“Would I truly wish to call those people as friends if they’d be so stuffy in their judgment?”
Ainsley spoke with a child’s simplicity Rowena had once possessed. She looked around the elegant white and gold parlor. It had been three days since she had begun schooling her charge in lessons on deportment and ladylike pursuits. In that time, she’d demonstrated the same frustration Rowena had over the years at the strictures binding women to such staid, purposeless endeavors.
“You wouldn’t,” she conceded, “yet, sometimes it is not about friendships.” Frustration roiling inside at her own limitations, she looked around Graham’s vast library. With its soaring ceiling and wraparound shelving of books, it had the look of the Temple of the Muses, that place she had so loved to go as a girl, before she’d begun to note the way women yanked their skirts away from her and Mother as they walked by. Remembering back to the day they’d bumped into the vicar, who became Rowena’s stepfather, she drifted over to the shelf. With numb fingers she tugged the nearest volume free and fanned the pages, absently.
...We will always know security and love, now, Rowena... We are going someplace safe. Someplace wonderful...
In the end, she’d been the only one who’d been without that someplace safe and wonderful. Her chest squeezed; and yet, at the same time, she welcomed that pain for its valuable reminder. One she desperately needed with Graham back in her life: trusting others was perilous. Ultimately, she’d only herself to rely on... and it was and would always be safer that way.
“Mrs. Bryant?” Ainsley asked hesitantly, with that astuteness she’d demonstrated since their first meeting.
“Do you wish to know the truth, Ainsley?” she asked quietly, as she turned back to face her charge.
The girl swung her legs to the floor and scooted closer to the edge. “Always.”
May she always feel that way. “It is good to never betray who you are, but who you are is not defined by how you walk. Life is hard and”—she touched her gaze upon the young lady’s delicate features—“I expect you know that as much as anybody. Mayhap more. Life is filled with uncertainties and dangers and struggles, and if one can make life easier for oneself by doing these”—she waved her book about—“small things to conform that ultimately don’t matter, that doesn’t make one weak.” It made one a survivor. “It makes you resourceful.” Just as she had been.
That resourcefulness had saved her life. It had kept her from a fate upon her back as the plaything of a powerful lord... whether it was Graham, Jack, or any other nobleman. A whore was a whore was a whore, and a woman who could rise up and find altogether different circumstances than those was a woman of strength. “Then it makes it vastly easier to convert one’s energies to the ones that truly do matter.
Ainsley wrinkled her nose. “So, I should change?”
“No. Yes. No.” Speaking to her charge felt a good deal like running in circles to chase a tale that wasn’t there.
The young lady scratched at her confused brow.
Battling a frustration at her inability to wholly articulate what she sought to convey, Rowena set aside the book in her hands. “I do not want you to change who you are,” she said at last, in a truthful utterance that would have sent even an unflappable Mrs. Belden into a fit of the vapors, and only after she’d sacked her. “But you can retain who you are in here.” She tapped her hand to her chest. “It doesn’t mean you have to approve of the gossips or the unfairness in social station, but you can hold onto who you are and prove that being spirited and free-thinking does not preclude you from knowing about and respecting Society’s expectations of who you are in here.” She briefly touched her head. “And here”—she touched her chest once more—“is what people should see... And if you only flaunt societal conventions, they won’t ever be able to look past that to see who you are.”
Ainsley folded her arms and grunted. “Then, I think I shouldn’t care what they believe.”
No. She shouldn’t. That truth slammed into Rowena. This child had more courage and strength than she did—or ever had. She who’d always longed to find acceptance in Society... an acceptance that would never be forthcoming.
Ainsley flipped onto her belly and, scrunching her brow, reached under the sofa. She muttered under her breath, and then—“Aha.” Her eyes lit. She dragged a leather book out and sat up. Her spirited charge handed the leather tome over.
Accepting it, Rowena skimmed the title: “Da Vinci.” She looked up. “You enjoy art, then,” she said, relieved. They could move on from the exact way to walk. This was a safe pursuit Rowena was familiar with. One the ton approved of.
“No. I hate it.” The young lady spoke with such candor that as a companion Rowena should be despairing. Instead, a smile tugged at her lips. How easy it was to smile around this girl. There was a refreshing realness to her that had long been missing in her own soul. “I found this book by chance when I first moved into Hampstead’s household,” Ainsley explained. “It was the first one I took off the shelf.” She plucked the copy from Rowena’s hands. Her face riddled with concentration, she fanned the pages, and then stopped abruptly. “Here.” She turned the book back over.
Rowena searched the dog-eared page, and then paused as she read.
“He was a bastard,” Ainsley said needlessly with the words all right there. She proceeded to tick off on her hands. “He was left-handed, and he never received a formal education.” She paused, giving Rowena a pointed look. “He wrote backward, Mrs. Bryant. Backward.”
Rowena returned her attention to the book and proceeded to flip through those bent, well-read pages. All those facts, marked off by the girl, in this very volume. As well as other details she’d underlined in a charcoal pencil... about flight and a moveable bridge. Graham had said there was no child like his ward. He’d greatly understated the uniqueness that was Ainsley Hickenbottom. Affection filled her for the unconventional lady who would challenge both her and polite Society.
“Would you like to study these concepts?” Gesturing to the peculiar flying machine and anatomical images of men, Rowena turned a question that would have set most ladies to blushing.
Ainsley dragged her legs close to her chest and looped her arms around them. “Oh, yes.” Her charge was a bluestocking. She smiled. How very refreshing this girl was from so many of the others who’d entered her classrooms. Her smile withered. But then, I was tasked with killing spirits, and that’s just what I did. Turned spirited girls into dull, lifeless versions of myself.
“And do you know what else?”
“What is that?” she asked, unnerved by the truth of what she’d done these years... or rather, the truth of what she’d not done.
“Everyone remembers Da Vinci hundreds of years later. We still have books about him,” she said, motioning to the volume in Rowena’s hands. “He is remembered. I would rather be remembered than well-liked.” She held a hand out.
Rowena eyed her fingers.
“I’m going to teach you how to skip, Mrs. Bryant.”
“I know how to skip,” she said instantly. As a girl, she’d taught a hopelessly incapable-of-skipping fifteen-year-old Graham those fanciful movements.
I bet a duke’s son has never done something so senseless as skip.
Laughter had pealed from her lips over the Berkshire countryside as he had gone through those awkward, lurching steps. Her gaze slid to the door. And, now, he’d become one of those somber, duty-driven peers.
Rowena gasped as Ainsley grabbed her hand and tugged her to her feet. Stumbling, she quickly righted herself. “Then it should be easy to try again. First, we must rearrange the furniture, Mrs. Bryant?”
Curling her toes into her soles, Rowena made a sound of protest. “I don’t—”
“Uh-huh, Mrs. Bryant.” In the greatest of role reversals, her charge wagged a disapproving finger. “I’ll allow you to teach me your dull, boring steps if you let me school you on skipping.”
Ladies walk with small, precise, genteel step
s. A lady who walks with noble grace finds a noble husband.
Rowena worried the flesh of her lower lip. Should word reach Mrs. Belden that she had done something as indecorous as not only skip but encourage it in her charge, she’d be sacked without a single reference to account for more than ten years of honorable service. She nodded slowly. “Very well, Ainsley. Deliberate steps and then skipping it is.”
Ainsley studied her through narrowed eyes. “Agreed.” Grabbing Rowena’s fingers, she pumped them once.
“Shoulders back, chin up, steps measured,” she guided, demonstrating those very movements.
Brow furrowed in concentration, Ainsley took several stiff, awkward ones of her own. “You’re very good at this, Mrs. Bryant.” That pronouncement emerged as an indictment more than anything.
Another smile tugged at Rowena’s lips.
“But you aren’t always miserably stiff like Hampstead.”
Rowena missed a step and quickly righted herself, damning the way her heart skittered at the mere mention of his name. Bringing herself back about, she started a slow walk back the other way.
“Oh,” she said, striving for nonchalance. “Is he truly miserable?” She’d born witness to his cool, ducal demeanor, but she had also seen glimpses of a man who smiled at servants and teased and sought to calm her fears through a threadbare wall.
Ainsley’s gaze concentrated on the opposite wall; she didn’t even bother to look over. “Not like Turner, mind you. Just formal. Ducal.” Yes, Graham had ascended to the title as though he’d been the one born to it. “He’s dreadfully dull in that regard.”
There were many words Rowena would have ascribed to Graham Linford through the years: ruthless, unfeeling, bastard, but never, even with the passage of time and the veneer of powerful nobleman fair glistening off his personage would she have ever dared to call him... dull. A desire to know more about the man he had become in her absence. Had the loss of his once-exuberant joy been a product of the war? His ascension to the dukedom? Or a combination of the two?
“You have many dealings with him, then?” Rowena ventured hesitantly.
“Pfft.” Ainsley took another measured step. “Hardly. It’s how I know he must be dull.” She startled a laugh from Rowena, and as that mirthful expression echoed loudly off the walls, she clamped her palm over her mouth.
“You know, it is quite all right to laugh, Mrs. Bryant,” Ainsley admonished, adjusting her strides as she started back in the opposite direction. “Mayhap that is why you and Hampstead once suited.”
“We don’t suit,” Rowena said quickly, all amusement now gone. How could the young lady, a stranger of three days, know that they’d had a deep past together. “We never suited. He’s merely my employer, and I’m—”
Her charge continued over her rambling protestations. “He doesn’t leave his office except to visit his boring clubs and attend his dull affairs. But you, Mrs. Bryant?” She looked over, a sparkle in her eyes, and stopped her awkward strides. “There is hope for you yet.” She held her fingers out. “And now we skip.”
Graham shrugged into his midnight black, double-lapel jacket. Waving off his valet, Smith, he buttoned the garment himself, and then held a hand out for the stark white cravat. He accepted it with a word of thanks. Looking in the bevel mirror, he went through the motions of knotting the white fabric.
Years earlier, when he’d fought off death and the agony of Rowena’s abandonment, he’d reentered the world of the living; losing himself in the inanity of it all. Or he’d tried to. For some of that time, he’d overindulged in drink, bedded eager widows and beauties, and visited the most dangerous hells in London. Through it, he’d failed to fully vanquish his demons.
They were always there. Always lurking. As Jack had aptly reminded him.
As such, he’d come to abhor making an appearance before Society. Be it the balls he was never without an invitation to or the club engagements with Jack, the opportunity of a misstep was always present. The chance that the nightmares would come and the whole world would bear witness to his weakness.
For the first time, however, he was eager to be free of the once-safe walls of his townhouse. His need to escape the one place that had been his sanctuary had everything to do with a five-foot, eight-inch lithe woman who’d occupied his thoughts since they’d arrived three days earlier. One whom he’d taken care to avoid. It had been abundantly easy for him to focus all his days on meetings and his evenings at ton events while Rowena remained behind, schooling his ward.
And through his work, thoughts and questions would sometimes creep in. If life had continued along a different path, she’d be guiding Ainsley not because she was a servant in his employ but because she was his duchess.
If she had waited for him.
If he hadn’t gone mad.
So many “ifs,” and there could be no going back.
“Is there anything else you require, Your Grace?”
A decanter of brandy, and a second one behind it. “No. That will be all.”
As the door closed, signaling Smith had left, Graham re-fixed his attention on the man reflected back at him. He’d delayed this inevitable meeting with Jack since he’d arrived. Giving over the tasks of organizing Ainsley’s debut ball and the formal dinner party with Wilkshire and Lady Serena, he had successfully put off news of the companion he’d hired. It couldn’t be avoided any longer.
With that, he took his leave of his chambers and started through his house when a bright peal of laughter made him freeze. That free, unfettered expression of happiness went through him, drawing him forward down the opposite corridor. He’d dwelled these past years in a self-imposed darkness, embracing his solitude and solemnity. His life, by design, was as he wanted it: passionless, quiet, organized.
When was the last time there had been any hint of mirth in this house? Now, the sounds of that lightness suffused a corner of his darkened soul. He stopped outside the library, hovering on the edge. Rowena and Ainsley’s muffled voices were periodically punctured by another round of snorting laughter. Graham layered his forehead against the cool plaster as another raucous round of amusement broke out from that room. It had been so long since he’d heard or taken part in that joyous mirth. So long, that he’d once believed he’d not even recognize it were it to slap him in the face.
He was wrong. Standing outside with Ainsley and Rowena conversing, he very much did recognize the sweet sound of that happiness and, God help him, he wanted to forget his plans for the evening. Forget his responsibilities and those dependent upon him. Forget Lady Serena and her equally-determined father, and just join in the simplicity on the other side of that door. Rowena’s bell-like laughter, as pure as it had been in the countryside of Wallingford, drew him. He stepped inside the doorway and all the air was sucked from his lungs.
Hand in hand, she and Ainsley skipped enthusiastically across the large, and recently rearranged, library. Her skirts whipping wildly about her slender ankles and her hips deliciously swaying, the sight of her held him as enthralled as when he’d first been discovering her lying in a sea of wildflowers, gazing up at the cloudless summer sky.
Transported back to that moment, he drew in a slow, agonized breath, aching for—
“We have an observer, Mrs. Bryant.”
Graham’s carelessness was a misstep that would have seen him killed in the Peninsula. He cursed as Ainsley’s pronounced whisper held him trapped. Silence fell inside the parlor, and he briefly contemplated a hasty retreat in the opposite direction. Alas, he’d never been one to walk away from a literal or figurative battle.
Forcing a smile, he stepped deeper inside the room, his graze trained on Rowena. Her cheeks flushed from her earlier laughter, her eyes sparkling with that same mirth, chipped away the years of jadedness that had clung to her since they’d been reunited. She was, once more, transformed, into the hopeful, starry-eyed girl who’d entered the village and stolen his heart. His pulse quickened. This is how she should be... always. How he’
d wanted to remember her, and how he wanted her to remain. “Miss Hickenbottom. Mrs. Bryant,” he greeted.
Eyes lowered, Rowena worried at her lower lip. “Your Grace. We were... I was...” She had the look of a child caught with her hand in the biscuit jar, and God, if she wasn’t more endearing with every blush and hastily averted look.
“There is nothing to worry about, Mrs. Bryant,” Ainsley reassured. “It’s just Hampstead.” Just Hampstead. Since he’d ascended to the rank of duke, he’d existed as nothing more than that hated title. How he preferred the simplicity of how this child saw him.
“I didn’t take you as one who’d listen at keyholes, Your Grace.”
That suspicion-laden charge turned his attention from Rowena. “No,” he concurred, and then waggled his eyebrows at his charge. “Then, mayhap there hasn’t been good reason to be listening at keyholes before now.”
His ward’s eyes formed round moons, and then she burst out laughing. “By God, Mrs. Bryant, who would have thought it? Hampstead does have a personality.” He had. Once. Long ago. Before battle. Before betrayal. Before it all.
Rowena said something quietly for the girl’s ears, and Ainsley wrinkled her nose.
Graham took in the room.
“We moved the furniture,” Rowena murmured, a guilty flush on her cheeks.
“I see that.” Sofas since shoved against the far back wall. Side tables neatly placed alongside chairs. It was a disorderliness that would have enraged the late, well-ordered duke, who’d not tolerated a hair out of place of the maid’s chignons or his breakfast routine at all interrupted.
“We were...” Rowena tried again. “We were...” From the corner of his eye, he detected her fingers nervously plucking at the fabric of her brown skirts. She should be adorned in sapphire hues and bold purples, not these dark, dreary colors meant to dim her beauty and light. “I’ll see it righted.” Did she think he’d sack her for having shoved his furniture about? Worse, what did it say about the existence she’d likely lived? And not for the first time, he damned her bastard of a husband for entirely different reasons. For having seen her reduced to this sometimes hesitant, oft-worried woman.
Schooling the Duke (The Heart of a Scandal, #1) Page 16