He made light conversation and watched her. He could find nothing in the woman to merit how Miss Sutherland – that fierce, animal girl – loved her. She was like an old, well-washed shirt that would have blown away in the breeze were it not pegged fast to a line.
Tom came into the room and bowed to Darlington. ‘Your Ladyship,’ he said in a quiet voice.
‘There you are, my darling,’ Mrs Sutherland murmured. When he made to take her hand she shooed him to the seat opposite Darlington.
In the soft light he could see Miss Sutherland’s brother more clearly. He was very like his sister – dark hair, golden eyes, a strong face – but his nose was not broken, and he did not unsettle Darlington by seeming to see right into him. He didn’t meet Darlington’s gaze but looked down at his hands that were soft and still in his lap, as though reading some meaning from the ink stains on them.
Darlington and Mrs Sutherland kept up a gentle, mutually flattering conversation. He had time to take in more of the room and a kind of muted horror was working its way, insect-like, up his neck. The signs of daily habitation were unmistakeable – miniatures hung on the wall in a cluster, brown petals collected around the base of a vase, books lay open on the one small desk, and a faint stain described where a teacup must have rested earlier in the day.
This was not a small evening parlour, or even the private parlour of the mistress of the house. This was their whole living area, next to the kitchen, in the very back of a dead house.
He looked at Mrs Sutherland, still working at her sewing, and at Tom, who did not look back at him. This was their private world, and they were to be his only company for a week at least. Miss Sutherland came into the room back first, carrying a tea tray.
And Katherine. She was here, too.
He made a travesty of her home, sitting there as splendid as an empress on their poor sofa that sagged where too many bottoms had sat before him. She served him, then Ma and Tom tea, then sat on the arm of the chair where Ma was doing needlework. The Duke asked Tom whether he’d yet come across the boy-poet Keats, which started a passionate discussion. Kit blinked, stifled a laugh and bent her head to watch her mother’s rhythmic stitching.
‘I suppose you’re hoping to convince her that you’re a respectable widow,’ she murmured, bending over to rest her chin on her mother’s shoulder. ‘Even though you haven’t the knack for fine needlework.’
‘I am a respectable widow. And as far as our guest will ever know, I embroider beautifully.’ She held up the hooped fabric and Kit hid her smile in the folds of her mother’s shawl. The patch was one of Miss Faith’s embroidered masterpieces. Ma was simply adding some ugly green shapes to the border.
‘Are those supposed to be lizards?’
‘They’re leaves, obviously.’
Kit caught Tom’s eye and he made a very slight expression that she could read as if she’d been the one to make it. He was nervous, but hiding it behind amusement. He turned back to a question the Duke asked him in Lady Rose’s unsettling voice. He made Tom uneasy, and Kit was the one who’d brought him here.
If he meant to turn her family into a weapon against BenRuin, he must have realised by now what poor ammunition they would make.
She let her head settle back onto her mother’s shoulder. Today had been a long day. She would think about what to do with the viper tomorrow.
‘I find I am tired by the day’s journey,’ the Duke said, placing his saucer delicately on the small table. ‘May I enquire what sleeping arrangements have been made for me?’
‘You’re to sleep in the room opposite this one,’ said Kit. ‘The bed’s ready made, and your things have been, er, put away as best we could manage.’ Stacked in a menacing pile in the corner of the room, because Ma’s wardrobe had filled after the first box was opened. ‘Let me show you the way.’ She was impatient to have him gone, so that she could have her family to herself – her brother, her dear mother.
The Duke stood and made one of those careless curtsies that women would study their whole lives to emulate. ‘Your hospitality undoes me,’ he said. ‘But I am afraid I must trespass further. It is difficult for me to admit it . . .’ He broke off in exactly the manner calculated to pique her mother’s curiosity.
He allowed a tense, expectant silence. Then, as though it were difficult to say: ‘I am afraid of the dark.’ His face was flushed, but his eyes flickered to hers and within the affected embarrassment she read triumph, like jewelled sap in bark. ‘It is shameful, a woman grown, and still I find I need company in order to sleep. I had thought perhaps a maid . . . But you have only the one, and I would hate to monopolise her.’
‘We had thought to give you my room,’ her mother said, a little less certain, ‘and I to share with Kit.’
Understanding rushed at Kit, as though from a great distance.
Her mother said, ‘I suppose you could share with her instead, though I’m not certain it’s right for the cousin of a duke to – that is, Kit’s bedroom is not exactly —’ She broke off into mortified silence.
‘It’s not a bad idea,’ said Tom, looking up at Kit. ‘I didn’t like Mother to climb all that way; her breathing has been worse since the flowers came out.’
This was how he meant to trespass on BenRuin.
‘Then I absolutely insist,’ said the Duke, who had somehow come into possession of her mother’s hand, and was kissing it affectionately. ‘I shall share Miss Sutherland’s bed for the duration of my stay.’
He knew. God, she could see in his face that he knew how the words were ripping up her insides in their need to be spoken. To deny that a man, a duke, could share her bed. This man, more than any other.
He meant to seduce her.
‘Liza could—’ She stopped. Liza couldn’t.
He opened his eyes at her, wide, innocent, and said, ‘I am sure on this at least you and I agree, Miss Sutherland. Your mother must have every comfort we can allow her. Now be a good girl and say you’ll let me share your bed. You will hurt my feelings if you don’t.’
He was like a clockmaker, and he had laid all her inner workings bare.
I would rather sleep out with the pigs
, she almost said, but Tom was looking at her; he knew something was not right. She had thought she could pay the Duke’s price when she agreed to it in Hyde Park. Now that she understood the full extent of what he asked, she couldn’t even begin to think of how to extricate herself. If she gave him away now, he would be back in Lydia’s bed tomorrow.
And he could tell all of London at his leisure where he had been. The Sutherlands of Millcross would be beyond ruined. All Tom’s ambition and hard work, undone. The last utterances of her mother’s good name. The reputation for forthrightness that she herself relied on for local credit.
She’d had her own bed for one measly year. She had taken to sleeping sprawled across it like a giant starfish, simply because she could. She hadn’t ever thought it might become a battlefield.
‘You may share with me,’ Kit said, and her limbs that had been forced again and again to bend as circumstance demanded formed themselves into something very like a curtsey. ‘I’ll show you up.’
As soon as they were out in the hall, she turned and raised her hand to him. They both looked at it, and she let it fall again in some confusion.
‘Something to say, Miss Sutherland?’
‘Those are people in there.’
‘Did I say I thought they were elephants?’
‘I have seen what you do when you forget that people are . . .’ She broke off, feeling an echo of the pain she’d felt watching him seduce Lady Marmotte, of losing something bright. If he tried to touch her like that she would stick him with a knife. And yet . . . she couldn’t afford to send him away.
He had seemed so clear that night – not simple, but defined in his black clothing with his hair off his face.
Now here he stood, in her house, the silk of his skirts brushing the walls, his travelling cases spilling out into the corridor. Every part of him was elaborate, down to his brilliant, speculative gaze. Every detail of his costume, every word he spoke, was a misdirection.
She hadn’t the faintest clue, she realised, and it washed cold through her, what he was capable of.
He said nothing as he followed her up the stairs, which Kit thought quite an accomplishment for him. For her part, she would push him down the stairs before she would resuscitate their conversation. They were the back stairs, used once upon a time by servants, when the Manor had such things as bells and servants and upper rooms. The wood was rubbed smooth in the middle of each step. It was more practical to use these stairs than the grand marble staircase out in the front hall – and far less lonely. The candle she carried shed a swaying, warm light in the narrow space.
At the top of two flights of stairs was a hallway that gave on to what were once the maidservants’ quarters. The first of these doors led into Kit’s room – tiny, cluttered,
hers
. More than once in this long day she had reminded herself that at the end of it she could retreat to her own limited domain and close her door on the rest of the world.
She opened the door and passed through it, and her room was already diminished – reduced to a stack of books, her old dresser and the badly crocheted blanket on her bed. She turned to tell him not to use the lock, but he was much closer behind her than she had thought, and she found herself face-to-face with him.
‘Excuse me,’ he said in that awful voice. She stepped quickly away. It was probably rude, but it was necessary. The backs of her knees hit the bed.
How easily he had brought them to this moment. He had done away with every obstacle before they’d even left London.
‘You needn’t think you’re coming anywhere near me,’ she said. ‘That wasn’t part of our bargain.’
He didn’t come any closer, but he smiled. It began very small. It made her think about what was bound so tight in that corset, what was hidden beneath the heavy, expensive fall of those skirts. ‘I had the impression you liked me well enough the first time we met,’ he said.
Her better judgement urged her not to speak.
‘You should allow a person one false start,’ she said, ‘where you’re concerned. My family downstairs think themselves charmed, as I once did. Why are you here?’
‘Oh, excuse me, I thought that was obvious. I’m here for you, Miss Sutherland.’
He watched closely for the impact of his words; there was nowhere left to retreat from him.
‘Why?’ It was ripped from her. ‘What possible reason could you have?’
His brow creased into delicate confusion. ‘Did your brother-in-law not warn you of exactly the kind of man I am?’
‘You didn’t answer the question.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I suppose I didn’t.’
She waited. She realised she could never out-wait him. ‘There are limits to what I’ll endure for my sister’s sake. You’ll not touch me.’
‘Hush. I ruined you the moment you let me through your bedroom door. There is no reason for me to seduce you in truth. You are . . . safe.’ His smile acknowledged that ‘safe’ was an inadequate word for whatever Kit was with the Duke of Darlington in her bedroom.
If he was telling the truth – if he need ruin her in name only to satisfy his purpose – then perhaps her thudding, fearful heart had the wrong of it.
She had not forgotten his uneasy relationship with truth.
He turned away from her, his skirts swaying lazily after him, and she put the candle down on the small table by the door. He raised his arms and started to pluck hairpins from his wig as he bent to look at the books and magazines overflowing in piles along the wall.
‘You’ve a good sight too much luggage,’ she said. ‘We’ll have to see if we can clean out another room for your clothes.’ Though where they were to get a wardrobe from, she had no idea. They’d broken up the last of their spare furniture for firewood two winters ago when things had been so very bad.
He made no sign he’d heard her. Another pin came free, and another, and her room became strange around her. She couldn’t look away from his pale, industrious fingers. Another pin plucked free. She knew the black hair that would be exposed when he took off the wig. She imagined it would be messy – pressed in tufts against his skull.
She fled, taking the stairs in the dark by memory and touch. Her mother called out as she passed her bedroom, but Kit ignored her. She spoke briefly to Liza then left by the kitchen garden into the thick, wet underbrush of the forest path. The sky tumbled endlessly out, and then the forest claimed her, soaking into her boots and hem and closing her away from the world. These trees had been bare and exposed not four months ago. They were strong enough to survive a winter.
She pulled her hair out of its hasty bun and opened the neck of her gown to the cold air.
Darlington fetched the candle – one stubby candle! – and put it on Miss Sutherland’s antique dresser. He sat himself before it and his fingers tightened erratically into fists, without the consent of his brain.
Breathe.
He amused himself by looking through Miss Sutherland’s things. The marble surface wasn’t covered with face paints and jewellery, as such dressers usually were. He opened one wooden box expecting the usual gewgaws.
‘Huh.’ His hand stilled. The box was full of what looked like small pieces of machinery. In another were various bits of paper – old shopping bills and dress patterns. In yet another was a collection of buttons, a piece of dried honeycomb and some white heather. In the very centre of the dresser, before the mirror, sat the perfect shell of a beetle, metallic blue and no larger than a button. And in that blue glass pot —
The maid entered the room with an embarrassed ‘Milady’.
Could she not have waited ten seconds more? He forced his fingers away from the unopened pot.
The maid placed a basin of hot water on the dresser before him and laid a nightgown – from his own luggage, he presumed – on the bed. She spent an age unbinding him, the ripe smell and heat of her body an unbearable intrusion. When all the laces were loose he excused her.
He took his time washing his face free of make-up – the movement of cloth to face a familiar thing from his childhood, when he had performed all his own ablutions.
He wrestled himself out of his dress, threw it over the back of the room’s one stuffed chair, and pulled the nightgown over his head. It was exquisitely made from the finest lawn, and a multitude of lace fell from his breast – whether for Mme Soulier’s private amusement, or as a further disguise, he couldn’t say.
He had never been comfortable sleeping naked and the garment was something clean and fine to wrap about himself in this strange place.
He approached the tatty bed, cautiously peeled back three or four layers and slipped in between the sheets. They smelt faintly of lye soap. The mattress wasn’t down, but neither was it straw. Wool, he thought, as he sank slowly into it. In fact . . . he moved about a bit until he found just the perfect spot between blankets and mattress, his face buried in the pillows. It was, in fact, bliss. Like being wrapped up in a dense English cloud. His heart slowed. He was so very tired. He sighed, and breathed right in.
And a scent, so faint it barely existed, of Kit surrounded him.
His eyes opened again. He rolled over and stared at the ceiling.
He’d snuffed the candle – between two spit-wet fingers, no snuffer in sight – because his desire to keep it alight had seemed childish.
He could do nothing but listen for Miss Sutherland’s tread on the stairs.
The first thing she saw, when she entered the room hours later, was the Duke slumped against the wall beneath the window. He looked small in the candlelight, his shadow looming. The curtains were open.
He looked up at her – no, not at her, at the candle. She looked quickly away from him, unsettled.
‘It’s kind of you to leave me the bed,’ she said, placing the candle on her dressing table beside the other cold stub. She frowned. Nothing was precisely out of place, but she knew to her bones that he’d fingered her things. ‘Have you —’
He pushed himself up the wall and the movement made her flinch. He shook so badly the layers and layers of lace at his chest rippled like water down rocks.
‘You’re here,’ he said.
She turned back to the dresser and tried to shrug, but her muscles were ungainly and slow. It was bad enough coming back and finding him awake, without this. He was so awfully undone, though she didn’t understand the cause, or how deep his shaking went. She took her time plaiting her hair, and he was more composed when she turned back. Which didn’t make the enormity of him in her room any less overwhelming.
‘Are you coming to bed?’ he asked, getting under the covers.
Her fingers gripped the edge of the dresser. She’d tried not to think too hard about how exactly she would climb into bed beside him, knowing the whole night long he might reach out for her. Behind her she could hear him . . . moving about. Making himself comfortable. His messy black hair on her pillow.
‘I will write a book of bad ideas,’ she said, pulling viciously at the buttons on her sleeve, ‘and the final chapter will be dedicated to this epic, gravity-defying feat of stupidity. And in hundreds of years a celebrated English wordsmith will come across it and write a poetic tribute to the very bad idea that malformed in the brain of one demented duke. His work will run to eleven volumes before his vocabulary has even begun to do justice to how extremely bad this idea is.’
She could hear him smiling in the dark, and she knew she was showing off. Just a bit.
Idiot.
She bent to blow the candle out before she took off her dress; she’d have to sleep in her shift and stockings.
‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘Don’t blow it out.’
‘I’m not leaving it lit so you can gawk at me.’
‘But I’m so terribly curious, Miss Sutherland.’
His eyes were on the candle, not on her.
‘Oh, my God,’ she said, ‘You’re scared of the dark.’
He said nothing, and she took a step closer. ‘The Duke of Darlington. Quaking like a small boy. Well, well. If there isn’t a silver lining to every cloud.’ She sat on the edge of the bed, and tutted like a concerned aunt. ‘You can tell Kit everything, lovey. Let it all out.’
If her bed was to be a battlefield, let this be the first sally. Let him attempt seduction in the same bed where she had pitied and judged him.
‘Tell me,’ she said. ‘For myself I’m not particularly interested, only I’m sure there are some London papermen who will be. It would be some neat insurance should you try anything against me and mine. Did the little duke wet his bed, too?’
‘Stop,’ he said quietly. ‘You’re not nearly unkind enough to want to do this. You imagine you will enjoy my humiliation. You won’t.’
‘Do you have any idea what it took to keep this house? Do you suppose for a second that I’d have managed it if I’d been
nice
?’
He said nothing.
‘Tell me, you condescending prick.’
They were silent for a long time, but she wouldn’t look away. His neck was rigid, and he didn’t move under the covers. The candle guttered; his eyes flicked involuntarily towards it.
She laughed, a mean sound, and turned away from him. ‘Forget it.’
‘You may not have noticed this,’ he said, ‘but I’m not exactly the manly variety of man. My father was a keen observer of the fact, and his response was to lock me into a particular room under the house with no windows.
Would that be the Grosvenor Square house?
you are about to ask me,
or the Hartsfield estate?
To save you the arduous task of naming all twenty-one of my houses, I can tell you now, Miss Sutherland, that my father had a room just like it built in every one. And I needn’t point out that they all seemed very much the same to me, given that I couldn’t see what a single one of them looked like. What? No witty rejoinders? I would have thought at the very least a gleeful chuckle would be in order.’
‘I don’t.’
He waited patiently, but when nothing else would emerge from her mouth he said, ‘Tut, Miss Sutherland, I won’t let you give up nearly so easily. What I have told you is idle chit-chat that would barely cover one cup of tea. What you’re after is something truly horrific. Something that would bring the newspapermen to your very door.’
‘I don’t want to hear any more.’
‘Are you sure? Because there are worse things a boy can be deprived of than light. I always thought my father an affectionate man when he made his feelings that tangible.’
‘You were right,’ she said, ‘I’m not unkind enough to enjoy this.’ She concentrated on the solid, right-here thunk of her shoes as she kicked them off into the corner. This was a man who had seduced a woman under her husband’s roof, and remained as untouched as the dead. She could not compete with him. It made her cold to think what it would take to beat him.
And now was the moment to join him in her bed. She wrapped herself in her shawl and hopped on to the very edge of the bed, on top of the covers.
He sighed. ‘I told you, you have nothing to fear from me. Come, you needn’t martyr yourself.’
‘I’ll sleep on the floor if you don’t shut up.’
She lay on her side in silk and wool, as though turning her back on him would make sleep any more likely.
‘Good night,’ he said.
She gritted her teeth and did not reply.
Darlington had his eyes so almost closed that the grey glass of the window shivered and shuttered between his lids. She had left the bed, never having really entered it, about ten minutes earlier. He had been relieved that she kept her distance and he did not have to risk her toes getting caught up with his in the night. It was worse without her here.
His hand was still closed about empty space, where he’d reached out on waking.
The door opened.
‘Get up,’ she said, and placed a basin of water on the dresser. She pulled a razor from the pocket of her smock and stropped it against her thigh. For an irrational moment he thought she was going to kill him.
‘You look less like a woman this morning,’ she told him, not quite looking at him, and he wondered if she’d done all her looking earlier when he’d been drifting uneasily in and out of sleep.
‘I used to shave Father all the time – you needn’t worry I’ll cut you. But it has to be now. Here, sit on the stool and put this napkin under your chin. I’m already late helping Liza with breakfast, and she uses too much wood when I’m not there to watch her make the fire.’