The Secret Pearl

by Mary Balogh

  Raw manhood exerting its ruthless ascendancy over weakness and poverty and hopelessness.

  With her head she knew that it was perhaps unfair to hate him. He had paid well for what she had offered freely. He had shown her kindness both with that meal and with this employment.

  But she hated him with a horror and a revulsion that might yet send her fleeing from the house without provisions or plans—just as she had fled from Heron House more than two months before.

  She closed her eyes again, the brush fallen still in her hand, and pictured his finger smoothing gently over the puppy’s fur. She had to swallow several times to overcome the nausea.

  THE DUKE OF RIDGEWAY tapped on the door of the duchess’s sitting room the following morning and waited for her personal maid to admit him, curtsy, and leave the room quietly. His wife had sent for him. He rarely entered any of her private apartments without such an invitation.

  “Good morning, Sybil,” he said. “How are you today?” He crossed the room to take her hands and kiss her. She turned her cheek, as usual.

  “Better,” she said. “I was a little feverish during the night, but I feel better this morning.” She withdrew her hands from his. Small, delicate hands that he had used to like to hold and kiss.

  “You must take care of yourself,” he said. “I would not want you ill again as you were during the winter.”

  “I instructed Houghton to pay Miss Hamilton and dismiss her,” she said breathlessly, looking at him with her wide blue eyes. “He told me that he must consult you first. What are you going to do about it, Adam?”

  “Ask your reason for wanting to dismiss the governess, I suppose,” he said. “What has she done or failed to do?”

  “I mean about Houghton,” she said, tears springing to her eyes. She was wearing a flowing white silk-and-lace robe. Her blond hair was lying loose along her back. She looked, her husband thought dispassionately, quite breathtakingly lovely. And as fragile as the young girl with whom he had left his heart when he went to Belgium. “Are you going to let him get away with speaking to me like that?”

  “Houghton is my personal secretary,” he said, “answerable to me alone, Sybil. I would release him in a moment if he forgot himself to the extent of taking orders from anyone else in this house without first consulting me.”

  She flushed. “So your secretary is more important to you than I am,” she said. “It was not always so, Adam. You loved me once, or so I believed. It seems I was deceived.”

  “You should know by now,” he said, “to come to me personally with all your problems. You would save yourself some humiliation if you would do so. An efficient secretary cannot take orders from two people. What is the problem with Miss Hamilton?”

  “You should not need to ask that question,” she said, twisting a handkerchief in her hands. “It should be enough that I wish to see her gone. I don’t think she is suitable to have the care of my daughter. Please dismiss her, Adam.”

  “You know,” he said with a sigh, “that I do not dismiss even the lowliest of my servants, Sybil, without a very good reason. I don’t know if you realize how close members of the servant class live to the edge of poverty. I will not dismiss anyone merely to satisfy a whim.”

  “A whim!” she said, her eyes widening and filling with tears once more. “I am your wife, Adam.”

  “Yes.” He looked at her steadily. “You are, aren’t you?”

  She lowered her eyes and sat gracefully on the edge of the daybed. “I am the Duchess of Ridgeway,” she said quietly.

  “That sounds like a more accurate description of you,” he said. His voice held a note of weariness. “Must we always have this sort of conversation, Sybil? Must I always appear to be the tyrant? I’m sorry for my sarcasm. What is the problem with Miss Hamilton?”

  “She took Pamela outside yesterday afternoon,” she said, “despite the cold wind and the direct sunlight. She nagged at Nanny until Nanny said yes, just for an hour. And she returned more than two hours later. Pamela was dirty and exhausted and is too ill even to rise from her bed this morning, the poor darling. She deliberately disobeyed Nanny, Adam. Even you cannot defend her against that.”

  “They were with me,” he said. “I would not allow them to return to the house when Miss Hamilton would have come.”

  She looked up at him sharply. “She was with you?” she said, raising her handkerchief to her lips. “For more than two hours?”

  “You have the wrong pronoun,” he said. “I said they were with me—Pamela, Miss Hamilton, and the puppy. If Pamela was dirty, it was because I rolled in the grass with her. If she was tired, it was because I ran and played with her and gave her more than two hours of sunshine and fresh air. Children should be tired after an outing and a romp.”

  The duchess was very white. “This is intolerable,” she said. “I have told you before, Adam, that you are far too rough with Pamela. She is delicate and should be left to my care and Nanny’s. And a dog! She can catch goodness only knows what disease from it. Oh, I knew this would happen as soon as you came home. You have no regard for my sensibilities at all. You are so very selfish. I was quite deceived in you.”

  He looked steadily at her until she lowered her eyes again.

  “I will continue to spend as much time with Pamela as I can spare,” he said. “She needs a parent’s attention more than the coddling of an elderly nurse, Sybil. And she needs activity, both physical and mental. And let me understand you. Does Miss Hamilton take her orders from Nanny?”

  “Yes,” the duchess said, “of course she does. My darling is just a baby.”

  “In future,” he said, “it will be the other way around. I trust you will inform Nanny of the change. She will pout when you tell her, though you will do so. I will inform Miss Hamilton of the new rule.”

  Two tears spilled over from the duchess’s eyes. “You are a cruel and hard-hearted man,” she said. “You will do anything to thwart my will, won’t you, Adam? Just because you once did me a kindness, must I be in your debt forevermore?”

  He looked down at her tight-lipped. “You know that there has never been any question of any such thing,” he said. “And never will be. Only in your imagination, Sybil. Sometimes you almost have me persuaded that I am a tyrant and a villain.”

  She brushed at her eyes with her handkerchief and twisted it in her lap. “So I am to subject myself to having my daughter taken from my care and from her nurse’s care and put into that of your doxy,” she said. “Very well, Adam. I am too weak to fight you.”

  “My doxy?” he said. “Have a care, Sybil. Perhaps I should suggest that you make it unlikely that I would wish for the services of any doxy.” The right side of his face smiled fleetingly when she glanced up at him, startled. “No, I didn’t think that idea would appeal to you.”

  “Sometimes I think you will force me to hate you,” she said in a low voice that shook from her tears.

  “You become tedious,” he said.

  He watched her as she coughed and sank back against the cushions of the daybed and pressed the handkerchief to her lips.

  “I should have insisted that you have that cough looked at by another doctor months ago,” he said quietly. “Hartley seems quite unable to cure it. Let me send for a physician from London, Sybil. Let me do something for you. Let there be some kindness between us for a change.”

  “I think I would like to be alone,” she said. “I need to rest.”

  “I did not plan this,” he said wearily. “I did not plan that we would come to bicker and set our wills against each other. I did not foresee that you would come to see me as a tyrant and that sometimes I would be forced into acting like one. I hoped for a good marriage. I did not foresee that we might come to hate each other.”

  “Sometimes,” she said, burying her face in her handkerchief, her voice a thin thread of misery, “I hate you for pretending to be dead and coming back alive. I hate you for driving Thomas away when you knew what we had become to each other. Sometim
es I find it hard not to hate you, Adam, though I try not to. You are my husband.”

  She started coughing again and could not stop.

  White-faced, he crossed the room to her, took out his own handkerchief, went down on one knee before her, and held it out to her. But she slapped his hand away.

  “Sybil,” he said, and rested a hand lightly against the back of her head while she coughed.

  But she squirmed away from him, got to her feet, and fled to her dressing room, slamming the door behind her.

  The Duke of Ridgeway remained on one knee, his head bowed forward. And he wondered, as he had done dozens of times before, if she had ever loved him. Had she said she did only because she wanted to be his duchess and mistress of one of the most splendid homes in the kingdom? Had all the kisses, all the melting looks and sweet smiles, been artifice?

  He had grown up knowing that he would be expected to marry her. And the idea had never disturbed him. But he had not fallen in love with her until he came home from Spain to find her grown up and lovely and fragile, her blue eyes wide with admiration for him. He had fallen deeply in love, painfully in love.

  And had it all been completely one-sided? Had her protestations of love been all lies? Or perhaps she too had been bound by the expectations of years. Perhaps she had tried to fall in love with him or at least to develop a regard for him. Perhaps she had tried.

  He supposed that she might have felt some regard for him then, when his face was whole, when perhaps he could have been described as a good-looking man. He would never forget the look of deep revulsion on her face when he had caught her up on their first meeting after his return and twirled her about and kissed her.

  She had hurt him badly. But he had expected the look to disappear once she had got used to his new appearance. It never had. But by the time of his return, of course, she had been betrothed to Thomas. He had made far too light of that fact at first.

  The duke got wearily to his feet and put his handkerchief away in his pocket. If someone had told him that spring of Waterloo and the spring after, when he was coming home, that his love for Sybil would ever die, he would have laughed in derision. A love like his could never die this side of doomsday.

  So much for love, he thought with heavy cynicism.

  He turned to the door, aware of his wife coughing in her dressing room. There was not the spark of an ember of his love left. Only a certain pity for what she had undoubtedly suffered, and the vague hope of some peace between them. Some hope that he would not always appear to be the villain in their life together.

  But it seemed that he was not to be granted even peace.

  IT WAS PETER HOUGHTON WHO INFORMED FLEUR of the new arrangement later that same morning while she waited in the schoolroom for a pupil who would not come because her nurse insisted that she was ill with exhaustion from her exertions of the day before.

  Fleur was a little afraid of Peter Houghton because he undoubtedly knew who she was and what she was. And yet he had treated her with unfailing courtesy in the two days since his return to Willoughby—they both ate with the upper servants at Mrs. Laycock’s table. Not by word or gesture had he shown that he felt any distaste at having to consort with her on terms of near-equality. There had been not a whisper or a hint of what she was to any of the other servants.

  She was relieved by the new arrangement, not because she wished to have power over Lady Pamela’s nurse, but because she wished to feel that she was doing something to earn her salary and keep. She had had the uneasy feeling for the previous weeks that she was there on false pretenses.

  The duke himself brought his daughter to the schoolroom that afternoon. Fleur curtsied and did not look directly at him. But, she realized before many minutes had passed, he had no intention of leaving immediately. He settled himself quietly on a chair in one corner of the room and watched.

  They worked with the alphabet book for a short while, making a game out of memorizing the letters, each of them thinking of some absurd word that began with the letter in question and then trying to remember each word and its letter in sequence.

  “Faradiddle,” the duke said when Lady Pamela had puzzled over F for several seconds.

  She exploded with sudden laughter.

  It was his only contribution to that particular lesson.

  They counted up to fifty and back to one again and did some simple sums on paper. They examined a tablecloth that Fleur had found folded in a drawer in her room, and she named each embroidered stitch for Lady Pamela and promised that she could start a handkerchief of her own the next day and learn one of the stitches.

  “Can I choose whatever colors I want?” she asked Fleur.

  “Any colors you wish,” Fleur promised with a smile.

  “Red daisies and blue stems?”

  “Purple daisies and canary stems if you wish,” Fleur said.

  “But everyone will laugh.”

  “Then you must choose whether to pick your own colors and be laughed at or pick the expected colors and not be laughed at,” Fleur said. “It is quite simple. The choice will be entirely yours.”

  Lady Pamela frowned and looked suspiciously at her governess.

  They talked about the picture of the pavilion, which had still not been painted, and Fleur lifted down a rather large landscape painting that was on the wall so that her pupil could see how many different colors and shades had been used to create the total effect of sky and grass and trees.

  “But the choice is yours, you see,” she said. “Your job as an artist is to help the viewer see what you see. And no one can tell you quite what you see. We all see things differently.”

  “I want you to play the harpsichord for me,” Lady Pamela said when the topic was exhausted.

  Fleur was very aware of her employer sitting silently in his corner.

  “Perhaps you would like to sit on the stool and I shall give you a lesson,” she suggested.

  But Lady Pamela had already tried to play for herself and had discovered that she could not produce music as Fleur could. She had also learned that even after a lesson or two she had not acquired the magic formula for producing a fluent melody.

  “Sit down,” she said, “and play for me.”

  “Please,” Fleur said quietly.

  But even as she prayed silently for cooperation, she knew that she would not get it.

  “Play for me,” the child ordered petulantly.

  “Please,” Fleur said.

  “That is silly,” Lady Pamela said. “What difference does ‘please’ make?”

  “It makes me feel that I am being asked, not ordered,” Fleur said. “It makes me feel good about myself.”

  “That is silly,” the child said.

  “Please will you play the harpsichord, Miss Hamilton, while Pamela goes to lie down on her bed?”

  Fleur’s back stiffened. She had not heard him get up and cross the room.

  His daughter threw him an exasperated look. “Please, Miss Hamilton,” she said.

  Fleur closed her eyes briefly. She would have done anything rather than play. Her hands were clammy. But she sat on the stool without looking around and played Bach, compensating as well as she could for the key that stuck.

  “It is your turn now, Lady Pamela,” she said when she was finished.

  “You are good,” his grace said. “Have you seen the instruments in the drawing room and music room?”

  Fleur had seen them during the tour with Mrs. Laycock, though she had not had the temerity to touch either one. The pianoforte in the drawing room was better than the one at Heron House, she suspected, lovely as that one had been—Mama’s precious treasure. The massive grand pianoforte in the music room she had been able to look at only in awe.

  “Yes, your grace,” she said. “I saw them on my first day here.”

  “Come along, Pamela,” he said, reaching for his daughter’s hand. “We will hear Miss Hamilton in the music room. And we will remember to say ‘please.’ Won’t we?”

&
nbsp; “Yes, Papa,” she said.

  Fleur followed them numbly from the room and along the upper corridor to the far staircase. And yet there was a feeling of excitement too. She was to be allowed to play that pianoforte!

  If only she could be alone, she thought as they entered the room next to the library and she approached the instrument and touched its keys reverently. If only he were not there.

  “If you please, Miss Hamilton,” he said quietly, and he disappeared somewhere behind her back with his daughter.

  She played Beethoven. It had been so long. Beethoven was not suited to a harpsichord. She played hesitantly at first, until her fingers accustomed themselves to the smooth ivory of the keys and the flow of the music and until her soul was carried beyond itself and she forgot where she was.

  Music had always been her great love, her great escape. Cousin Caroline’s barbed tongue, Amelia’s caustic comments, the knowledge that she would never see her parents again, the strict discipline and drab routine of her school years—all had ceased to exist when she touched a keyboard.

  She bowed her head over her still hands when she was finished.

  “May I go and see Tiny now, Papa?” a voice said from behind her, bringing her soul back inside her body again.

  “Yes,” he said. “Ask a footman to go with you. You might remember to say ‘please.’ ”

  “That’s silly, Papa,” the child said.

  Fleur heard the door open and close again.

  “You have great talent,” the Duke of Ridgeway said. “But you are out of practice.”

  “Yes, your grace.”

  “If you are to teach my daughter,” he said, “you must play faultlessly yourself. Half an hour a day for her lesson, an hour a day for your practice.”

  “Where, your grace?” She still had not turned.

  “Here, of course,” he said.

  She rubbed at a key with one finger. “I am not allowed on this floor, your grace,” she said.

  “Are you not?” he said. “By Nanny’s orders?”

  “By her grace’s,” she said.

  “Given in person?”

  “Yes, your grace.”