The Famous Heroine/The Plumed Bonnet (57 page)

Sometimes she envied her husband, who needed to use neither. His word was everyone’s command. He never raised his voice, never spoke harshly to anyone. Often he did not even have to speak at all. A lifted forefinger at the table would bring a footman smartly hurrying with the coffeepot. Raised eyebrows would send the instant message that a door should be opened or that one course of a meal might be removed and the next brought on.

But she could not be like him. She had to learn to live her new life her own way. She no longer needed to feel guilty about deviating from some of the instructions she had been given.

There were neighbors to meet, visits to make, entertainments to plan. There were tenants to be called upon and laborers too. There were the sick and elderly and very young to identify so that she might learn to give them extra attention. There were the rector and his sister to be seen and parish concerns to be discussed.

There were letters to write. After the restrictions imposed upon her by the Burnabys, writing and receiving letters were among her greatest pleasures. But there were so many. The dowager duchess wrote to her as did Cousin Bertha, her sisters-in-law, Jennifer, Samantha, Cora, Miriam, and Tom’s wife.

There was her own estate with which to concern herself. She summoned her steward to Wightwick and spent hours with him over four separate days, asking questions, looking at ledgers, listening to advice, making decisions. She was very tempted to ask her husband to oversee the estate for her since she knew that he was more than competent with his own. And she knew that he waited to be asked, even though he said nothing but merely entertained their guest with his usual correct, rather austere courtesy. But she did not give in to the temptation. It was her property, and perhaps she would wish to live there one day—perhaps soon.

And there was the summer fête to organize. There were to be stalls and competitions and maypole dancing in the village, and cricket and races in the park. There were to be refreshments all day in the park and a grand ox roast there in the evening to be followed by an outdoor dance. All the celebrations in the park for years past had been organized by the dowager duchess. Now the task fell upon Stephanie’s shoulders. The fête was
the biggest event of the year in the neighborhood. She knew she would be judged harshly if it was poorly organized.

She might have busied herself with her tasks as Duchess of Bridgwater from the time of her early rising until bedtime, she sometimes thought, and still not feel that everything was done. But there was another major area of her life too, and it took at least half her time. She had a new marriage to work on.

Strangely, it was not difficult. It might almost have been idyllic if she had wanted it to be, she thought. Her husband made time to spend with her, though her mother-in-law had warned her that she must not expect to see a great deal of him once the marriage had been solemnized.

He was the one who showed her the house the day after their arrival, though Mrs. Griffiths seemed somewhat taken aback. He took her through the state apartments, rooms that awed her with their size and magnificence. He took her to the portrait gallery on an upper floor and spent longer than an hour there with her, pointing out his ancestors to her, telling her their stories. He paused longest before a portrait of his mother and father, painted soon after their wedding. His mother was beautiful then as she still was now.

“Oh,” Stephanie said, going one step closer, “you are very like your father. You might almost
be
him.” The former duke stared back at her from the canvas, proud, aloof, almost arrogant—and very handsome.

“Yes,” her husband said quietly. “Perhaps that was part of the trouble. Because I looked so like him, I was expected to be like him in all ways.”

She turned to look at him. “You did not love him?” she asked incautiously.

“Oh, yes,” he said, “I loved him. And he loved me. Perhaps that was part of the trouble too.”

He did not elaborate, but he was not silent with her. He talked to her almost constantly, telling her about his life, about his heritage.

He loved his home, she thought. Perhaps more deeply than he realized, though he had once described it as his pride and joy. If he had wanted none of it as a child, he certainly loved it now.

“You love Wightwick,” she said to him, smiling at him. “If you had been the younger son, it would have been George’s now.”

“Yes.” He looked about him. “Yes, and so it would.”

He walked about the park with her, showing her its most obvious attractions, taking her on walks that had been carefully laid out to give both a picturesque route and unexpected and glorious prospects of greater distances. He took her on a shady walk through a grove of trees until they reached a small, secluded lake she had not suspected was there.

“Hartley—Lord Carew—redesigned the park for me several years ago,” he said, “before his marriage. He has great talent as a landscape gardener. Indeed, when he and Samantha first met, she mistook him for the gardener of his own estate.”

“Oh,” she said, “I hope he disabused her as soon as he realized what had happened.”

“No.” He smiled ruefully. “We men do not always do what we ought, Stephanie.”

He took her riding. She had ridden as a girl, though not a great deal since her father had kept only one horse and that exclusively for the cart. She had not ridden as a woman. But he chose a gentle mare for her and rode patiently at her side while she cautiously walked the horse and eased it into a canter until the world seemed to be flying past at a dangerous pace to either side of her. Once she caught him laughing at her—it was when she had taken her horse to a canter for all of thirty seconds
across a perfectly level meadow and then hauled back on the reins before blowing out her breath from puffed cheeks.

He looked like a mischievous boy when he laughed. She wondered how he had looked when he was nine or ten—when he had got up to some of those wild escapades he had told her about. She could not imagine his doing anything wild.

He always attended her in the drawing room when she was entertaining, even if it was just some of the ladies to tea. He made pleasant, courtly conversation with them. He always accompanied her on visits, even to his tenants. She suspected that he drank more tea during the first month of their marriage than he had drunk in the whole year previous to it.

He came to her bed every night. She was sometimes alarmed by the thought that she might be becoming addicted to what happened between them there. She found herself anticipating it with eagerness all day long, and willing it not to end while it was happening, and then fighting bleakness after he had returned to his own room at the thought that there was the rest of the night and all the next day to live through before it would happen again. The marriage act was the most enjoyable activity the world had to offer. She was convinced of it.

She was disturbed by her enjoyment, felt guilty about it. Sometimes she wondered if she stayed just for that. How would she live without it now that she had experienced it?

How would she live without
him
?

On the surface the marriage was not an unhappy one. Their neighbors and acquaintances had a way of looking at them—with a sort of amused indulgence—that suggested they were seen as a newly married couple living through a honeymoon. And in many ways they were. Stephanie found that even her need for quietness and
privacy was waning. A couple of times during the evenings after dinner she had retired to her own sitting room with a book, feeling the need to be away from his eyes and his voice. Feeling the need to be herself. And yet the second time it happened, remembering how the first time she had been unable to concentrate on her reading or do any constructive thinking either, she took her book and went back downstairs. She found him in the library, also reading.

“May I join you?” she asked.

He had got to his feet as she entered; he always stood when she came into a room. He was always the perfect gentleman.

“Of course, my dear,” he said, indicating the comfortable-looking leather chair on the opposite side of the fireplace from his. He waited for her to seat herself before resuming his own place.

At first she was self-conscious and read and reread the same paragraph without comprehending a single word. But after a while she looked up with a slight start, wondering for how long she had been absorbed in her book. He was reclined in his chair, looking very comfortable, clearly absorbed in his own reading. They sat, silently reading, for a few hours before he put his book down and suggested that she ring for the tea tray.

It had been a strangely seductive evening. They had not spoken, and yet his very presence had relaxed her and enabled her to enjoy one of her favorite pastimes.

“It is getting late,” he said and half smiled.

She glanced at the clock on the mantel. They would drink their tea, and it would be time for bed. Within the next hour … She felt the now familiar aching sensation in her womb and between her thighs.

“I am sorry,” she said, getting to her feet. “I have been neglecting my duty.” But his words had not been scolding, and her answer had not been apologetic.

Sometimes she wondered why they were not completely happy. She would look back on her life with the Burnabys and shudder inwardly. She would picture life alone and free and independent at Sindon Park—she knew he would not try to stop her from going there if she decided to do so—and felt a bleak chill.

By her own request their marriage had continued to be a real marriage. She was proving both to her husband and to herself that she was capable of being his duchess. They communicated. She knew that she pleased him in bed. He pleased her there too. It was too soon to know whether she had conceived during this first month of their marriage—she had had her monthly period only just before her wedding and did not know yet if the next one would happen. But he had come to her each night except the second. She loved perhaps best of all, although it came at the end of what she never wanted to end, the heat of his seed passing deep inside from him into her.

Yet there was in both of them at the end of their first month together a sense of waiting—a sense of a decision yet to be made. It was strange, perhaps. They were married. The decision had been made. She was his property, to do with as he wished. She had vowed obedience and would not break her vow. But she knew that there was a decision to be made and that he would allow her to make it and would live by whatever she decided.

She was perhaps unique among women.

She was married, yet she was free.

She did not have that freedom by right. He had given it to her.

It was a thought that made her angry at first. Why could women not be free as men were free? Why did they have no right to freedom?

But it was also a thought that began to dominate her thinking, that began to haunt her night and day. He had
her in his possession. All the forces of law and religion—as well as his superior masculine strength—were behind him to back up his claims. No one—
no one—
would ever blame him for holding on to her for the rest of their lives and forcing her into submission to his will. Yet he had given her her freedom. He had exposed himself to the possibility of censure and ridicule—he would receive both in plenty if he allowed her to leave him—and given her freedom.

He had treated her during that journey to Hampshire with contempt veiled in courtesy. He had been no different from anyone else she had seen while dressed in those clothes. He had judged by appearances and had dismissed everything she had said, everything she
was
, with an amused cynicism. He had been quite prepared to amuse himself with her during their nights on the road and to set her up in some love nest for his future pleasure.

Her shock at being so dismissed as a person deserving a hearing, deserving some respect, was still deep.

But he
had
helped her. And he
had
been courteous. And he had
not
tried to force himself upon her once she had uttered that one word—
no
. And finally, when he had fallen into his own trap, he had taken the consequences with his characteristic courtesy and sense of honor.

And now he was
still
giving her the choice of saying no. No to whatever he wished to do to her or with her. No to being his wife in anything but name. No to living with him.

And even when they were still at Sindon Park, he had insisted that the marriage contract state that her inheritance remain independently hers.

Sometimes it seemed foolish and childish—and even downright insane—to refuse to forgive him.

Sometimes when his body was joined with hers in her
bed, she would hold him with tenderness and try to persuade herself that it was merely with pleasure and that it was a pleasure she took for herself without regard to the pleasure he might be taking too.

But it was tenderness.

She was not sure that she could allow herself to feel tenderness for him. She was not sure she could respect herself if she did. But it was something she had to work out for herself.

It was a lonely feeling. Freedom is a lonely thing, she thought with some surprise.

T
HE SUMMER FÊTE
had never been his favorite day of the year even though he had always made it a point to be at Wightwick for the occasion. He had always felt it important to watch his people celebrating, to stroll among them, talking with them, encouraging the participants in the various contests, congratulating the winners, commiserating with the losers, eating with them. Even dancing with them. His mother, of course, had done all the organizing and had busied herself throughout the day, going from the village to the park, making sure that she was always available to judge the contests in baking and needlework and to hand out the prizes in all the races and other competitions. It was something she had done with grace and apparent ease and with perfect, unruffled dignity.

This year was to be different. He knew it almost before he had swallowed the first mouthful of an early breakfast. Fortunately, he had seen from the window of his bedchamber, the day promised to be sunny and warm, a luxury this year. Stephanie came hurrying into the breakfast room, smiled quickly at him, smiled more dazzlingly at the footman beside the sideboard, and
asked him if he would please bring her two eggs and two rounds of toast. Oh, and some coffee, please, James.