The portrait of a duches.., p.5
The Portrait of a Duchess, page 5
How disappointing she was lavishing this quality on Rory, and not Rafe. It was difficult to look upon her gorgeous face and not remember a time when he’d felt that there was no one else on earth he’d rather be with. She, however, did not look awash in misty memories.
“How was the journey?” he asked briskly, to keep from dwelling on emotions. He could not stop himself from feeling things, but he could stop himself from acting on those feelings.
“Lovely,” she said. “Quick.”
The trip from London was little more than an hour in the fine carriage and six that numbered among the vehicles in the ducal equipage.
“The Rosemere horses are far superior to the nags that pull the London hacks,” she added. “I suppose my uncle had you to credit for that.”
There was an edge to her voice. He needed to explain his years in the duke’s employ, and soon. He planned to do so at supper, once she was settled in the house.
“You must be tired,” he said. “Canette has prepared a room for you. I’ll ring for her.”
He pulled a lever tucked discreetly beneath the desk. One that ensured the servants appeared silently, as if by magic.
“Canette is still here?” Cornelia asked, looking as pleased as a girl with a new doll.
“She is. She was promoted to housekeeper. She’s looking forward to seeing you.”
This was an understatement. When Rafe had informed Canette of Cornelia’s forthcoming arrival, she’d begun to cry.
“I’ve arranged dinner for us tonight at seven. We can go over our plans and become reacquainted.”
She smiled at him. “I can bring myself to endure a bit of your company in exchange for food, I suppose.”
He chuckled, but her words were not without a light sting. He didn’t want to trade barbs with her. He wanted to trade memories. To learn of her life. To make audacious plans.
“Gracious of you,” he said.
She curtsied ironically and batted her eyelashes at him. “I don’t suppose Mr. Thompson will be joining us?”
Rafe felt an unattractive flare of envy. “Absolutely not,” he said.
She chuckled at the knowing tone in his response. God, he’d missed that infectious laugh.
“It’s good to have you here,” he said. “The house was never the same without you.”
The words came out oddly stiff, and he looked down at his shoes. Before he could recover, the door flew open.
“Cornelia!” Canette cried, her voice heavy with emotion.
“I’ll leave you,” he murmured.
But Cornelia was not paying him any mind. She was running into Canette’s arms.
Chapter Seven
Cornelia was grateful for a reason to tear her attention away from Rafe in all his unholy masculine splendor. It was bad enough she’d been preoccupied with him for days. But to see him in his riding clothes, hair loose and mussed, nearly twice her size—
Stop swooning, you amnesiac woman. He isn’t good for you.
He’d proved it decades ago, in a way it would do her no favors to forget. Men like him—emotional, demonstrative, easily attached—were anathema to the way she lived: uncommitted to one person. Free of heart.
Cornelia bounded into her girlhood nursemaid’s outstretched arms. “Canette, my God, it’s really you,” she murmured.
Behind Canette was Mr. Singh, the servant who’d been kindest to her when she was a child. She beamed at him over Canette’s shoulder, tears beading in her eyes.
“And Mr. Singh. My heavens, I never thought I’d see either of you again.”
“Miss Ludgate,” Singh said, bowing to her deeply. “We are beyond pleased you have returned.”
“Mr. Singh, you needn’t bow to me,” she said, still nestled in Canette’s bosom. “God knows I’m not an esteemed guest of this establishment.”
“You are an esteemed guest in our opinion, dear girl,” Canette said, squeezing her so tight it hurt.
The hurt felt good. Normally she was not free with her embraces. But there were so few people in her life that had known her when she was young. Canette was like a piece of herself that she’d not realized she was missing until now.
They pulled apart and looked each other over. Canette was only a decade older than Cornelia. She’d been seventeen when she’d been hired, and at the time, she’d been the only Black servant in the house. Cornelia had instantly been taken with her, this pretty young woman with brown skin so like that of her mother’s in the only portrait she had seen of her—a miniature painted by Cornelia’s father. Canette was from Barbados, like Cornelia’s mama’s family, a link that made Cornelia feel less like an outsider inside her uncle’s walls.
Canette meant so much to her—something between a parent and the closest friend Cornelia’d had in all of her strange childhood.
“We’ve had the duchess’s bedchamber prepared for you,” Singh said. “We heard the happy news. Imagine, our girl, a duchess.” He beamed at her like a proud father.
“A duchess!” Canette sighed, before Cornelia could protest that she was no such thing.
“Mr. Goodwood always seemed so fond of you,” Canette went on, taking Cornelia’s hand and squeezing it. “When your uncle would rail against you, he would always say a few words in your defense. Now I see why. We were delighted to discover you were wed to him. He’s a good man, I think.”
That remained to be seen.
Still, she was touched by Rafe’s loyalty. All these years, she’d assumed he loathed her after the bitter way they’d parted. But she should not dwell on rumors of his kindness. For then she’d be tempted to recall how he’d looked breathless when she’d walked into the library. How he’d sidled his eyes at her with envy when she flirted with his friend. How his shirtsleeves had been pulled up to reveal his forearms—
Don’t you dare.
“Oh, it’s not like that,” Cornelia said quickly, waving away the idea that she and Rafe were really married. “Just a temporary situation.”
Canette and Singh both inclined their heads at her, perplexed, for everyone knew marriage was a lifelong institution.
“Well, regardless of the situation, you would deserve the finest chamber even if you were married to a troll,” Canette said.
“Can trolls marry?” Singh asked.
“They can if I can,” Cornelia said with a laugh. “It would be no less unlikely.”
“Shall I take you to your room?” Canette asked. “The footmen have brought up your things. And your . . . lovely cat.”
“I hope Lucius was polite. He can be a difficult guest.”
Canette laughed as they walked down the grand hallway to the vast, three-story staircase. “He is less than enthusiastic about his new dwelling.”
Cornelia didn’t blame him. The house was stifling in its luxury. Overheated, overstuffed, overfurnished. One could scarcely breathe for all the clutter. Not to mention all the memories.
The duchess’s rooms were no different.
As a girl, Cornelia had coveted the chambers of the lady of the house—a sumptuous suite with a bed draped in ruffles and walls lined in pink silk embroidered in gold flowers.
Now that she was grown, she was not charmed by it. She wandered around, reacquainting herself with the wardrobing chamber, the powdering closet, and the bathing room with its massive, luxurious soaking tub. The bathing chamber that sat between their two suites, connected by doors. Where Rafe no doubt soaked after long rides.
In the nude.
Stop it, you incorrigible, amorous—
“Could you fix my hair before supper?” she asked Canette, to avoid thinking of how easily she could visit Rafe in the night if she chose to. “I’m afraid it went limp on the drive.”
Canette had always had a gifted hand with Cornelia’s hair. She’d taken one look at the frizzled state the hapless white maids had made of Cornelia’s voluminous corkscrew curls when she’d arrived at Gardencourt and suggested she take on the seven-year-old child’s coiffure. So had begun the elegant hairstyles Cornelia wore to this day—and her first memory of feeling truly beautiful and cared for.
“Oh, you couldn’t stop me from fixing that hair,” Canette said. “But first, let’s get you dressed.”
They turned to Cornelia’s gowns, which had already been hung in the wardrobe. “I think I’ll wear the red silk,” Cornelia said.
Canette grinned. “I think I can hear old Rosemere groaning from the mausoleum at the very thought of it.”
Cornelia laughed. “I think you mean screaming.”
She’d never been allowed to wear bold colors when she lived here. She was told they were too brash, and she must be demure. She must behave with the utmost respectability. She must be better, even, than other gently reared daughters of lords. After all, her mother had been an artist’s model and courtesan who’d moved to London after she’d been granted freedom by her father, who had owned the plantation where she’d been born enslaved. Cornelia’s father had been notorious for marrying a woman of another race and lower class, for rejecting the aristocratic customs and values he’d been born to, for making art and taking risks.
Cornelia had been born marked—from the color of her skin to the reputation of her parents. She must, therefore, be perfect, she was told—tacitly, and aloud. And if she slipped, it was impressed upon her, she would be ruined in a heartbeat.
And they’d never stopped waiting for her to slip.
She’d been watched, scrutinized for any lapses in her comportment, manners, beauty, and most importantly, her morals.
For so many years, she had shaped herself around that pressure. She’d told herself her value was in her ability to perform the role so perfectly that she would be loved despite the strikes against her. But that vigilance had drained her until, at the age of sixteen, she’d found a cache of her late father’s belongings tucked away in a long-forgotten wardrobe in his abandoned cottage on the far side of the grounds.
And what she saw in them was not dissipation, but joy, and life.
She began to question everything.
She wanted to talk freely of the ideas she’d found in her father’s books, to see for herself the vivid world he’d painted. She wanted to live exuberantly and sensually, the way her mother had.
She’d begun by learning to paint. It had been the doorway to finding what moved her soul.
And the cost had been all this.
This manor, and its army of attendant servants clad head to toe in fuchsia livery. This luxury, supported by the labor of unseen thousands, who paid half their livelihoods, or more, in rents. The society of the proper guests inside, who found the very notion of her presence too threatening to countenance.
And she did not miss a lick of it.
There was not a moment of the old life she had sacrificed that she regretted.
Her days brimmed with adventure and friends and pleasure and laughter and tears and sex—joy and sadness that had nothing to do with propriety or caution; victories that had nothing to do with ballrooms or marriage.
She had chosen freedom.
And now, here she was: storming the castle keep from a position not of apology or desperation for acceptance, but power.
“There,” Canette said, clasping the tiny buttons of her scarlet bodice tight around Cornelia’s waist. “Now for your coiffure.”
Canette fashioned her hair into a loose chignon, allowing tendrils to fall down from her temples. As a finishing touch, she pinned a few bright red roses behind Cornelia’s ear.
Cornelia looked striking and sensual and not at all ladylike in her crimson gown and hothouse flowers.
She couldn’t keep the smile from her face as she thanked Canette and descended the many steps downstairs.
Menacing winged gargoyles leered down at her as she walked toward the doors of the dining room. As a girl, she had always thought of them as sentries. But maybe, with their outstretched wings expanding toward the sky, they’d also been trying to flee this place.
Maybe, despite the unsettling bitter memories mixed among the happy ones, this was Cornelia’s chance to make Gardencourt more welcoming for everyone.
Perhaps she could take Rafe at his word when it came to his promises of reform.
She would find out, for he was waiting for her at a table that comfortably accommodated twenty people.
Alone.
Looking more edible than the food.
He wore a deep navy coat that set off his blue eyes, and a slim black vest that clung to the impressive musculature of his chest. His chestnut hair was swept back from his face, held in place by a ribbon, rather than tucked shaggily behind his ears. It brought out the gray at his temples. She’d always liked silvered hair on a man.
“Good evening,” he said, rising from his chair. “Have a seat.”
“Shall I sit at the opposite end of the table?”
He laughed. The table was approximately twenty-five feet long.
“Only if you want to shout at me.”
She gave him her most enigmatic smile. “We’ll have to see if you deserve it.”
He looked at her levelly and gestured at the chair beside him. “Cornelia, before we eat, there’s something I’d like you to know about me. I think you’ll find the meal more palatable if you listen.”
Had he ever spoken to her so firmly? Could it be that he was even more attractive when the authority of his voice matched his intimidating physicality?
She sat.
“You certainly have captured my attention. What is it you wish to confess?”
He locked eyes with her. “When I told you I’m not a Tory, that wasn’t the whole truth of it.”
“I knew it!” she said. Disappointing, but it was no more than she’d expected. She picked up her wineglass. Being right deserved a toast.
“No, you didn’t. You don’t understand,” he said firmly. “The truth is I’m a member of the Equalist Society.”
She put her wineglass down without taking a sip and snorted. She’d sooner believe him if he said he was a turkey.
“You aren’t,” she said. “I’m a member of the Equalist Society. I would certainly know if you were one of us.”
“You wouldn’t, actually,” he said flatly. “I’m a spy.”
“Pardon?”
“I’m a spy. I’ve been gathering information about the Tories covertly for eighteen years, and passing it to Jack Willow.”
Jack was the founder of the Equalist Society and the publisher of its circular. Not to mention a chief enemy of the Tories, who pegged him as a seditionist for his views. If what Rafe said was true, he’d been in a very dangerous position.
If what he said was true. She had no reason to believe him.
“Jack never mentioned you to me.”
Rafe shrugged. “Why would he? He was not aware you and I were . . . connected.”
Connected. The vagueness of the word almost made her laugh out loud.
“Tell me more,” she said. “If what you say is true, how does it work, this so-called spying?”
He relaxed a bit, as though grateful to be given a chance to win her credulity.
“As you know, I’ve been acquainted with Jack since my youth. Your parents introduced us. It was his idea for me to secure a position with your uncle and ingratiate myself with him and his Tory friends.”
“Why you? You’re not exactly inconspicuous.”
He was six feet five inches of broadly built horseman. Surely such a role would be better performed by a retiring clerkish type.
“I was uniquely situated to gather information. Horse trading is an expensive undertaking, and your uncle’s customers and friends are among the most powerful men in the country. Successful breeders easily win the respect and camaraderie of horse enthusiasts. Meals are shared, rides are taken, and the conversation inevitably turns to politics. I made them my friends. And all the while I gathered information about their positions and plans and shared it with Jack.”
She supposed it was plausible. She knew Jack had sources of information he did not share widely with the group, for reasons of safety and discretion.
“Who else knows about this?” she asked.
He shook his head, solemn.
“No one knew until last month. I’ve told a few associates who will be joining us for the house party.”
“And they believe you?”
He looked taken aback. “Yes. They have no reason not to. What could I gain by lying?”
“You could be spying on the Equalists to help the Tories. Trying to gain our trust.”
He nodded. “Ah. I suppose that’s true. But in turn, inviting your allies here would make me vulnerable to their scrutiny.”
She considered this. There was no right answer. She would simply have to remain on guard until she decided whether she could trust him.
A thought occurred to her.
“If you are so close to Jack and share secrets with him, do you know where he is?”
It had been six months since anyone had seen Jack, and no one had heard a word from him. He had a habit of disappearing for weeks here and there when the political winds turned against him. But he had never left without informing at least one member of their circle where he’d gone, and this time he’d left without a trace. The only thing to think, after months and months without word, was that he had not left willingly.
Jack had enemies. Powerful enemies. And the man chief among them was Elinor’s estranged husband, Lord Bell, who had accused his wife and Jack of having an affair. Bell was suing Jack for criminal conversation in an attempt to ruin his good name and render him destitute. But he was capable of worse.
Rafe looked down at his fingers. “I don’t know where Jack is,” he said. “I’ve been keeping my ear to the ground for any word of him, but our usual channels have gone silent. I’m very concerned.”
The way he said this—without meeting her eye—made her suspect he was keeping something back. Perhaps his story wasn’t true at all.
Yet for some reason, despite everything, she wanted to believe it.
“You spin a very convenient tale,” she said slowly. “But all I have is your word. And it’s never meant much before.”
