He hesitated – she feared he wouldn’t let it go – then he shrugged. It had been mere idle curiosity, then.
‘And so you leave us with only two topics of conversation,’ he said. ‘Your sister’s dress and how desperately we are dying for love of the Duke of Darlington.’
The Duke of Darlington. She had all but forgotten. She strained for a sight of him through the crowds and saw he was still standing by the giant mirror where he’d stopped earlier.
‘A newly minted duke is a spectacle, is it not?’ the man beside her said. ‘It’s rather sad, really, how he tries to fill his late father’s shoes. He’s too weak and silly by half – a mewling runt of a man. Even the simple task of properly acquiring his title seems beyond him.’
‘But . . . his father died a month or so ago. I walked past St George’s the day they buried him.’ The pavement had been washed out in black, the
ton
’s finest gathered together to mourn the passing of one of their own.
‘Even a duke’s son must make a claim for his title, and this man’s claim has gone to the Committee for Privileges. Perhaps they see him as clearly as I do, and hesitate to confer such power on him, though it is his by right.’
The men and women of London did not agree, then, when it came to the Duke of Darlington. Kit rather thought she sided with the men. If she truly must confront a duke, she would prefer that he be a weak and silly duke.
‘You may lean on me, if you want to go up on your toes for another look. Are they
your
pigs, Miss Sutherland?’
She almost told him, because she suspected he would enjoy it. But he wouldn’t understand the desperate pride you could feel in a couple of pigs that were
yours
.
‘What’s your name?’ she asked.
He tipped his head and watched her. She felt in those heartbeats as though he drew somehow closer to her, though he didn’t move. She flushed and looked away.
He said, ‘You won’t spare the Duke, will you, when you tell him to stay away from your sister? I would give much to be there.’
‘He is generally admired – but you do not admire him?’
His mouth kicked up again at the corner. ‘Darling,’ he said, ‘there’s no one alive who loathes him like I do.’ His eyes unshuttered, and she saw something she knew she should not have seen.
Until that moment she had thought she had his complete attention – had felt, in fact, like something pinned open on a dissecting dish. He gazed at the dancers and she realised only the smallest part of him was even here, in this room. The rest of him was off somewhere, and she couldn’t help wanting to follow, to find out where. To bring him into focus and see him clearly.
The dancers seemed distant, the music indistinct, the voices around them a constant hum from which a laugh or exclamation occasionally surfaced. It was such a long time since she’d focused on anything but her family. She felt tentative, taking that first step into curiosity. She, whose body was strong enough for anything.
‘What did he do to make your dislike so violent?’ she asked.
He turned his shoulders to the wall and tipped his head back against it. ‘We have a long history, he and I. It is quite, quite gruesome. Are you sure you want to hear the sorry tale?’
Her skin shivered like nervy horse-hide. ‘I live to hear the Duke slandered.’
‘I grew up on the Northumberland estate, where the family spends their summers.’
‘Were you and he boyhood friends, then?’
‘Ah, me. I feel sometimes the only thing worse than being interrupted is having someone break into your tale and guess what comes next. It makes one feel so very predictable. May I continue, or have you divined the whole story already?’
She gestured graciously for him to continue and tried not to smile, because her smile might be a sort of sunrise.
‘The Duke – he had the courtesy title of Viscount d’Auton then – was always a little wild, but I was worse. We were . . . very attached. We had a grand old time wreaking the devil’s own havoc, until he realised that he only got into trouble when I was around.
Other
people didn’t like me very much, you see.’
She watched this astonishing man, whose voice was as beautiful as the rest of him, and was sceptical. Then she thought about that unsettling thing she’d seen in his eyes.
‘I find it hard to imagine you tearing around the countryside.’
‘Then you haven’t much imagination, Miss Sutherland.’ There was no censure in his voice – just a stark reminder that she did not know him at all.
‘What did he do?’
‘The summer we were nine he greeted me with as much affection as ever. He suggested a game of hide-and-go-seek. I hid in the old scullery, which was an excellent spot, and he locked me in. He didn’t let me out for three days.’
‘Christ.’
‘It became his favourite game, until I refused to come to the big house and play with him any more. Then he told his father that my father had been poaching. My father was a good, loyal servant and nothing could be proved, so instead of being transported we were simply made to move, with a black mark against our name. My name. My whole life I have not been able to rid myself of him. I feel, sometimes, that I am locked in that room still.’
He said these things lightly, but Kit’s listening became intent. His voice was expensive – a servant could not have afforded it for his son. And he had admitted already to having some difficulty with truth. So she listened instead to the things he did not say.
‘You are a man who feels he cannot move,’ she said, watching his face closely. He gave nothing away. ‘And you feel this, because you think the Duke is a powerful man.’ It was curious, given that he had called the man weak and silly.
He turned to face her, his shoulder and head against the wall, and he was close, she realised, much closer than he should be. ‘I do,’ he said.
‘Then you’re a bloody fool.’
He went absolutely still, and a second later she started to tremble. She couldn’t say what had changed, but she was sure he would crush her with the next words that came out of his mouth.
He opened his lips.
Closed them.
Gave a small, devastating smile. His eyes were shuttered, she realised, because sadness lay across them like the grime over the stained-glass windows at St Paul’s.
‘What do you mean?’ he asked simply.
‘Being a duke does not make him powerful,’ she said, her voice strong and even, giving no sign that her fingers longed to reach for his pale, perfect cheeks and make him warm. Bring him to her. Lay her forehead against his – to say, better than words could say,
Be safe
.
‘In the great British Empire only royalty stand above him, yet you say he is not powerful?’
‘He doesn’t take his seat in Parliament,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t risk an opinion before other men. What has he built? Who does he champion?’ She gestured to the much fêted duke. ‘What is he, but a hairstyle, some tall collars, and a cravat that other men envy?’
She turned back to him, feeling suddenly absurd, a retraction ready on her lips.
Some feeling had pulled his beauty apart and left his features exposed, unsure. His eyes flickered to hers, and he flinched away.
He smiled a perfect, charming smile, and she wouldn’t have known, had she not seen it, that something troubled him.
‘Excuse me, Miss Sutherland,’ he said, bowing to her. ‘There is somewhere I need to be.’
Darlington turned away from Miss Sutherland and caught Crispin’s eye before he left the room.
The boy stood in ducal finery by one of the five enormous mirrors Lady Marmotte had commissioned for the ball, surrounded by admirers. He gave Darlington a slow, exuberant smile, then turned back to his conversation with Hopwell.
It was working.
Nobody had realised yet that the man they thought was the Duke of Darlington was actually Crispin Scott, the Chancellor’s son, in dress-ups.
Darlington left the room, and allowed himself the very small luxury of stopping in a dark corridor to lean against the wall, where no one might watch. He tried to catch his breath.
Fool. Worse than a fool.
He hadn’t meant to speak to her – hadn’t known he would find Lydia’s sister haunting the same anonymous corner of the ballroom he’d chosen for himself. He had told himself he would just have a look at her, this sister Lydia never spoke about.
He had paid for his curiosity.
She fed pigs, and loved her mother, and her nose was crooked as a scrapper’s from the rookeries. She had the eyes of a wild creature, gold and wary, and did not belong here, in London. She had caught and fixed him in the beam of her regard. She had illuminated the thing that cowered at the very centre of his soul.
He threw his head back against the wall, trying to make a clear path for his breath, from mouth to lung.
His night had not even begun. He still had a role to play. There was a woman upstairs, waiting.
He forced himself away from the wall. He was no longer a boy. He was the Duke of Darlington, as his father had been before him.
Kit pushed forward through the crowd gathered about the Duke of Darlington, and ignored the slight flush on her cheeks. This was her chosen course; she would not be granted an audience in private.
She had read something about his encounter with BenRuin, in the days since. BenRuin had gone for him in a gentleman’s club, in front of countless witnesses. He had almost got his knife to the Duke’s throat, if rumour could be believed.
Aside from the utter idiocy of approaching a duke without an introduction, he would likely abhor her connection to BenRuin. But then there was her connection to BenRuin’s wife.
He was less pretty up close.
‘Your Grace,’ she said, and sank into a curtsey so low her knees wobbled.
He held his hand out to her. A kind face, a kind gesture. Not the man she’d envisaged, given her brother-in-law’s fury. It made her certain Lydia’s affair had nothing to do with this man at all, and everything to do with her husband.
‘You know my sister, Lady BenRuin.’ She kept her voice low, and the Duke drew her to the side.
‘You must be Miss Sutherland. It is a pleasure to finally meet you.’
‘This is not about pleasure, Your Grace. I . . .’ And how exactly did she tell off a duke, now that she was standing before him, no matter how gentle he seemed? ‘I do not want you to see my sister any more.’
‘A commendable desire,’ he said, without blinking an eye. ‘You will be happy to know she and I have parted ways already.’
She tried to read anything from his face but a kind of concerned benevolence, and could find no trace of untruthfulness. How different he was from the man in black.
She nodded, and he was taken away from her by the young men who crowded around him before they could even exchange farewells. Let Lord Marmotte look to his own wife – Kit’s business was done. Let the gossips make what they would of it. Let them think the graceless Miss Sutherland was making a play for a duke. She left the room and walked down the hall, where a passing couple looked at her oddly.
Right. She was striding again. Lydia had talked to her about that. At length.
She looked into a room where about ten tables were set up for cards. Some of the young men were wearing the decorated hats she’d read about but never seen, and their wrists were wrapped in leather. At least her father had never stooped to putting flowers in his hat, she thought.
It wasn’t much comfort.
‘Will you play?’ a man asked behind her, and touched her elbow.
She moved quickly out of the way. ‘Why are they only playing piquet? I’d thought baccarat and faro were popular in London, too.’
‘Lord, you are new, aren’t you,’ he said, laughing, and pulled a snuff box from his pocket. He was a good deal older than she – closer to fifty than forty. Old enough for dissolution to have made its mark on his face. He leaned into the doorway and snuffed powder from between his fingers before closing the box and dropping it back into his pocket.
Lady Marmotte’s June card party will be the event of the season – has been for years. She’s the sharpest player we’ve seen in a long time, but she’ll only play piquet, and she’ll only invite whomever she pleases, devil take the rest. The young bloods in there,’ he nodded, ‘are hoping they’ll impress her and receive an invitation. I doubt she’ll even look in this evening. Do you play?’
The boy seated at the nearest table to the door with his back to her had a quart minor – six, seven, eight and nine of diamonds – and didn’t discard his fifth card into the stock.
Fool
.
‘No, I don’t play,’ she said.
When the man opposite raised his eyebrows she realised she had spoken with some violence.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Please excuse me.’
She meandered through the house, amusing herself by walking like she’d been given sedatives. Her father would have been struck dumb with astonishment, could he have seen her. Though it shouldn’t surprise him, as it was he who had taught her to laugh at the world.
She didn’t see the man in black again.
She caught a glimpse, through the ballroom door, of couples wheeling about the floor. She spied Lydia in the arms of a soldier – just an impression of a moustache and teeth bared in a laugh before they spun away from her again. Kit didn’t think Lydia had so much as danced with the Duke this evening, and she was glad for it. Perhaps the affair was all rumour and exaggeration.
She found herself in a portrait gallery and started composing a letter in her head to her brother, because the sudden wish to have him there with her was a hard ache in her chest.
Dear Tom
, she would write (no ‘darling’ or ‘dearest’ though he was both those things to her),
You won’t believe me when I describe this portrait to you. Some ancestor of Lord Marmotte thought it a good idea to pose astride a rocking horse
–
no doubt some relic of his youth
–
whilst striking one of those grand, conqueror’s poses. In that distant, imagined future when I have my own portrait painted, I will pose just so
.
Ah, he would laugh with her here, where the ball was a distant seashore of sound. I wish I’d been able to drag you to London with me, she would say, treacherous brother of mine. You would be sorry then, that you inflicted it on me. It’s the most absurd place on earth to come and find a husband. These men and I are from different worlds. I sometimes wish they would just offer me baubles, as they do the natives of America, and be done with it. I will come home a confirmed spinster, and dance like Rumpelstiltskin for joy!
Except that was no longer entirely true, was it? How would she describe the man in black to Tom? Would she dare to tell him that something in her had been touched? She turned into the next room, and a faint cascade of notes reached her. The music was so unlike anything else she’d ever heard that it took her a while to realise what it was.
She smiled, and followed it.
This was the piano as she hadn’t even known it could be played – subdued passion that she was fairly sure wouldn’t be allowed in public. One melody tripped lightly ahead of the other,
follow me
. The second was slow; it would never catch the first but ran under it, as deep as an ocean.
She had never heard anything so beautiful.
She turned down a new hallway as the notes slowed, almost disappeared, dissolved into each other, became something new and light and tantalising. As she walked she strained her ears for one note, then another that told her the deep ocean tide had not given up. It still yearned. Across from an open door she stopped.
And there he was, the man in black. His profile was to her, his fingers as clever over the keys as his tongue was over words. But less . . . restrained. His music was lit at the edges.
She stayed very still and watched him, and told herself that she would be well. She had survived worse. He looked up suddenly, and the music broke, stopped. She thought at first he had seen her, and was almost sure she would step into the room.
A woman walked into Kit’s view. A round bottom sheathed in silk, an exposed nape, ostrich feathers bobbing down and covering their faces. Snatches of him like sky through leaves on a windy day.
He began to kiss the woman’s shoulder, and Kit’s mouth opened. His fingers spread themselves across the woman’s arm, down her back. They unlaced her with his personal brand of grace.
Kit couldn’t move away. She couldn’t stop herself from watching what bruised her. He had wound her in so much tighter than she could ever have imagined, and she could not shrug this away – the truth that some part of her had reached for him, and he was squandering himself on this woman.
He had the woman unlaced, and he turned her, sat her on the piano with a jarring clash of notes.
Another shock went through Kit. It was Lady Marmotte, their hostess.
Lady Marmotte giggled, then gasped. The man in black had pulled her corset down, and pressed her against the instrument so that it must bite into her back. She didn’t seem to mind. Her large breasts were exposed to him, and the very worst part was that Kit could see his face.
She could see that he was not engaged at all. He did not feel passion. His expression was calculated. His smiles, his voice, were deliberate. He used his body with as much dispassionate skill as the carpenter at Millcross used his lathe. He pushed her further back still, and then he leaned forward and licked her breasts, first one then the other. Methodical, contained.
Kit wondered, before she could stop herself, what he would be like if he unleashed himself.
Lady Marmotte threw her head back and thrust her hands greedily into his hair, which seemed very foolish to Kit, who could see how he flinched. He came upright and took the woman’s wrists hard enough to make her gasp again. He pinned her hands to the piano. She gasped in pleasure, and seemed neither to notice nor care that she could no longer touch him.
Every part of Kit felt cold. That was a flesh-and-blood woman in his arms, who feared age and spilled tea on her letters when she read them at the breakfast table and lived for moments like these.
Watching him pull her apart, Kit thought she would rather embrace a corpse.
She turned and walked down the hall. She strode. She would not run, but she would not be sedate. She found Lydia and pulled her out of a dance set, just to prove once and for all how very uncivilised Lady BenRuin’s sister was.
‘We need to leave,’ she said. ‘We need to leave.’
Lydia looked at her oddly, then nodded and took her arm. Kit’s cold flesh drank in the warmth of Lydia’s. She let her sister steer her through the crowd.
‘What happened?’ Lydia asked in a low voice.
What have you done now?
did not need to be said aloud.
‘Lady BenRuin,’ said a man in smooth tones, stepping into their path, ‘do not say you are leaving us already. You had promised me the quadrille, and I am afraid life will hold no savour for me if —’
‘Get out of my way, Richard,’ said Lydia, and pushed past him.
Then she had Kit in the carriage and they were alone. ‘There, there,’ she said in her London voice that dripped with ennui. ‘There, there.’ She patted Kit awkwardly on the shoulder and then said nothing else all the way home.
When Darlington arrived home, it was still dark outside, though he wasn’t sure how that could be. Perhaps the sun had been extinguished. Perhaps it would never be light again.
‘Champagne,’ he said, and grinned at Crispin, who sat across from him. ‘We need champagne.’
The four other boys who followed him everywhere – who had insisted on calling themselves the Duke’s Dandies since his father’s death – draped themselves over sofa backs and on the floor. ‘Champagne,’ Babylon said, his voice gruff with drink. ‘Blistering – blaster – good idea. Never been so nervous in my life. Those footmen were demmed serious about keeping the Duke in their sights.’
Hopwell reached out a lazy foot and kicked whatever part of Babylon was easiest to reach. ‘I swear you told everyone who would listen,
That’s him, don’t you know, the Duke of Darlington. You’re to call him Your Grace, don’t you know
.’ The imitation was cruel but accurate.
Crispin hadn’t looked away from Darlington. His eyes crinkled up, and he laughed. ‘How did I do? Do I not make a very fine duke?’
Darlington lurched forward and took Crispin’s face firmly between his hands. The boy looked so like him, yet so young and unspoiled, that some days it broke his heart. ‘You were incandescent,’ he said.
Crispin flushed, his eyes going brighter still. ‘I told you I would not let you down.’
Of course you wouldn’t, thought Darlington. Because all that love and loyalty you think you feel for me, I have lodged in your breast so that I may ask such a thing of you, and you will not let me down.
He made his smile wider. An obliterating kind of a smile. ‘A lady told me tonight that the Duke of Darlington is nothing more than a hairstyle, some tall collars and a cravat that other men envy. I’m afraid we only proved her right, passing you off so easily as me.’
How long it seemed since those words had been spoken, yet they stung him still.
Crispin laughed. ‘How clever we are.’
He kissed Crispin lightly and let him go. ‘I am going to make a pamphlet of her words for the discontented bourgeoisie. Let them read something entertaining while they eat their cake. Can the bourgeoisie read? Never mind. Someone fetch me paper and a pencil!’
He began composing a scathing and pithy account of the Duke of Darlington, and the Dandies shouted out their own suggestions. It was very important it be pithy. He wondered, after he stressed this point for the third time, just how drunk he was. The words scrawled in pencil on the back of an old concert bill seemed curiously detached, as though his hand were following some simple, happy direction he wasn’t privy to.
His butler entered to preside over the footmen pouring champagne. He bore a letter on a salver, addressed in the Prime Minister’s hand. One golden sip of champagne seemed to scour Darlington clean, and he had to remind himself not to drain the glass. He opened the letter and smiled.
The Most Honourable Duke of Darlington; Rumour tells me you had a grand time at the Marmotte ball, and behaved yourself perfectly. On quite another note, I have drafted the bill for Lord Marmotte’s divorce from his wife, and need only his petition to proceed. Rest. Eat. Please try to at least resist doing anything foolish. It was signed merely Liverpool, under which was scrawled, Coffee does not count as food.
He looked up at the Dandies, who shouted the night’s events to each other, already drafting the anecdotes they would tell later. He had handpicked them. They were boys no one thought to pay mind to – boys one could sometimes be excused for mistaking for imbeciles.
When they spoke like this, at the end of a long night, Darlington sifted their conversation for the frighteningly acute things they observed about the people who dismissed them. And sometimes the truths they betrayed about their own families.
He had seduced them one by one with his attention over the past two years, and now he wasn’t entirely sure he would be able to get rid of them again without inflicting considerable harm.