by Various
* * *
Christine went from the room with Lucien and left them there in each other’s arms, the tears of the past running down both their cheeks and the promise of an uncertain future.
He was no longer just a groom. He was no longer homeless. He was no longer Mr William Miller either, but William Maythorne, the heir to the Dukedom of Melton and all the property and fanfare that accompanied it.
He would be introduced to society and fêted and claimed. By everyone. He was no longer just hers.
‘You knew, Luce. You knew who he was?’
‘I guessed and then he told me. The letter I sent with you outlined my summation of his history.’
‘It’s why Warrington wanted to kill him, then. Because he was a threat to everything he’d worked so very long for, the property and the titles. How would he have known, though?’
‘Elizabeth Maythorne saw him when he went to Portman Square to visit at my request. She recognised him as her grandson, for by all accounts the family likeness is most acute.’
‘She has his eyes.’
‘Or he has hers.’ He looked at her then and she saw sadness.
‘I can’t keep him now. He will be lost to me.’ She had not meant to say as much, but she couldn’t help it.
‘Give him time, Christine, to find out who he is. Allow him the space to find you.’
‘There are so many others who will want him now, his title will see to that.’ She felt shattered and empty.
‘He is a man who has not had a family in years. Would you not want the same chance of knowing the last relative you had if you were in his position?’
‘Yes.’ She had to give her brother the truth for without honesty there would be nothing left.
* * *
Will came upstairs an hour later to retrieve his haversack and she was waiting for him on the landing.
‘You are leaving?’
‘My grandmother wants me to stay with her and she looks so exhausted I have agreed. I will be back tomorrow to talk to you.’ He put out his hand, but she did not take it. Now was not the time for pleas or tears, for Lucien was right. William Lynton Melton needed to find out exactly who he was.
‘She looks like a lovely woman, the Duchess. I think when you know her better you will understand her choices, too.’
He smiled at her words and the golden chips in his eyes were as noticeable as they had ever been, burning at the edge of green.
‘Tomorrow then?’
And he was gone, across the landing and down the stairs. He did not look back as he reached the bottom, but went straight to his grandmother.
* * *
He did not come the next day, nor the next, and not the one after that. She had not seen him for three whole days, though each morning and afternoon he sent a note to her explaining his difficulties, his busy meetings with lawyers and banks and those who held the knowledge of an estate as large as Melton and needed him to know it, too.
She did not send correspondence back because if he had truly wanted to come to her he could have and because she still had her pride even given the kiss at Linden Park with her words of for ever standing in the wind.
She dreamt of him, though, every night for all that time until finally Lucien and Alejandra had had enough of her moping about and insisted that she accompany them to the McFarlane ball that evening in Chelsea.
She had no heart for it, but still she did have a love for beautiful fashion and she chose her very favourite gown tonight. One she needed to give her strength and to bolster her courage.
Her maid curled her hair but did not pin it in the usual way. Tonight she left some ringlets down so that they swung about her shoulders and down her back in long waves of pale spun gold.
She wore no jewellery save for a tiny pin of rubies her grandmother had left her. It seemed fitting somehow.
And when she walked down the stairwell towards her brother and his wife she could see the surprise in their eyes, but also the admiration.
* * *
Lady Christine Howard wore a bright silk scarlet gown and he saw her the moment she came into the ballroom of the McFarlanes.
Already the room had hushed on his entrance with his grandmother half an hour earlier and it did so again as the Ross party stood at the top of the stairs and were introduced.
She barely looked real, her hair pale and her gown a frothy red, her height giving her that slender elfin look of a woman who knew her worth. And she smiled at the numerous men who came forward to take her hand and speak, though she did not linger with any one of them.
The Frozen One was how she had named herself. Tonight she looked exactly the opposite, a living flame caught under candlelight, impossibly beautiful and regal. Lady Christine Howard, an earl’s daughter, and unmatched.
She had not replied once to the many letters he had sent her. He had seen her brother in town yesterday and asked after her. Busy, Lucien had said, with her whirlwind of a life.
Too busy for him?
His grandmother beside him saw her, too, and she threaded her hand through his arm.
‘Ask her to dance, Will. Wait for the waltz to begin and ask her to dance.’
She’d been teaching him the steps after lunch each day, the only dance she thought he might manage with such a short tuition, and they had counted the beat together as she allowed him to partner her. Her renewed energy had surprised him, but she’d been adamant she had waited a long time to meet him and was not going to waste another second of it.
Ten minutes later when the first strains of the waltz sounded he crossed to where Christine stood and asked for her hand in the dance.
There were numerous others there, but when she caught his glance he saw the shock in it and was pleased.
* * *
He was here right in front of her, dressed in fine evening clothes that made him look different, sterner, unapproachable. She had never danced the waltz, not once in all her years of being in society, never pencilled any name on her card when it was played, never allowed another to hold her close and still because it reminded her too forcibly of all she would never have.
But tonight she took William Maythorne’s hand and allowed him to lead her to the floor and the crowd parted as they went, the whispers of gossip all around them, behind the fans and the hands and the watching eyes.
She could not care. She did not look at anyone save for him, the dark blue of a new jacket stretched across arms that had seen toil and endurance and hardship. The cut of his beige breeches was the height of fashion and the leather was shiny in his silver buckled shoes. He was the new Duke of Melton, a high title commanding much respect. His place here was cemented into the very centre of manners and convention.
When they were in place on the dance floor he simply turned and took her into his arms as though she was meant to be there, as though she fitted.
‘You look different,’ he said quietly as they stepped into the waltz.
‘So do you,’ she returned as she followed him. ‘And for the life of me I cannot see you learning to dance like this in the wilds of Virginia.’
He laughed then and the ice broke and it was as if they were back on the hill above Linden Park, the wind in their faces and all of the world before them.
‘My grandmother taught me each day for an hour. She said I should only manage it with a woman who cared. For me, I think she meant, someone who might forgive my mistakes and see instead the endeavour.’
‘You did not come and I waited.’ She bared her soul to him in such a truth.
‘I love you, Christine,’ he returned, just like that. She could barely believe he had said the words here so unexpectedly in the middle of a crowded ballroom, but then he went on. ‘I have loved you since the first moment I saw you in Hyde Park.’
Her
fingers tightened about his own, holding on to the impossibility, to the wonder. Speechless.
‘I could not come because the estate is a large one and every moment of my time had been accounted for. I also thought, perhaps...’ He stopped.
‘What? What did you think?’ She’d found her voice again, the shock in it easily recognisable.
‘That you might not wish for all of this. The title. The responsibility. The sheer hard work of it.’
She could not quite understand what he meant and frowned.
‘As my wife. As my duchess. I want to marry you, Lady Christine Howard, and if there was room on this floor to get down on my knees and properly ask you then I would.’
She stopped then, simply ceased to move in the middle of the dance in the middle of the floor in the scrambled melee of others and under the light of the numerous chandeliers.
‘Yes,’ she said and then repeated it just to make sure that he had heard. ‘Yes, I will marry you, Lord William Lynton Maythorne, Duke of Melton, and as soon as you can make it happen.’
Around them people whirled, but it was as if they were the only ones in the room. She saw him breathe out in relief, she thought, and look across at his grandmother.
‘She knows about us?’
‘I told her that I would marry you. She was more than pleased.’
Christine felt a flash of relief. ‘Can we leave, Will? Can we go somewhere to talk?’
‘Or to kiss?’
‘Or that.’
His smile was beautiful, bound up in the knowledge of understanding someone truly. Her soulmate and her friend.
‘I can take you home to Melton House. My grandmother will act as chaperon. We could have some privacy there.’
She liked the way his arm came around her waist as they walked from the floor, the engraved gold ring twinkling on his finger.
The Melton crest. Her first clue and then so many others following it. Lucien came and joined them as he saw their wanting to leave.
‘You said you would never hurt her, Melton. Make certain that you don’t. I expect you home by one, Christine. I’ll be waiting up.’
Will spoke then. ‘I plan on seeing you tomorrow, Lucien. I need your blessing on a union.’
Her brother tipped his head. ‘At eleven, then. I’ll open a bottle of my best brandy.’
In the carriage the Duchess looked as though she would fall asleep the moment they got home, her eyes closing for long moments and then opening as a street light impinged on the darkness or a noise came close.
Once inside the house she simply excused herself, but not before kissing Christine’s cheek.
‘My grandson will have the most beautiful Duchess of the ton beside him.’
When she was gone he poured them each a drink and blew out half the candles on the mantel in a large salon off the main front hallway.
‘Scarlet suits you, Christine. A lady of secrets.’
He was not laughing at her, rather he was asking a question. She knew all of his secrets and now she must tell him hers.
‘I am not a virgin.’
‘Well, neither am I.’
She smiled. Sometimes she forgot he was from a world so far from her own.
‘Here things like that matter...to men...I mean...to husbands.’
‘Why? You were engaged to Burnley. In Virginia a promise is a promise. How were you to know he would die before he could honour it?’
It was all so easy suddenly. For years and years she had worried about something he had given only a fleeting moment’s worth of notice to and the relief of it was exhilarating.
When he sat on the sofa she came on to his knee and his arms came around her, holding her close.
‘My first bedding was with a prostitute in a brothel in Hampton. It’s a sea port on the Atlantic just outside Chesapeake Bay. I’d gone there when I was seventeen to meet a man who had promised to buy my timber at a good rate so I was feeling...successful, I suppose.’ He smiled. ‘I went with the arrogance of a young lad, the taste of independence heady.
‘She asked me into her room and... Well, the back county wasn’t a place where you’d find a young lady easily, you understand, and while this one wasn’t exactly young she was...generous to me. At least I thought she was.’
‘And after that...’ Christine could scarcely believe he would bare his soul to her and she liked it. His honesty and his ease, all the stumbling truths of a youthful initiation gone wrong. Like her own.
‘I left with my mother’s Bible passages ringing in my ears and went back to the mountains.’
With care she placed her arms about his neck and kissed him, liking how he opened his mouth and found hers with a stealthy and undeniable push.
No quiet token here, but the full-blown ardour of a man who wanted something back from her and was not going to settle for otherwise.
‘You even taste scarlet,’ he said a few moments later, his finger tracing a pattern on her neck above the silk. ‘I could drink you in for ever, but if I am going to make an honest woman of you I want it to be soon. I can apply for a special licence, a way of quickening things up. If you agree to it we could be married on Friday.’
Two days away. When she was a young girl she had imagined her wedding to be complete with a cast of hundreds. She had imagined the most intricate wedding gown in the land with a long trail of cream lace and a veil of silk that fell to her ankles. She had conjured up the flowers and the jewellery, the chapel and the food, all unmatched, all expensive, all in such very good taste.
And now instead of that grandeur she would be happy to be giving her vows in her scarlet gown and her hair undressed if needs be, with barely another accoutrement.
It was love that was important, the love between them, the absolute ease of it. For the first time in her life she did not want to be elsewhere and rushing. She only wanted to be here with him.
‘I love you, Will. You have made me whole again.’
* * *
They were married on a Friday morning in the second week of December in a tiny chapel in Knightsbridge.
Amethyst and Daniel Wylde were there as well as Adelaide and Gabriel Hughes.
On Will’s side his grandmother sat with Alejandra and Alice, her mother’s insistence in having a place in the hurried wedding gratifying.
It was a small celebration, but just as she wanted it, and Will smiled at her as she came down the aisle on Lucien’s arm.
She had made her own gown of cream satin and decorated the bodice in Brussels lace. A simple design. Her hair was dressed in a loose chignon because she knew her husband-to-be liked it that way best. Around her head was a garland of the smallest winter-white peonies laced in sage ivy.
And when their glances met Christine felt happiness burst into warmth and life around her heart.
* * *
Much later in the ducal bedroom at Melton House her new husband placed the garland of flowers away on an oaken desk and used his fingers to spread her hair across her shoulders, the curls softer now and falling longer.
‘You have hair of spun gold,’ he said, ‘and your eyes are like the shade of blue only seen in a mountain stream running shallow.’
She smiled. Her ardent admirers in the ton had not thus far found such images to liken her to. Their compliments were of a far more mundane variety. ‘I’d like to see Virginia one day. I’d like to see the place that raised you.’
‘Then I will take you there, my beautiful wife.’
‘You think I am? Beautiful?’
‘I know it and so did every other man in the McFarlanes’ ballroom.’
‘It was the scarlet gown, I expect.’
‘I like this one as much.’
His hands slipped the straps of satin off her shoulders so that her skin was s
een pearled in the light, almost see through, he thought, as he kissed the expanse beneath the curve of her neck. He had wanted to do this from the very first moment of meeting her, there in the park against the light and the grey of the Serpentine.
Perfect skin without marks or marring.
His mouth dipped lower and he cupped the flesh of one breast, the size fitting into the palm of his hand. The nipple had hardened and was sweet when his tongue swept across it and sweeter still as he began to suck.
He was not as inexperienced as he had let on, his forays down from the mountains to the various trading posts filled with the promises of many willing women, but after the first one he had been selective and careful and he had never seen another so fine and long limbed as Christine Howard. No, Melton, he amended. The Duchess of Melton now. His wife.
She smelt like rain, fresh and distinct, with hints of meadow and flowers. And sunshine, too, the heat of her against him melting away caution as he brought the rest of the satin across her stomach and her hips and then it fell, pooled at her feet in a quiet whoosh of fabric.
Beneath the gown was a gossamer-thin petticoat, each edge trimmed in soft lace and then it was gone, too, until she stood finally in white stockings and blue garters with velvet ribbons to hold them up.
Every fantasy at night he had ever dreamed up in the ridge on his rough bed did not equate even nearly to this reality. She was slender and shapely and fragile. She was nothing at all like the women he had slept with before, those draped in homespun cloth with their bodies shaped by work and by the elements and by hardship which was as much a part of life on the mountains as breath.
He was suddenly shy of his own body, with its scars and its history. The broken arm that had never quite straightened after his father had belted him, the nail missing from the third finger on his left hand when he had caught it splitting wood. A knife wound in the thigh when he had gone down to the seaport of Hampton after receiving his grandmother’s letter to arrange a passage to England.
Even their wedding rings underlined the difference between them. Hers a single diamond flanked by rare blue garnets, his a wide band of white gold. Plainer. Larger. More utilitarian.
‘Love me, Christine, and let me love you.’