by Joan Wolf
—Shakespeare
Tracy’s ball was one of the last of the Season and, by common consent of the ton, the most brilliant. The dinner party that preceded it was attended by, among others, Lord and Lady Castlereagh; the Prince and Princesse de Lieven; the Prince and Princess Esterhazy; the Earl and Countess of Bridgewater; the Duke of Wellington; the American Minister, Mr. Richard Rush and Captain Adam Lancaster. After the dinner was over, a vast, glittering array of London’s “best people” filled Tracy’s rooms. The hostess herself was one of the most brilliant stars in a very brilliant galaxy.
Tracy wore the Hastings rubies, a fabulous collection of jewels that included a huge necklace, a ruby and diamond tiara and several enormous bracelets. When Adrian had given them to her, he had said ruefully, “They’re worth a fortune, but you couldn’t possibly want to wear them. They’re dreadfully heavy and old-fashioned, I’m afraid.” She had locked them away carefully, but when she had thought of this ball, she had thought once more of the rubies.
Adrian’s face, when he saw her, told her she had been right. Her deeply décolleté, white satin dress was fitted closely to her waist and fell in graceful fullness to the floor. It was not fashionable, but on Tracy’s tall, narrow-waisted figure, it was exquisite. And it was the perfect style to show off the rubies. The rubies were Tracy’s costume, not the dress.
They glowed against her skin—rich, warm, indescribably beautiful. The necklace, on her, did not look at all heavy. It might have been made just to adorn that long, slender neck, to rest on just those full, young breasts. As she surveyed herself before leaving her room, Tracy remarked to Emma, “I never could have worn this dress, or carried off this great expanse of rubies, before Billy.”
Both girls laughed at her words, and Emma said sincerely, “I think, Your Grace, you could carry off anything.”
It seemed the ton agreed with her. The amazing thing was that the rubies, stunning as they were, did not eclipse the wearer. Tracy’s smile was as brilliant as her jewels. She combined magnificence and friendliness. Her party might be a ball for six hundred people, but Tracy, bred in the tradition of American hospitality, felt she must speak to as many of her guests as she possibly could. Very few people left without having had the gratification of a few words with the Duchess.
The Duke was not so gregarious, but he did not need to be. People always knew where he was, in the way they always did; and his princely transcendence was, as it always was, innate to his personality.
* * * *
Tracy was thinking something like this as she regarded her husband in conversation with the Prince Regent. As she watched Adrian turn his generous grace on the monumentally fat, carefully primped figure of his sovereign, there was no doubt at all in Tracy’s mind who was the more royal of the two.
And Adrian worked, she thought vehemently to herself. He had all the gifts of fortune and leisure, yet he worked. She might not agree with everything he did, but she admired his dedication tremendously. And she really couldn’t see how he could bring himself to be so sublimely deferential to the Prince Regent.
“He must spend three quarters of the day eating,” said a cynical voice in her ear. She turned to find Adam Lancaster at her side. “How on earth do you bring yourself to curtsey to him?” he asked in unconscious echo of her own thoughts.
“It was really difficult the first time I had to do it,” she confessed. “But he is so ridiculous, Adam, that one finds one can’t take the whole thing seriously.”
“Your husband must take him seriously,” he said.
She shrugged a little. “Adrian’s loyalty is as impeccable as his manners. He will never say what he thinks, and certainly not to such die-hard republicans as ourselves.”
This was not strictly true. Tracy knew what Adrian thought about the Prince Regent, but her loyalty kept her from telling Adam. “Are you enjoying yourself?” she asked him with a smile.
“Very much. But I would like to dance with you.”
“I don’t have time to dance, Adam. I’m the hostess.”
“You can dance once at least.”
She looked longingly toward the floor. Tracy loved to dance. “Oh, all right,” she said, laying her hand on his arm. “I do deserve at least one break from my labors!”
The two Americans moved onto the floor together and, as they made a very handsome couple, they attracted more than a few pairs of eyes. One of those pairs belonged to the Duke.
After the last guest had departed, Tracy turned to her husband as they stood together in the hall and said, “I’m exhausted. It’s much more fun to go to a ball than it is to give one.”
“I know what you mean. I didn’t realize there were as many dowagers in the whole of London as the number who descended on us tonight.”
Tracy looked at him curiously. “Were you actually talking to dowagers, Adrian?”
“I was not. They were talking to me.”
She laughed. “I think it was a success,” she said with a note of inquiry.
“Assuredly it was a success. You have established yourself as a brilliant hostess, ma mie. And if you are even half as tired as I am, I think you ought to come to bed.”
Tracy was conscious of a flash of annoyance. She didn’t consider Adrian was being appreciative enough of her triumph. She wanted to be praised and lauded, and all he did was say he was tired and wanted to go to bed.
Of course, since she had never confided any of her anxieties to him, he was unaware of her present sense of jubilation and victory. She had striven to present him with the appearance of one to whom giving balls was as easy and unimportant as carding wool, but now that he failed to exult with her in her success, she was irritated. It crossed her mind that she was being unfair, but the irritation persisted.
“You go on upstairs,” she said to him, her voice unaccustomedly clipped. “I am going to the kitchen to tell the servants to go to bed and not to stir until nine tomorrow. They have all worked like horses.”
And off she marched, her back straight as a lance, a general on her way to dismiss the troops. Adrian watched her go, a shadow deepening the dark blue of his eyes.
All these misinterpretations of Tracy’s feelings came to a head the following evening. Tracy had had a very lazy day, recuperating from her exertions of the night before. She and Mary went for a drive in the park in the late afternoon and then had dinner alone together, as Adrian had left word he would be dining with Lord Castlereagh at White’s. The sisters-in-law discussed with pleasure the prospect of returning to Steyning Castle in a few days. They both were looking forward to seeing Lord Harry, who had been at the Castle for most of the month. London had held little appeal for fifteen-year-old Harry and his visits to Hastings House had been brief. He was better off, Tracy realized, in the country with his horses.
After dinner both Tracy and Mary went upstairs to play with the baby and put him to bed, then Mary went off to her room to write and Tracy settled down in the library with Rob Roy. She had been reading for perhaps an hour when Wilton came in to announce that Captain Lancaster had called and wished to see her. Tracy was surprised but told Wilton to show him into the library.
“Adam!” Her surprise was faintly audible in her voice. “What brings you here this evening? Adrian is not home, I’m afraid.”
“I know,” said Adam. “I saw him earlier at White’s.”
“Oh,” she said rather blankly.
“Tracy”—he came across the room and took her hands in his large, hard grasp—”I’ve got to talk to you.”
She tried to pull her hands away, but he held them more tightly. “What about?” she said, bewilderment mingling with alarm.
“I’ve been trying to say this to you for days now. It seems I never get a chance to be alone with you. I want you to come back to America with me.”
“What?”
“I love you,” he said intensely. “I have always loved you. Come away with me. You aren’t happy here. You know you aren’t. You only married him because of your father.”
“No.” She was staring up at him in distress. “Or, yes, I did, but things have changed...”
“My feelings haven’t changed,” he said passionately. “Come with me, Tracy. He’ll get a divorce and then we can marry. Let him keep the money. It’s what he wants, and we don’t need it. I have plenty and I’ll make more.”
She was looking up at him, eyes wide with alarm, lips slightly parted, ready to protest.
“I love you,” he muttered and, pulling her hard against him, bent his head and kissed her. For a moment Tracy was still, her senses reeling with the shock of his words, of his totally unexpected embrace. Then indignation finally overcame surprise, and she raised her hands to push him away.
From the doorway came her husband’s voice. “May I ask what is going on here?”
Adam released her and she whirled away from him, turning to see Adrian in the doorway. The look she saw on his face caused her throat to dry and her heart to start pounding.
“I’m glad you came home,” Adam said. “I want to talk to you.”
“Tracy,” said the Duke, “go upstairs, please.”
“Adrian . . .” she breathed, pleadingly. She had never been so frightened in her life. She looked at the two men in the room with her—Adam so huge and dark and grim, Adrian so slender, so icily composed—and knew that her husband was the more dangerous. “Adrian, please,” she said.
“Go upstairs.” He spoke quietly, without heat, but she knew that he was very angry indeed. He didn’t look at her as she passed next to him and once she was in the hall, he closed the door behind her. She was trembling all over as she climbed the stairs to her room.
Chapter 26
Thy love is better than high birth to me,
Richer than wealth, prouder than garment’s cost,
Of more delight than hawks or horses be.
—Shakespeare
The next few hours were the longest Tracy had ever spent in her life. She dismissed Emma and paced about for a while, then she went next door to look at her sleeping baby. She moved about the room, deliberately making noise, and when he woke and cried she picked him up and held him close to her, rocking and comforting him, trying to comfort herself with his sweet warmth. She sat down and nursed him for a little and then, when he fell back to sleep with her nipple still in his mouth, she sat holding him for ten more minutes before she gently put him back into his cot.
There was still no sign of movement in Adrian’s room, so Tracy slowly undressed herself and got into bed. She did not lie down but sat, propped against her pillows, her dilated eyes fixed on the door that led to her husband’s room. After what seemed a very long time, she heard footsteps next door, and then the sound of voices. A door closed and footsteps sounded in the hallway. He had dismissed his valet, Tracy thought.
The night was warm, but she was shivering as she stared at the un-moving door. At last it opened and Adrian was there. He came into her room and stood silently, looking at her as she sat upright in the huge bed. Her shining hair was tumbling in curls over her slender shoulders. She wore a thin green nightgown and her arms and shoulders were bare. Her eyes in the glow of the lamp were huge. She looked very frightened.
He was still fully dressed, his neck cloth immaculately tied, his black coat buttoned. The fact that he had not undressed for bed frightened Tracy even more. He was not going to make love to her. The thought flashed through her mind, leaving profound dismay in its wake. “Adrian . . .” she said again, her voice a thread of sound in the silent room.
“I understand from Lancaster that you wish to leave me.”
She couldn’t speak; she only continued to stare at him out of enormous green eyes.
“He was kind enough to inform me that I might keep your father’s money. Evidently you neglected to tell him about the trust fund.” He spoke with a bitterness that astonished her.
After a moment she managed to push words out of her constricted throat. “I don’t want to leave you.”
“Oh? I am very glad to hear that, ma mie, because I’ve no intention of letting you go.” His face was pale and set. She had never seen him look so stern.
“What did you do to Adam?” The words were barely a whisper.
He looked at her in silence for a minute and when he finally spoke his voice was even. “Nothing. I came very close to killing him. Very close.” His mouth twisted a little. “But, of course, it would have made such a scandal. And I do not want a scandal”
“There won’t be a duel?”
“There won’t be a duel.” He turned away from her to look out of the window at the dark garden. “Your reputation would never survive a duel, Tracy,” he said. “Captain Lancaster is safe.”
It took a moment for his words to register, but when they did, the terror that had gripped her began to subside. “I don’t care about Adam Lancaster!” she cried, feeling the blood begin to flow through her veins again.
The worst had not happened. Adrian was not going to send her away and he was not going to shoot Adam. She knelt up in the bed, able once more to speak and urgent now to reach him. “Adrian, you must listen to me. What happened tonight—it was not my fault! Adam came in and all of a sudden he was asking me to go to America with him and I was so stunned I didn’t know what to say and then he started kissing me. It all happened so quickly! I don’t know what got into him, but truly truly I did not encourage him. He had only been with me five minutes before you came in! You can ask Wilton if you don’t believe me.”
He listened to her in silence, his back still to her as he stared out the window. He listened. And he did believe her. What he could not forget, however, were Adam Lancaster’s words, “She only married you to please her father. She loved me, but she married you because her father was dying.”
That was what the Duke believed too.
“Adrian .. .” Her voice was trembling. She was on the brink of tears. He turned to her, a little wearily, a little impatiently.
“Yes,” he said. “I believe you.”
She looked at his beautiful, reserved face and the tears began to slide down her cheeks. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I am such a bad wife, but I do love you so. I don’t know why Adam did what he did tonight. I thought he had forgotten all that, as I have.”
“What did you say?” His voice held a note she had never heard before.
The tears came even faster and she tried to wipe them away with her wrist as she answered. “I said I know I am the wrong wife for you. You deserve someone who is regal and dignified and who knows how to entertain and how to be a duchess. I try, but I never learned those things, and I know I’m not the right wife for a man like you. You can’t even discuss your work with me, because half of it I don’t understand and the other half I don’t agree with.”
She gave up trying to wipe away her tears and let them fall unregarded as she lifted her face to look at him. “But I love you,” she said. “You could search this earth over and you’d never find anyone who could love you more.”
He came across the small space that separated him from the bed. “Is that the kind of wife you think I want?” he asked harshly, “the kind of person you have just said you are not?”
Her tears had stopped and lay now sparkling on her upturned face. “Don’t you?” she asked faintly.
“No!” His voice was unusually loud, almost violent. “I do not want a wife like this bloodless paragon you have just described. I do not want to come home and talk politics to my wife when I have been talking nothing but politics all day long to endless rows of ambassadors and government ministers. I want to come home to someone who is alive and vital and who has seen and done and spoken about things that are not politics. I want to hear a voice that is different from the voices I hear all day, and half the night too, at receptions and balls. I want to come home to you. I want to be married to you. Don’t you know what it means to me to know I have you”—his eyes swept over her face, her thinly veiled breasts, her bare arms and shoulders—”waiting
for me, sharing my life, my bed, mothering my son? Do you really think I would have let you go, even had you wanted to?”
Tracy had never seen his emotions so nakedly revealed, never heard him speak in such a voice. Her heart had begun to hammer once again, but not in fear this time. She stared at his face, and what she saw there caused a great tide of joy to begin to well up within her.
“I thought you loved Lancaster,” he was saying, and his voice had still not returned to its normal cadence. “All this last week, I have felt like murder. If this were the sixteenth and not the nineteenth century, I would have put a bullet into all six feet three inches of him.”
Strangely, Tracy’s democratic instincts were not at all outraged by this very feudal statement. In fact, the glow within her spread to her face, which now looked illuminated from within. Even the tears on her cheeks seemed radiant “I didn’t know,” she said, “I didn’t know you loved me like that.”
His eyes were darker than midnight “How did you think I loved you?”
She shook her head a little. “I don’t know. I guess I thought you were fond of me and would be loyal to me, but I never thought you loved me half as much as I loved you.”
“You wouldn’t have married me if your father hadn’t wanted you to.”
“No.” She got off the bed and went to stand before him, putting her arms around his waist, resting her cheek against his shoulder. “You fascinated me,” she said softly. “You were unlike anyone I had ever met. But I would not have married you.”
She pulled back a little and tipped her head to look at him. “But by the time we returned from our honeymoon, I thought that the greatest bliss life could offer me was to be your wife. Surely you know that? Adrian? Surely you know that your touch is sweeter than heaven to me, your presence all that makes my life worthwhile.”
He was staring down at her with a look that suddenly recalled to her his expression when he had looked at her after Billy was born. “Tracy,” he said only. “Tracy.” He pulled her against him, holding her so tightly that she could scarcely breathe. She didn’t complain, however, but locked her own arms around him and pressed her cheek into his shoulder. They remained that way for a long, silent minute. Finally she moved, and his hold on her relaxed a little. She put her hands up to his neck cloth. “You forgot to get undressed,” she said.