by Mary Balogh
He opened his eyes. Her face was turned his way and she was looking directly at him with a glow of happiness. Or perhaps it was only relief. But—could this possibly be the same woman he had dismissed just a few weeks ago as a sort of nondescript unpaid servant of his grandmother’s? She was incredibly, vividly beautiful.
“You belittle yourself,” he said. “You did it all alone without any help from me.”
“But you were there with me,” she said, “and I kept remembering what you said last night.”
He looked blankly at her.
“My arms are here for you,” she reminded him.
He had spouted more such nonsense too, he remembered. He wished he had not.
“Did you mean it?” she asked him.
“Of course,” he said. “I am your husband.”
Her eyes searched his before she turned her head away and her face was hidden behind the brim of her bonnet. He stared at it in silence until they arrived home.
He would go to White’s for luncheon. He could hardly wait to get away.
21
The following couple of weeks were in many ways happy ones for Chloe. They were certainly busy ones. Scarcely an evening passed when she and Ralph did not attend some evening function—a concert or dinner or soiree or the theater or opera. They avoided balls as perhaps a little too frivolous so soon after the death of Ralph’s grandfather, though they would host their own soon enough at Stockwood House.
No one gave Chloe the cut direct. Of course no one did—she was the Duchess of Worthingham. It was a great relief, though, to find that she was not being shunned in company or excluded from any of the more glittering events of the Season. Indeed, she and Ralph had to decline far more invitations than they could possibly accept.
They saw the Marquess of Hitching’s family for the first time at Mrs. Chandler’s crowded soiree. Guests filled the drawing room and the music room beside it and the salon beyond that where refreshments had been laid out. The marchioness was entering the music room from the drawing room at the same moment as Chloe was coming into it from the salon with Gwen and the Countess of Kilbourne. It was the marchioness who chose to approach Chloe, while the general volume of conversation decreased quite noticeably.
“Ah, Lady Kilbourne, Lady Trentham, Duchess,” she said, deliberately not lowering her voice—or so it seemed to Chloe. “Good to see you. A pleasant entertainment, is it not? Elsie Chandler can always be depended upon to attract the very best company to her soirees.”
“Lady Hitching,” the countess said while Gwen smiled. “How do you do? Yes indeed, and we look forward to the pianoforte recital later.”
“Good evening, ma’am,” Chloe said. “How delightful. I hoped when we met a few days ago that I would see you again soon.”
“Ah, Duchess.” The voice came from beyond the marchioness. The marquess had followed her into the room. He came closer, took Chloe’s hand in his, and raised it to his lips. “You look quite charming in blue. Ladies?” He bowed to the other two as he released Chloe’s hand and then offered his arm to his wife. “Shall we find you that lemonade, my dear?”
And that was all, apart from a distant bow from Viscount Gilly and a frosty stare and a slight inclination of the head from Lady Angela Allandale across the room during the music recital later.
It was all, but Chloe was more grateful to the Marchioness of Hitching than she could say. She was in no doubt that the woman detested her, but she had obviously made the decision to squash gossip by observing the strictest of civilities toward the daughter her husband had fathered only a very short while before he married her. And she had clearly imposed her will upon her eldest son and her daughter, who, if they could not be quite polite, were at least civil.
The onlookers had no doubt been fascinated by the exchange yet were probably frustrated by it too. Had it or had it not settled the burning question of whether the new Duchess of Worthingham was or was not the natural daughter of the Marquess of Hitching?
Even at those evening entertainments, Chloe did not spend much time with Ralph. It was not good etiquette, of course, for husbands and wives to cling to each other’s company when there were so many other people with whom to mingle, but Chloe sometimes found his almost constant absence from her side a little depressing. She tried not to do so. Theirs was not a marriage that had promised any closeness, after all. Perhaps it would have been better, though, if there had never been any at all. But there had been some—or so it had seemed at the time. Perhaps she had just misunderstood. Even those most cherished words of his were capable of a different interpretation from the one she had given them at the time.
I am your husband. When you feel lonely or afraid or unhappy, it is to me you must come, Chloe. My arms are here for you, and my strength too for whatever it is worth. You will never be a burden to me.
She could still feel what seemed like a lump in her throat when she remembered those words. They had sounded so very tender. They had seemed almost like a declaration of love or at least of deep caring. But perhaps all they had expressed was duty. He was her husband. He would care for her needs as any husband ought. He would not consider her a burden because he had made vows to her.
She must not care that he did not care. He did support her emotionally as well as materially. He had accompanied her to the Marquess of Hitching’s house and had seemed like a rock of dependability. But in the carriage on the way home, when there was no more need to bolster her confidence, he had withdrawn. She had felt it. It had been more than just the fact that he had moved his position, sitting across the corner of the carriage seat, as far from her as he could get.
She must not feel depressed.
Their days were spent almost totally apart except for the time they spent in the study together with Mr. Lloyd, going through the pile of invitations each morning’s post brought and working on the plans for their own ball. They stayed home one morning writing invitations. And they did go together one afternoon to call upon his grandmother and Great-Aunt Mary and stayed all of two hours. But those instances were the exception to the general rule.
Chloe was not idle—or alone. She went shopping with Sarah and to a garden party in Richmond with Nora and her mother-in-law. She went with her father to the library and to a church bazaar in which Graham was involved. She went driving in Hyde Park with the Duke of Stanbrook and walking there with Gwen and her young sister-in-law. She went to Gunter’s for ices with Lucy and the children one afternoon. She went walking with them in the park too.
In fact, that was just what she was doing on one particularly bright morning when the sunshine seemed to have brought out half the fashionable world to stroll or ride close to the Serpentine. Several children played beside the water, including Lucy’s two. Jasper Nelson was sailing the wooden boat his father had made for him, pulling it along parallel to the bank by the attached string. He was pretending to be Lord Nelson and was fiercely resisting his sister Sukie’s attempt to seat her doll in the vessel. There were no females on the Victory, he told her crossly. Did she not know anything? And no, not even Mrs. Lord Nelson.
“Lady Nelson,” Sukie cried scornfully. “There is no such thing as a Mrs. Lord So-and-So. Is there, Mama?”
Thus appealed to, Lucy stepped forward to settle the dispute and stop Sukie from capsizing the boat and Jasper from drowning the doll. Chloe stayed back on the footpath, a smile on her face. Sometimes there were definite advantages to not being a parent, especially when the children’s nurse had a cold and had been persuaded to remain at home in bed. She rested the handle of her parasol against one shoulder and twirled it above her head.
She would not be a parent herself just yet. Not within the next nine months, anyway. The discovery had been a terrible disappointment, but . . . Well, perhaps next month . . .
“Ah.” The clopping of horses’ hooves close behind her stopped. The voice was male and sounded bored. �
��The delectable duchess. And the scandalous sister.”
“Never tell me, Corny,” another voice said as Chloe spun about, wide-eyed. “It is there in the old memory box somewhere. Eton. English class. Boredom supreme. Alliteration. Yes, that’s it. Alliteration. Hadn’t thought of the word in years. Well done, old chap. Aspiring to be a poet, are you?”
Lord Cornell, handsome and elegantly dressed for riding, looked down upon Chloe from horseback. A second gentleman, who bore a distinct resemblance to his horse, rode beside him.
“You may observe, Cedric,” Lord Cornell said, “that when two ladies are sufficiently lovely and sufficiently determined, they may steal husbands and flout scandal and even decency to win their way to the very top. Though a prince would have been a more brilliant catch than a duke, I daresay. Close to the very top, then. But what can one expect when one considers the mother? And one wonders if the delectable duchess won her duke in the same way as the mother tried to win a marquess and the scandalous sister won her—ah, playwright.”
Chloe stared up at him in disbelief. She had not realized that Lucy had turned away from the water and her children until she spoke.
“One of them,” Lucy said, “was fortunate enough to escape the clutches of a cad and a villain. But what can one expect when one considers that the man is not a gentleman?”
The horsy gentleman guffawed.
“Hoisted with your own petard, Corny,” he said. “I remember that from English class too. The Bard himself, if I am not mistaken. I had no idea I had paid that much attention.”
Lord Cornell grinned appreciatively at Lucy, touched the brim of his hat with his whip, and looked Chloe over from head to toe before riding onward along the path.
“You were quite right, Lucy,” Chloe said. Her voice was shaking, she could hear. And her knees felt decidedly unsteady. “He is a cad and a villain. And no gentleman.”
“Freddie said so even before I ran off with him,” Lucy told her. “But I could not tell you at the time, Chlow. You would have wanted to know who had told me. Besides, you would not have believed me. You were terribly enamored of him.”
She turned back toward the lake to keep an eye on the children.
“Chlow,” she said after a few moments, “what did he mean about Mama? Do some people still believe those rumors?”
Chloe closed her eyes briefly and gathered together her scattered thoughts. It was all very well to know with her rational mind that the purely uncalled-for spite of her former beau was not worth getting upset over. It was another thing to convince her emotions. And now here came another crisis. She had hoped Lucy might never have to know the truth. Presumably, so did Papa and Graham. But Lucy had a right to know.
“They are true, Luce,” she said. And she told her sister about their father’s confession and about her visit to the Marquess of Hitching’s home.
Lucy was openmouthed and wide-eyed by the time she had finished.
“You are my half sister, Lucy,” Chloe said, “just as Lady Angela Allandale is. Graham is my half brother, just as Viscount Gilly and his two brothers are. I have not met those two. I do not believe they are in London.”
Lucy flung herself into Chloe’s arms, drawing a few curious glances from the people around them.
“Oh, no,” she cried. “There is all the difference in the world, Chlow. He may be your father, and his children may be your half sister and half brothers, but Papa is your papa, and Gray and I are your brother and your sister. And do not ask me to hate Mama, Chlow. It cannot be done. I did exactly what she did but even worse, for Freddie was still married at the time, and Jasper would have been a ba— He would not have had a proper father if Freddie’s wife had not been obliging enough to die. Though that sounds callous, does it not? I am sorry, but I cannot feel really sorry for her. She despised him, you know. She did not understand him at all or appreciate his great talent. And she did not love him.”
The children were squabbling again. The doll lay forgotten on the grass while Sukie tried to wrest the string of the boat from her brother’s grasp, loudly admonishing him for refusing to share. Lucy hurried off to adjudicate.
It was only later, as they were walking home, the children ahead of them, that Lucy referred again to the incident on the path.
“That man,” she said, “ought not to be allowed to get away with insulting you so, Chlow. Will you tell His Grace?”
“Oh,” Chloe said. “No, such silliness is best forgotten, Lucy. No, I will not say anything.”
She and Ralph did not say a great deal to each other. Oh, no, that was not quite correct. They conversed at the dinner table each evening and at the breakfast table when they took the meal together. They spoke to each other on the way to and from the various evening functions they attended. There was rarely silence between them.
But they rarely if ever talked. Not since her visit to the Marquess of Hitching, anyway. And his eyes, if not quite empty again, had become inscrutable. Chloe remembered her first impression of him as a man who was unknown and unknowable. He had become that man again. But she could not complain. It was that man she had married, after all, quite deliberately.
And he was never cold with her or unkind or neglectful.
She tried to be happy with what she had. It was not his fault that she loved him.
* * *
Ralph could not seem to move ten yards from his own front door without feeling the compulsion to look over his shoulder. But any hope he had entertained after that evening at the theater that Viscount Harding and his wife had been making a brief stay in town was soon dashed. He saw them from the carriage window on the afternoon he went with Chloe to visit his grandmother. They were walking arm in arm along Oxford Street. They did not see him.
He had liked them, just as he had liked Max’s parents and Rowland’s. But these two in particular, because they had liked him. Lady Harding had laughed at all his silly boy’s jokes as though they were really amusing and had commiserated with him whenever he complained about having three sisters to plague him but no brothers to offer companionship. Viscount Harding had listened patiently to all his impassioned ideas upon any and all topics that had captured his boy’s imagination and had told him that he would be a great leader one day. They had liked Max and Rowland too, of course. It was not that they had singled him out as their favorite. And Tom, their own son, was obviously the apple of their eye, the light of their very existence.
Ralph said nothing to Chloe about having seen them.
He said nothing at all of any significance to Chloe, in fact, during the few weeks following their visit to Hitching. They conversed—there were never awkward or strained silences between them. But they talked to each other more like polite strangers than anything else.
Oh, it was true that he had held her briefly to comfort her the night she broke the news to him that she was not with child. He had assured her that of course he was not annoyed with her.
“Annoyed?” he had said, setting her a little away from him and frowning down at her. “But why would I be? It takes two, you know. I assume you did know.”
She had smiled wanly at his weak attempt at a joke.
“I was so hoping I would be,” she had said.
“Well, let us not be too disappointed,” he had told her. “Now I have an excuse to keep on visiting you here nightly.”
He had intended that too as a kind of joke. But as he spoke the words, he had realized that they were true. He might have felt obliged to keep his distance from her if he had impregnated her. He did not want to keep his distance. And it was not just the sex, though that was admittedly a large part of it. He liked sex with Chloe. It was also, however, about being in bed with her all night, about being close to her even if they did not touch, about feeling her warmth, hearing her breathing, smelling her soap and the essence of her. On the whole he had been sleeping better since his marriage.
He had, however, felt obliged to quit her bed and her room for the five nights of her courses. He had hated it. His bed had felt as big as a small country. He had found it difficult to get warm despite the fact that spring was turning to summer. He had kept waking up and reaching out one arm—or reaching out one arm and waking up. He was not sure which provoked which. He did know that he had not slept well during those nights and had returned to his wife’s bed with an almost embarrassing eagerness when the five days were over.
But during those five days he had withdrawn into himself a little further. If he had wanted to tell her the night he held her that he would miss her for the next little while, that she meant more to him than he had expected, that she was crucial to his comfort and well-being, he was very glad afterward that he had held his tongue and not made such an ass of himself.
He was not really worthy of Chloe. She was his superior. And he had certainly not expected that. He had thought her a nondescript, shadowy mouse of a woman when he first met her. Good God, he had not even noticed that she was in the drawing room that evening when he and his grandmother talked about the need for him to find a bride as soon as possible.
He was not worthy of her—or of anyone.
Sometimes he almost hated her. And he had started to hate himself again, something he had worked hard at Penderris to stop doing. Perhaps he never had stopped anything except feeling. He had been tempted to feel again since his marriage. He had even given in to that temptation a time or two. But allowing himself to feel meant allowing excruciating pain back into his life, and that was merely self-destructive.
Sometimes he wished he had chosen one of those girls from the ballrooms of London as his wife. And sometimes the thought of not having Chloe in his life brought him to the edge of tears before he froze the thought and turned his mind elsewhere.
He kept busy. He escorted Chloe to the very best social events each evening. Introducing her to the ton as his duchess was one of the main reasons for this stay in London, after all. He kept up his usual activities during the day and helped his wife and Lloyd plan the ball, which was already being talked about and was expected to be the grandest squeeze of the Season. He wrote a long letter to Imogen, Lady Barclay, the one woman member of the Survivors’ Club, after she wrote from Cornwall to congratulate him on his marriage and newly acquired title and to commiserate with him over the death of his grandfather. He wrote another to Ben—Sir Benedict Harper—who had written a far briefer letter from Wales on the same themes. He wrote his regular biweekly letters to his maternal grandmother. He called a few times on his mother.