Antonia blinked. “You rowed over here?”
“Is there any other way? An early morning ride about the parklands with the Duke and his cronies enabled me to take in the lay of the land. This pretty little red brick manse is surrounded by ha-ha barriers on three sides, to keep the sheep in or out, so I’m told. And the road is not only gated but has two wide-eyed sentries who look as if they’ve come straight from a pugilist’s hellhole and enjoyed the experience. Invasion by boat was the only option left me.”
Antonia’s shoulders relaxed and she leaned in. “Who is Sarah-Jane?”
“My daughter: The pretty strawberry-blonde who grabbed my arm. The other two are the Aubrey twins. Silly goslings, both of them.”
“The strawberry blonde one she is your daughter?” For some inexplicable reason Antonia was relieved. “She is very pretty.”
“Yes. At nineteen years of age she’s determined to marry a Baronet at the very least.”
“But… You… You do not look old enough to be her papa. You cannot be much older than my son, yes?”
“Eight years his senior,” he revealed. “I shall take your astonishment as a compliment. Like you, I became a parent in my teens. The searing heat of the Indian subcontinent has baked my skin to such a healthy brown glow that I am what is generally referred to as ruggedly handsome.”
Antonia ignored his flippancy. “And your daughter she wants to marry a Baronet? Please, you will explain this to me.”
“A Baronet, at the very least,” Jonathon corrected. He put aside the cheroot, again balancing it on the lid of his tinderbox, contemplating his answer. “Her Cavendish relatives have instilled in her the importance of marrying for the right reasons: Connection, title, and wealth.”
Antonia was puzzled. “I do not understand at all why these reasons are the right reasons.”
Jonathon gave a bark of laughter. Her forthright if naïve responses were delightfully refreshing.
“That is easy for you to say, Mme la duchesse. You are a duchess. You were married to one of the wealthiest and most powerful noblemen in the kingdom.”
“But that was unimportant,” Antonia stated dismissively. “I did not marry Monseigneur for any other reason than love. Our marriage it was fated.”
Jonathon cocked a mobile eyebrow at her.
“Fated? Admit it: Monseigneur’s nobility and wealth helped you fall in love.”
Antonia was outraged.
“I will admit to nothing of the sort! You are insulting and cynical. There were many wealthy noblemen in France and here who wanted to marry me, but I wanted only Monseigneur.”
“Yes, I’m sure they were all lined up at your boudoir door, too,” he murmured, momentarily forgetting his good manners and allowing his admiring gaze to dip from her flushed face to her full round breasts barely concealed under a gossamer-thin silk fichu. “Monseigneur must’ve been quite the man to have captured your heart…”
When her fingers stole to the folds of the fichu he quickly looked away, realizing his remiss, and stared out across the sloping manicured lawn to the jetty. He watched a swan glide into view out from the tall rushes surrounding a small island and paddle across the still waters of the lake to meet up with its mate.
“Sarah-Jane does not believe in fate,” he said conversationally. “For one so young she is hard-headed about her future. She has no need to marry for money. I made my fortune in trade. But early hardships in India and a father with a turn for business taught her the value of money and hard work... The sapskull who proclaimed trade money couldn’t open the front doors of noble houses has a melon for a brain! Sarah-Jane will have her titled husband. There are too many beggarly lords out there who require my blunt to prop up their estates for her to be overlooked.” He met Antonia’s green-eyed gaze with a crooked smile. “Yet, I am reasonably confident that when the time comes, Sarah-Jane will be guided by my opinion of the young man she settles on for a husband, regardless of his titles and estates.”
“And your wife? What does she have to say about your daughter’s plans to marry a Baronet at the very least?”
Jonathon hooked his long legs back over the ornamental balustrade and faced her squarely, elbows on his knees and gaze unblinkingly on her lovely eyes. “My wife Emily died in childbed trying to give me a son. The boy died with her. Sarah-Jane does not remember her mother at all, which is a great shame and very hard for me because she has a great look of her... She was not quite three years old when her mother died.”
“You were very young to be left with the care of a motherless infant.”
“Yes. Not quite two and twenty.”
“Tell me about your wife.”
“Emily was three and twenty and married when we met. I was reading classics at Oxford and she was visiting a cousin who had a living at Magdalene. I literally bumped into her in the street. I had just turned eighteen and in my ninth miserable year—”
“Miserable?”
“I’d not been home to Hyderabad since a boy. When my elder brother James died, relatives back here persuaded my father that as I was now the only living male heir I needed an English gentleman’s upbringing. Hence six excruciating years at Harrow—”
“Pour Quoi? Excruciating you say? Why?”
He glanced away, to gather his thoughts and Antonia waited.
“When you are young all you want to be is the same as everyone else,” he explained, gaze again very much on her eyes. “And when you discover that you are not, that you are different from your fellows, you are mortified because you believe the fault lies with you. And they—the fellows you are thrown together with at school and who are all the same—they are merciless in pointing out that difference at every opportunity.”
“Because your skin it is the color of warm toffee?”
That made him laugh. “Warm toffee? I like it! But no,” he said with a shake of his head, “I wasn’t warm toffee then. That came later, when I returned to India.”
“Then I do not understand at all why these boys mistreated you,” she said dismissively. “As a boy you were no different to them, hein?”
“Yes, I was and I am,” he stated quietly. “One day you will know why. But not today...”
“And Emily?” Antonia prompted when he paused, thoughts seemingly miles away, no doubt thinking about those lonely years separated from his family. “You said Emily she was married?”
“Yes! Yes, married.” He pulled a face. “Married off at seventeen to a much older man who thankfully up and died seven years later—”
“Thankfully? Why do you say thankfully? Just because her husband he was much older than she does not mean they—”
“Excusez-moi, Mme la duchesse, but when I say thankfully, you must trust that I do not use the word lightly. He was not a good husband. He did not marry Emily because he loved her; he married her because she was a Cavendish and an heiress. In just six years of marriage he managed to dissipate her fortune and ruin her good name by dying in the arms of a whore. If you’d had the chance to meet her you would agree that Emily was a gentle shy creature who did not deserve such ill treatment. His age had nothing to do with it.”
Antonia was suitably contrite.
“Please, you will excuse me, M’sieur. I—It was wrong of me to presume...”
Jonathon inclined his head and pulled the hair back out of his eyes and continued. “To be brief, we eloped. The consequence of this thoroughly romantic gesture? Her father, friends and relations promptly disowned her. But who can blame the General for that? Emily’s husband may have been a brute with a title and a hopeless gambler but he was a Spencer. I was presumed a nobody with nothing.”
“But she loved you.”
He smiled.
“Yes, she loved me, and I her. We took the first passage to India and were finally married in Hyderabad, at my father’s house...” He let out a breath and stubbed the cheroot, saying without looking up, “She survived all those weeks aboard ship, rough seas, bad weather, giving birth to Sarah-Jane
in a God-forsaken African port, the tropical heat and the dreaded insects all without complaint. And in less than three years she was taken from me, before I had made my fortune and before—before she had any idea who I was destined to become...” His smile was gone and his lean face taut. Suddenly he looked at Antonia, adding in French, “Mme la duchesse, I am an honorable man. I will never do or say anything to intentionally deceive or-or hurt you. I give you my word.”
Antonia held his gaze. She believed him. The sincerity in his deep voice told her he had loved his wife very much. That he spoke the last two sentences in impeccable French should not have surprised her, but it did. Why had she not realized that he could speak her native tongue when he was capable of not only understanding everything she said but replied in English with such quickness of brain that he had to be simultaneously translating the one language into the other.
She noticed then that he wasn’t wearing a frockcoat, just a sleeveless waistcoat over his white shirt. It was a different waistcoat from the night before, but just as exquisite. This one was a deep sea green similarly embroidered but with elephants. His billowing shirtsleeves were rolled loosely to the elbow, no doubt as a consequence of rowing across the lake to her dower house.
The distance across the man-made lake from the monolith of stone that was the family palace to her quaint Elizabethan manor house with its gargoyle motifs upon the chimney pots was deceptive. It did not look that far, particularly from the west side of the lake where from atop the hill that housed the family mausoleum, both houses were clearly visible. But the lake was misleadingly large and meandering with many islands and bridges that had to be negotiated if one wanted to cross from the monolith to Crecy Hall, with its summer pavilion and small formal garden tucked away in a wide bend; both houses unseen one from the other.
Crecy Hall had sat crumbling and neglected for a hundred years until the fifth Duke, Monseigneur, had remodeled and refurbished it with his wife’s future widowhood in mind. To Antonia such painstaking considerations had seemed so distant that she had never permitted herself to dwell on the inevitability of outliving her husband by many years. And now here she was, a widow, living in the Elizabethan house with its fanciful chimney pots, fragrant gardens, a jetty and an icing-cake pavilion on the shores of the lake with its lovely outlook across tranquil blue waters stocked with fish and where families of swans and ducks glided by. And yet to her it was more prison than house.
He must be thirsty after all that rowing.
Antonia went to pour out a second glass of lemon water from the crystal pitcher but he was quick to do this for her. When he handed her the full glass she offered it to him and he took it with a small smile and drank gratefully of the cool tangy liquid refreshment.
“I am very sorry about Sarah-Jane’s maman,” she said quietly, looking up at him. “You still miss her very much.”
“Thank you. Yes.” He returned the empty glass to the silver tray but remained standing because Antonia had not sat down again. “It doesn’t go away, y’know; the sadness. Even after all these years. One just learns to live with it and get on with life. I suspect it is the same for you… But losing Monseigneur, despite it being three years ago, feels like yesterday. You still can’t believe it, can you? I knew that last night, watching you.” Adding with a small shake of his head, “I thought you were looking at me. What a blow to my self-esteem when I realized later that you hadn’t been looking at me at all, but at the entrance doors over my shoulder. You were remember—”
Antonia blanched and swallowed hard. “Stop!”
“—remembering all the times Monseigneur had come striding through those doors,” he continued in his deep steady voice. “You were trying so hard to believe that perhaps he would do so again. I know. I used to do the same with my Emily. Hoping she would magically appear in the doorway at some party, or in any of the rooms of our house, and then I would know that it was all a bad dream. But she never came. I knew she never would, but I couldn’t stop myself wondering, that if I just wished for it hard enough—”
“Fermer gueule. Stop I said! No more! No more!” Antonia pleaded. She pressed her hands to her hot cheeks before running shaking fingers up through her hair as she walked to the furthest corner of her quaint pavilion in a rustle of petticoats. “How-how dare you come here and-and disturb my-my peace.”
If she could just remove her wretched boots...
If she untied the laces and kicked off her boots and put her stockinged feet upon the chaise she would feel much better. Her feet ached but it was nothing compared to the heaviness that weighed on her shoulders and pressed on her heart.
Where was Michelle? Where could her personal maid be? What was keeping her? She should be here with her now so she need not be here alone with this stranger who was upsetting her peace of mind.
She would not talk about Monseigneur with this gentleman. She could not. It wasn’t fitting. It wasn’t right. But what he said—all of it—was true. No one, not her sons, not her daughter-in-law, not her extended family, no one knew how desperately she prayed this lonely life she was leading now, a life without Monseigneur, was all but a bad dream. She would soon wake up and he would indeed saunter through a doorway, come straight up to her, kiss her forehead and say her name in his soft-spoken drawl with that smile he kept exclusively for her. But how could this tall, brown gentleman know that? How could he know her deepest desire? A tiny inner voice of calm and reason told her the answer: He too had lost the love of his life. Of course he knew. He had lived the nightmare. He had hoped and prayed just as she hoped and prayed but nothing and no one could change the unalterable veracity of death.
But she had lost so much more than he could ever imagine…
No! That was unfair.
He had loved his wife. She had died in childbirth, her young life and their marriage tragically cut short. Monseigneur had lived a long, very full life. She should be grateful for the twenty-seven years they had shared together. So everyone kept telling her, over and over and over. She was grateful, but nothing had prepared her, nothing could change the deep sense of loss, the aching loneliness and despair of being his widow. No man could replace Monseigneur. No man could love her as he had loved her. No man would want her in that way as much as he had wanted her… And no one could tell her what she was supposed to do with her life now, without him.
Unconsciously, she returned to the chaise and stared at Jonathon, mentally castigating herself for feelings of self-pity at his expense. Tall and with a healthy glow that served to make his brown eyes that much more intense and his teeth whiter than white, she wondered why at eight and thirty he remained a widower. He had danced very well and was graceful and leisurely in his movements for a big tall man. She could see why he would be much sought after at balls and routs. Perhaps he had not met the right woman? Perhaps he would find her here at Treat? Her daughter-in-law seemed to have invited every pretty young woman of marriageable age to the house party. He was too ruggedly handsome and virile not to want to remarry and start a second family. And men could marry at any age. Monseigneur had been older than this gentleman when she had become his duchess. She hoped he found a nice woman to marry. Someone young, fresh and alive…
She would do it herself! She did not need her maid to do such a trivial task. She must be turning lazy in her abstraction. She would untie her own boot lacings. With her boots removed she would feel much better. Her feet ached. That must be why she was more miserably self-centered than usual.
Surely the tea things would arrive soon?
Antonia had no idea tears were streaming down her face.
Jonathon patiently watched and waited while Antonia paced the pavilion.
He knew she was remonstrating with herself. She looked wretched. When she covered her face with her hands he pressed his clean white handkerchief on her and she took it without being aware of his existence. He wished he could do or say something to comfort her, but he had said more than enough for one day. He suspected her famil
y was oblivious to her secret hope and here he was, a stranger, baldly throwing it in her face. But it needed to be said. He knew the futility of continuing to hope when there was no hope. After Emily’s death, he had lived his life like that for a number of years.
When she finally stopped pacing and came back to the chaise longue, put her boot up on the blue striped cushion and bent forward to grasp at the laces, he grabbed at the chance to be of practical help. He offered to remove her boots for her. Antonia brushed him off, saying she was quite capable of looking after herself.
He stepped back and watched her struggle with the knot in the lacings, twice grasping at the bow then bringing her foot to the stone flooring before again putting her boot to the cushion and tugging in vain at the thin leather cords.
When she lowered her boot to the stone floor a third time, cursing her feebleness, he could take no more. He unceremoniously grabbed her about the waist, picked her up, swung her about and dumped her amongst the cushions on the chaise longue as if she was a mere marionette that weighed less than papier-mâché.
Antonia was so stunned by such cavalier treatment that it took her several seconds to react, and before she could protest at such high-handedness, her right boot was on his bended knee and he was tugging at the first knot in the laces. She tried to pull her foot free but he grabbed her about the ankle and held her firm.
“Sit still!” he reprimanded.
“I did not ask for your help!” she countered angrily, trying to recover her composure and her dignity by brushing down her disordered petticoats so they at least covered her stockinged legs below the knees. “I have a maid to do such menial tasks and she—”
“—isn’t here. So don’t be foolish.” Only when she was still did he let go of her ankle. And when she did not move, he returned to the task of unlacing her boot. “As if you could bend to untie these ludicrously long laces in stays!” He deftly undid the knot and gently pulled apart the lacings. “I’d wager you’ve never had to try before today.”
Autumn Duchess: A Georgian Historical Romance (Roxton Series) Page 5