by Anna Cowan
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.
Chapter Three
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 pub
lic. 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 wo
uld be able to get rid of them again without inflicting considerable harm.
‘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.