The Duke I Tempted

by Scarlett Peckham

  Archer opened his eyes to the filtered light of a wintry afternoon. He coughed, and felt the ragged burn of his lungs. Black phlegm came up in his throat.

  Poppy stood over him and dabbed a kerchief to his mouth. If the fire had singed her nose and throat as it had his, she didn’t show it. For hours she’d sat at his bedside, wiping his brow with cool linens and putting ice chips to his lips with nary a cough. For hours, he’d dodged and shrugged off her ministrations, wishing he hadn’t married her, wishing she’d simply leave.

  “Off me,” he croaked at her. “Get out.”

  She pursed her lips. “You must rise. The solicitors are here.”

  “Send them away.”

  “They’ve come to discuss the damage.”

  “Sod the damage.”

  “Don’t be insensible,” she snapped. “Our work cannot move forward until the insurance assessments have been completed. Your financing covenants have been frozen. If you won’t see the solicitors, I shall confer with them without you.”

  He closed his eyes and when he’d opened them, a trio of old men had filed in against his wishes, all dressed in black like three crows come to examine a fresh corpse.

  Mr. Tynedale, the oldest of their lot, bowed and began a crisp assessment of the fire. The contracts and currency were safe in Archer’s vault at Hoare’s, undamaged. The counting-house was irreparable, but handsomely insured. His Grace had been very perspicacious, prepared for the inevitabilities. He could easily rebuild. But there was the matter of assuaging creditors, lest the flow of capital to his portfolio be interrupted. It was critical to make a show of strength at his earliest convenience.

  He didn’t care.

  Poppy peppered them with questions about operations, securing temporary quarters for the workers, the agreements with financiers.

  She had learned quickly, his wife.

  “Tynedale, leave us.”

  “Your Grace, there are several matters further to discuss,” the solicitor objected.

  “Out. Now.”

  The crows exchanged a look and trickled out. Poppy remained, wraithlike, aggrieved at him for sending them away.

  “The least you could do is listen to what they have to say,” she hissed. “If we do not secure our assets and reputation, we will be descended on like vultures by the creditors. They could cause delays for months.”

  “Enough, Poppy,” he yelled, beating his head back against the wooden headboard. The pain of it centered him. He did it again.

  “Stop that! You will injure yourself.”

  He opened his mouth and laughed, a nasty, mirthless snarl. “Will I? Rich words from the likes of a woman who ran into a burning building.”

  “It was not yet burning,” she said with a petulant toss of her head. For once, her determined jaw and tumbling hair did not move him. He wanted to shake her.

  “Does your own life mean so little to you? And what if you are with child?”

  She glared at him. “Yes. God forbid something happen to your broodmare. I was perfectly safe—”

  “Enough,” he shouted at her.

  “No,” she shouted back. “How could you reproach me for attempting to save my work? It is everything I have. I would have nothing if I lost it. Nothing.”

  He hated her, for those words. He knew exactly how much a fire could take, and sketches of plants did not begin to cover it.

  “You have,” he told her with excruciating slowness, “no idea what it means to lose everything. And God help you, Poppy, should you ever know.”

  She must have heard the note of disgust in his voice. She looked up at him, startled, as though it had only just dawned on her what he meant.

  “I wasn’t comparing— I didn’t mean to imply—” she began.

  But she had, damn her. She had never seemed younger. The very sight of her made him feel empty and exhausted.

  “It’s not the same,” she said quietly, her eyes drifting to the floor. “You loved them, Archer. Be angry if you like, but please don’t claim that it’s the same. You’ve made it clear to me in every way that it is not.”

  He felt the blackness curling up from his chest into his esophagus. He felt it behind his eyes, in his shoulders, his calves, his feet, his toes.

  He knew what was coming.

  “Leave me,” he said, rising out of bed.

  “Archer, wait,” she said, following him. “I insist I did not mean to—”

  He waved her off.

  She pounded on the wall with her fist and began to cry in furious sobs. “You know, you don’t have a monopoly on grief. I had a family too, Archer. I did not spring from this earth alone and with nothing. It came about by dribs.”

  “Leave,” he roared at her. “Did I not dismiss you?”

  He bent over his knees, his head spinning, the blaze in his ears deafening once more.

  “You’re right, it was not sensible of me,” she went on shouting. “It’s only that these months I have felt so desperate, so bereft—because I am here, with you—with you—and yet I am alone.”

  She was unstrung, sobbing about their argument, his secrecy, his bloody scars. He heard the words but could scarcely make sense of them, blending as they were with the roaring in his ears. Sweat beaded on his brow and arms. He had to stop this. He had to seize control of himself before he well and truly let the rafters crumble.

  He launched himself past his wife’s devastated form and lurched out of the room. He stormed up the stairs to his study and slammed the door behind him, locking it with shaking fingers.

  Poppy knocked at it and called his name through tears.

  “I’m sorry. Please can we talk sensibly?”

  “Do not disturb me,” he bellowed at her through the door. His voice came out at half volume, his throat still caked in silt.

  He sat at the desk and put his palms facedown on the top of it and simply breathed. The room smelled like ash. Because she had draped it with her bloody half-burnt papers.

  They were everywhere, pinned up about the walls to dry. He rose up and tore them down. Nothing was supposed to make him feel this way. Was that not the reason he’d married her, so that there would be no occasion to ever feel this way again?

  She was right. It wasn’t supposed to be the same.

  But it was.

  He ran out of papers to cast down and knocked a stack of letters from the desk and watched them scatter on the floor. He opened drawers and tossed aside every possession of hers he could find: seed packets, grower’s manuals, the effluvia of her intrusion into his life and space and heart.

  He tipped over a shelf and sent her plants and porcelain smashing to the ground, making a mess of petals and pollen and sodden shattered glass. He took the drawers out from their nooks and emptied them on the floor.

  Only when he had thoroughly upended every single nook and surface that bore traces of her incursion did he finally sink into a chair, distraught and shaking and disgusted with himself.

  The room was shameful.

  He was shameful.

  He’d made a mess of her things, his things, the rug. The servants would think him a bloody monster. She would think him a bloody monster. He knelt and straightened the jumble he’d knocked from the cupboard. A glass jar of powdered leaves labeled Pennyroyal Tea rolled across the floorboards and landed near his knee.

  He tossed it aside. He got halfway through the room before a creeping, dawning clarity overpowered the more blinding momentum of his sorrow.

  Pennyroyal tea. It was used for—

  He could not make himself finish the thought.

  Of all the monstrous things.

  She had laughed off his fears about the nursery. Scoffed, just now, at the possibility of pregnancy.

  She knew very well she was not with child.

  She had made sure of it.

  He took the jar and threw it at the fireplace and watched it shatter.

  And then he yanked the bellpull for a footman.

  Chapter 29

 
What had she done?

  She was weak with remorse. All day Poppy had seethed at her husband for pulling her out of the fire. Countermanding her—like she was a foolish child. Blocking her from saving the things that were dearest to her in the world. She’d been so focused on her anger that she had not given a thought to him, who had lost more.

  She had known, and done it anyway.

  Even if he did not love her, it was incalculably selfish. Cruel. The guilt of it made her body feel like a prison. It beat on her from within, unendurable.

  “Archer, please,” she whispered to the door.

  The crashing behind it did not pause. She had pleaded with him to reveal himself to her, but she had never imagined him this way. Out of control.

  She was responsible. She had provoked him until he exploded. She’d done it because she was furious that all she had to save was her papers. That her heart had not cooperated with their agreement. That she loved him, desperately, and he merely tolerated her.

  She was going to tell him. It was unbearable to live with the words unsaid, swirling inside her, blackening her spirit. It was turning her into someone venal. Someone capable of the way she had treated him today. If he could not bear to confess to her the nature of his secrets, it no longer mattered. She would give him her love and take the penance she deserved.

  The crashing behind the door, at last, stopped. She pressed herself against the wall as Gibbs came running.

  Archer threw open the door and walked right past her, not sparing her a glance. He thundered down the stairs without a word.

  The sound of the heavy front door slamming shut echoed up through the house before she could collect herself. Stunned, she edged her way into the wreckage of the study and peered out the window to the street. He was there, striding to his carriage. She hoisted the window open, prepared to plead with him to come back, never mind the public scene.

  “Twenty-three Charlotte Street,” she heard him tell the coachman.

  Before she could get a word out, he was gone.

  She looked down at the chaos he had made of the room. He had ripped down all her papers, broken vases, overturned the shelves. She bent down to pick up bits of broken glass and paused.

  Oh dear heavens. No.

  It was the pennyroyal tea. Packed away months ago by Mrs. Todd when she’d made the request in anger, and promptly forgotten. He must think—

  He would never forgive her if he thought her capable of such a thing. But she wasn’t capable. She hadn’t done it, in the end. She hadn’t even wanted to.

  She had to find him.

  She did not bother to order her carriage. She donned a cloak and slipped out her own front door.

  The hackney driver she hailed gave her an odd look at the address.

  “You’re certain, madam? Not a part of town for proper ladies this time of night.”

  “Make haste,” she ordered, not bothering to tell him that she was not a proper lady.

  The street outside the address was quiet. The door marked twenty-three looked no different from the others, and no plate marked it as an establishment of business. Was it a private home? She rapped on the heavy iron knocker.

  After a rather long pause, an unsmiling girl answered the door. She wore a dress of black, severely cut enough for a novice at a nunnery, but made from fine silk with the detailing of a lady’s mourning garment. The girl said nothing, merely stared at Poppy expectantly. The room beyond her was hushed and dark, lit by only a few flickering wax candles. Poppy strained to see, but the girl blocked her line of sight.

  “I need to speak to my husband,” Poppy said. “The Duke of Westmead. It’s urgent.”

  The girl looked at her appraisingly. “You have a key?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Do you have a key?”

  “No.”

  “Then the establishment is closed.”

  “I am the Duchess of Westmead. My husband is here.”

  The girl stared at her dispassionately, unmoved by her title or her distress.

  “Please, inform him I’m here,” Poppy pleaded. “I beg you.”

  The girl shook her head. “Unless you have a key, you’ll need to leave. Good night.” Without malice, she closed the door in Poppy’s face.

  She heard a bolt slide into place behind the door. Unbelievable. What was this place? Not a gentlemen’s club. Such an establishment would have a sign, a proper butler, some obeisance to the basic laws of class and courtesy.

  She thought back to Tom Raridan’s vulgar words. But this place did not bring to mind the brothels she’d seen in naughty woodcuts—women with exposed bosoms and rouged cheeks plying soused men with drink. The house had the silent air of a cathedral.

  Several men walked past her, their chatter stopping as they paused to take in the unusual sight of a woman alone on the dark street. Her hackney coach had left, and there were no others idling.

  Well, why should she cower here? Her husband was indoors—ill and not himself and wrongly convinced of the worst of her. Did that not give her the right to enter? If she found him with a courtesan, so be it—she must speak to him. If she did not unburden herself, she would not be able to bear the feel of her own skin.

  There was a narrow alley between the town house and the larger edifice next door. She ducked inside it and felt her way amidst the narrow moonlit channel until she edged upon a door. Tom Raridan had once shown her how to pick a lock with a hairpin. She plucked one from her head and set to work. When she tried the handle, the door opened with a creak.

  She was in a servants’ hallway, dim and unadorned but scrupulously clean. The house was still and silent.

  She tiptoed through a door and into an austere reception room. Dark curtains were drawn over the single window. A hard schoolroom bench by the wall farthest from the fire was the only seat. This was clearly not a home.

  She paused to listen, but no sounds or voices echoed through the halls. There was only the deep, velvet hush of enveloping darkness.

  She crept past an antechamber, and saw the maid bent over a desk, oiling a row of keys that resembled the one she had seen around Archer’s neck. The girl turned at the sound of a bell and Poppy crept back into the shadows. She watched the girl gather a strange assortment of items onto a tray—a pitcher of water, a stack of clean linens, and a box whose scent she recognized immediately as peat moss. She used it to pack plants in crates to halt their deterioration. Surgeons used it to ward off rot.

  Was it possible that Archer was more badly wounded than he let on? Had he hurt himself tearing apart the study?

  The girl turned with the tray down a long corridor at the other side of the chamber. A faint knock. The swish of a well-oiled hinge. The murmur of female voices. “His wife was here,” she heard the girl say, in a tone not meant to be overheard. “I sent her away.” She could not make out the answer.

  Poppy retreated to the servants’ stairs as the door closed and the girl walked away. A faint, percussive thwack sounded from the chamber. An odd sound, like the swishing of a tree branch knocking at a window in a storm.

  A moan. His moan.

  He was in pain. She stepped into the hallway, not bothering to hide the sounds of her steps. If her husband was here, suffering, it was her duty to go to him.

  She straightened her spine to her full height, took a deep breath, and opened the door, preparing to announce herself. But the sight within robbed her of her words.

  She knew exactly where she was.

  Of course.

  An exclusive private whipping house.

  Archer was bent over. Splayed on his forearms and knees on a black blanket, his head facing the wall. He was naked, save a linen shirt that was rent down the middle and falling off his shoulders, as though it had been cut from his neck. His head was thrown back in some agony or ecstasy, a scarf tied around his eyes to block his sight. He arched his back, his beautiful back, architecturally made, every tendon and ligament powerful and finely sculpted, beneath the web of scars. S
cars, it was now clear, that had been made by the whips and birches that were organized along a shelf, as bald and neatly sorted as the tools in her own gardening shed.

  The woman who stood over him was tall, with thick, dark hair pulled into a tight chignon. Not yet aware of Poppy’s presence, she set down her handful of birches on a low sideboard and picked up a heavy whip, a leather braid with golden-corded fronds woven from something that looked fine and painful. She raised it in the air and with a flick of her wrist brought it down toward Archer’s back.

  “No,” Poppy shouted. She raced forward, prepared to take the blow herself. The woman whirled around and the fringe cracked against the wall. Archer rose up on his knees and turned around, ripping at his blindfold.

  The woman turned to look at Poppy. Her face bore not a spot of rouge or powder, and though she was not young, she was not old. Her dark hair was borne atop her head in a severe knot—no fringe, no ringlets, no ribbons. The planes of her cheeks were wide and the make of her jaw was firm and defined, her brows dark slashes above darker eyes. In another guise she would be considered a beauty, if a sober one.

  A thin thread of bright red blood trickled from a cut on Archer’s thigh and threaded down his leg, dripping along his ankle. His elegant, aristocratic ankle.

  He stood, and as he spun to face her, she saw her confirmation that this torture, whatever it was, was not innocent. The shirt had dropped to his feet, and his arousal announced itself plainly, uncovered.

  She backed from the room as he got the blindfold off. His face contorted at the sight of her, snapping from a glazed look of absence into a rictus of disbelief, then horror.

  He said her name—croaked it, his voice still ravaged from the fire.

  As his eyes met hers, her toes gripped the floor through her shoes and her ankles made them pivot toward the door. Her thighs propelled her legs, one step, then two. But even as her body turned and fled, and her eyes saw carpet become stairs, and stairs give way to alley—even as her arm shot out and flagged another hackney—even as she turned and saw him lurch into the street, coat covering his nudity, his bare feet digging into muck and gravel, that single bead of blood still threading down his ankle—even as she heard him shouting “Wait!” and “Please”—