Chapter Twenty
A
nother day and night and another day passed before Bonny was to see her husband again, and by then he suffered from the effects of heavy drinking. She had taken another solitary dinner and retired with her needlework to the drawing room, when she heard Mandley talking with Radcliff in the outer hall. By the time she put up her sewing and left the drawing room, Radcliff was no longer there. She walked down the hall, opened the door to his library and was taken aback at the sight of her husband.
He sat before his desk. which bore a single candle and a full bottle of Malmsey. His cravat hung loose, his hair was disheveled, and the heavy growth on his face indicated he had not shaved since she last saw him.
“Are you all right, Richard?” Bonny questioned, worry in her voice.
He glared at her. “Actually, my dear, I am not well. In addition to feeling wretched, I find my life very repetitive.”
She strolled into the room and sat in a wing chair near his desk. “I am not surprised you find it so. One would expect as much from the hollow existence you’ve led these past fifteen years.”
“You sound like a cleric’s daughter, my dear.”
“Not a nagging wife?”
“That, too,” he said.
“A wife would be expected to show concern when her husband continues to live as he had before his marriage,” Bonny replied.
Radcliff lifted the full bottle to his lips and drank. “It’s a worthless existence I’ve led. If I died tomorrow, there would be nothing to show for my life. Not even an heir.”
“I hope you do not fault me for that.”
He shook his head. “No, I cannot fault you. You have never refused me, my dear.” His cold tone did nothing to assure her.
“Why do you speak so maudlin, Richard?”
“Think on it. What would be left of me if I died? At least my ancestors built grand houses that will stand for centuries. They fought valiant battles for the kingdom. They left heirs.” He took another drink. “I have a very strong longing to fight on the Peninsula. Nothing could be more noble than to die for England.”
Bonny caught her breath, her insides flinching at the grief caused by his words. “I pray you will say no more.”
His glassy eyes met hers. “Would it bother you if I died, Barbara?”
“It does not bear thinking of. It is far too painful.”
“But you would be the richest woman in the kingdom.”
“You think I care about that?”
He shook his head sadly. “No. I cannot say that I do. I don’t think you are interested in wealth and title. I have often wondered, my dear, just why you married me. I suspect it was to please your mother.”
Her heart pounded. “Did it never occur to you that I might be in love with you?” She had not wanted to force her love on him, but she’d been unable to hold back the words.
“Only when you are in my arms. Then, I must admit. your ardor is most pronounced.”
Bonny colored. “You underestimate your charms outside the bedchamber.”
He laughed a mirthless laugh. “Barbara, my love, you must remove yourself from this room. I have papers that demand my attention, and it is much too difficult to look upon your face and not want to seduce you beneath this very desk.”
“I grow very tired of your homage to my face. I am a real woman with real feelings, Richard.” With a defiant tilt of her chin and a scolding tone, she added, “I think all you wanted in a wife was a beautiful woman to display, and because I am in mourning and you cannot trot me out like one of your prize horses, you have no desire for my company .”
“I do greatly look forward to the day I can present you to all of London.”
That he did not deny marrying her for her beauty hurt her more than all the lonely nights she had lain in her empty bed and imagined him in the arms of other women, but she could not allow him to know how deeply he wounded her. “Perhaps you could present me at a small dinner party. Twigs wishes to leave Radcliff House, and I believe we should host a farewell dinner for him.”
“Whatever you wish, just do not ask Dunsford,” he warned in a menacing voice, his eyes scowling.
“Had I known how strongly you dislike him, I should never have asked him, though I do not understand why you detest him so. He seems a most amiable man. I hoped that Emily might look upon him with something more than friendship.”
Radcliff gave his wife a puzzled glance, then opened his drawer and took out some papers, which he began to read. “Pray, leave the room, Barbara. You distract me much too much.”
Evans dragged the sharpened razor across the heavy stubble on Radcliff’s cheek. “It is to be hoped no one of consequence has seen your grace today in such deplorable condition. Had you only sent for me, I should have been most happy to have brought you around a fresh change of clothes and seen to your appearance.”
“I fear I slept too bloody damned late, Evans. It was after dawn before we got to bed.”
“I must say I am happy you still see your old friends. A fun-loving lot they are, your grace.”
Radcliff thought of his father and how he would have viewed those fun-loving friends and disapproved of his son’s rakish behavior. No man had ever been nobler than the fourth duke. Nor had Radcliff ever known a happier man. “Still carrying on as we did when we came from Oxford.”
A rather pleasant grin flashed across Evans’s normally placid features. “Oh, yes, indeed, your grace.” He stood back and surveyed his master’s smooth face. “Now you will look proper for your dinner party tonight.”
“Has the duchess been worried that I may not show?”
“Not five minutes could go by that she did not scurry from her chamber, inquiring if you had come.”
“I do not understand why my wife does not scream and cry or come flying at me with a dagger over my lamentable conduct.”
“She knows her place. You are the master.”
“Her place?” Radcliff screwed up his face. “By God, man, she’s my wife. You are speaking of the Duchess of Radcliff. She has as much right to be here as I do.”
With his mouth in a straight line, Evans moved to take up the suit of clothing his master would wear to the dinner party, which was due to begin in half an hour. After he assisted Radcliff in getting dressed, Evans was dismissed.
Radcliff entered his wife’s chamber through the adjacent dressing room. His breath caught at the sight of her sitting before her dressing table. She wore a low-cut black crepe gown, a black plume in her hair.
After Marie left, Bonny turned to stare at her husband. “I feared you had forgotten about tonight.”
He walked up and kissed her forehead. “You can depend upon me, Barbara.”
Her simmering eyes met his. “Can I?”
Radcliff’s finger trailed over his wife’s ivory shoulders and along the length of her neck. “I should like my friends to see you in the Radcliff Jewels tonight, my love. I want them all to know you are mine.”
Bonny’s face went white. Averting her gaze from his, she said, “I...I cannot find them, Richard.” She burst out crying.
“You cannot find them?” he said angrily.
“I...I opened my drawer to look at them—” she stopped, her voice breaking “—and they were gone.” Her hands covered her face as she continued crying.
“What do you mean, ‘they were gone’? You believe someone stole them?”
She nodded.
“Where were they?”
“I kept them in the drawer.”
Radcliff began to open all the drawers. After finding nothing that resembled the Radcliff Jewels, he gave Bonny a cold stare, his face reddening. “No one will ever get away with stealing from the House of Radcliff.” His cold eyes traveled over her. “Get control of yourself,” he said sternly. “You cannot greet our guests looking like a watering pot.”
“Oh, Richard, I’m so dreadfully sorry. You’d have been better off had you never married me.”
He did not respond.
Dinner was a disaster. Bonny’s plans to display her husband in a happy domestic setting to his friends blew up in her face. No one could have looked more brooding than Radcliff did throughout dinner. He barely said two words. And every time one of the footmen passed his chair with a bottle of wine, he demanded another glass. By the time the men retired to Radcliff s billiard room, he was well on his way to a thorough foxing.
At least the ladies’ assemblage in the salon lacked the awkwardness of her last dinner party with the unwanted Lady Lynda Heffington, Bonny thought, still holding back tears.
Why had Richard been so dreadfully inhospitable? And the way he had looked at her! As if he could wring her neck. His wicked friends were sure to be more desirous than ever of removing him from so wretched a household.
As the finely dressed women sat around on silken sofas discussing delicate topics, Lady Landis directed her gaze at Bonny. “I must say, marriage does not seem to agree with either you or your husband, Barbara.”
Bonny, jolted from her reverie, shot a puzzled glance at her aunt.
Lady Landis’s eyes danced. “Why, you’re getting as thin as a poker.”
Her aunt was sharper than Bonny had given her credit for. Not even Marie had noticed how Bonny’s gown had begun to hang on her thinning frame. Ever since this estrangement from her husband, Bonny had lost interest in eating, to the degree that she sometimes felt physically ill at the sight of food. “It is probably just your imagination, Aunt.”
“Bonny looks perfectly beautiful to me,” Emily said.
To which Mrs. Miller and Cressida readily agreed.
Bonny, sitting next to her cousin, placed her hand over Emily’s. “You never can see any fault with me.”
“I suppose I am very loyal to those I care about,” Emily whispered. “Even if you haven’t been to see me of late.”
“I’m sorry, Em. I have been feeling wretched lately.” Her face brightened. “I did come to see you twice, though, and both times you were riding in the park with Lord Dunsford .”
“I...I had hoped he might be here tonight. Since you invited him the last time.”
Bonny watched her cousin’s face carefully. And she knew. Emily had transferred her love for Harold to his brother.
“I do wish William Clyde’s little wife could have been here tonight,” Mrs. Miller said.
“Did I hear him telling you at dinner that she recently presented him with a second son?” Cressida asked.
“Yes. She has been at her mother’s for her confinement.”
“I think she should have been at her own house, with her husband,” Cressida said. “Instead of him carrying on in London as if he had no family and no responsibility. I told Mr. Twickingham my thoughts on the subject, and he quite agreed.”
Poor Twigs, he would probably agree to anything Cressida said, Bonny thought. Cressida fairly well led him around by the nose. There was nary a thought in his head that was not put there by the lovely blonde he had taken off the shelf.
Lady Landis strode across the room, smiling, and reclaimed her seat next to her daughter. “These bloods appear to have little interest in the married state.”
At this point, the men entered the salon.
“Radcliff,” Lady Landis snapped, “don’t you find your wife getting thinner?”
He turned to Bonny. He was still so angry he could have shaken his beautiful wife senseless. She must have sold the Radcliff Jewels—jewels that had been in his family for two hundred years—to pay her lover’s gaming debts. Everyone in London knew of Dunsford’s heavy losses. Radcliff’s s eyes swept over Bonny’s body. “You are correct, my lady.” He turned back to his friends. “Whist anyone?”
“Mr. Twickingham has promised to teach me the finer points of the game,” Cressida said, removing herself from the sofa and strolling to Twigs’s side.
There was enough interest for two tables. The four young men who took their gaming rather seriously sat at the other table. That group included Bonny’s cousin, Alfred, and the duke’s three friends.
Not being particularly close to the duke’s circle, Stanley Moncrief stayed with the women and attempted to charm them.
“Have you ever seen Richard’s hunting lodge in Scotland, your grace?” Stanley asked Bonny.
“I did not even know of its existence,” Bonny said.
Stanley got to his feet and held out his hand to Bonny. “Come, I will show you a painting of it.”
He led her to Radcliff’s library. Over the blazing hearth hung an oil painting of a rather Tudorish two-story house nestled among fir trees, a blue stream running beside it. “Lovely, isn’t it?” Stanley said.
Her eyes on the painting, Bonny nodded.
“Like you,” Stanley said, encircling her with his arms as he bent to kiss Bonny.
She tried to wriggle from his grasp. “Stop this!”