“Francesca, you will please recall that I am acquainted with the notion of an index and that the figures you mention were drawn by my own hand. I might have some insight into their organization.”
The Yorkshire breeze blew nearly constantly, and already a strand of her hair was whipping across her lips.
“Insight and action are two different things, Greyville. If you don’t start listing the figures separately from the sketches now, you will never do it. Several years of illustrations is an enormous body of work, and unless it’s well organized, none of it will be of use to anybody.”
One of the coach horses stomped, causing the harness to jingle. Other farewells were in progress several yards away, between Stratton and the woman Mary Alice. Stratton’s small daughter looked as woebegone as Grey felt.
“I will be no use to anybody for at least a month after you get into the coach, Francesca.”
She glanced back at the house, where at least six dozen servants were doubtless watching from the windows.
“Then I’d best be on my way, hadn’t I? Thank you, Grey, for everything, and please be safe.”
She kissed him, and not some tame peck on the cheek. She kissed him as if her kiss would have to last him the whole distance to India and beyond. He kissed her back as if, more than funding, science, honor, or reason, she was all that would sustain him for the journey.
If he made the journey.
His arms stole around her, and she leaned on him, and to perdition with whoever might be watching.
She was about to climb into that coach and leave him, as if he were a wilderness that had been adequately explored and documented, and he could in good conscience do nothing to stop her.
“Francesca, will you write to me?”
“I need your handkerchief. This shouldn’t be so difficult.”
He produced the requested item. “I’ve been considering some options and will write to you, even if you don’t write to me. Your welfare will always concern me, and my work matters, but depending on variables outside my control, at some—”
She put two gloved fingers to his lips.
“I love you, Sir Greyville Trenton. Wherever you go, whatever endeavor you undertake, however your fortunes wax and wane, I love you.”
Before Grey could respond, before he could form a single word, he had to stand back so Francesca’s traveling companions could join her inside.
Then some idiot—Stratton perhaps?—had slammed the coach door closed, and the team trotted off.
Grey raised his hand in farewell and stood in the drive apart from the others long after the coach had disappeared, staring at the drifting plume of dust, waving at nothing.
“Your expression suggests that woman just departed for darkest Peru and will never return.”
Stratton walked over to Grey, and from the look in his eyes, the past two weeks hadn’t exactly been his idea of a springtime frolic. He’d appeared quite fond of Francesca’s friend, and she of him. The child had apparently returned indoors.
“Francesca is bound for York,” Grey said.
“And you’ll shut yourself up in the damned office and pretend your heart isn’t breaking?”
The last of the dust had dissipated, leaving only the wind and the high green hills on all sides. “Two weeks ago, I would have told you that the heart cannot break,” Grey said. “The organ can cease to function, but it’s not a watch, to stop running as a result of an imagined impact on the emotions.”
“That does sound like your typical pontifications, but it’s not two weeks ago. What do you say now?”
Grey started marching for the house, his host in step beside him. “Now, I want my pony back. Sebastian has been riding my Tiger long enough.”
“Greyville, I have endless respect for your brilliance, but perhaps it’s time you took a repairing lease. A short respite never hurt—”
“Don’t lecture,” Grey said, “or I shall have to strike you. Manifestation of the frustrated mating urge perhaps, or a simple reaction to a surfeit of nonsense.”
“My dear friend, I suspect you’ve been in the tropics too long, and now you’re determined to hare off to India, of all the bug-ridden, fever-infested, pestilential purgatories. Stirling and I have often discussed the benefits of an academic—”
“The problem isn’t the jungle,” Grey said, striding into the manor. “I am the problem.”
“Was there ever any doubt of that?”
“Some friend you are. I need to think. Be off with you.”
“You’ve said farewell to the first woman you’ve noticed as anything other than a specimen in years. I will make allowances, but you’re being an idiot. How will you get her back?”
And there was the problem, now that Grey had let her go. “I don’t know, but I am the determined sort, and I’m well aware that a machete has little value in the jungle without a whetstone.”
“Greyville, I do believe the bonds of friendship require that I get you drunk.”
“A reciprocal burden falls upon me, given the mournful expression with which you watched that coach depart. Let’s be about it, shall we?”
* * *
Italian women often wore black quite well, while Englishwomen, especially blond, blue-eyed Englishwomen, seldom did.
“Blond, gray-eyed Englishwomen,” Francesca corrected herself, pulling off her gloves.
Despite how black washed out her complexion, Francesca had found that traveling in widow’s weeds made sense. She need not attire herself as a duchess, and her privacy was respected more than it would have been had she not been heavily veiled in black.
“Good day, Your Grace. I hope your walk was enjoyable?”
MacDuie, her butler, had conveyed with the leased house, like the furnishings and cook. Francesca liked to hear him speak, for his Scottish accent was as unrelenting as his good cheer.
“My walk was peaceful, thank you.”
“You have a caller, Your Grace. A gentleman.”
She paused, her bonnet ribbons half untied. She’d worn her favorite mourning bonnet, the one with thick black netting that preserved her from prying eyes but still let her see and breathe.
“Has Mr. Arnold come over from the bank?”
“The gentleman’s card is on the sideboard, Your Grace. A Sir Greyville Trenton. Quiet fellow, and he has some sort of letter for you. He said he wanted to deliver it in person.”
Oh heavens. Oh gracious.
After nearly two weeks of waiting, hoping, and wishing for even a note, Francesca had all but given up. She was certain he’d have written, but being Grey, of course he had not. He was here, in person, ready to observe, collect data, and draw his own conclusions.
She draped her veil over her face. “No tea tray, MacDuie. I don’t think the gentleman will be staying long.”
Perhaps he wanted to thank her in person. She stopped halfway up the winding front stair, nearly felled by the notion that he’d already made plans to depart for India.
She entered the formal parlor very much on her dignity.
“Your Grace.” Grey stood, his bow most proper. He was exquisitely attired for a morning call, not a wrinkle to be seen, and the sight of him left Francesca’s knees wobbly. “Thank you for seeing me.”
She gestured to the chairs arranged before the hearth. “Please have a seat, Sir Greyville.”
His brows knit at the sound of her voice. “Now that is most odd. I am here because your handwriting bore a striking resemblance to that of another, a lady I esteem most highly. Perhaps an Italian education accounts for such a similarity, but you even sound like her. In any case, an offer as generous as yours deserves the courtesy of a reply in person.”
Of course he’d recognize her penmanship and voice. Francesca had an Italian accent, but she usually worked to keep it behind her teeth.
“You received my letter?” she asked, putting a hint of Tuscany in the question.
“I did, two weeks ago, and I must thank you from the depths of my being
for your proffered generosity.”
“Shall we sit, Sir Greyville?”
He was studying her with that look, the one that said a quizzing glass was unnecessary, because Sir Greyville Trenton was examining the specimen, and no instrument or measuring device could improve upon his powers of observation.
He waited for Francesca to choose one of the velvet-cushioned seats, flipped out his tails, and settled near enough that she caught a hint of his exotic fragrance—the one from dratted India.
“I have penned my reply to your offer,” he said, passing over a letter. “My abilities with spontaneous social discourse are wanting. Perhaps you’ll read my letter now?”
Francesca broke the seal and recognized the tidiest sample of Grey’s penmanship she’d ever seen. He must have copied the letter several times. And yet, as legible as the words were, Francesca could not make sense of them.
He was rejecting her offer. Throwing it aside when she’d delivered his heart’s desire on a silver platter. Bewilderment, rage, and a curious frisson of hope had her reading his words three times.
“I don’t understand, Sir Greyville. In the space of two weeks, you’ve decided your passions lie in another direction? I was given to understand that your dedication to science is second to none and your interest in this Indian venture considerable.”
He rose and prowled the room, which was about as nondescript as elegant furnishings and good housekeeping could be. The oil painting over the mantel was of some red-coated stag posed just so in an alpine meadow, and the sideboard, chairs, and sofa were all of matched blond oak.
England at its genteel finest, and but for his sense of energy, Grey belonged in this room.
“My interest in the Indian venture will continue unabated, Your Grace, but I find for the present that more pressing concerns keep me in England.”
Whatever did that mean? “Should one be concerned for your family, Sir Greyville?”
He left off admiring the stag and looked at her as if he could see right through her veil. He couldn’t. Francesca had seen her reflection in enough mirrors to know the veil shielded her from observation.
“My family will be making a remove from our seat in the Midlands to a more modest property in Kent.”
“What? I mean, I beg your pardon?”
He made a circuit of the room, pausing to study an etching of some flower or other. “The time has come for me to explore a wilderness closer to home. The matter involves a lady, Your Grace, so I will keep my comments oblique, but my mind is made up. I’ll not be leaving for India in the immediate future.”
He looked very severe, very resolute, also tired and dear.
Francesca folded her veil back and pinned it to her bonnet. “Grey, what on earth are you going on about? India is your heart’s desire, your dream. I can make that happen for you.”
He was across the parlor in two strides. “I knew it was you! By damn, Francesca, what are you about? You leave me, and now you’re a duchess, and possibly not even English. I can make no sense of this.”
She saw in his eyes the same emotions roiling through her—bewilderment, anger, and a small gleam of hope.
“I am the dowager duchess of the Italian duchy of San Mercato, also Francesca Pomponio Pergolesi, widowed these past five years. One travels more safely without a title, and my friends and I had a significant need for privacy.”
“You haven’t been sleeping,” he said, scowling down at her. “And you stole my glasses.”
“You stole my heart.”
“One can’t—you stole mine first.”
They stared at each other for a fraught moment, then they were kissing, wrapped in an embrace that brought back memory upon memory, all of them happy.
Francesca broke the kiss, feeling as if she’d taken her first decent breath in days. “Are you traveling to India or not?”
“Not… without you,” Grey said. “Black does not become you, Francesca. The weeds threw me off, which you probably intended. Camoufflage, as the French would say.”
“If you start spouting science now, Greyville, I will put you on a boat for India myself.”
“You’d save me the trouble of getting you to the docks, for I won’t leave without you, Francesca. I’ve had a brisk exchange of letters with my brother.”
“Come,” she said, taking his hand and leading him to the sofa. “Tell me.”
It wasn’t their sofa, but sitting beside Grey anywhere soothed an ache in Francesca that had been building for two weeks.
“I told Sebastian I wanted my pony back. He was the earl, not I, and responsibility for the family finances rested on his shoulders, not mine. My family is welcome to reside with me in Kent, but I’ll no longer spend years hacking my way through insects, snakes, and mud to keep him in matched teams.”
“You quoted me?”
“You have the better command of persuasive prose, Francesca. We needn’t belabor the obvious.”
She took his hand, drew off his glove, and laced her fingers through his. “So you’ll live in Kent, cheek by jowl with your family? What about your science? What about your tea plantation?”
What about us?
“Francesca, I have more specimens, journals, and drawings than I can organize in a lifetime. I’ve sent plants to Kew, to the family seat, to my own conservatory, to Cambridge, and to colleagues. I can busy myself with that inventory for the next six decades. I don’t need to single-handedly establish the tea industry in India. I need you. Only you.”
He kissed her knuckles, while Francesca looked for holes in his theory.
“You were concerned that you’d deplete my means if I financed your voyage to India. I am scandalously wealthy, Grey. My banker will happily meet with you and describe the extent of my holdings. I’ll give it all away in a moment if penury is necessary to merit your continued notice.”
His arm came around her shoulders. “When I watched your coach roll away, I realized something.”
Francesca had realized a few things too. “Tell me.”
“Family should look after one another. Sheep know this, dogs know this. My impulse to aid my relations was not wrong, but I domesticated my family instead of allowing them to develop their natural abilities. Sebastian has composed heaps of music he hasn’t published because an earl should give away his talent. That’s balderdash, to use your term. Mama has jewels she never wears and doesn’t even like. She should sell them and invest the proceeds. I could go on.”
“You’re very good at going on, among other things.” Mostly, he was good at being Sir Greyville Trenton, scientist at large and the man Francesca loved.
“Well, my dear family can either accept my hospitality or fend for themselves. A little time in the wilderness is good for us all. Having discovered the obvious, I am now intent on offering you marriage.”
“Don’t you dare go down on one knee,” Francesca said, rising. “Pietro did that, in the greatest display of hypocrisy I’ve ever endured. I don’t want to live in Kent with your dragon of a mother and your spoiled sister-in-law.”
He rose and took out his handkerchief, and even that had been neatly folded into his pocket. He produced a pair of spectacles from an inside pocket—the second-best pair.
“Francesca, I would like to support my wife, assuming you’ll have me. We can reach an accommodation—my manor house has thirty-six rooms—but you will have to elucidate your reservations.”
Thirty-six rooms was nearly the size of the ducal villa Francesca had called home for five years.
“I understand that you want to support your wife and children, Grey, but I want to support science. As it happens, I meant what I said in my letter to you. Establishing a tea industry in India strikes me as a brilliant investment opportunity and a way to contribute significantly to the realm.”
If he polished his spectacles any more vigorously, he’d part the lens from the frames. “You want me to go to India? Francesca, the voyage can take months, and my destination is the western region of t
he subcontinent. I could easily be gone for five years.”
“We could be gone.”
He dropped his spectacles on the carpet and made no move to pick them up. “I’m not sure I heard you correctly.”
The handkerchief in his hand shook minutely, as if a small tempest beset it.
“We could be gone. Officer’s wives go out to India all the time, Grey. My plan was to follow you out and capture you in the wild. I never anticipated that you’d pounce upon a widowed Italian duchess right here in England.”
“You were prepared…? You were prepared to follow me to India? Francesca, I hardly know what to say.”
She picked up his glasses and handed them to him. “Say what’s in your heart. I love you, and I want you to be happy. I want you to make the contributions only you, Sir Greyville Trenton, can make. If that means I sleep with you in a hammock, then I’ll sleep with you in hammock. It’s as you said, Grey. Loneliness stalks us, bitterness, regret. Against those predators, the only haven is love. For two weeks with you, I was content, complete, and full of dreams. I want that back. If I have to go to India to get it, that’s a small price to pay for a lifetime of happiness.”
His arms came around her. “You deliver a very convincing lecture, Francesca, and I cannot hope to equal its eloquence.”
She kissed his cheek. “Try.”
“Yes, love.” He fell silent for a moment, then spoke very softly, right near her ear. “I enjoy science.”
“And you are very good at it.” Brilliant, in fact.
“And I am very good at it. I love you. I would like to become the best in the world at that undertaking. I would like my expertise in this regard to eclipse all known records and become a species of love unto itself. I can pursue my objective in India, in Kent, and anywhere in between, but only if you are by my side, as my wife, my companion, my lover, and my guide.”
“Your skill with a lecture is improving.”
“I’m the determined sort. Say yes, Francesca. Please, or I’ll make an idiot of myself and start begging.”
“Yes, Grey. Yes, I will be your wife, and all those other things, in India, Kent, and everywhere in between. Do you suppose we might remark the occasion by exploring my private apartment in the next ten minutes?”
Duchesses in Disguise Page 10