by Mary Balogh
Strangely, even though he prized his aloneness, he avoided the one small place on his estate where he always went when he wanted to relax into total solitude. He was too restless to relax.
He spent long hours with his steward, as he had not seen him in person since the Easter break from the House of Lords, and he rode with him about the vast home farm, checking that all was running smoothly according to his directions. He granted audience in the library to a number of his tenants and laborers and other petitioners, something he did conscientiously twice a week whenever he was home. He looked over the estate books and other business papers. He read all the reports that came from stewards on his other properties and dictated the appropriate responses to his secretary.
He wrote to each of his siblings, something he did regularly, at least once a month.
He received courtesy visits from some of his neighbors and returned most of them. Viscount Ravensberg and his lady and their children had just returned from a journey north that had taken them through Leicestershire. They had stayed for a week at Grandmaison with Rannulf and Judith and were able to bring Wulfric direct news of them.
He began to think that what remained of the summer might prove tediously long and planned visits to some of his other estates.
He read a great deal. Or, at least, he sat in his library a great deal, a book open in one hand, while he stared through it and brooded.
There were a score of women he already knew and doubtless scores more he did not who would jump at the chance of being his mistress. It was not a conceited thought. He did not think he was the answer to every woman’s prayers. But he did know that he was a powerful and influential and enormously wealthy man, and he did not doubt that most such women were well aware that he had been generous with Rose.
If he were to choose one of them and set her up as his mistress, he would probably settle contentedly with her. His life would soon return to normal.
He missed Rose with a gnawing ache.
He kept his thoughts firmly away from the one woman with whom he had already tried to replace her.
She had rejected him. Just as Marianne Bonner had done when he had offered matrimony. Mrs. Derrick had rejected him when she had assumed he was offering the same thing again—even though she had just given herself to him.
A little rejection, he supposed, was good for the soul.
But his soul felt bruised, even crushed.
He planned visits to some of his other estates—but neglected to give the necessary orders that would have set the preparations in motion.
It was unlike him to procrastinate, to feel lethargic, to brood.
To feel lonely.
He did not think of Christine Derrick. But sometimes—or most of the time if he were to be quite truthful with himself—he discovered that bright, laughing blue eyes and tangled dark curls and sun-bronzed skin and a freckle-dusted nose could slip past thought and lodge themselves in unwelcome images in the brain and in a heavy feeling about the heart.
Soon he would visit some of his other estates. All he needed was something to keep him busy.
Soon he would be back to normal.
LOOKING BACK ON her fortnight at Schofield Park one week after the house party was over, it seemed to Christine that it might all have happened a year ago or a lifetime ago. Her life had resumed its usual semiplacid course and she was happy again.
Well, perhaps not exactly happy. But she was contented at least. Although she had been happy with both Oscar and his world for a few years, it was a world that had ultimately let her down and made her desperately miserable. Seeing Hermione and Basil again had not been a good experience. And being in company with people of ton again had reminded her of how easy it was to be scorned, sneered at, disapproved of. Not that it had happened much during her marriage, and not that it had happened much at Schofield. But the thing was that it never happened during her day-to-day life at Hyacinth Cottage and in the village beyond it. There she could relax and be herself and everyone seemed to like her for it. She had no enemies in the neighborhood, only friends.
And yet those years of her marriage and those years spent with the ton—and now the fortnight spent at Schofield Park—had left her restless and less satisfied with her life at home than she had been before. She felt like someone caught between two worlds and not quite belonging in either. She resented the feeling.
She chose to belong in her village. She enjoyed life here. There was always something to do. She liked teaching at the village school, even though she did it for only three hours a week. The schoolmaster had complained to her one day that he hated teaching geography, she had replied that it had always been her very favorite subject when she was a pupil, and the arrangement had been made. Even as a child she had visited the sick and elderly with her mother or with the old vicar’s wife. It had become a habit, though never a dreary one. She still did it. She liked the elderly, and she had endless stories and smiles and cheerful conversation to share with both them and the sick—as well as two ears willing to listen and two hands willing to help out.
There were social visits to pay and receive, a few teas and dinners to attend, one assembly at the village inn. There were female friends with whom to share some confidences, gentlemen who would become her suitors if she wished.
She did not wish, even though perhaps it was a pity she did not. All she had ever really wanted was a home of her own and a husband and children to love. But she had lost the one—even before his death, if the truth were known—and never had the other. And her dreams had changed—or perhaps they had simply died.
There were her nephews and niece at the rectory, and Melanie’s children at Schofield Park, though she did not visit the latter so often when Melanie and Bertie were in residence. She loved children. She quite passionately adored them. It had been the great disappointment of her marriage that she had never conceived.
There was Melanie to call upon and a long coze to enjoy together over the success of the house party. Melanie insisted that all the gentlemen had fallen in love with Christine and that the Earl of Kitredge had looked quite forlorn when he discovered that she had left Schofield after the ball instead of waiting until the following morning. In Melanie’s opinion Christine could have been a countess before the summer was out if she had been so inclined.
“But I know,” she had said with a sigh. “You have been unwilling to look at any man since poor Oscar died. He was a dear, was he not? And so very, very handsome. But one day, Christine, you will be able to let go of him and fall for someone else. I thought at one point that he might be the Duke of Bewcastle. You won that very naughty wager I heard about—and you were waltzing with him at the ball. But, splendid as he is, you know, and elated as I was to have him as a guest at my party, I certainly would not wish him upon my dearest friend. It is true, is it not, that he lowers the temperature of any room he walks into? Even so, I think he was the tiniest bit sweet on you, Christine.”
Christine chose to laugh merrily as if a great joke had been made, and after a moment Melanie joined her.
“Well, perhaps not,” she said. “I doubt there is any sweetness in him or any normal human sensibilities. I wonder if even the Prince of Wales cowers under his steely glance.”
The Duke of Bewcastle was the one factor in Christine’s life—in the past tense of her life—on which she chose neither to think nor to brood. There was pain in that direction, and she chose not to explore the pain.
She had plenty with which to occupy herself in the days following her return from Schofield, then—plenty to keep her busy and feed her natural ebullience of spirit. She was almost happy. Or, if not that, then she was definitely contented—provided she kept her thoughts carefully censored.
CHRISTINE WAS FEELING rather warm and flushed after one particular geography lesson. She had taken the children outside the schoolhouse, since it was a very warm day, and their usual game of flying on a magic carpet to the chosen country had taken them on an energetic course about t
he garden, all their arms flapping to the sides to keep them aloft—including her own. She could hardly be left behind when the carpet embarked on its journey, after all.
They had flown over a wide and blustery Atlantic Ocean, spotting two sailing ships and a large iceberg on the way, and up the St. Lawrence Seaway to Canada, to Montreal, to be more precise, where they had touched down and rolled up the carpet before embarking inland with the colorful French voyageurs in their large canoes to trade for furs in the interior of the continent. They had rowed in near-perfect time with one another after practicing for a while and had braved rapids with noisy exuberance and negotiated rugged portages past the worst of them, the imaginary canoe held upside down over the heads of half of them while the other half staggered beneath the weight of the imaginary cargo. They had sung a rousing French song to keep their spirits high and spur them on their way.
By the time they had stopped to rest at the large trading post of Fort William on Lake Superior, from where they would embark at the beginning of the next lesson, they were all weary and fell back onto the magic carpet—which they had taken with them in the canoe—and crawled or staggered back in the direction of the schoolhouse with a great fuss of moans and groans and limp, flapping arms and giggles and complaints about having to go back inside for arithmetic.
Christine smiled after them until they were safely inside and she was free to return home to change her clothes and cool down in the quiet of the sitting room with some of Mrs. Skinner’s freshly squeezed lemonade. She turned away from the building, the smile still on her face.
There was a man leaning on the fence, she could see. A gentleman, if she was not mistaken. She shaded her eyes with one hand and looked to see if he was someone she knew.
“Mrs. Thompson informed me I would find you here,” the Duke of Bewcastle said. “I came to meet you.”
Gracious heaven! Absurdly—utterly absurdly—her first thought was for her flushed cheeks, her damp, rumpled hair beneath her old straw bonnet, her dusty dress and shoes, and her generally bedraggled appearance. Her next thought—just as foolish—was that he must have seen some of that silly lesson—silly, but very effective in helping children learn and remember without their ever realizing that they were doing it. Her third thought was a blank question mark, which seemed to hang invisible in the air over their heads.
Her feelings were another matter altogether. She felt rather as if the bottom had fallen out of her stomach—or as if the journey by magic carpet had made her queasy.
“What are you doing here?” she asked him. It was a horribly rude question to ask of a duke, but who could think of good manners at such a moment? What was he doing here?
“I came to speak to you,” he said with all the cool hauteur of a man who believed he had every right to speak to anyone he chose at any time he chose.
“Very well, then.” The return flight across the Atlantic had also left her lamentably short of breath, she noticed. “Speak to me.”
“Perhaps,” he said, straightening up from the fence, “we may walk back in the direction of Hyacinth Cottage?”
He had been there already? But he had just said so, had he not? He had spoken with her mother. He had actually walked up the garden path to the cottage and knocked on the door. There was no sign of any servant trotting along in his shadow to perform such menial tasks for him.
She left the schoolhouse garden and fell into step beside him. And lest he get any idea about offering his arm, she clasped her own very firmly behind her back. She must look like a veritable scarecrow.
“I thought,” she said, “you left here ten days ago like everyone else.”
She knew he had. She had visited Melanie since then.
“You thought correctly,” he said haughtily. “I went to Lindsey Hall. I have come back.”
“Why?” she asked. Anyone would think she had never even heard of good manners.
“I needed to talk to you,” he said.
“About what?” It was beginning to strike her fully that the Duke of Bewcastle was in the village and walking along the street at her side.
“Were there any consequences?” he asked her.
She felt a rush of heat to her cheeks. There was no misunderstanding his meaning, of course.
“No, of course not,” she said. “As I told you at the time, I am barren. Is this why you returned? Do you always show such solicitude for the women with whom you—” Ignominiously, she could not think of a suitably euphemistic word with which to complete the sentence.
“I could have sent my secretary or another servant if that were all I wished to ascertain,” he said. “I noticed a private-looking garden beside your house. Perhaps we may talk there?”
He was going to ask her again, she thought incredulously. How dared he? How dared he? And how dared he come back like this to disturb her peace all over again. Determined as she had been not to think of him, her nights were still filled with vivid dreams of him, and even her days were not yet free of unwilling memories that seemed quite beyond her power to banish. She did not want this.
Being a duke did not give him any right to harass her.
They did not proceed unseen. It was a warm day. Half the villagers—at least half—were sitting quietly or standing in gossiping groups outside their cottages. And every last one of them turned to wave a hand or call a greeting to her. And every last one of them gave the duke a good looking-over. Even if some of them did not know who he was, they would soon find out from those who did. It would be the sensation of the hour—of the decade! The Duke of Bewcastle was back and walking along the street and disappearing into the side garden of Hyacinth Cottage with Christine Derrick. Word would get back to Melanie and she would be here at the crack of dawn tomorrow—or as close to dawn as she could rise from her bed and submit to her elaborate toilette—to worm an explanation out of her friend.
Melanie would think she had been right all along. She would think the Duke of Bewcastle was sweet on Christine. But instead he was hot for her and determined to employ her as his mistress.
He did not say another word while they were on the street. Neither did she. She really thought that if he was too arrogant to accept that no meant no this time, she was going to have to slap his face. She had never slapped any man’s face and disapproved of it as a feminine weapon of annoyance, since the man concerned—if he were a gentleman—could not retaliate in kind. But her palm itched with the urge to dole out punishment to the ducal cheek.
She was not pleased to see him.
Eleanor was in the sitting room window, peering over the tops of her spectacles, but she disappeared when Christine glared at her. Mrs. Skinner opened the front door unbidden but closed it again when Christine glared at her. She could only imagine the excitement and speculation going on within.
She led the way through the low garden gate, diagonally across the front garden, which was ablaze with the colors of numberless flowers, and up the stone steps and through the trellised arch into the square side garden, which tall trees partially secluded from both the house and the street and flower borders made lovely and fragrant. She went to stand behind a wooden seat and set one hand on its back. She leveled a gaze on the Duke of Bewcastle. Dressed in a charcoal gray coat and paler pantaloons and white-topped Hessian boots, he looked quite overwhelmingly male. Not many men came into this garden.
“Mrs. Derrick,” he said, removing his hat and holding it at his side while the sunshine tangled in his dark hair. His voice was haughty and abrupt. “I wonder if you will do me the honor of marrying me.”
Christine gawked. Thinking back afterward, she was sure she had not just stared in genteel surprise—she had gawked.
“What?” she said.
“I find myself unable to stop thinking about you,” he said. “I have asked myself why I offered to make you my mistress rather than my wife and can find no satisfactory answer. There is no law to state that my position demands I marry a virgin or a lady who has not been previously married.
There is no law that states I must marry my social equal. And if your childless state after a marriage of several years denotes an inability to conceive, then that is no prohibitive impediment either. I have three younger brothers to succeed me, and one of them already has a son of his own. I choose to have you as my wife. I beg you to accept me.”
She stared at him, speechless for several moments. She gripped the back of the seat with both hands. Her head always seemed to fill with the most ridiculously absurd thoughts at the most serious of moments. This occasion was no exception.
She could be the Duchess of Bewcastle, she thought. She could wear ermine and a tiara. At least she thought she could. She had never really investigated the privileges of being a duchess, having never expected to be offered the role.
And then she found herself being restored to cold sanity as some of his words fell into place in her mind.
. . . a virgin . . . my social equal . . . your childless state . . . an inability to conceive. I choose to have you.
She gripped the back of the seat more tightly as anger welled in her and almost broke free.
“I am honored, your grace,” she said, her nostrils flaring. “But, no. I decline.”
He looked arrested, surprised. His eyebrows arced upward. She expected his infernal quizzing glass to materialize in his hand—and that would have made her temper finally snap—but he appeared not to have it about his person today.
“Ah,” he said. “I daresay I offended you when I offered you something less than matrimony.”
“You did,” she said.
“And when I allowed you to believe after we had coupled that it was the same offer I was about to make,” he said.
Her brows snapped together. It had not been? He had been about to offer her marriage then? She did not believe it. A man did not propose marriage to a woman who had just freely given him everything he wanted of her. But why had he come back now to do just that?