The Captive Duke, page 20
When had he become such a well-muscled specimen, and how was she to look him in the eye now that she’d attacked him not once but twice?
“You must allow, two accidents befalling you in a span of days is at least a dangerous coincidence.” He took a sip from the water glass she’d placed on the table.
The dratted man watched her over the rim of the glass the whole time, drinking from the same spot she had, and Gilly felt panic welling up at the implications of such a simple action.
Such drama, and over a few kisses.
Except—this awareness thumped into her mind, rather like a blow—he hadn’t meant the two incidents of kissing as the accidents he’d referred to. Something had shifted in Christian’s regard for her, and not because the girth on her saddle had broken.
“I will allow those mishaps are unsettling accidents, but only that. Coaches lose wheels, riders take the occasional tumble. Those are everyday occurrences.”
“In the eight years of your marriage to Greendale, did either occur to you even once?”
“No,” she said, trying to focus mentally on the topic of her safety. This was difficult, when her body had developed an acute and inconvenient physical awareness of the duke. When I am inside you…
“Then you will indulge me, my lady, when I ask you not to leave the house without either my escort or that of at least two footmen?”
She mentally reviewed the words independent of his leonine stare.
“You’d make me a virtual prisoner of the house.” Indignation gave her some purchase against the fog in her brain and the lassitude in her limbs. “I spent eight years bowing and scraping to Greendale, denied my liberty. I shall not exchange his domineering possessiveness for another man’s, not ever.”
That sounded convincingly clearheaded, and was even true.
“I seek to keep you alive,” he countered, running his finger around the rim of her glass. He had her drink cradled in his lap, resting against his falls. She looked away as he continued to speak.
“You agreed to join this household, so you should consider yourself bound by my dictates. I’m not suggesting we lock you in a tower for the rest of your days, only that you exercise some reasonable caution for the nonce.”
Reason was not her friend, and never had been. But you’ll be a countess, Gillian. A countess…
“You make it sound so simple, to be again attended everywhere as if I were a child of Lucy’s years.”
“You make it sound so awful, to have the company of brawny fellows—or me—dedicated to your welfare when you’re out-of-doors. Can you detest me so much as all that?”
His lips quirked, as if he’d made a jest, but those eyes of his were watchful and serious, and Gilly realized abruptly she’d swum into even deeper waters than she’d feared.
“You are good-looking,” she said, her tone resentful. “Too good-looking and good-smelling and good-sounding, and now you’ve become nigh brawny yourself. I cannot think straight when you’re giving orders and duking about, and when you turn up charming and reasonable, I am even more befuddled.”
“Is to duke a verb now?”
“Don’t distract me, and yes, when you’re underfoot, there’s duking going on.”
“And some countessing too, I suspect.” His finger stopped moving round and round on the glass. “For the next little while, indulge me, Gilly. Let me give you my arm when we’re out of doors, let the footmen carry your basket when you’re in the garden. I’ll assign you the handsomest of the lot, my only aim to keep you safe from harm.”
She nibbled her lip, hating him for being so believable.
“Please, love…I wasn’t here to keep Helene safe. I wasn’t here to look after my own son when he fell ill. Let me protect you.”
And listening to him, listening to the low, utterly serious words, it was easy to forget how closely protection could resemble possession. He believed what he was saying, and he had a point: Gilly was under his roof. Her choices were to leave, or to obey him.
She could leave later, when Lucy was in better spirits, when memories of captivity didn’t have the duke seeing threats in every shadow.
For now—only for now—she’d obey him, and only in this matter of permitting an escort out of doors.
Only for now.
The countess was not a sedentary detainee, but Christian had hardly expected she would be. He would come in from his morning ride to find her dragging two bleary-eyed footmen all over the gardens, even as the sun was peeping over the Downs. By late morning, she was on his arm as they made their outing with Lucy. She spent the afternoons on the back terraces or again in the gardens, embroidering, reading, tatting lace, or working at the social correspondence Christian delegated to her in such volume.
He decided to take pity on his footmen and joined her as she once again headed for an afternoon out-of-doors.
She set her basket at her feet and crossed her arms. “I thought George and John were to assist me.”
“Alas for you, you’ll have to make do with a mere duke,” he said, picking up her basket. “What are we about today, Gilly? Gardening, I see.” He winged his arm, and a martial gleam came into her eyes.
“I’m tending the graves.” She took his arm, looking pleased with her strategy.
“More transplanting, then?”
“Yes, though it’s too late for the lily of the valley to bloom.”
“There’s always next year.” Her tactics wouldn’t deter him. Graves were part of a soldier’s life, after all.
She marched along beside him in silence, but it was a beautiful summer day, and Christian was content simply to bear her company. He’d grown accustomed to looking out his window and seeing her in the gardens, to listening for her footsteps coming to fetch him to the nursery, to seeing her across the candlelight at the evening meal.
“Is somebody tending Greendale’s grave?” he asked.
“That is not my concern. He would not allow me to garden while married to him. I’m not about to turn my skill in that regard to his benefit in death.”
She wasn’t an unkind woman—far from it—but her antipathy toward her late spouse was intense to the point of puzzling Christian.
“By rights, you should have hated Helene,” he said, hoping to turn the subject. “She had much that might have been yours.”
“A tiara?” She stopped while Christian opened the gate to the family plots. “I had my title, little good it did me.”
“Helene had a young man for a husband, one who sought to indulge her at least initially, and who left her in peace when the marriage foundered. She had children, a boy and a girl each, she had many friends and gallants, she had tremendous wealth, and staff to wait on her hand and foot… She had every reason to live.”
His countess preceded him through the gate, and he was relieved she didn’t respond to his last observation, or to the puzzlement in his tone.
“I’ll take the blanket,” she said, holding out a hand. He passed it to her from the top of the basket and watched while she spread it out, not near the headstones, but near the wall, where a bed of irises was going dormant after blooming profusely earlier in the year. Their scent had comforted him on more than one long, quiet evening.
“We’re to separate those?”
“It’s early,” she said, “but yes. They’ll do better for setting down some roots before winter comes, and in autumn, the Holland bulbs will demand lifting and separating. You needn’t bother to help.”
“I brought riding gloves.” He dropped to the blanket beside her and passed her one of his gloves, then put up his left hand. She held out the glove, though he’d developed the knack of putting on his own over the past few weeks.
“Your hand looks better,” she said, working the glove over his fingers. “The nails are growing in, the fingers not so bent.”
“The hand wants use. It hurts to use it, it hurts if I don’t use it, but at least then it has some strength and flexibility.” He got his right glove on by himself, because she was regarding him with an entirely too thoughtful frown.
Her ladyship gestured with a hand spade. “You start on that end. I’ll start on this one. They’re likely choked most tightly up against the wall.”
He had a momentary vision of bloody bodies all jumbled together at the base of some Spanish town’s siege walls while a hot wind whipped across an arid plain and flies buzzed in a malevolent cloud.
The Forlorn Hope they’d been called, the volunteers who had led the charge when the guns had breached the walls. For those who survived, it was a good chance at a field promotion, which meant a raise in pay, but it was near-certain death as well.
Still, volunteers had never been in short supply, and they’d broken every siege Wellington had put them to.
“Christian?”
He stared down at the hand spade she held out to him. “Woolgathering.”
“Go gently. The roots are tender.”
He knelt up, the better to get at the tangled roots and leaves, and started working back against the old stone wall surrounding the family plots. The roots erupted from the ground, a twisted, gnarled puzzle that seemed to him in want of a few good swats with the sharp side of a shovel.
“You have to be patient,” she said. “Think of them as ailing, in need of tender care.”
He sat back, rows and rows of stretchers in his mind’s eye, the groaning of the dying in his ears alongside the silence of the dead and nearly dead. And the stench…
Why today? Why the hell did these ghosts have to walk today?
“Was Helene truly prostrate with grief?” The question was out, a means of keeping his morbid imagination from dwelling on battle horrors.
“I was here,” the countess said, setting a dirty white root aside and using her gloved fingers to pry at another. “She’d brought herself nearly to exhaustion fretting over Evan. Easterbrook was very concerned for her.”
“She nursed Evan herself?”
While Christian battled an ache in his fingers, Gilly tugged the root from the choke hold of its neighbors. “She hadn’t the patience, but she fretted nonetheless, looked in on him constantly, spent a great deal of time trying to write to you and ask you to come home.”
“I would have come.” He would have, had he not already been taken captive. Odd, how life could time tragedies for the most exquisite complement of sorrow.
“You would have,” the countess said, setting the second root aside. “Even Greendale didn’t grouse when I told him I was going to her. She didn’t know what to do, didn’t know how to cope.”
“Life hadn’t asked much of Helene to that point,” he said, seeing for the first time that Helene had been closer to childhood than adulthood when he’d married her. Not a woman with a great deal of personal fortitude, certainly not prepared to be a duchess.
And it wasn’t her fault, any more than captivity had been his.
“Helene excelled at being pampered and indulged, a disservice often inflicted on a young woman with abundant beauty.” The countess bent over the flower bed to get a better angle with her hand spade. “But when Evan didn’t rally, Helene blamed herself. In her mind, if she hadn’t sent you away, God would not have punished her by taking her child.”
“Remarkable, isn’t it, how we manufacture guilt to fit most any occasion? Everybody dies.”
She peered up at him over her shoulder. “You blame yourself.” She sat up and took off her gloves. “Oh, Christian…”
He stared straight ahead, seeing the dank, dark walls of the dungeon where he’d been held all those months.
“Girard explained my situation as a choice.” His own voice sounded far away, detached. “I could spare the lives of countless men by keeping my silence, but he promised assassins would see to the death of my wife and my heir did I keep my peace. He could describe the English countryside as if he’d ridden it himself, as if…” Christian frowned down at the tool in his hand. What was he supposed to do with it?
“And if you had told him what he wanted to know?”
“My men would die, and many others with them. Thousands.”
She made a sound of muted horror and wrapped an arm around his waist.
“My family was innocent,” he said. “I did not kill them. Girard’s threats were merely an obscene coincidence, and he stopped making them early in my captivity—they were simply one taunt among his arsenal of torments. I know that, but I should have been here. If I’d been here, Evan would not have taken a chill, or fallen ill, and Helene would not have done what she did.”
He recited his conclusion woodenly. He’d fashioned it in his mind weeks ago, when Easterbrook had first explained that both the duchess and the heir had died, and in Christian’s mind, the mea culpa had sounded smooth, like a catechism. Spoken aloud on a pretty summer day, the words had no sense, but were still somehow compelling.
“Helene was liberal in her use of laudanum,” Gilly said. “You know this. Think back, Your Grace. She threatened to use it on her wedding night.”
He regarded the unearthed irises in a growing pile on the countess’s blanket. Helene had used a little of the poppy on their wedding night, and been a relaxed bride as a result. He’d wondered why all nervous brides didn’t use the same trick.
“But if I had been here, I would have watched over the boy,” he said, and this was the demon that plagued him the worst. An adult woman could be trusted to look after her own interests, her own health, not so a toddling infant.
“You said yourself you were banished from the nursery.” Gilly rubbed the center of his back, where a cold tightness dwelled regardless of the pretty day. “The weather was not bitter, or even particularly damp. Evan was a healthy child, and his illness started with a simple sniffle.”
“Was he bled?”
“Helene said you disapproved of the practice, so no.”
That was something. Helene had respected his wishes and spared the child at least that horror. “And he was gone in a week?”
“One week, and Helene was wild in her grief, or perhaps her guilt, then she got word you’d been reported missing.”
“Only missing, not dead?” This mattered, though to a grieving mother, the distinction had likely been lost.
“Only missing. Marcus had leave to tell her in person, and he assured her every effort was being made to find you.”
“Then why in the bloody hell would she be so careless with her sleeping draughts? Why cast her life away like that?”
“You aren’t indifferent.”
She said it so solemnly, he had to turn his head and risk looking at her.
“Good God, of course I’m not indifferent! She was my wife, I loved her in my fashion, and while her death was ruled accidental, she herself committed the accidental misuse of the drug that took her life. That is nigh suicide, Gilly, recorded as accident only out of deference to her title, or perhaps to her daughter’s memory of her, and had I been here, it would not have happened.”
“Don’t do this.” She leaned into him, pressed her face to his arm, even as she kept her hand on his back. “Helene blamed herself for the child’s death, blamed herself for sending you away when there was no spare in the nursery. She howled with the anguish of it like a wounded animal, and it was no more her fault than it is yours. You said it yourself: everyone dies. Everyone. Instead of cursing yourself for being taken captive, you must celebrate that you yet live.”
She shook him by his arm; then she rose to her knees and wrapped both arms around his shoulders.
“Helene had choices,” she went on, “and if she chose to take her life, there is nothing anybody can do about it. You have a daughter, you will have more children, you will laugh and love and live. You will.”
“Do you think she killed herself?”
The countess sat back down on her heels, and Christian was both relieved to be free of her embrace and disoriented, like those irises, dug up, cut loose, all their tender parts exposed to the sunlight.
“Only Helene knows what her intentions were, but she said nothing to me about wanting to die. It’s easy, with one dose taken, to become confused about how much was consumed and when. By low light, many drops can look like a few, days blend, memories blend. Laudanum deaths are legion among the ill.”
“If she did…take her own life…” Christian set his hand spade down. “I was missing, soon to be presumed dead, her son was gone… If she did, I cannot blame her.”
Dirt was everywhere—on his gloves, his breeches, on Gilly’s blanket, and the same dirt that grew flowers provided a final resting place for the mortal remains of people who had been loved while they’d walked the earth.
“You must not blame yourself, either, Christian. Never once did Helene express any sentiment reproaching you for being taken captive. Never.”
They sat in silence for long minutes before the countess yanked up one more root, tossed it on the pile, and sat back again. “I owe you an apology,” she said.
“For?”
“Thinking you were indifferent to your losses.”
“You have your own guilt to manage in that regard,” he said, but he felt too hollow to explain what he meant. Hollow and curiously light. “We all grieve differently.”
She nodded and passed him the little spade, and it seemed to Christian the roots came up more easily after that.
Gilly forced herself to focus on the gardening, but her insides were in an angry, disbelieving uproar.
What kind of mind would make a man choose between his family on the one hand and his comrades in arms on the other? Between home and hearth, and the men under his command?
And it was no credit to this Girard person that he’d ceased his taunts early in Christian’s captivity. The seed of self-castigation had been planted in fertile soil and allowed to flourish at the expense of Christian’s sanity.
Watching Christian tear at the hapless irises, Gilly realized the duke had tried to take his own life, or at least contemplated it. She’d had her concerns, particularly when she’d walked in on him with a razor in his hand, a wild look in his blue eyes.
