‘Signor Gaspari?’ She smiled at the notion, a chink in her schoolroom manner. ‘Oh, no, your Grace, he is the very soul of decorum. No, I heard it from another, though I cannot recall exactly where.’
In those few moments, Richard sensed more than she was telling. Could she have met someone here during the few weeks she’d been here alone, someone who’d taught her how to taste chocolate and ham together and to speak so easily of courtesans? Could that be the reason that she seemed so different from how he remembered her?
Could the ever-respectable Miss Wood have had an intrigue?
He studied her with new thoughtfulness. She might not be a young girl any longer, but there was an intelligence and animation to her, an eagerness, that gave beauty to her features in a way that he’d never noticed before. In the silvery winter light of Venice, she looked more delicate than he’d remembered from the bright country sunshine of Kent. Here she returned his gaze levelly, without hesitation or fading deference, and that was different, too. She was beautiful, really, with her round little face and luminous blue eyes.
‘Do you be needing me, your Grace?’ Wilson stood in the doorway, clearly peeved at having been called down for what he perceived as a fool’s errand. Behind him hovered Signora della Battista and one of her footmen, her expression filled with more curiosity than concern. ‘We heard Miss Wood shouting, your Grace, loud enough to raise the very dead, and—’
‘No one’s dead, Wilson,’ Richard said curtly, pushing his chair back from the table without looking at Miss Wood. He felt foolish now, almost guilty, for no reason at all. ‘And no one’s in any need of help, either.’
Wilson glanced pointedly at the chocolate pot. ‘None of your coffee, your Grace?’
‘No.’ Likely he looked a great fool, too, sipping hot chocolate with a governess in his nightclothes. ‘I am finished with breakfast, and I’ll be dressing now for a day out of doors.’
‘Out of doors, your Grace?’ Wilson asked. ‘On the water?’
‘Out of doors, Wilson, and on the water, and into the very sky if it pleases me to do so.’ Richard nodded, striving for nonchalance as he walked past them, or at least as nonchalant as he could be in his bare feet and dressing gown. ‘In addition to the proper clothes, I’ll ask you to arrange what is necessary for keeping warm while in the open. Miss Wood will be my guide, and I will be going wherever she suggests.’
Chapter Seven
‘I’ve heard enough tales of that infernal bell tower, Miss Wood,’ the duke said. ‘No more campanile, if you please.’
Jane looked at him sideways, using the hood of her cloak as an excuse to keep from turning her face fully towards him. She wasn’t sure if she could, anyway, she was that close to being frozen stiff. The coals in the tin foot warmer beneath her petticoats had long ago lost their warmth, and with it she’d lost the feeling in her toes as well as in her fingers. The weather had turned much colder overnight, and the breeze that came down the canals from the open sea felt less like the customary summery caress and more like an icy slap.
Yet the duke had insisted they survey the city by gondola. On other, balmier days, Jane had thought a gondola was a fine, elegant method of travel. She’d come to love gliding through the watery streets, with the gondolier at his oar behind her and Signor Gaspari sitting at her feet while he described everything they saw.
But this morning was different. Without Jane’s knowledge, poor Signor Gaspari had been summarily dismissed. As the duke’s new guide, Jane had at once volunteered to sit in the guide’s place on the plain bench, but the duke wouldn’t hear of it. Instead she must sit with him, beside him, as uneasy equals. His Grace insisted. There was no argument.
And sitting on the gondola’s cushioned bench with a man as large as the duke was, well, intimate. No matter how Jane tried to ease herself apart from him, the sleek narrowness of the gondola’s design pushed them together, and she couldn’t help touching her arm against his arm, her leg against his, her hip against his. The way that Wilson had tucked them in together beneath fur-lined rugs as if they were in bed only made the arrangement cosier still.
In retrospect, it had been her own fault, feeding the duke the ham with the chocolate at breakfast. She’d intended it to be instructional, not seductive, but his Grace had clearly misinterpreted, and considered the simple gesture as something more than she’d ever meant it to be. It was not as if he’d attempted any new familiarity, or said anything to her that was disrespectful, but she sensed the difference just the same in how he looked at her, even listened to her speak.
Somehow she’d lost that invisibility that servants had in most households. He’d stopped treating her like a governess, but as a person, or worse, as a woman, and however subtle the change might be, it still unsettled her. How was she supposed to respond? What was she to say, to do, to think, sitting like this with his thigh pressed shamelessly against hers beneath the rug? She sighed with agitation, her breath coming in a little pale cloud before her face.
‘Forgive me, your Grace,’ she said, finally answering his question. ‘But isn’t that the reason you asked me to attend you in this way? To learn about Venice? Surely there is no single landmark in the city that contains as much history as the campanile at San Marco.’
‘I’m sure,’ he said, shifting his body more squarely towards hers. His face was ruddy from the chilly air, his dark gold hair tossing lightly beneath his cocked hat of dark grey beaver. He didn’t seem affected at all by the cold, partly because of the heavy cloak he wore over his coat, but mostly, Jane suspected, because he was simply of warm and hearty temperament, accustomed to riding across the lands around Aston Hall in every kind of weather. Now he yawned, stretching his arms before him. ‘I do believe I’ve learned enough for one day.’
He wasn’t smiling, making it impossible for Jane to tell if he was speaking in teasing jest, or perfect seriousness.
‘I’m out of practice with learning, Miss Wood,’ he continued ruefully. ‘These days my head can accept only so much knowledge, and no more.’
She doubted that. ‘Then I must be the poorest of teachers, your Grace, if, after one morning, your head is already stuffed beyond capacity.’
‘I didn’t say that, did I?’ he asked with a smile. ‘It’s more a question of the topic than the teacher. I’m sure if you spoke of something other than history, then I might again be your best pupil.’
‘What subject is more pleasing, your Grace? Mathematics, philosophy, geography—’
‘Something more personal, perhaps,’ he said. ‘Something of more interest to us both. Such as why you permitted my daughter Mary to fall in love with this man Fitzgerald.’
Jane caught her breath. So this was the true reason for this junket, to give him the opportunity to interrogate her. She’d not escape from him here. In a gondola in the middle of the Grand Canal, she was as good as trapped, and they both knew it.
‘I didn’t mean to surprise you,’ he said. ‘That is, I did mean to surprise you, but not in a malicious way. I wish to know the truth, that is all, and without permitting you the time to contrive a practised answer that would—’
‘I have told you nothing but the truth in regard to both your daughters, your Grace,’ she said swiftly. ‘Lord John has a great deal in common with Lady Mary, and she with him. There was no “permission” to their attachment at all, and I do not believe I could have stopped their friendship even if I’d tried. Mutual interests led to a delight in one another’s company, and love soon after followed.’
She hadn’t meant to run on so long, but he’d listened, and he hadn’t interrupted, either, the way he usually did. He’d simply…listened, and now that she’d realised it, she blushed.
‘The short of it, your Grace, is that they fell in love,’ she said, ‘and I am certain that neither has ever been happier.’
‘In love, you say?’ he repeated, watching her so closely that her flush deepened further. ‘You speak as if from your own experience, Miss Wood. You have bee
n in love yourself?’
‘I, your Grace?’ she asked, stunned. However was she to answer so personal a question?
‘Yes, you, Miss Wood,’ he said. ‘Surely you must have some experience with love yourself if you were so quick to recognise it in my daughters.’
‘Love.’ She could not bear his regard any longer, and in confusion lowered her gaze to her frozen fingers.
‘Aye, love,’ he repeated, more softly. ‘Is there something wrong with your hands, Miss Wood?’
‘They are cold, your Grace,’ she said. ‘It is my own fault.’
‘But easily rectified.’ He lifted the edge of the fur-lined rug, inviting her to slip her hands within. ‘Here, tuck them in. I’ll warm them fast enough.’
She shook her head, determined not to succumb to such a scandalous temptation. To let him warm her hands against his body, beneath luxurious fur!
‘Thank you, no, your Grace,’ she said, still addressing her fingers and not him. ‘Next time I shall put aside my vanity, and wear my heavy woollen mittens.’
‘You won’t speak to me of your old loves, will you?’ he asked. ‘I am sorry. Last night I realised that, despite all the years you have been in my employ, Miss Wood, I know very little about you.’
‘But you do, your Grace!’ she exclaimed. ‘You know that I was born in Hertfordshire, that I was schooled by my father, that I speak French and read Italian, that I can teach mathematics for ladies, composition, painting in watercolours, and—’
‘That is nothing,’ he said with such an all-encompassing sweep of his arm that the gondola rocked from the force of it. ‘Anyone who reads your references will know that much. But it was not until last night that I learned your eyes are the same shade of blue as the lilacs that grow beneath the dovecote, back at Aston Hall.’
She gasped, made speechless by his audacity. Yet as soon as her gaze rose to meet his, she realised how wrongly she’d judged that audacity—his words weren’t meant as an idle gallant’s compliment, but as a confidence, a gift of unadorned honesty to her.
To her.
And if he’d never noticed her eyes were blue, how was it that she in turn had never noticed his were neither blue, nor green, nor brown, but a blending of all three that was as unusual and as complicated as the duke himself was. His life out of doors had carved little lines around those eyes, radiating outward like the rays a cartographer would draw around the sun, lines that became more pronounced when he smiled. He was smiling now, and she felt her own lips curl upwards in shy response.
Yet to her surprise, this time he was the one who looked away first, staring off past the gondolier and his sweeping single oar and towards the chilly grey canal.
‘I met Lady Anne Hailey at a Twelfth Night ball,’ he began, so softly that Jane had to lean closer to hear. ‘I was down from school for the holidays, a cocky young whelp with a fearsome opinion of my own worth, while she was so young she’d not yet even been presented at Court. But she tamed me fast enough. She had red ribbons in her hair and freckles that she hated, and when she laughed I thought it was the merriest sound I’d ever heard. She’d no more use for the foolishness of the ball than I did, and she led me outside to see the moonlight on the fallen snow. She kissed me first that night, and in the summer, we were wed. She was my first love, aye, my duchess, and my only love, and then too soon, she was gone.’
He sighed, a little puff of old grief and warm memories in the chilly air. Wistfully Jane doubted he even recalled she was there with him, he was so lost in the past. Yet he had shared a part of himself with her that he kept buried from everyone else at Aston Hall, and the confidence touched her so deeply that she felt tears well up in her eyes. He’d trusted her with his duchess, and in return she could not keep back her own old sorrow.
‘I was sixteen, and he was twenty-two,’ she said, the long-buried story now coming out so fast that the words tumbled over one another in a tumbled rush. ‘His name was George, George Lee, and he was a lieutenant in his Majesty’s navy, visiting his uncle in our parish. And he was handsome, handsome as the day, with the sunlight on his gold lace and buttons. I’d walk with him through the orchard beneath the apple trees, and he told me of all the foreign places he’d seen and battles he’d fought. I’d never known anyone like him, and when he asked me to wait for him, I said yes.’
She’d never forget George. She never tasted apples without thinking of him, of how the boughs overhead had bowed beneath the weight of the ripening fruit above them, and how the heady sweet scent had filled the late-summer air. He’d let her see there was a world beyond that orchard, and taught her how to dream of it. And he’d kissed her, too, just the once beneath the apple trees, before he’d left.
‘Did you love him, then?’
She blinked, like a drowsy sleeper wakened too soon.
‘I did,’ she said, sadly. ‘I loved him, and he me. I promised I’d wait for him. I would have done anything for him, anything at all.’
‘And yet you are here.’
Jane shook her head, the old sorrow reduced by time to a dull ache, but an ache that had never quite abated. ‘He sailed away, and though I waited, he never came back. His ship was lost with all hands off Gibraltar.’
Being a parish minister, her father had had much experience with bearing sorrowful tidings, and he’d waited until they were alone in their parlour before he’d showed her the paper from London with the news. She’d stared at him in shock, and refused to believe what he was so gently telling her. Instead she had snatched the paper from his hands and run to the orchard to read it for herself. Surely Father had misunderstood the news. Surely there had been survivors. But there had been no hope to be found in the tersely worded announcement from the naval office, and not even she could pretend her George would return. She’d dropped to her knees and wept until she’d no tears left, there among the last mouldering windfalls in the dry autumn grass.
‘I trust you haven’t shared that gloomy tale with my daughters,’ the duke said solemnly, jarring her from her reverie. ‘Young females can be melancholy enough without having their heads filled with stories of doomed lovers lost at sea.’
She stared at him, so wounded she could scarcely force the words from her mouth.
‘How—how can you speak so, your Grace?’ she stammered. ‘How is my—my loss any less than your own?’
‘Because Anne was my wife, my duchess, the mother of my children,’ he said, as if this explained everything. ‘I do not intend to belittle your grief, Miss Wood, but I don’t believe our…ah…our losses are comparable.’
She shook her head, silently rejecting his hideous, selfish belief. How could she ever dream they’d something in common? He was her master, not her friend, her superior in every way. He certainly wasn’t her confidant, and now she could not bear to be in his company another moment.
‘Forgive me, your Grace, forgive me for everything.’ She rose upright in the gondola, impulsive rather than wise, and the narrow boat pitched precipitously. Though she caught at the black-lacquered side to save herself, she refused to sit again, looking past the startled duke to the man at the oar.
‘If you please, gondolier,’ she called in Italian. ‘Draw to the side, here, and put me out at once.’
The man nodded, doubtless deciding the English lady was mad, and deftly steered the gondola towards the side of the canal.
The duke reached out to steady her, his fingers firm around her arm. ‘Here now, Miss Wood, none of that. I won’t have you tumbling over the side.’
She looked at him sharply, her hurt now flaring into anger. ‘You needn’t concern yourself, your Grace, not for me. My loss would not be comparable, would it?’
She jerked her arm free as the gondola slid closer to the walkway. She didn’t wait for the gondolier to settle at a gate, but instead bunched her skirts in one hand and jumped towards the walkway. For one frozen second, she glimpsed the grey water lapping beneath her and the distance she needed to jump between the heaving boat and th
e walkway, and all too easily she imagined herself dropping down between the two, deep into the cold water never to rise. Then her shoes were scrabbling over the paving stones and she realised she’d landed.
She shook out her skirts and hurried away, praying he wouldn’t follow as she ducked in a narrow alley between two houses.
‘Miss Wood!’ he shouted, his bluff English voice echoing against the ancient Venetian walls. ‘Miss Wood, come back here at once!’
For the first time since she’d been in his Grace’s employ, she pretended not to hear him. Instead she quickened her steps and ducked into another alley, praying he wouldn’t follow her. She needed to be alone, to recover control of her emotions, and, if she were honest, to recover her pride.
How had she let herself be such a fool where the duke was concerned? To him she was no more than another servant, and never would be otherwise, no matter that he’d noticed the colour of her eyes. When George had said such things to her, he’d meant it, but his Grace—no.
Furious with herself, Jane dashed the tears away from her eyes, and darted down yet another passage and over an arching bridge. In this impromptu escape, she had the advantage. She’d spent so much time in the last weeks exploring the city that she’d soon learned her way through the maze of inner courtyards and alleyways that existed inside the canals. Another right turn here and across the bridge over Rio del Palazzo, and she was in the Piazza San Marco, dominated by the glittering domes of the Basilica San Marco.
Crowned with statues of golden saints and horses, the ancient Byzantine cathedral was one of Jane’s favourite places in Venice, and likely, too, the last place a staunchly Protestant Englishman like the duke would ever look for her. Here she’d be permitted to think of her lost love in peace, and she swallowed back a fresh surge of emotion. It was wrong, all of it, and tugging her hood lower over her face, she headed towards San Marco’s welcoming steps.
On most days, the Piazza was thronged with people, Venetians as well as foreign visitors, but because of the cold, only a few hardy souls clustered beneath the arched passageway to the shops of the Procuratie Vecchie. Gusts of wind swept from the sea across the open square, swirling across the patterned paving stones and making the space so inhospitable that even the usual flocks of pigeons had gone into hiding.
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