But she was a stranger. He did not love her, and she certainly did not love him.
Edelston, at last, realized he’d been an utter cake all along.
Chapter Twenty-two
The king seemed to have changed little since Connor had last seen him, except to have grown much fatter. George IV was eager to spend the evening with his aging mistress, and not at all eager for her to get a look at the handsome returned duke, so he had kept the audience short, and made noises about hoping Connor would vote with him in Parliament . . . though his father and brother never had. And Connor had made polite noncommittal noises in response, thinking, Fat chance, Your Majesty.
He could now see the Cambridge Horse Fair on the horizon; the colorful tents and flags were disappearing, little by little, as workers tucked them away for next year’s festivities. His heart leaped. In mere minutes, he would be with Rebecca again.
Before his audience with the king, he had spent the morning going over the Dunbrooke accounts with Mr. Matthew Green. If Mr. Green recalled his fleeting (or, rather, fleeing) visitor, he was diplomatic enough not to mention it. He had instructed Mr. Green to suspend the rents of the tenants at Keighley Park effective immediately, and to send a number of experts on building, landscaping, and farming to the area to prepare a detailed report on the conditions of the home and surrounding lands. Since the corn crop had been too good in recent years to bring decent prices, Connor was interested in suggestions on how the tenant farmers could find other sources of income.
Weston himself had been personally pleased to set two teams of his Bond Street tailors on the urgent project of creating two new suits for him, shirts, trousers, waistcoats and all.
And thanks to Colonel Pierce, Cordelia was being discreetly and securely held at another of the Blackburn properties in London. Bow Street Runners lounged about the place, their big boots up on the fine furniture, their huge rough hands clutching Dunbrooke china and downing Dunbrooke tea, their shrewd eyes glued to Cordelia with nothing more than professional curiosity. Bless them. The little footman that had hovered about Cordelia like a crow, however, had simply vanished.
And the Tremaines—well, he’d successfully dodged Sir Henry so far. He would bring Rebecca to them the moment he returned to London with her.
All in all, Connor had to admit being a duke had felt quite delicious for the past day or so.
He had the intelligence and wherewithal to do real good with his money and position, he realized. With the promise of Rebecca by his side, and without the specter of his father looming over him, his birthright had begun—as much as he hated to admit it—to look more like freedom, like an opportunity, like a blessing, than a trap.
Perhaps he could forge a new Dunbrooke legacy. With Rebecca at his side, anything seemed possible. He could hardly wait for their future to begin.
He kneed his horse into a run.
While Leonora rolled bedding, Rebecca knelt before the trunk and tucked their herbs and tinctures lovingly into a bed of straw and muslin to cushion them against the jostle of the rough roads.
“What will you do with Lord Edelston?” she asked Leonora.
Edelston had been consigned to his own small tent. The Gypsy men had quickly perceived that he posed no threat whatsoever, unless one felt threatened by incessant grousing.
“I suppose he will travel with us for a few days at least. He is not yet fit enough to travel on his own. Raphael has decided the lord must work to make up for the cost of his keeping. And then, if the lord is . . .” She paused, searching for the right English word.
“Childish? Unpleasant? Ridiculous?” Rebecca suggested.
“Cooperative. If the lord is cooperative, Raphael may give him an old horse to carry him back to London, or perhaps some money for a coach.”
Rebecca stopped packing for a moment, pondering this. The prospect of watching Edelston work for his keep held an undeniable appeal.
Rebecca finished packing the trunk, and looked around nervously for something else to do. She had slept only briefly and fitfully last night, and her dreams had been short and raw. She had jerked awake at the conclusion of each one, and yet she couldn’t really recall any of them completely. She had awoken this morning with a bitter, metallic feel in her mouth, as though she could taste her own heart bleeding. Even Martha had lost the power to rattle her.
And I dukker best of all, Martha had said. How ironic if that was indeed true. They were leaving the Cambridge Horse Fair, and yet there was no sign of Connor.
“Take these outside to the wagon, Rebecca, if you would,” Leonora asked, sensing Rebecca’s need to keep moving. She pointed to the bedrolls; Rebecca scooped them up and pushed the tent flap aside.
The Gypsy camp was bustling cheerfully; men were loading the wagons with tents and chests and lifting children up to sit beside their mothers. Rebecca found Leonora’s wagon, her placid white horse already hitched to it, and tossed the bedrolls in.
The sound of hoofbeats coming at a gallop made her turn. She searched the periphery of the camp with her eyes until she found the source: a lone rider was approaching, obscured in a puff of dust. Immediately wary, the Gypsy men paused in their work and shaded their eyes from the lowering afternoon sun. A gallop signified urgency, and so far there was nothing at all about the day that required urgency.
But Rebecca knew who it was. Knowing that her hair glowed like a beacon among all the dark heads of the Gypsies, she stood in place and waited for him to find her.
Which he did in moments. Connor pulled his horse to a halt before her and lowered himself to the ground stiffly, and because his own legs weren’t quite ready to hold him up after the long ride, he swayed a little on his feet. He was breathing heavily, and drenched; his shirt had gone transparent with sweat, and sweat made little gullies in the dust caked on his face and beaded in his eyelashes and eyebrows. When he reached up a hand to push his hair out of his eyes, his hair stayed where he’d pushed it. He left fingerprints in the dust on his forehead, Rebecca thought distantly.
How is it, she wondered, that he always seems more real than anything else? It was as though the world were a painted backdrop against which he stood in stark relief.
Her eyes went to his sweat-soaked shirt. It was new, made of fine linen; new, not filthy and patched by her own clumsy hand. Made for him.
Made for a duke.
“Oh, God. Rebecca.” Connor’s voice was a joyful rasp, tattered from the hard ride. “I thought . . . I thought I’d never get here . . .”
“Hello, Connor.” Icy politeness.
Connor looked troubled for a moment. Then his face cleared, as though he’d decided she was teasing him.
“Hello, Miss Tremaine,” he said with mock formality, and bowed.
She remained silent and stared back at him with something akin to impassiveness.
Connor’s brows drew down in confusion. He cleared his throat nervously, then reached out a hand to touch her. “I’ve so much to tell you—”
Rebecca stepped back from him, and his hand dropped like a bird shot out of the sky.
“That’s a fine new shirt, Your Grace.” Her voice was low, almost contemptuous.
The realization dawning on Connor’s face was a thing to behold.
“The name’s Roarke, is it not? Is that what she calls you, Connor, when you . . . when you . . . lie with her?”
“Lie with—lie with—wee Becca, what are you talking about?”
She couldn’t help herself; the words kept welling up involuntarily, like the blood of someone who has been stabbed in the heart. “And where is the duchess this afternoon, Your Grace? At a fitting for her wedding gown? You are just in time for my wedding, Your Grace. Edelston arrived yesterday evening, bearing the glad tidings of your nuptials—”
“Of my what? He is lying. He is—”
“—to your mistress, Marianne Bell. And what choice have I, a ruined woman, but to take him to my bed?”
It was a lie, designed specifically to hurt hi
m.
And, oh, it did. His expression then almost gave her pause . . . his eyes huge and black, like new bruises.
His voice shook. “Rebecca, I do not know what he told you, but he had no right—I will kill him—”
“No right? No right? You speak of rights? You . . . you . . . lied to me, Connor. Or should I call you Roarke? And how am I to know whether you speak truth now? Whether you’ve ever spoken the truth?” She said this with wonderment, and shook her head, as though she could still scarcely believe it. “But perhaps I am to blame, because I was oh, so easy to lie to, wasn’t I? I was foolish: I would have believed it if you’d said you were the one who’d arranged for the sun to rise each day. I wore that locket with her picture in it around my neck. You knew. Did you laugh at me, at my naiveté, did you think it was funny?”
“I did not so much lie, wee Becca, as . . . omit parts of the truth.”
“Are you amused by this?”
Connor pushed his hand through his hair again, ner-vously; it was clear, Rebecca thought with some relish, that she was coming at places he had not expected to need to defend. “Rebecca, I tried to tell you, that morning by the river. Perhaps I did not give you names and places and dates, but I tried to convey to you, somehow, all that I had left behind. You deserved that much, I knew. None of it would have mattered, none of this would have happened, if we had been able to leave then for America. And you asked for nothing more than what I told you. You said . . . you said that it did not matter as long as we were together.”
“I think you did not tell me all, Connor, did not give me names and places and dates, as you say, because you knew that it would matter, that it did matter. You guessed, correctly, that I would be too naive to question you further. You took the coward’s way out.”
He froze and stared at her; his entire body tensed like a bunched fist before her eyes. Almost unconsciously, Rebecca took another step back.
“Rebecca, you are a child.” The words were etched in derision.
Rebecca’s spine went rigid with outrage; she could feel hot color flooding into her cheeks.
Connor smiled a small, sardonic smile. “Yes, you are in so many ways a child. Are you capable of comprehending, I wonder, what I have risked for you? I gave up a peaceful life for you, and now I have my old life back, the one I never wanted, and I did it for you. And it was you, not I, who made me into a hero, Rebecca; me, the keeper of your father’s horses, a hero. Laughable, when you think about it,” he added cruelly. “And now you are gravely disappointed to learn that I am just a man. Not a god, not a hero. Just a man. I do not always do the noble and right thing; I do not always even know what the right thing is. I have lived a whole life, Rebecca. I had a mistress named Marianne Bell, and yes she was beautiful, and yes I made love to her, because that is what one does with mistresses. But I never loved her. Is that what you wanted to know, Rebecca? Does that soothe your pride? Need I remind you precisely who brought the locket on our journey?”
“I—”
“I’ve been to war, Rebecca. I’ve seen men die horrible deaths right in front of me. I’ve killed men without knowing their names. But nothing has ever frightened me so much as the thought that I might lose you if you knew the truth about me. And perhaps what I did amounted to lying. I had no experience of love to call upon, you see, to tell me what to do. I did what was easiest, and simply stayed silent about my past, and hoped it would come right, for I wanted none of it, none of my legacy. Perhaps it was not the right decision; perhaps I should have trusted you to understand. But you have not lived as I have lived, Rebecca, and you have not been required to make the choices I have made. You have not earned the right to call me a coward. Do not ever—ever—call me a coward.”
They stared at each other in righteous, furious silence for a moment.
When she spoke, her voice was subdued. But it was steady, and she was proud that it was.
“Connor, of everyone I’ve known, I thought I knew you best. I trusted you with . . . that is to say, I . . . I . . . made love with you.” She stammered, blushing, over the words; they still did not spill off her tongue lightly. And suddenly the fact that this should make her blush made her freshly angry. “I gave you my trust freely, but you did not honor me with your own—you chose instead to harbor secrets. And you acted as everyone else always has—my father, my mother, Edelston—you assumed I would do just exactly what I was told, simply because it was you doing the telling. And what choice did you give me? You left me here, and I was forced to wait for you, because it was my only choice. That’s not choice, Connor. That’s . . . that’s captivity.”
Connor lifted an eyebrow. “Captivity, was it, wee Becca? So helping Leonora was much, much worse, was it, than, for instance, staying at home and playing pianoforte?”
She was silent.
“You have to believe me, Rebecca. Please . . . please listen to me. Marianne is nothing to me now. Nothing. Rebecca, she was trying to have me killed. Edelston lied to you for his own gain. And . . . I cannot tell you everything now, it would take so long, but I will tell you all, I promise. Just come away with me.”
Rebecca stared at him, her eyes brimming with unshed tears.
“It seems everyone is lying to me for their own gain.”
“Please. I will make it up to you for the rest of my life, Rebecca. Won’t it be amusing to have something to hold over me for the rest of your life?” A desperate attempt at humor.
“I am not going anywhere, Connor.”
His face seemed to cave in upon itself then, as if the words had punched the breath from him.
“What . . . what do you mean?”
“I am staying here. I certainly cannot go home to my family, disgraced as I am. And I am needed here; I am learning to be a healer. No one here pretends to be something other than what they are, you see.”
As intended, she had found her mark.
“Yes, I do see,” he said softly. “What of Edelston?”
“Edelston will be gone from here in a few days.” An admission, of sorts, and yet when Connor turned soft eyes on her, looking for softness in her, he found none.
“Come away with me, Rebecca. You will not regret it,” he tried again.
“No.”
“Rebecca—”
“How, Connor, can I ever trust you again? It’s all very simple. I can only stay here.”
“I will not force you to come.” A warning.
“I know.”
“I can stay with the Gypsies, too.”
“I cannot stop you. I strongly prefer, however, that you do not.”
Connor was silent for a moment.
“What of your parents, Rebecca?”
“What of them? I will be gone with the Gypsies by the time they arrive, if your plan is to tell them.”
Neither of them spoke for another long moment.
“I love you,” Connor said quietly.
She turned her head away from him.
“Shall I leave then, Rebecca?”
She nodded.
“And you’re very certain it’s not just your pride saying that, Rebecca?” Bitterness had crept into his voice.
“You should go,” she said softly. “Just go.”
She would not look at him.
Connor reached for the reins of his horse.
“What . . . what will you do now?” Rebecca asked hesitantly.
“It matters not,” he said.
And as she did not reply, Connor nodded curtly to her, and led the horse away.
Rebecca watched, dully, as Connor approached Raphael, to whom he spoke a few words. And then she could not watch any further. She heard, though, after a space of time, the hoofbeats of a horse cantering away from the camp.
When Rebecca turned, finally, she found Martha watching her, her expression absolutely captivated and ablaze with jealousy, and Leonora, who saw everything, the truth of it, in Rebecca’s face.
“You are welcome to stay with us, little Gadji, of course,” Leonor
a told her gently. “I have need of you. But I will say one thing: sometimes the wisest, bravest thing we can do is follow our hearts and forgive the thing that seems unforgivable.”
Rebecca said nothing. Her eyes were on the place on the horizon where a horse and rider had vanished a few moments before.
Chapter Twenty-three
No,” Lady Tremaine said. “No, no, no, no no.”
The note of hysteria in her voice escalated in pitch with each “no.” The last “no” was, in fact, delivered with tremolo. A nice touch, Sir Henry had to concede.
Still, he was unmoved. Sir Henry merely eyed his wife with resolve. He had decided that for once he would not be cajoled from his position, not by tears, nor hysteria, or by cold silence. For once, he would simply wait out whatever strategy his wife decided to employ in an attempt to sway him, the way one waited out a spell of inclement weather. It would not be comfortable in his home for some time, he speculated, and yet he rather relished the idea of the challenge it would present. Perhaps his mild rebellion was long overdue.
He could hear the muffled sobs of Lorelei, who was upstairs behind closed doors. Her mother had dealt with her rather harshly for conducting a courtship in secret. A courtship with someone other than a viscount, that is.
“She can be a countess, Henry. She can marry an earl. She is the greatest success the ton has seen in years. What in heaven’s name are you thinking? She should not be given your blessing. She should be given a beating.”
“All right, Elizabeth,” Sir Henry said, gently but firmly. “That is quite enough. You will sit down and be quiet while I speak.”
Lady Tremaine gaped at her husband for a moment, surprised. They were about at the point in the conversation where he normally capitulated.
“Henry —”
“Sit down, Elizabeth.”
She sat, albeit reluctantly.
“I think,” he began slowly, “we have lost sight of something important. I think we agree that it has been our goal as parents to see our children well married. And if we manage to secure a fine match for our child and feel certain they will also be happy in that match, then our joy should be twofold, is that not true?”
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