long center table. The room filled with light, the illumination banishing its aspect of
ghostly disuse.
There was a fire on the hearth, ready-laid for morning, and it kindled quickly,
radiating a welcoming warmth. Wessex searched out the brandy decanter and
poured himself a generous glassful. Langley kept the decanters filled; the Dowager
might use this room, but she would not materially change the way it had been when
her son was alive.
Automatically, Wessex looked up to the portrait above the mantelpiece; a LeBrun
portrait of his father as a young man, wearing the satin and lace of a vanished age
and swaggering with a rapier upon his hip. That swashbuckling dandy had died a
dozen years ago, in a fatal, foolish attempt to save me Dauphin of France from the
Terror, but Grandanne lived in patient waiting, as if some day Andrew Dyer might
walk back in the front door – even though a dozen men had pronounced him lost in
France and a Chancery Court had ruled that the tide should pass to his son.
Still, somehow, Grandanne thought against all reason and sense that Andrew
might someday return, and sometimes Wessex felt as if she were right; as if the
so-distant certainties of his life were only a masquerade, their foundations built upon
shifting sand.
He shook his head, dourly amused at his own fancies. He needed either more
liquor or not to have drunk what he already had; with a quick, brutal gesture he
raised the glass of brandy to his lips and half drained it. He had not meant to give
Sarah the Heart of Flame at all. A petty gesture, he knew, as if having lost the game
of freedom he could not bear to capitulate utterly. For the Heart of Flame was a gift
between lovers, and he and Sarah were not lovers, nor would they ever be: he had
married her at the command of the King, and at the same command she had
accepted him.
But he had given Sarah his name and his title, and she was entitled to all of the
jewelry that went with them. There was no reason for him to withhold any of the
traditional gems simply because the act of their presentation was a lie.
He emptied the glass and refilled it again, knowing that the liquor was a substitute
for steadiness of nerve, and tomorrow he would have to learn to face his wife
without its aid.
Tomorrow and for the rest of his life.
Wessex sighed, and carried his glass back to the fire. As he passed the stool, his
foot struck something that lay upon the carpet and set it skimming across the floor.
Intrigued, Wessex stooped and picked it up. A sketchbook, bound between boards
of gold-stamped buckram. He carried it back to the chair and sat down,
automatically moving the workbasket as he did so. Neither Grandanne nor Dame
Alecto sketched, to his knowledge. He wondered whose it was.
The pages were rilled with careful, intricate drawings, some of them finished in
watercolor and ink. Obviously the sketchbook of a young lady of fashion, the
contents were very much what one would expect: bowls of fruit, studies of flowers
and horses’ heads, drawings of long-limbed ladies in elaborate gowns, apparently
copied from Ackerman’s Repository.
But there were other drawings, harmless enough in themselves, but oddly
disturbing to Wessex. The deck of a ship, carefully executed but oddly generalized,
as if the artist were attempting to reconstruct something from memory. A Colonial
settlement, its crude whitewashed buildings scattered along a stretch of unfamiliar
coast. A woman churning butter. Another sitting at her spinning wheel.
And then page after page of Aborigines, wild and splendid in their feathers and
paint. The artist had spent a great deal of time on these subjects, rendering every
detail of their barbaric costumes and wild surroundings with scrupulous care… and
accuracy. Wessex had reason to know the drawings were accurate, as he and the
volatile Mr. Koscuisko had spent some six months traveling with the People in the
American colonies during one memorable adventure.
But it would be an extensive search to find any woman – even one born and bred
in the Colonies – who had as intimate an experience with the Cree as this artist
seemed to possess. Who was she?
There were some letters interleaved with these pages, and from them he
discovered the name of the book’s owner: Sarah, Marchioness of Roxbury.
His wife.
Surely this was not possible. If Sarah had traveled to the American Colonies
Wessex would know… and if she had not, he did not think she could have drawn
such detailed and precise images.
For the first time, Wessex began to wonder precisely who it was that he had
married.
Sarah ran from the Terror that pursued her through a landscape that grew
increasingly more unreal, until its very unreality drove her out of sleep and into
waking.
She was lying in an unfamiliar bed in an unfamiliar narrow room. Golden morning
light turned the mural of aerial London spread across the ceiling to glitter and fire.
She was in Dyer House, and yesterday she had married the Duke of Wessex.
Sarah groaned, rolling over. She’d thought, for a brief dazzling moment, that it
was all part of the dream.
The dream! But even as she tried to grasp at it, those memories filtered through
her fingers. There was something she’d learned – some truth that she needed to
remember….
But it was gone.
Sarah pounded her hand against her pillow in frustration, and yelped as something
cold and supple slithered against her wrist. She jerked away, sitting upright and
opening her eyes.
There was a necklace lying in the bed, where it had fallen from the pillow.
Confused, Sarah picked it up, wondering if in all the confusion of yesterday she
could possibly have worn such a thing to bed.
No. This was none of her jewels. Sarah stared down at the ruby heart cradled in
her hand as understanding came to her. The Duke of Wessex had been here,
sometime while she slept, and left this.
Sarah turned the glittering prize over in her hand, and gazed at the intertwined
initials engraved upon the back. A pretty token; an opulent bribe, intended to buy her
compliant silence on the subject of his absence the night before. To buy… as if she
were a tradesman, a servant, a common prostitute walking the London streets. As if
there were no honor between them, or even duty, but only an acquiescence that must
be bought.
Sarah ground her teeth in irritation rapidly turning to fury. Wessex must not think
his dukedom a very worthy thing if that was the sort of person he was willing to have
for his Duchess. Pure furious anger swept away all the ambiguity and uncertainty of
the last several weeks and the last clinging cobwebs of her strange dream. Wessex
had offered her a mortal insult, and Sarah was going to make him very sorry that he
had.
The yellow-and-white breakfast parlor on the first floor gave one a fine view of
the bustle of the street below. The Duke of Wessex regarded it with a baleful
disinterest. The fine china cup before him held strong black coffee instead of his
usual morning chocolate; even with Atheling’s sternest measures and a great deal of
ice-cold well water, Wessex felt as brittle as the delicate cup he held.
He had cornje down to breakfast as if everything were perfectly normal; he had
greeted Grandanne (the Dowager was a notorious early riser, and her grandson was
not surprised to see her up and doing at an hour when most of Society still clung to
its bed) and told her that Sarah was still asleep. So far he had told nothing but the
truth; if the conclusions he wished his grandmother to draw were not precisely the
truth, that was merely another sin upon his far from lily-white conscience.
If the Dowager had anything to say about the lateness of Wessex’s arrival at Dyer
House or his choice of nocturnal beverage, she made no comment. The morning
light sparkled upon the linen and silver, and upon the bright spectacle of oranges
filling the colorful Export Ware bowl on the table. The Dowager placidly ate her
marmalade and toast and drank her tea as if this were any ordinary morning, and
Wessex realized that he had made yet another miscalculation in this whole disastrous
affair.
He had undertaken to enact a masquerade with the aid of an only
somewhat-willing partner; well and good. But it was borne in upon him that unlike his
many other impersonations, he had no idea of what this one entailed. How was he to
carry off before the eyes of the ton – and, a slightly more urgent question, before the
eyes of his own grandmother, a far more critical audience – the illusion of an
ordinary marriage?
He was saved from further consideration upon that head by the entrance of his
Duchess. Sarah swept into the room as regally as if she were making her bow before
Royalty, and stopped beside Grandanne’s chair to drop a kiss upon the Dowager’s
cheek.
„Good morning, my dear. How radiant you look,“ the Dowager said placidly.
„Thank you, Godmama,“ Sarah answered.
She was dressed in a pale pink morning robe trimmed with ribbons of darker
pink, and the Heart of Flame was a vivid blaze about the base of her throat. She
looked across the table to Wessex, who had stood when she entered the room.
„Rupert,“ Sarah said calmly.
Of course she had every right to use his Christian name – they were more than
mere acquaintance, they were married – but Wessex found himself slightly nettled by
her cool assumption of her new status. However, he bowed over her hand in the
fashion that had charmed countesses and courtesans in half the capitals of Europe,
and conducted her to her seat.
„I trust you slept well?“ the Dowager asked, as a footman stepped forward from
his post beside the door to pour tea for Sarah. „Sometimes it is difficult to do so in
a strange house.“
Sarah smiled at Wessex, color rising in her cheeks, and raised her cup to her lips.
„I slept entirely well,“ she said.
The ring that held the device of the Boscobel League glimmered upon Sarah’s
finger, made to fit by a plug of beeswax inserted between the finger and the band.
Gazing at his new-wed bride, Wessex felt himself relax. She had agreed to his terms,
then, and would help him play out the game. Married by the King’s command, theirs
would be a marriage blanc, with no sordid tangle of bodies or passions to mar it.
Sarah would have a Duke’s ransom in jewels.
But no Duke.
Chapter 13
A Singular Duchess
It was exceedingly fortunate, the Duchess of Wessex told herself on a fine June
morning precisely one week after her wedding day, that her husband had been called
from Town on Royal business of the most urgent. Fortunate because if he were not
there to see it, he was not there to rebuke her for removing back to the comfort and
familiarity of her own home – fortunate, too, that his absence carried with it a
ready-made justification for such a move that even the highest sticklers must accept.
The move back into her own house gave her a breathing space while she
considered how she was now to manage her life. For King Henry and the
still-unknown Princess Stephanie of Denmark’s sake, Sarah must present the world
with the illusion of a happy marriage. And that meant that she must see Wessex
every day. They must live in the same house.
But not yet, Sarah told herself with craven relief. Her husband was off to the fen
country, and she was left in Town, to sample the delights of being Wessex’s
Duchess without suffering the inconvenient presence of the Duke.
Those delights were both powerful and pervasive, but Sarah possessed a sense of
standing apart from the pleasures of Society. Others might desire these things, but
she did not.
The puzzled looks of her servants and of her acquaintance told Sarah how very
much she had changed from the Marchioness of Roxbury that they had known. But
she was not that woman, and in her troubled, restless nights, Sarah wondered if she
ever had been. Only Mooncoign seemed real, and not the ritual and the pomp that
surrounded it – and certainly not this London life of endless revelry.
At least she had made one true friend in her time here. And Sarah had discovered,
to her delight, that a ducal coronet seemed to carry enough weight with Meriel's
wicked uncle to overcome his prohibition against Mend’s going forth into any form
of society whatever – for Miss Bulleyn had been granted permission to call upon the
Duchess of Wessex today to drink tea.