by Mary Balogh
“What about?” she asked after a short silence.
“Tell me about the orphanage,” he said. “What sort of life did you have there?”
She shrugged. “There is not a great deal to tell.”
It must certainly have been a superior sort of orphanage. But even so, an orphanage was an orphanage.
“Were you lonely there?” he asked. “Are you lonely?”
“No.” She was not going to be very forthcoming with her personal history, he could see. She was not like many women—and men too, to be fair—who needed only the smallest encouragement to talk with great enthusiasm and at greater length about themselves.
“Why not?” he asked, narrowing his gaze on her. “You grew up without mother or father, brother or sister. You have come to London at the age of twenty or so, if my guess is correct, doubtless with the dream of making your fortune, but knowing no one. How can you not be lonely?”
She set the book down on the small table beside her and clasped her hands in her lap. “Aloneness is not always the same thing as loneliness,” she said. “Not if one learns to like oneself and one’s own company. It is possible, I suppose, to feel lonely even with mother and father and brothers and sisters if one basically does not like oneself. If one has been given the impression that one is not worthy of love.”
“How right you are!” he snapped, instantly irritated.
He was being regarded from very steady, very blue eyes, he noticed suddenly.
“Is that what happened to you?” she asked.
When he realized just what it was she was asking, the intimately personal nature of the question, he felt such fury that it was on the tip of his tongue to dismiss her for the night. Her impertinence knew no bounds. But a conversation, of course, was a two-way thing, and he was the one who had tried to get a conversation going.
He never had conversations, even with his male friends. Not on personal matters. He never talked about himself.
Was that what had happened to him?
“I was always rather fond of Angeline and Ferdinand,” he said with a shrug. “We fought constantly, as I suppose most brothers and sisters do, though the fact that we were Dudleys doubtless made us a little more boisterous and quarrelsome than most. We also played and got into mischief together. Ferdinand and I were even gallant enough on occasion to take the thrashing for what Angeline had done, though I suppose we punished her for it in our own way.”
“Why does being a Dudley mean that you must be more unruly, more vicious, more dangerous than anyone else?” she asked.
He thought about it, about his family, about the vision of themselves and their place in the scheme of things that had been bred into them from birth onward, and even perhaps before then.
“If you had known my father and my grandfather,” he replied, “you would not even ask the question.”
“And you feel you must live up to their reputations?” she asked. “Is it from personal choice that you do so? Or did you become trapped in your role as eldest son and heir and eventually the Duke of Tresham yourself?”
He chuckled softly. “If you knew my full reputation, Miss Ingleby,” he said, “you would not need to ask that question either. I have not rested on the laurels of my forebears, I assure you. I have sufficient of my own.”
“I know,” she said, “that you are considered more proficient than any other gentleman with a wide range of weapons. I know that you have fought more than one duel. I suppose they were all over women?”
He inclined his head.
“I know,” she said, “that you consort with married ladies without any regard to the sanctity of marriage or the feelings of the spouse you wrong.”
“You presume to know a great deal about me,” he said mockingly.
“I would have to be both blind and deaf not to,” she said. “I know that you look upon everyone who is beneath you socially—and that is almost everyone—as scions to run and fetch for you and to obey your every command without question.”
“And without even a please or thank you,” he added.
“You engage in the most foolhardy wagers, I daresay,” she said. “You have shown no concern this week over Lord Ferdinand’s impending curricle race to Brighton. He could break his neck.”
“Not Ferdinand,” he said. “Like me, he has a neck made of steel.”
“All that matters to you,” she said, “is that he win the race. Indeed, I do believe that you wish you could take his place so that you could break yours instead.”
“There is little point in entering a race,” he explained, “unless one means to win it, Miss Ingleby, though one also must know how to behave like a gentleman when one loses, of course. Are you scolding me, by any chance? Is this a gentle tirade against my manners and morals?”
“They are not my concern, your grace,” she said. “I am merely commenting upon what I have observed.”
“You have a low opinion of me,” he said.
“But I daresay,” she retorted, “my opinion means no more to you than the snap of your fingers.”
He chuckled softly. “I was different once upon a time, you know,” he said. “My father rescued me. He made sure I took the final step in my education to become a gentleman after his own heart. Perhaps you are fortunate, Miss Ingleby, never to have known your father or mother.”
“They must have loved you,” she said.
“Love.” He laughed. “I suppose you have an idealized conception of the emotion because you have never known a great deal of it yourself, or of what sometimes passes for it. If love is a disinterested devotion to the beloved, Jane, then indeed there is no such thing. There is only selfishness, a dedication to one’s own comfort, which the beloved is used to enhance. Dependency is not love. Domination is not love. Lust is certainly not it, though it can be a happy enough substitute on occasion.”
“You poor man,” she said.
He found the handle of his quizzing glass and lifted it to his eye. She sat looking back at him, seemingly quite composed. Most women in his experience either preened or squirmed under the scrutiny of his glass. On this occasion its use was an affectation anyway. His eyesight was not so poor that he could not see her perfectly well without it. He let the glass fall to his chest.
“My mother and father were a perfectly happy couple,” he said. “I never heard them exchange a cross word or saw them frown at each other. They produced three children, a sure sign of their devotion to each other.”
“Well, then,” Jane said, “you have just disproved your own theory.”
“Perhaps,” he said, “it was because they saw each other for only a few minutes three or four times a year. As my father came home to Acton Park, my mother would be leaving for London. As she came home, he would be leaving. A civil and amicable arrangement, you see.” One he had thought quite normal at the time. It was strange how children who had known no different could adapt to almost any situation.
Jane said nothing. She sat very still.
“They were wonderfully discreet too,” he said, “as any perfect couple must be if the harmony of the marriage is to be maintained. No word of my mother’s legion of lovers ever came to Acton. I knew nothing of them until I came to London myself at the age of sixteen. Fortunately I resemble my father in physical features. So do Angeline and Ferdinand. It would be lowering to suspect that one might be a bastard, would it not?”
He had not spoken those words to hurt. He remembered too late that Jane Ingleby did not know her own parents. He wondered who had given her her last name. Why not Smith or Jones? Perhaps it was a policy of a superior orphanage to distinguish its orphans from the common run by giving them more idiosyncratic surnames.
“Yes,” she said. “I am sorry. No child should have to feel so betrayed even when he is old enough, according to the world’s beliefs, to cope with the knowledge. It must have been a heavy blow to you. But I daresay she loved you.”
“If the number and splendor of the gifts she brought with her from London are any ind
ication,” he said, “she doted on us. My father did not depend upon his months in London for pleasure. There is a picturesque cottage in a remote corner of Acton Park, Jane. A river flows at the foot of its back garden, wooded hills grow up around it. It is an idyllic setting indeed. It was home during several of my growing years to an indigent relative, a woman of considerable charm and beauty. I was sixteen years old before I understood just who she was.”
He had always intended to give the order to have that cottage pulled down. He still had not done so. But it was uninhabited now, and he had given his steward specific orders to spend not a single farthing on its upkeep. In time it would fall down from sheer neglect.
“I am sorry,” she said again as if she were personally responsible for his father’s lack of taste in housing his mistress—or one of them anyway—on his own estate with his children in residence there. But Jane did not know the half of it, and he was not about to enlighten her.
“I have much to live up to, you see,” he said. “But I believe I am doing my part in perpetuating the family reputation.”
“You are not bound by the past,” she told him. “No one is. Influenced by it, yes, perhaps almost overwhelmingly drawn to live up to it. But not compelled. Everyone has free will, you more than most. You have the rank, the wealth, the influence to live your own life your own way.”
“Which, my little moralist,” he said softly, narrowing his eyes on her, “is exactly what I am doing. Except now, of course. Such inaction as this is anathema to me. But perhaps it is a fitting punishment, would you not agree, for having taken my pleasure in the bed of a married woman?”
She flushed and looked down.
“Does it reach your waist?” he asked her. “Or even below?”
“My hair?” She looked back up at him, startled. “It is only hair. Below my waist.”
“Only hair,” he murmured. “Only spun gold. Only the sort of magic web in which any man would gladly become hopelessly caught and enmeshed, Jane.”
“I have not given you permission for such familiarity, your grace,” she said primly.
He chuckled. “Why do I put up with your impudence?” he asked her. “You are my servant.”
“But not your indentured slave,” she said. “I can get up and walk out through that door any time I please and not come back. The few pounds you are paying me for three weeks of service do not give you ownership of me. Or excuse your impertinence in speaking with lascivious intent about my hair. And you may not deny that there was suggestiveness in what you said about it and the way you looked at it.”
“Certainly I will not deny it,” he agreed. “I try always to speak the truth, Miss Ingleby. Go and fetch the chess board from the library. We will see if you can give me a decent game tonight. And have Hawkins fetch the brandy while you are about it. I am as dry as a damned desert. And as prickly as a cactus plant.”
“Yes, your grace.” She got to her feet readily enough.
“And I would advise you,” he said, “not to call me impertinent again, Miss Ingleby. I can be pushed only so far without retaliating.”
“But you are confined to the sofa,” she said, “and I can walk out through the door at any time. I believe that gives me a certain advantage.”
One of these times, he thought as she vanished through the door—at least one time during the remaining two weeks of her employment—he was going to have the last word with Miss Jane Ingleby. He could not remember not having the last word with anyone, male or female, any time during the past ten years.
But he was relieved that their conversation had returned to its normal level before she left. He did not know quite how she had turned the tables on him before that. He had tried to worm out of her something about herself and had ended up telling her things about his childhood and boyhood that he did not care even to think about, let alone share with another person.
He had come very close to baring his heart.
He preferred to believe that he had none.
7
OME HERE,” THE DUKE OF TRESHAM SAID TO JANE after a game of chess a few days later, in which he had prevailed but only after he had been forced to ponder his moves and accuse her of trying to distract him with her chatter. She had spoken scarcely a word during the whole game. Jane had moved away to return the chess board to its cupboard.
She did not trust the tone of his voice. She did not trust him when she thought about the matter. There had been a tension between them during the past few days that even in her inexperience she had had no difficulty in identifying. He saw her as a woman, and she, God help her, was very much aware of him as a man. She breathed a prayer of gratitude as she approached the sofa for the fact that he was still confined to it, though she would no longer be employed if he were not, of course.
The thought of leaving her employment—and Dudley House—in another week and a half was becoming more and more oppressive to her. In their careless conversation, his friends had several times referred to the fact that her father’s cousin, the Earl of Durbury, was in London and that he had the dreaded Bow Street Runners looking for her. The friends and the duke himself appeared to be on her side. They jeered over the fact that she had overpowered Sidney, a man who was apparently not universally liked. But their attitude would change in a moment if they discovered that Lady Sara Illingsworth and Jane Ingleby were one and the same person.
“Show me your hands,” the duke said now. It was, of course, a command, not a request.
“Why?” she asked, but he merely raised his eyebrows in that arrogant way he had and stared back at her.
She held them out toward him hesitantly, palms down. But he took them in his own and turned them over.
It was one of the most uncomfortable moments of Jane’s life. His hands dwarfed her own, cupping hers loosely. She could easily have pulled away, and every instinct urged her to do so. But then she would reveal her discomfort and its only possible source. She felt the pull of his masculinity like a physical force. She found it difficult to breathe.
“No calluses,” he said. “You have not done much menial work, then, Jane?”
She wished he would not sometimes lapse into calling her by the name only her parents had ever used. “Not a great deal, your grace,” she said.
“They are beautiful hands,” he said, “as one might expect. They match the rest of your person. They change bandages gently without causing undue pain. One wonders what other magic they could create with their touch. Jane, you could be the most sought-after courtesan in all of England if you so chose.”
She pulled her hands back then, but his own tightened about them a little faster than she moved.
“I did add ‘if you chose,’ ” he pointed out, a wicked gleam in his eyes. “What other magic can they create? I wonder. Are they musical hands? Do you play an instrument? The pianoforte?”
“A little,” she admitted. Unlike her mother, she had never been any more than a proficient pianist.
His hands were still tight on hers. His dark eyes burned upward into her own. Her claim to be able to escape him at any time by simply walking out through the door was ridiculous now. By just a slight jerking on her hands he could have her down across him in a moment.
She glared at him, determined not to show fear or any other discomfort.
“Show me.” He released her hands and indicated the pianoforte on the far side of the drawing room. It was a lovely instrument, she had noticed before, though not as magnificent as the one in the music room.
“I am out of practice,” she said.
“For God’s sake, Miss Ingleby,” he retorted, “do not be coy. I always withdraw in haste to the card room whenever the young misses of the ton are about to demonstrate their party pieces at any fashionable entertainment. But I have degenerated to the point at which I am almost eager to listen to someone who openly admits that she plays only a little and is out of practice. Now go and play before my mind turns to other sport while you are still within grabbing distance.”
She went.
She played one of the pieces she had committed to memory long ago, a Bach fugue. By happy chance she made only two errors, both in the first few bars and neither glaring.
“Come here,” the duke said again when she had finished.
She crossed the room, sat in the chair she usually occupied, and looked directly at him. She had discovered that doing so protected her from being bullied. It appeared to suggest to him that she was capable of giving as good as she got.
“You were right,” he said abruptly. “You play a little. A very little. You play without flair. You play each note as if it were a separate entity that had no connection with what came before or after. You depress each key as if it were simply an inanimate strip of ivory, as if you believed it impossible to coax music out of it. You must have had an inferior teacher.”
The criticism of herself she could take quite philosophically. She had never had any illusions about her skills. But she bristled when he cast such aspersions on her mother.
“I did not!” she retorted. “How dare you presume to judge my teacher by my performance. She had more talent in her little finger than I have in my whole body. She could make it seem as if the music came from her rather than from a mere instrument. Or as if it came through her from some—oh, from some heavenly source.” She glared indignantly at him, aware of the inadequacy of words.
He gazed at her in silence for a moment, a strange, unfamiliar glow in his eyes.
“Ah,” he said at last, “you do understand, then, do you? It is not that you are unmusical, just that you are without superior talent of your own. But why would such a paragon come to an orphanage to teach?”
“Because she was an angel,” Jane said, and swiped at the tears that threatened to spill onto her cheeks. What was the matter with her? She had never been a watering pot until recently.
“Poor Jane,” he said softly. “Did she become a mother figure to you?”
She almost told him to go to hell, language that had never passed her lips before. She had almost sunk to his level.