‘Duke,’ said Crispin beneath the hubbub, something wary and disquieting in his eyes. ‘I don’t mean to be foolish, but I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.’
‘Champagne makes fools of us all, my love. Speak.’
‘The argument at White’s three days hence, with the Earl of BenRuin.
Was
that a surprise to you?’
Crispin should not be thinking of that, still, in the flush of tonight’s triumph.
‘It would hardly have been gentlemanly to spit my coffee out when he arrived,’ Darlington said.
‘I just . . . it’s awfully impertinent in me to think it, but I couldn’t help wondering . . . Was that a game? Did you mean for it to happen? Because I’ve been racking my brains, and I just can’t think what you meant to gain by it, if it was.’
He hadn’t thought Crispin watched him so closely, nor thought so deeply on what he saw. Soon he might have to do away with even this small indulgence of company.
That single moment between himself and BenRuin, when his life had hung exquisitely on the edge of extinction, had been the work of six months of planning. Players arraigned for and against. He had liked having the mechanism there, like a favourite shiny toy, but had been almost convinced he wouldn’t ever use it.
Then his father had died, and he had been given that iron key, and all he could think of was meeting BenRuin’s rage.
For all the good it had done him.
‘You think far too much of me,’ he said, ‘if you suppose I can divine what that great lummox might do from one moment to the next! I’ll be happy never to see him again in my life. But my pretty boys, we haven’t yet plumbed the depths of my character. I feel we can be much more pithy. Much, much more pithy.’
He ushered them out not long after, with a graceless, abrupt dismissal. He waved the concert bill at Crispin and said, ‘Get thee to a print house!’
Darlington sat on the edge of his bed, shaking. His heart pounded in slick, baseless beats and he tried to slow them down by breathing, but he couldn’t breathe and he couldn’t slow his heartbeat, and his fingers slid wet against the bright thread of his counterpane.
Her body, in the dark. The noisy pleasure in her voice. The dark, sucking way he had wasted himself in her, on her.
It went deep in him, what he had done to Lady Marmotte tonight. As if she had poisoned him, and he had forced his throat to be soft and swallow it down.
He tried to unbutton his jacket, to pull the garment from his skin, but he couldn’t get the thing off on his own, and he couldn’t call Grey. Everyone believed the Duke of Darlington was a dandy of middling intelligence and more than average charm. He couldn’t bear for his valet to see him as he was now, drenched in his own sweat, wrestling his jacket as if it were the devil on his back, and ready to cut himself if that would only free him of it.
He couldn’t think of a single person he could call to his side. A single person he didn’t lie to, or use, or mislead. A single person who would look at him and really see him.
He held a shaking hand against his chest, where his heartbeats slid by so fast.
Before he had learned to hide all but the smallest part of himself he had regularly scared the people around him. He had never scared himself, before that day he sat in St George’s with his father’s body five feet away.
Now, fear followed him wherever he went.
It had followed him into bed with Lady Marmotte.
There was a quiet knock on the door, and Grey entered.
‘There’s a lady to see you, Your Grace. Do you desire to change, before you see her?’
He tried to focus. A lady.
He reminded himself that Grey did not see a grotesque, sweating beast, but a man. A duke.
‘I’ll need the blue coat you ordered last week, and the gold silk waistcoat.’
‘Forgive me, Your Grace. Uh, Jones says he won’t deliver the coat until you fix up your account. I told him —’
Darlington waved it away. ‘My dressing gown will suffice. The red brocade.’
‘Very good, Your Grace.’
He forced himself to be still, to let Grey take his coat off, instead of the mad frenzy his body wanted. The man was too close, the coat was too close, and he forced himself to be still.
‘My little dumpling,’ he murmured, when Lydia appeared in the doorway. ‘You light up the night.’
‘I hear dreadful rumours, darling,’ she said, draping her shawl over a chair. ‘You and I are no longer lovers. I do so hate it when the gossips know these things before I do.’
He walked over to where she stood, lifted her fingers and kissed them. He had given her this poise that did not bend. He let her hand fall and traced his fingers lightly up her arm, his head on an angle, watching her. There was a kind of oblivion for them in each other’s arms. Even now he felt the pull of it. He could press her to him until they dissolved into each other and disappeared. Cold, distant, made in his own image – perhaps Lydia was the one person who knew him as he was. Something deep in his stomach responded, sick and unexpected like the last muscular movement of a fish corpse.
He let her go and sat back in his chair.
‘Are you really leaving me, then?’ she asked, and he found the poise he had taught her was imperfect, after all. When he said nothing she walked over to the window. She moved a porcelain dish to the corner of the windowsill then back again, and took her time turning to him. He wondered what other emotion her smile was concealing.
‘What will you do?’
‘I had considered travelling abroad for a while,’ he said. He couldn’t stay in London, he was beginning to see that. London was killing him. ‘Give your husband time to calm down before we meet again in public.’
‘Oh no, we can’t have you causing riots on the continent with that face.’
She said it casually, but Darlington quelled a sudden tenderness. He wished he loved her. He would take her away to the continent with him and spoil her until the Princess of Wales looked like a pauper in comparison. He wished he could touch her face, so that she could let her guard down for just a moment before taking it up again.
He knew if he touched her face she would not let her guard down. There was nothing in the world he could say to her, because he was not the one man she wanted. He wasn’t that man to anyone.
‘You are quite the most beautiful woman I know,’ he said. ‘But we have come as far as we can together, darling.’
‘You will make my sister very happy,’ she said.
Her sister.
Inexplicably, the mere mention of her sister was a shock in his flesh.
‘You amaze me,’ he said. ‘Do you intend to give me to her?’
Lydia did the very last thing he would have expected of her. She gave a loud, involuntary snort of laughter, and her face lit for a moment with unabashed amusement. It transformed her in ways he couldn’t even begin to parse, and he thought,
There. That woman would be worth facing a whole brace of angry Scottish earls
. She quickly regained control, though a blush bloomed around her neck. Nothing like her cool poise, that blotchy red. Darlington wondered whether her husband knew these small, intimate inconsistencies of his wife.
‘Forgive me,’ she said, and her careful lips broke into another smile. ‘That was the furthest thing from my mind. I meant only that my sister’s longing for our separation matches yours. Your leaving me will make her happy.’
‘Does she disapprove of me?’ He knew her disapproval, felt it still. What an ugly thing truth was.
Light had begun to draw fine lines around the sitting room’s curtains. Another night ended. And yet one part of the night had not fallen away, would not fall away: Miss Sutherland, looking at him and seeing him clearly.
Something sharp and alien made itself some space in his chest.
‘I believe my sister hasn’t thought of you at all,’ Lydia said, ‘except that she does not want you to break up my marriage. She holds it more sacred than I do. She understands nothing.’
‘Indeed. Her lack of understanding has become almost legendary. A shame I haven’t yet had the pleasure of meeting her.’
Lydia looked down at him and her look said,
You may be a duke, but you would be lucky to lie at my feet like a dog
. ‘And you won’t have that pleasure,’ she said. ‘Ever.’
Everything in him seized on it – this anger, this fear that was not his. His mind was suddenly as bright as a pinprick, turning over the many ways he could pry into her anger and make her hurt worse.
‘Never ever?’ he murmured.
He could see she wanted to reply. The devil in him urged her to speak. But they had been friends too long, and she held her tongue. She sat herself in his lap, stroked his face. He kept very still and didn’t throw her away from him. It wasn’t easy for him to be touched, and he suspected Lydia was the same. Two idiots forcing themselves on each other. He caught her hand and kissed her palm.
He fought, again, for control.
How weary he had grown of this battle that never abated. He wrapped himself around the image of Miss Sutherland, and realised suddenly what it made him feel.
Hope. Inside his dumb terror, he felt hope.
‘Must we really part, though?’ Lydia asked.
‘We must, darling.’
Her fingers worked on the fabric of his sleeve, and she didn’t meet his curious gaze. ‘We could . . . could we not still be . . . friends, though?’
‘Ah, dear girl.’ He couldn’t conceal the pity in his voice and she tensed up in his lap. ‘You and I do not have the kinds of friends who would forgive us that.’
She took a deep breath, and the fact that she tried again, though he had rebuffed her, bruised him deep and quick. ‘Will you know me in public, Duke? You won’t desert me to the gossips?’
He finally understood, and it complicated everything. That was
need
she was trying to hide. Lydia had declared war on her husband by coming here, and Darlington was the only person she still had in the world.
God help her.
It was all over London the next morning. How the Duke of Darlington had seduced Lady Marmotte under her husband’s nose by passing off one of his acolytes – the Chancellor’s son, no less! – as himself. It was the
coup de grâce
of the social season or the ruination of a parliamentarian, depending on which paper you were reading. Everyone knew, apparently, that Lady Marmotte was the money and the brains behind her husband’s political campaigns.
One paper was full of claims by partygoers that they hadn’t been fooled for a moment, of course not, they’d just been playing along. Others gave outraged voice to the mockery it made of the peerage. An artist was called upon to discuss the similarity in feature and build between the Duke and the Chancellor’s son, Crispin Scott.
On one point all the papers agreed: the Duke had been dared to do it by a cleverer mind than his. Everybody knew he was a simple soul.
Kit put the paper down on the table and just resisted banging her head into it. Repeatedly.
A simple soul.
She very carefully didn’t throw anything across the room, and she didn’t scream. To think that last night she had thought his seduction of Lady Marmotte a kind of betrayal. God, what kind of bee-brained git was she? That man – that glorious, awful man – was her sister’s lover.
‘Lord Marmotte is going to petition Parliament for a divorce this morning,’ she said to Lydia, pouring herself another cup of coffee – all she could manage at this moment. She would recover soon. ‘A marriage has been ruined that is never going to be made right.’
‘Their marriage was in name only, everyone knows that,’ Lydia said, nibbling delicately at her toast and flipping the pages of a fashion magazine. Kit was only recently in the habit of watching her sister closely, and she couldn’t say whether her unconcern was an act or truth. An affair with
that
man would not be a simple bid for BenRuin’s notice.
The assurance she’d received from the Duke that the affair was done was useless. They had been given to her by a boy.
‘You must break it off,’ she said. She wouldn’t normally tell Lydia what to do, but she was desperate. She would do anything to separate her sister from the Duke’s influence.
‘I don’t know what you mean.’ Lydia flipped another page. ‘Oh, how pretty. I’ll have Candace make you one in yellow. It will go well with your eyes.’
‘The Duke, Lydia. He is not a man to play with. He is not the man to use to make your husband jealous.’
Lydia still didn’t look at her, but her smile wasn’t very nice. ‘He is just the man for it,’ she said.
‘Then jealousy is not going to save your marriage. Did Lord BenRuin even come home last night?’
Lydia stopped turning pages all at once and looked directly up at Kit. ‘You think I don’t know the Duke at all, don’t you? You are ridiculously naïve. Last night was nothing to him, a mere wave of the hand. We are speaking of a man who was once discovered by Sir Henry Wittwer in his wife’s bedroom and managed to convince the baronet he was a woman disguised as a man, seeking shelter with his lady wife from an angry lover.’
‘You refuse to see he will do the same to you and worse.’
Lydia stood, and Kit recognised the look she gave her, because it had been inherited from their father. It made her sick to her stomach. ‘I will take advice from you,’ Lydia said, ‘when you outrank me.’ She left the room, the toast half-eaten on her plate.
Kit buttered a scone and covered it in jam, then made herself take a bite. Her fingers splayed over the fine newspaper print, and she concentrated until the whirr in her brain had quieted a little, and the words made sense again.
It was self-indulgent and silly to wish her sister would return. There hadn’t been any affection between them to rupture or set right for more than a decade.
She forced her eye to the next story, and sat up straighter in her chair. There was a rumour that a second claim to the Darlington title would be lodged this morning, alongside Lord Marmotte’s divorce. He had told her himself that his claim had gone to the Committee for Privileges – and now a second claim would be made by a man called Albert Shrove. She was viciously glad.
Oh. She slumped back into her chair. He was an accountant from Leeds. Kit could write in to the paper that she intended to be a baroness before the year was out and it would be less absurd.
She read the paper all the way to the end, but Lydia did not return.
Lydia leaned over the side of the carriage to talk to an acquaintance – Lady Isley – and Kit sat beside her, staring down at the pamphlet she held in her gloved hands. She had been longing to go outdoors, and it was a rare sunny day, if a little windy and cold. She barely even noticed.
What kind of man would publish these words about himself? It unnerved her, because she couldn’t understand it.
‘Darlington,’ Lydia purred.
Kit’s head whipped up, and there he was, coming towards them with four other riders.
If any part of her had persisted in thinking there must be some good in him, it died in that moment. How could anyone be so lacking in moral sense – in shame?
Her eyes lingered on his face only long enough to be sure it
was
him this time. It was. He looked expensive and stupid and she wished she hadn’t looked at his eyes, because they were sadder today than they had been yesterday.
He stopped by Lady Isley and swept off his hat in greeting.
Lydia said, ‘You have been too, too naughty. If I hadn’t such a bad reputation myself, I shouldn’t dare to be seen with you.’
‘But I should dare anything to be seen with you, my lady, so I am afraid you shall have to suffer your reputation a little longer.’
Lady Isley tittered and fished for details of last night’s scandal, which the Duke easily avoided. He and his friends said a lot of nonsense that sounded very naughty but meant nothing if you parsed it down. If Lady Isley had only condescended to speak with Lady BenRuin’s unfashionable sister, she could have had more details than was polite.
Kit waited to be introduced to him, though she supposed that in a strictly theoretical sense she had met him already. Twice over. Lydia appeared to have forgotten she existed – she’d even gone so far as to put her back between Kit and any clear sight of the Duke. Lady Isley left them to greet another acquaintance who was waving from a barouche farther ahead. As soon as she was out of earshot, Lydia and Darlington’s friends began swapping gossip in bright, earnest voices.
Darlington looked away over the park and said nothing. He seemed blank – merely a body inhabiting a space. It bothered Kit, more than she liked. She leaned around Lydia and said to him, ‘I’m Miss Sutherland. How lovely to make your acquaintance for the very first time.’
That made him smile – a smile as if he were coming back to life. He shouldn’t smile at her like that. She shouldn’t have tried, despite herself, to amuse him. It had been as instinctive as the desire to run a finger through the grime on a window to let some light shine through. He manoeuvred his horse to her side of the carriage and made to take her hand.
‘Let’s not do any of that,’ she said in a low voice. His sudden closeness was sobering. ‘I know what you are.’
‘Have you been reading the papers, Miss Sutherland?’
And then she wanted to pull him off his horse and pummel him into the ground. She would spit on him for approaching her last night when he knew who she was, and what she wanted from him.
She would be home soon, she reminded herself. All of this would be done, soon.
The carriage lurched briefly forward, and she saw the workings of his knee from the corner of her eye, as he urged his horse to keep pace. The beast was pale and large – almost too large for the man who sat astride it. It was kept perfectly in control, but showed its desire to be unrestrained more clearly than its master did.
‘Just do me the courtesy,’ she said, ‘of hearing what I have to say.’
He nodded. ‘Would you walk with me?’
‘Kit.’ Lydia turned from her lively conversation. ‘You cannot leave me alone in the carriage, that simply won’t do.’
Kit had no way of knowing whether this was true or not.
The Duke laughed. Different to that single, precious laugh Kit had longed to keep, before she knew the kind of man he was. ‘My dear Countess, you are a married woman. Though I must forgive you for forgetting it, when I so often forget it myself.’
They were careless words. Kit looked at her sister, the married woman who was supposed to fend for herself. Behind the fortune’s worth of material she wore, behind her icy posture and her mocking smile, behind her knowing eyes, she glimpsed the tiny girl with thistledown hair who had once been the most precious thing in her world, and Tom’s.
‘I won’t be long,’ she said, and touched Lydia’s hand.
Lydia recoiled from her. ‘Go, go.’
The Duke dismounted and threw the reins to one of his hangers-on. Kit didn’t look at his sad eyes, which had no doubt missed nothing, and she refused his hand out of the carriage. She walked out ahead of him. He came up beside her and offered his arm. She didn’t take it.
‘You want something from me,’ he said, ‘yet so far you offer nothing in return. Your negotiation is somewhat lacking, Mistress Pig Farmer.’
Kit watched a flock of girls walking down by the water, their parasols waving white and lazy in the breeze. When she and the Duke had walked far enough from the carriage she said, ‘I want you to leave my sister alone.’
‘Why?’
She faltered a step. How could he even ask? She searched his face for sympathy, though she knew better. ‘She is married. She is young and impressionable. When you chew her up and spit her out two or six or even ten months from now, you’ll still be a duke, and she will be fair game for any man who wants her.’
His eyes moved over her, thinking, calculating. She didn’t like watching the speed at which he worked; she suspected nothing he did was by accident, and he’d meant her to see it. He walked on.
‘A young, impressionable woman comes to town from the country,’ he said. ‘She marries to satisfy her family, but the man she marries is altogether too much for her, and so every day is a battle to keep him at bay. She does not understand the rules of this world where she has landed, nor the people in it who look down on her from their castle walls. She is alone and drowning.’
Drowning.
‘Then a man takes pity on her, and he fashions her a suit of armour. He teaches her to demolish castle walls with a single word. With his help, she learns to bring the world around her to its knees in worship. She is a queen. But her family, who sent her from the country as a young, impressionable woman, demand that she give that man, that single ally, up.’
She counted sixty whole seconds of silence. Her father had rearranged reality with words, too, and she had discovered that if she allowed some time to lapse she could begin to pick through his fancy for the pieces she knew to be true.
Oh, God, had Lydia really been so alone?
‘She doesn’t need to be worshipped. She needs to be esteemed and liked and respected.’
He made a graceful bow then continued walking. ‘All of those things, I feel for your sister.’
‘She needs those things from her husband and her peers, not from a lover.’
‘And her family? What does she deserve from them?’
The shot pierced her clean through. She stopped to allow for the curious pain of it and looked up at him. ‘I want you to stay away.’
His eyes met hers and it hit her, forcefully, that he was right – she had nothing to offer him in return for what she asked.
She saw with excruciating clarity that all those years she’d been turning Lydia into the kind of woman who could marry well above her station, she’d been turning herself into a narrow kind of woman with no power. Not of the sort she desperately needed now. Why hadn’t she tried to make an ally of her uncle after Father died, no matter how hopeless it seemed? A relation like Lord Barton might at least have made the Duke pause.
He watched her steadily, waiting, because they both knew he could demand anything he liked of her.
‘If there is anything I can give in return, name it,’ she said, and each word was pulled painfully to her will, like arrows knocked to the taut string of a longbow.
He looked away across the park. ‘I want you to leave London,’ he said.
She couldn’t believe it. She wanted nothing more. She would comply in a heartbeat.
‘And I want to come with you.’
Darlington watched, but he couldn’t detect any particular change in her. She was perhaps a little paler, but it was hard to tell beneath the bonnet and with the mottled shade of leaves across her face.
He did not feel so composed as she. What fate had put her so wholly within his power, when he needed her so very much?
‘You cannot,’ she said. The sunshine in her voice surprised him, as it did every time she opened her mouth. There was, still, nothing sunny about her. ‘You cannot come with me.’
‘Do you have no proper chaperone at home? That will not be a problem.’
‘I have no proper home for a duke.’
They stood not too far from Lydia’s carriage. He was aware that Lydia and the Dandies watched them, as did half the
ton
, it seemed. The Dastardly Duke of Darlington, not content to rest after last night’s efforts, already seducing an innocent.
It was difficult to say whether she was innocent or not.
He waved to Lydia, one graceful swish of his hand through the air. He knew already that he would desert her. He would put his needs above hers, and prove himself irredeemable.
‘I do not need a proper home, Miss Sutherland. I am not going to burden you with my retinue. My valet will cry himself to sleep, poor man, but even he shall not accompany me.’
‘You don’t understand, Your Grace. I cannot – cannot expect a duke to live where I live.’
‘Then you may rest easy. I will not travel as the Duke of Darlington – even he will be left behind.’
She drew in a deep breath and looked directly at him, the way only she did. ‘This is what you ask?’ Her words were slow, distinct.