She felt a momentary flood of relief that it was only him, not some vagrant or poacher prowling in the woods. And then she remembered what she had to fear from him and felt foolish.
She kept quiet.
He jumped down from his horse and shone his lamp into the trees.
“I know you’re here. Please come out. This is absurd.”
She said nothing. She would wait him out.
“I can hear you breathing,” he sighed, after a pause. She held her breath.
“I will wait here all night if I must.”
He was only a few inches away.
He hung his lamp lower, shining light into the underbrush. And then its soft glow was on her face, and his eyes were on hers.
“What is it?” he murmured. “You’re shaking.”
“Stay away,” she barked. Her voice had gone raspy with exhaustion and fear.
Looking more bemused than dangerous, he rose to his feet and backed away a few paces.
“Why did you follow me here?” she hissed.
His brow knit together. “What choice did I have? Did you think I would really leave you to wander the woods alone? Do you have any idea what could happen to you?”
The question was so absurd, so offensive, that her better sense disappeared, and she answered it.
“Yes. Perhaps something like what you did to her.”
“Did what to whom?” he asked, running a frustrated hand through his hair. “You aren’t making sense.”
“Bernadette,” she cried out. “My God, you don’t even remember her? Bernadette Montrieux. My nurse.”
He did remember, clearly. The fact that he remembered was written in every line of his body, which, in the moonlight, had gone rigid.
“Ah, so you can at least recall the name of the woman you ravished. I suppose that’s some small comfort.”
For an agony it was just their ragged breathing in the woods.
When he spoke, his voice was deadly, deadly quiet. “How dare you say that to me?”
“How dare I? Because I saw what you did to her. I saw everything. To think what I have allowed between us.” She shivered. “It makes me ill.”
“Enough,” he said.
“Enough? I saw you, Westmead. I saw you.”
“Whatever you think you saw, you were mistaken.” He spoke with such force his words echoed in the night.
But she would not be cowed. She had seen it. It had haunted her for years.
“Deny it if you haven’t the honor to confess, but I assure you I was there. I was hiding in my uncle’s stable. Bernadette came in with a man—with you. He pushed her up against the wall. She was whimpering and crying out, but no one came to help her. And the next morning she was gone. She never returned.”
He stared at her with such contempt she felt it like a physical blow, despite her fury. The gall of him, playing the persecuted man after what he had done.
“Admit it, Westmead,” she said. “Admit it was you that night.”
He threw back his head. “What you accuse me of doing I have never done. Would never do.” His voice was unlike any sound she had ever heard. He paused and blew out a ravaged breath. “We—that is, yes, Poppy: I am guilty of having once made love to Bernadette Montrieux in your uncle’s stable. Eighteen-year-old lads do such things, I’m afraid. When the lady is willing.”
Oh. That, she had never considered.
Was it possible that her child’s eyes had misconstrued what she’d seen? The note of despair in his voice sounded to her like the truth. But how could she believe him, when for years she’d replayed a different truth in her mind?
She struggled for some question that would lead her to an answer—some sign that she could grasp upon for clarity—but before she could speak, he broke the silence with a string of words he uttered like she had cut them from his throat.
“I would never have hurt Bernadette. She was my wife.”
He felt like his throat was ripping as he said the words. They were fossilized now. One could not expect to excavate them without shattering away layers of calcified rock.
Even Constance knew nothing of the gap in his life. His father had never told her of his marriage in the years he’d lived abroad, and had sent her to an aunt’s upon their mother’s death, when he’d returned with his family. She only knew that there was darkness in their family’s dissolution that he refused to speak of.
“I don’t understand,” Poppy said. She looked at him like a bewildered child. “You have no wife.”
“She passed. Many years ago.” Some perverse part of him, the part that found some sick relief in saying it out loud, could not stop himself from adding the final note of horror. “Along with our son.”
Poppy put a hand to her mouth. He simply watched her, numb.
He wished he could summon some stronger emotion than the sense of defeat that suffused him—some low-simmering anger at her accusation. But he felt only empty. He knew what was coming. He felt it rising up, closing around him. Filling the place where the rocks and fossils had been. Emotion. Pure and sickly and unstoppable as flowing water.
“You’re telling the truth?” she asked, her voice sounding small.
“Do you truly think that I would invent such a thing?” He put his free hand to a tree trunk, the torrent within him closing around his organs from inside.
He struggled for breath, but it was choked beneath the weight in his chest, crushing him.
Damn her, she could see it. Even in the darkness, she could see.
“You are telling the truth,” she murmured. “Oh, Archer.” She stood helplessly and moved beside him as he strained to breathe against the fog in his lungs.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
He tried to answer, but what came out was something like a sob. Fuck. Fuck, but he was going to succumb to it.
She tentatively put her hands down on his shoulders and brought him toward her until he was enclosed in her embrace.
An age passed while she breathed with a slow forceful rhythm, as though she could model for him the proper working of lungs. I’m sorry. Breathe with me. I’m here. Slowly. Just breathe.
Finally, excruciatingly, he found the strength to straighten up and break away from her.
He was soaked through with sweat, and the breeze in the air sent such a chill through him she could likely hear his bones rattle above the rustle of the trees.
“Apologies,” he murmured, mortified at the display she had just witnessed.
She reached out and put her fingers lightly to his hand. “Please. It’s me who is sorry.”
He turned back to his snuffling horse. “Come. We should return. You can leave in the morning.”
“Archer,” she said quietly, staying rooted where she stood.
He turned back to her, impatient to put this all behind him.
“It’s a great comfort to know that she simply had a love affair. I feared for her all these years. I’m so relieved to know that she was loved. And by someone like you.”
The words were kindly meant, but he’d rather she stay silent than congratulate him for the pain he’d wrought so long ago.
“Do not be tempted,” he said, “to cast me as some romantic hero. The story is not a happy one.”
Something in his manner made her think he wanted to tell her more, but couldn’t make himself.
“But you married,” she said softly. “And you had a son. What was his name?”
His eyes looked fixedly just beyond her. “Benjamin.”
She had always found his eyes remarkable—their essential gentleness, which he could never quite mask even at his most lordly and imperious, was what had endeared him to her, made him handsome. Now they clouded with an anguish she could hardly stand to look upon.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I won’t make you speak of it.”
But instead, he drew a ragged breath and began to tell the story of a boy who met a girl and fell in love.
How one summer afternoon in
his eighteenth year he wandered into the woods on an afternoon’s aimless stroll and discovered her with her bare feet dangling in the stream.
She was six years older, a nursemaid employed by Poppy’s uncle to care for his recently orphaned young niece. She’d grown up in Paris, the daughter of a merchant who’d died when she was young. She’d been sent to a convent for an education, and to find work, she’d come alone across the sea to Wiltshire.
He knew he could never have her. His father had made clear it was his duty to secure a wife who would enhance the family’s crumbling finances, despite the fact he was the second son. She was alone, foreign, a Catholic, in service—unsuitable to a family that had carefully tended its bloodlines for generations.
Poppy was silent as he told his tale. How they’d met in the woods for two summers until he’d convinced her to run away with him—taken her to France and told his father of his marriage only months later. How the duke had sent solicitors to Paris threatening annulment, disinheritance. How little they had cared.
How Bernadette had painted while he apprenticed with a merchant trader who specialized in wine. The arrival of their baby. A laughing, merry boy with a mane of golden curly hair who loved to ride on his father’s shoulders to the market, babbling nursery songs in French.
How they’d been happy. Until one day a letter came informing him of the death of his mother and elder brother in a carriage accident. You will be Westmead, his father wrote. Whatever our differences, your responsibility to this family outweighs them. You must return.
“He told me to leave them in France,” he said bitterly. “He wanted an annulment, or at least discretion. But I was defiant. Determined that if he wanted me, he must accept my family. I brought them here. I brought them here.”
Suddenly she knew with sickening clarity how this story ended. Westhaven’s west wing had been ravaged by a fire many years ago. The old duke had died soon after the blaze and the family had not returned. The official cause had been a dirty chimney. But local legend had always had it that the duke had set the blaze himself, in a drunken fit after the death of his wife and eldest son.
“Oh, Archer,” she breathed. She reached for his hand, but he waved her away.
“He waited until I was out with the estate agents. By the time I saw the smoke, we were a half hour’s ride away. By the time I made it back, the stairs had collapsed. It was too late.”
She could not think of what to say but knew she must say something. “You couldn’t have known. He’d have to be mad.”
“No. He wasn’t. For all the talk of my father’s insanity, it was never him who succumbed to madness. It was me. For weeks, I couldn’t rise from my bed. By the time I came to grips, my father was dead of a bad heart and I couldn’t bear to speak of what he’d done. So he accomplished what he wanted. And that’s my fault.”
“You can’t blame yourself,” she said softly. “You were grieving.”
“I was weak. Out of control. Unable to go about the basic tasks of living and frankly better off had I been among the dead. I spent months that way. And when I did come half to rights, I couldn’t stand to remember. I threw myself into investing with a kind of single-minded madness and I let my wife and boy … just disappear. And for that, I can’t forgive myself. I have no wish to.”
His face rearranged itself as he said these words. The pained light in his eyes went cold, and he straightened his face back into the aloof veneer of the duke who strode around and never slept and kept his papers in exacting little stacks.
And so she completed the story for herself. About a man who had shut himself up very tightly, and assumed control very rigidly, to pay an act of penance.
She wondered if he could see, like she could, that it wasn’t working. That the mask that he wore was beginning, little by little, to slip away.
She wondered what would happen when the inevitable occurred.
When it fell away entirely.
The experiment was over. He had thought a decade’s absence from this place was enough to cauterize the wounds.
It was not.
His mind was fog, his chest a chasm, turning septic.
He had not told her the whole truth of it. It was not just his labors that saved him. It was also pain, and with it strength. The possibility of a place inside himself that bore no relation to the house of Westmead. A place he longed for now.
What he needed was in London. What he needed was not kind words but a cold stone floor beneath the balls of his hands, branches snapping on his skin, fingers in his hair. Sharp commands pulling him back into himself. Bracing him into the man he chose to be instead of the one that he’d been born.
Poppy stood quietly, observing his effort to collect himself with an expression she might have worn upon discovering a wounded fawn.
Intolerable.
He turned away from her and glanced up through the trees. The sky was beginning to change from darkness to the deep purple preceding first light.
“We should return to the house before the sun rises. Better no one know you left.”
He lifted her up onto his horse and swung himself behind her, tucking an arm around her waist.
He rode quickly to beat the light. The sooner they were parted, the sooner he would recover.
But to keep balanced, she pressed her body back against him, and with every movement of her form along his person, he felt a pang of want.
He hated himself for it.
The proper thing would be to loosen his grip on her waist. To wall off this desire for her touch.
Instead, he held her tighter.
She snuggled back against him, indulging his mad desire for affection, not reproaching him for his flesh wanting what it wanted. For being still damnably alive.
As the forest parted and the house peeked into view, he crushed his nose into her hair and placed a kiss on the crown of her head.
“Thank you,” he whispered, loosening his grip on her. He was grateful she could not see the longing no doubt written on his face. It would not do to let this need be what she remembered of him.
But she was no longer paying attention to him at all. Her gaze was trained on something in the distance.
“Bollocks,” she murmured, shielding her eyes against a ray of sunlight sketching the rooftop of the house in blinding orange.
“What is it?”
“Nothing. I thought I saw someone in the window. But it was only a trick of the light.”
“Constance’s set is not known for their early hours. I expect they won’t begin ringing for their breakfast trays until twilight.”
“I have noticed you have no surfeit of affection for them. Will you return to London?”
“Yes. This morning.”
“You won’t come back here.”
“No.”
Not ever.
His sanity was a skittish creature that required a climate of grayish light and ordered papers and rooms that bore no memories. Sheep-speckled meadows and lichen-spotted elm trees and dewy dawns breaking with a wild-haired girl tucked under his arm fed an ache inside him he was not in the business of indulging. It needed to be slaked into submission and fed a diet of solitude.
There was only one thing he would miss here.
He helped her down onto the terrace mounting block.
“I suppose this is farewell, then,” she said.
Christ, but she was beautiful, looking up at him beneath those long black lashes with the morning sun bouncing off her eyes.
He tried to summon words that could adequately express his depth of feeling without descending to the mawkish. The silence between them was the sort that cried out for some kind of declaration of attachment or gesture of affection. But he was not the kind of man who had those to give away.
“I am all gratitude for your friendship, Cavendish,” he said. Feebly. “I shall think of you … most fondly.”
You insufferable clot. The words landed with a thud, so insufficient as to be ludicrous.
&nbs
p; Poppy, lovely Poppy, spared him the indignity of acknowledging their unsuitability as she accepted his hand one final time.
She squeezed it.
“Be well, Your Grace.”
He made his hand let go of hers, finger by reluctant bloody finger.
And then he memorized the sight of her as she disappeared into the house.
Chapter 15
Hoxton Square, London
August 2, 1753
Archer had nothing but contempt for gentlemen who drowsed away the day in bed and lingered over their toilette. Any man who was not at his desk in the counting-house by the stroke of seven was not long for a position in his concern.
But it was well past eight by the time he had dragged himself from his bedchamber to his dressing room, squinting at the gray light pouring in from Hoxton Square. He ate porridge without tasting it and scalded his mouth on strong black coffee and felt as though his coat were made of lead. The day rolled out in front of him like a death sentence. He would go to Webb’s and buy a ring. And then he would call on Miss Gillian Bastian and offer to make her a duchess.
It was exactly what he wanted. Why the thought of it was making him so miserable was, therefore, confounding.
“Your carriage is waiting outside, Your Grace,” Gibbs said.
He nodded at the butler and dragged himself up from the table. He shrugged on his overcoat and walked to the door.
“Your Grace, I should warn you—” the butler said, but he was not paying attention and pulled open the latch himself.
“Your Grace!” a chorus of voices called at once. Fifteen or so men huddled in front of his house, waving their arms and calling out his name. The path before his front gate was littered with them.
“Westmead, what say you of the Beau Monde Botanist affair?” a particularly strident specimen shouted above the rest.
He recoiled and slammed the door.
“As I was saying,” Gibbs said blandly, “a crowd has gathered outside.”
“What, pray tell, is the Beau Monde Botanist affair?”
Gibbs gestured at a pile of newsprint neatly folded on the sideboard. “I believe it refers to some chuff in today’s Peculiar.”
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