybil, so your question was rather pointless, was it not? Would it be so surprising if I did take a mistress?”

“It is what I have learned to expect of you and to accept,” she said. “But though your love for me is dead, Adam, I thought there would have been some remnants of respect left for the fact that I am your wife.”

“Wife.” He laughed softly and took two steps toward her. “I would not need a mistress if I had a wife, Sybil. Perhaps you would like to protect your interests more actively.”

He set one hand beneath her chin and kissed her lips. But she turned her head sharply to one side.

“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t, please.”

“I didn’t think that idea would have much appeal to you,” he said. “Don’t worry, Sybil. I have never forced you and am unlikely to start doing so now.”

“I feel unwell,” she said. “I still have not recovered fully from that chill.”

“Yes,” he said, “I can see that you are right about that. And you have lost weight, have you not? Did your visit have any other purpose?”

“No,” she said, her light, sweet voice shaking. “But I know you are lying, Adam. I know you have been with Pamela’s governess. No matter how much you deny it, I know it is true.”

He had a sudden and unwelcome mental image of blood—on Fleur’s thighs and on the sheet where she had lain.

“It seems,” he said quietly, looking steadily at his wife, “that we are both ready to go to the drawing room to make ourselves agreeable to our guests. Shall we go together?” He extended an arm for her hand.

She laid a hand on his sleeve without gripping his arm at all, and walked beside him in silence. A small and fragile and beautiful woman who looked as innocent as a girl.

It was difficult sometimes, his grace thought, to accept the fact that this was his present and his future, the marriage he had dreamed of as a young man. Except that all the dreams were dead and there could never now be any others to take their place.

Just perhaps unwary dreams at night.

He thought again of Fleur, of his first sight of her standing quietly in the shadows outside the Drury Lane Theater, and of his unexpected need for her. The need to spend a night sheltered in the arms and body of a woman who would accept him without question. The need to sleep with his head pillowed on a woman’s breast. The need for some peace. The need to soothe his loneliness.

And he thought again of the blood and of her hand, which had been shaking so badly after he had violated her that he had had to hold it while putting the wet cloth in it. And of her hunger and the self-discipline that had held her back from wolfing down the food set before her. And of her humiliation
when he had set the coins in her hand, payment for services rendered.

He paused outside the doors into the drawing room while a footman opened them, and entered with his wife on his arm. He smiled and was aware of her bright glances for those of their guests already assembled there.

F
LEUR PRACTICED IN THE MUSIC
room in perfect privacy the following morning. The door between it and the library remained closed.

And she found herself more self-conscious than on any other morning. Was he there? Was he lurking behind the closed door, listening? Was he about to fling it open at any moment to criticize some error in her playing or to tell her that she was no longer welcome to use that room? Or was he not there at all? Was she indeed as alone as she seemed?

She could not concentrate on the pieces she was learning. She could not lose herself in the music she already knew and could play with her eyes closed. Her fingers were stiff and uncooperative.

She smiled at herself without amusement as she left the room five minutes before her hour was at an end. Could she relax more, knowing that he was close, than she could when he was absent—this dark, hawkish man who terrified her more than anyone she had ever known, even including Matthew, and whose physical closeness always made her want to turn and run in panic?

All morning as she taught Lady Pamela a variety of lessons, she listened for the sound of a firm tread outside the door and of the doorknob turning.

But they were left in peace. And peaceful the morning seemed, Lady Pamela unusually quiet and docile, until she suddenly snatched up the scissors without warning while they both embroidered and cut first the silk thread with which she
had been sewing and then the handkerchief itself with deliberate and vicious slices.

Fleur looked up in amazement, her own needle suspended in the air. She was in the middle of telling a story.

“She said I could go down,” Lady Pamela said. “She said! And he said some other time. He said he would remind her. He said it ages ago. I’ll never be let to go down. And I don’t care. I don’t want to go down.”

Fleur set her work quietly to one side and got to her feet.

“And now you will tell them that I have been bad,” the child said, making one more cut with the scissors, “and they will come to the nursery and scold me. Mama will cry because I have been bad. But I don’t care. I don’t care!”

Fleur took the scissors and the ruined handkerchief from the little hands and stooped down in front of the child.

“And it’s all your fault,” Lady Pamela said. “Mama said I was to go down, and you would not let me. I hate you, and I am going to tell Mama to send you away. I am going to tell Papa.”

Fleur gathered the child into her arms and held her tightly. But Lady Pamela flailed at her with one free arm and kicked at her with both feet. She broke into loud shrieks as Fleur scooped her up into her arms and sat in the window seat with her, cradling her, rocking her, crooning to her.

The door opened and Mrs. Clement came bustling in.

“What have you been doing to the poor child?” she said to Fleur, her eyes glinting. “What is it, poor lovey?”

She reached out her arms to take Lady Pamela. But the child shrieked louder and clung to Fleur, her face hidden against her bosom. Mrs. Clement disappeared again.

Lady Pamela was crying quietly when the door opened again several minutes later. The Duke of Ridgeway closed it quietly behind him and stood looking for a few moments. Fleur had one cheek resting against the top of the child’s head. She did not look up.

“What is happening?” he asked, advancing across the room. “Pamela?”

But she continued to cry quietly in Fleur’s arms.

“Miss Hamilton?”

She raised her head to look at him. “Broken promises,” she said quietly.

He stood there for a while longer and then slumped down onto the window seat beside them, half-turned to them, one of his knees brushing against Fleur’s. He reached out to run one finger along his daughter’s bare arm as it circled Fleur’s neck.

And Fleur looked at him to find him staring back bleakly, his scar starkly noticeable in the light from the window on his weary face. It was once a remarkably handsome face, she thought, remembering his portrait, despite the blackness of hair and eyes and the prominence of his nose—perhaps because of those features. But it still was handsome, the scar somehow enhancing rather than detracting from the strength of his features.