Liza smiled, smoothing an errant curl behind Grace’s ear. “And they call us of the serving class ‘uncivilized.’ Least we don’t send our young girls off to the marriage bed thinking they’ve been murdered the next morn.”
Grace’s cheeks colored at her own ignorance. Liza squeezed her hand. “It isn’t your fault, my lady. Those sorts of things just aren’t talked about among the quality. My ma had nine of us girls and she takes us aside when we each of us reaches ten-and-five. Tells us everything there is to know about ladies and men and what goes on when they get alone between the bedcovers. And because she did, not a one of us has come home yet with a swelling belly before first getting a husband to care for us.”
Grace looked at Liza. It took her a moment to realize what exactly the maid was saying. A child. A child that could have been conceived because of what had happened between her and Christian the night before. While at first the notion of it frightened her, after a moment or two, it also gave her an inkling of warmth unlike any she had ever known. Her hand instinctively dropped to her belly. Even now she might be carrying a child of her own. Someone she could love. Someone who would be with her always, who would love her—and who would never leave.
Grace heard the sound of the coachman again on the drive outside and remembered the time. She didn’t want to be late and risk annoying Christian. “Liza, will you help me to dress, please?”
They left the ducal bedchamber for the small antechamber where Grace had bathed the night before. At the corner washstand, hidden discreetly behind an embroidered screen, Grace performed her ablutions, washing herself thoroughly before asking Liza for her chemise and stockings.
She sat staring at her reflection in the glass while Liza quickly arranged her hair, twisting and pulling it up in a style that befitted a titled lady, but that left Grace resembling herself very little. She realized then she was no longer Lady Grace Ledys. Her name, her own body, and even her jewelry—she looked at the ring on her hand—were now different. She had lost her innocence, was now completely woman, and thus the unfamiliar styling of her hair seemed appropriate. But what of Christian? Would he present himself differently as well now that he had taken the role of husband?
Grace stood as Liza slipped her gown carefully over her head, arranging the soft fabric before setting to work on the buttons along its back. Somehow the plain color didn’t quite complement the more refined styling of her hair, leaving her feeling at contradiction with her two selves—the old Grace and the new.
When she had finished dressing, Grace left the ducal bedchamber and took the steps slowly to the ground floor, wondering what she might say to Christian when she greeted him at breakfast. What exactly did one say to a man after one lost their virginity to him? Thank you, sir, for performing the task?
What Grace really wanted was to ask Christian what she had done to displease him—more, what it was she should have done. She knew from her grandmother that a good number of husbands and wives shared marital relations without sleeping in the same bed. It was often considered normal. She also knew from her grandmother that those same husbands and wives often found others with whom to fill the time when their spouses were off elsewhere.
Is that what Christian intended? Did he plan to take a mistress, do those same things he’d done with her the night before with another woman? Would he look for someone who would do things correctly, someone to stay with until morning? Or what if he already had a mistress? He was, after all, a man of the world—she was a girl of the country. Despite what might be accepted in other marriages, Grace couldn’t bear to think of Christian doing those same things with another woman. Though her memory of last night was vague, what she did remember had been intimate and precious and utterly divine, a completion of the vows they had taken before God and the world, a culmination of the Fate that had brought them together. Now that she knew what really happened between a man and a woman, she would be better prepared. She hadn’t known what to expect the first time. Grace would just try harder to do— whatever it was she was supposed to do—right.
The trepidation she’d felt over how she would greet Christian that morning vanished when she reached the parlor door and found the room empty, with a single setting placed at the far chair. Grace felt her insides tighten hopelessly. Apparently, Christian did not intend to join her for breakfast.
A footman sprang to attention when he noticed her at the door, pulling the chair back for her to sit—alone. Grace remained at the door awash with humiliation, deeply stung by Christian’s negligence. She was taking breakfast alone on the morning after her wedding night. The footman stared at her and the expression on his face was almost too much to bear. He pitied her. Suddenly Grace found that the discomfort of an empty stomach was far preferable to the embarrassment of eating alone for everyone in the household to see.
“Thank you, but I do not wish to eat this morning,” she said to the footman. She turned from the room and hastened away so that he might not see the tears already springing to her eyes.
Chapter Eleven
Grace had no idea where she was headed after she left the dining room. Nor did she care. She simply turned away as quickly as she could, fleeing blindly down the nearest hall as she dashed away her tears in frustration.
As she walked, she fought to soothe her bruised emotions. She had come to this marriage knowing full well it would be work, but it was work she was willing to take on, especially if it meant that she and Christian would one day have the love and respect and commitment to one another that both her parents and her grandparents had found. Was it foolish of her to have even tried? She had expected to make mistakes but she had also expected to learn from them as she had learned everything else in life—from the proper way to pour tea to the right techniques for making sketches. She had never been one to quit, even against great odds. She had always tried to find a way to make things work, approaching a problem from all directions until she found a solution that put things in order. She had known it would take time to get past their initial unfamiliarity. What she hadn’t expected was to be denied the slightest chance to succeed.
From the moment she had agreed to wed him, Grace had made it her foremost wish to be a wife her husband could be proud of. When the vicar had spoken the vows the day before, she had listened closely to every word— better or worse, richer or poorer, in sickness and in health—and she had taken each one of them to heart. Yet here she was, the morning after her wedding, already abandoned by Christian. What in heaven’s name had she done wrong? No matter how terrible the experience of their wedding night might have been for him, Grace just couldn’t believe that she deserved to be forsaken for all of the household to see. Had he expected that she would wake to find him gone and simply sip her morning tea, eat her toast, and await him in the carriage, saying when they met, “Thank you for seeing to the distasteful task of my virginity, sir; might I offer you the seat with the best view?”
Grace stopped walking and looked about at her surroundings. She didn’t recognize anything. She stopped to listen, but when she didn’t hear any of the servants moving about, she realized she must have wandered into one of the hall’s vacant wings. She wondered what would happen if she were to come up missing, delaying their return to the city. Would Christian simply leave without her? Not wishing to be the cause of further discord between them, she decided she should try to find her way back. She wandered on through unfamiliar hallways and abandoned chambers, each just as cold and forbidding as the last. It seemed as if laughter couldn’t possibly have touched these walls, nor could merriment have danced across the rich Turkish carpets. This place wasn’t a home. It was a relic haunted by sadness and misery.
She came to a door at the far end of a hallway and quietly opened it. Inside she found a sitting room that was set off from the main house, the furnishings hidden beneath dust covers. She would have turned to leave except that the place drew her somehow, standing out as different from the rest of the house. Grace crossed the room and g
ave the heavy drapery a yank, allowing the morning sunlight to come pouring in through the grubby mullioned windows that lay underneath.
Carpets of the lightest yellow and blue revealed themselves in the sunlight, set beneath furnishings of delicate fruitwood and rosewood; the walls were covered in elegant pastel Chinese silk. It was a room that spoke of softness and femininity, and Grace wondered at the way it differed from the rest of Westover Hall. It was almost as if the chamber didn’t belong there—just like Grace. It, too, seemed to have been left to fend for itself.
Grace lifted the cover from one of the pieces and found an elegant Queen Anne secretary underneath. It was crafted of the finest cherry and engraved across a brass plate on its top were the words “For Frances, my wife… my love.”
She decided the room must have once been a withdrawing chamber for the dowager marchioness, Christian’s mother. Grace remembered her from the wedding—how polite Lady Frances had been to her. She remembered something else too—the shadow she had seen behind the woman’s eyes, as if a part of her wasn’t really there.
Grace ran her fingers thoughtfully along the polished desktop as she imagined the marchioness sitting in that room, reading or watching the rabbits at play on the lawn outside. Had she been happy? Or had she felt trapped by the coldness of this unhappy place? The desk had undoubtedly been a gift to her from Christian’s father, but why was it here, Grace wondered, forgotten and locked away in this place, instead of with Lady Frances at her own residence in London? It was such a special piece, with its inscription telling of the marquess’s regard for his wife. Had their marriage been an arrangement like Grace and Christian’s? Or had they married for love? Was such a concept even possible in the House of Westover?
A thick layer of dust had accumulated on the fireplace mantel, revealing it had been some time since the chamber had been put to use. As she turned from it, Grace noticed a painting high on the wall concealed by a cloth. Curious, she stood on tiptoe, tugging at the lower corner until the cover slid away.
Underneath was a portrait of a man, a woman, and a young child of no more than five years of age. Grace recognized the dowager marchioness, Christian’s mother, but a younger, more vibrant reflection of her. The child, a boy, was kneeling at her feet, his head resting softly against his mother’s full skirts while her fingers played lovingly with his dark hair. The man who stood beside them resembled Christian, particularly in the way he held his head. He had the same captivating silver-blue eyes, which regarded his wife with an unmistakable expression.
He loved her.
Grace moved her attention from the marquess to study the boy’s image more closely. It was Christian, but a carefree, innocent boy who bore little resemblance to the man she now called husband. Missing were the cold reserve and the unreachable eyes. This boy had known happiness and laughter. He had known love. Grace could only wonder what could have happened to have changed him into the guarded, inscrutable man he was now.
Her study of the portrait was interrupted when she heard the sound of someone walking on the gravel outside. She glanced to the window, where she caught sight of Christian moving from the house down a narrow path through the trees. There stood a door to her right that led to a terrace. Grace opened it quietly, slipping outside.
The wind rustled through the trees, lifting the hem of her skirts and tugging at the tendrils of hair that the maid had left loose as Grace fell in step behind him. She kept a good twenty paces away so that he wouldn’t hear her following. She wanted to see Christian, wanted to watch him without his being aware of her. People often behaved differently in diverse situations and she wanted to see if his indifference was a thing directed only at her.
As she came around a turn in the pathway, Grace stopped, lingering behind the sizeable trunk and thick overhanging branches of an oak. Christian had arrived at a small area shaded by other oaks and enclosed by a twisting iron fence. A number of tall headstones lined the interior, flecked gray against the rich, grassy carpet. Grace stepped off the footpath and onto the lawn so that Christian wouldn’t hear her approach. Coming under a curtain of new spring leaves, she watched as he stood in contemplation over one of the headstones, watched him crouch down to pluck away an offending weed from beside it. He smoothed a hand over the lettering, laying his palm flat against the stone as one might set a hand in welcome upon another’s shoulder.
As she drew a few steps closer, Grace saw that the gravestone he knelt before was that of Christopher Wycliffe, his father.
Christian remained kneeling, his head bent for some time in silent prayer. As she watched him, Grace thought of the man she’d seen depicted in the portrait, Christian’s father. He looked as if he’d been the sort of father a boy of five would have worshipped. She remembered her own grief at the loss of her parents, the disordered feeling even at her young age, as if her place in the world was no longer secure despite the fact that she hadn’t really even known them.
Grace’s birth had been accidental, an imposition on the lives of two people bent on personally conquering the world. She had been left with Nonny as a babe while her parents had gone away traveling more than they had stayed at home. They would return every so often to visit, never remaining long enough to unpack all their belongings before setting off for some other new and exciting destination. They had come home most often on special occasions—a random birthday, the marriage of a distant cousin, the death of Grace’s grandfather, the marquess. Still Grace could remember the last time she’d seen her parents, could even remember the clothes they had worn, the smell of her mother’s lavender perfume, the way the wind had ruffled the ends of her father’s neckcloth as he’d patted her on the head in parting. She remembered how her mother had bent to kiss her on the cheek, retying the ribbons on her straw bonnet with the promise that soon she would be old enough to join them on one of their jaunts around the world. “Next time,” she had vowed to her daughter. “Next time we will take you with us and we will see the lions and the elephants in faraway Africa.”
But that promised journey had never come. Instead, a messenger had arrived from London a month later with the news that the ship they had sailed upon had gone down in a storm. There had been no survivors. Ironically in death Grace’s parents had become touchable in a way they had never been while living, for from then on she’d had the twin headstones that had been erected in the Ledysthorpe cemetery to visit. She remembered the last time she’d gone there—the morning she was to leave Ledysthorpe forever. She had whispered her good-byes and cleaned away the weeds, just like Christian was doing now.
Grace remembered how Eleanor had told her of her brother’s closeness to their father. No doubt such an attachment would make facing the memorial of his death difficult, even after all the time that had passed. She wondered that perhaps their shared loss could provide a way for them to lay the first stepping-stone across the river of unfamiliarity that stood between them. Hopeful, Grace threw caution to the wind and started toward the cemetery.
The gate squeaked as she pushed it inward and the sound brought Christian to lifting his head. He stared at her for a moment, his expression unguarded. In a moment later, however, his eyes turned icier than the bitterest winter.
Grace froze, hovering just inside the gate as he stood. For a moment, she thought she saw the sunlight shine in a tear at his eye. He continued to stare at her without speaking, his face set without expression. He needed no words to convey that he was heartily displeased to see her there.
“You must have loved him very much,” she said awkwardly.
Christian turned, tossing the weeds he’d pulled over the fencing. “What are you doing here?”
Grace blanched. “I… I saw you come here and I thought you might like someone to talk to. You had been kneeling so long, I—”
“First my dressing room, now this. This is the second time you have stuck your nose where it didn’t belong. Do you make it a habit, madam, of intruding on the privacy of others?”
Gr
ace ignored his bitter words. “I know what it is to lose a parent, Christian.”
For the barest second, her statement seemed to reach him. His expression softened and the tense lines around his mouth went smooth—but only for a moment. Then the ice returned to his stare, and his voice was clipped and sharp as a blade. “You will do well in the future, madam, to avoid meddling a third time.”
Grace brought her arms around herself, chilled despite the warmth of the spring sun. She had only hoped to offer Christian comfort, a wife’s tender touch to ease his obvious pain at the loss of his father. She had wanted to talk to him, share with him the memory of her own parents, commiserate in their mutual experience. Instead she had met with his anger and hostility.
Grace turned her face away so that Christian wouldn’t see the tears that so quickly came to her eyes at his harsh words. Was she doomed to displease him at every turn? She looked back when she heard his bootsteps on the walkway and simply stood there, watching him leave her again, just as he had the night before, stripped raw of anything but humiliation and despair.
Chapter Twelve
Christian stared at Grace as she sat across from him within the closed carriage. They had left Westover Hall nearly an hour before. Since then she hadn’t spoken above two words other than to ask how long their journey might take and if he would prefer the front-facing seat instead of the back. But he would have known she was troubled even without her silence. She had one of those intelligible faces that showed the thoughts going on behind it as clearly as if they’d been written on paper. This, coupled with the book she was reading—and the fact that she was holding it upside down—gave a clear impression that she was still smarting from his harsh words to her in the cemetery.
White Regency 03 - White Knight Page 9