The Duke of Snow and Apples (30 page)

Charlotte took a deep breath, brought up her shoulders, and looked up at him. He could see the struggle in her eyes, the quiver she couldn’t keep out of her lip. She couldn’t be the little obedient doll anymore—he’d seen to that. Instead, she looked like the woman on the edge of a precipice, uncertain of where to go next.

“Of course,” she said.

…

I will write. Fool. Fool!
Charlotte rose with the other women after the viscountess declared they’d picked over their desserts long enough.
But who is the fool—him or me?

In the blink of an eye, in the slide of a ring onto a finger, she’d gone from being
beloved
to an
obligation
.

After she’d spoken with Sylvia, and repaired things, somewhat, she’d thought she could make a try with Frederick, Duke Snowmont. If she wasn’t quite ready to take the leap, she could at least nudge the gap with her foot, test the width, send a few metaphorical pebbles down to see how deep it yawned between them.

Instead, she’d spent dinner seated across from a man who could barely bring himself to look at her. How the tables had turned. To a footman, dallying with a Pure Blooded woman was an adventure, a forbidden sweet. To a duke with rapidly brightening prospects, how paltry she seemed in comparison.
Too late
, she thought, with spiteful glee.
You’re stuck with me
.

Although only in name
. Already, he planned to decamp to Neigent Hill and leave her behind to wait for his infrequent letters. He hadn’t even told her he was leaving. Was that how their marriage would be? She in the country, he in town? Letters and the occasional kiss on the cheek at Firemass and an heir or two when ducal obligation called for it? Or would he even go so far? After all, he’d avoided his ducal responsibilities for a decade.

As the other women headed toward the drawing-room, she undid the clasp on her bracelet. When Sylvia passed her, eyes questioning, Charlotte claimed it had broken, as an excuse to return to her room early. She couldn’t bear to sit in that drawing room now, with all those intrusive looks. Frederick was a duke now, but Charlotte hadn’t been caught with a duke. She’d been caught with a footman. Underfolk. And she doubted any of the guests would be able to forget that.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Frederick woke the next morning to the defiant
clang
of the housemaid’s dustpan against his grate.

“Sorry, m’lord,” said the girl, a barely veiled sneer in her voice. She made a show of trying to clean faster, which only resulted in more noise.

“Think nothing of it, Peg.” Peggy flushed bright red, as if surprised Frederick had remembered her name, after four years of service together.

He rolled out of bed with a sigh. As far as the Seven Dowagers’ staff believed (Mr. Gelvers being the glaring exception), Frederick Snow was no more.

From the awkward politeness that greeted him at the breakfast table later that morning, the Dowagers and their guests hadn’t completely reconciled him as Lord Snowmont. Truth was, however, Frederick didn’t feel like Lord Snowmont either.

By midmorning, Ben and Gregory finished packing Sir Bertram’s and Littiger’s luggage into their carriage. What little Frederick could take away from Charmant Park had already been packed, back when he’d considered flight his only option.

Despite Lady Balrumple’s objections, Sir Bertram insisted on an early departure, and Frederick agreed. The quicker he took up the reins as duke and resolved the issue of his Entailment, the sooner he could wed Charlotte, give her the explanation she deserved, and hope that would be enough to repair the division between them.

The Seven Dowagers—or, the Four of the Seven currently in residence—assembled to give him a formal farewell in the foyer. Lady Balrumple stood at their head, imperious in diamonds and ice-blue silk. She always dressed like a queen, but in this instance, her attire suggested the monarch of a nation about seven times larger and wealthier than normal. Snowflakes, embroidered in charmed white thread and tiny crystal beads, cascaded down her skirts. Appropriately, she jerked out a hand as stiff and cold as an icicle for Frederick to kiss.

“You
will
return, Frederick,” said Lady Balrumple. “We Diamonds do not enjoy being crossed.”

“We’re diamonds again?” Lady Enshaw sighed. “When we did decide that? I must have forgotten.”

“You haven’t,” said Lady Alderley. “You’re only confusing the boy, Hildy.”

Lady Balrumple swelled with outrage, the magicked snowfall across her bodice threatening to avalanche. “He
should
be confused. It’s the least we can do, for Charlotte’s sake.”

“I thought Charlotte was in love with the fellow.” Lady Enshaw blinked owlishly as Frederick bent to kiss her hand next.

“Love! Bah! Charlotte is a
child
,” Lady Balrumple said.

At that moment, the woman in question entered the foyer at a sedate pace, her face as bland and unwelcoming as a closed door.

“You’ll bring me back a present, won’t you?” she said, her voice deceptively careless. “Something large, I should think. And ridiculously expensive. A tiara wouldn’t go amiss.”

Frederick raised his eyebrows, an idea coalescing in his mind. “On the subject of hideously expensive jewels, your great-aunt is the authority. I’m sure if you put your heads together, you can come up with something bankrupting and gorgeous. Then send me a sylph—and I’ll get it. Anything you like.”

“
Anything
?” asked Lady Balrumple, her eyes widening and glittering until they resembled jewels themselves.

Lady Enshaw nudged Lady Alderley. “He’s good.”

“You are too generous,” said Charlotte, surprised, yet more wary than pleased. Although she refused to meet his eyes, she softened and held out the object she’d been holding.

It emerged, russet and ripe in her hands—one of the last of the autumn apples. A bit wizened, perhaps, with a small bruise near the bottom. Such an unassuming fruit, yet capable of such drastic changes in fate.

“I shall treasure it always.”

She wrinkled her nose. “I was rather hoping you’d eat it. Neigent Hill is hours away and for some reason the Dowagers’ cook claims that all the food she’d packed for your trip spoiled overnight. I had to steal this while she wasn’t looking.”

Frederick threw back his head and laughed.

…

The carriage rumbled and jounced down the country road, Frederick seated on one side, Sir Bertram and Littiger on the other. They stared in passive unison at Frederick, until he began to wonder if, at some point during their ride, they had chosen a sport and had made their first play as a team, leaving solitary Frederick to make the next move. Silence choked the air between them like thick steam.

Silence and Gray.

Questions left unanswered in Frederick’s mind grew and spread like weeds. First Ellie had fallen to the Gray, then Littiger. Then Charlotte. Somehow that time line didn’t seem right. Ellie had not changed so swiftly—hell, it had taken months for the Gray in his mother to progress to that point.

With rising frustration, Frederick
wished
there was someone like him, someone who could teach him the use of his powers, establish some cause and effect. It gnawed at him, this uncertainty in himself. He could fight the Gray, but he could never truly be free until he discovered what caused it in the first place.

“Have you stayed mostly in the country, Charles? Or do you venture to town?” he asked.

“Littiger has a seat in the Council of Blooded,” Sir Bertram said. “Although now, I suppose, it is your seat.”

Frederick restrained a shiver. Despite the salamander-bottles under their feet, he felt incapable of staying warm while sitting so close to Sir Bertram. He felt a strange reluctance to look at Sir Bertram through the eyes of his magic. Perhaps it was a remnant of his childhood dislike, or perhaps because Sir Bertram’s own glances in his direction were so searching and invasive that he didn’t want to reveal his powers under such constant scrutiny.

He turned again to Littiger. “How have you fared under the Entailment?”

“As well as can be expected,” Sir Bertram said.

“Why doesn’t Charles answer for himself?”

Sir Bertram stared at him, his gem-green eyes glittering. Frederick felt an absurd chill snake up his spine, as though he were being measured and counted by unfriendly hands.

The silence accumulated in the carriage until it finally squeezed a response out of the heretofore silent Littiger. “Bertram knows a fair bit more than I do about these sorts of things.”

“There’s no reason to explain yourself to him,” Sir Bertram said.

No reason? Where have I heard that before?
Frederick’s eyes flickered from Sir Bertram to Littiger and back again. Answers to the hundreds of thousands of questions he had asked himself over the years began to filter into his brain, but he had no proof. No certainty. No possible way of knowing for sure.

“Why should he?” Frederick asked. He leaned forward. The smothering confines of the carriage proved an ally in that, short of leaping out of the moving vehicle, Littiger could no longer avoid direct conversation. “You were the duke. It should have been your responsibility.”

“
You
were the duke,” Sir Bertram snapped, “whose responsibilities you abandoned. Someone had to stay behind and pick up the pieces.”

“And how many pieces did you end up with?”

Sir Bertram’s mouth shut with a snap, but a strange twitch in his left eye pulsed in a frantic rhythm.

Frederick leaned back against the seats and turned his gaze back out the window, as his estate came into view over the rise, a tall, four-square building of red brick, topped with corner turrets.

Neigent Hill was one of his family’s smaller estates, but one that Frederick had never visited. As far as he knew, it had been closed for years, with nothing but a skeleton staff to maintain it. In his first year of service at Charmant Park, he’d lived in terror that the new duke might take up residence so close by, but as the years passed, he realized that even if anyone came to Neigent Hill, none of its inhabitants would think to look at yet another footman sitting on the back of a carriage.

A group of people stood in a formal line in front of the entrance as Frederick, Sir Bertram and Littiger descended from the carriage, seemingly impervious to the icy winds tugging their skirts and wigs.

His
servants now. Seven footmen, he counted, in black coats trimmed with gold braid, and dashing red waistcoats. A surprisingly young housekeeper whose brown hair was brushed back beneath a white cap, and a butler wearing the ageless, universal butlerian expression of self-importance meant to convey, “If
I
am grand enough to hold my head this high, only imagine the magnificence of my employers!”

At the moment, Frederick, bedraggled and harassed from his trip, had no hope of living up to his butler’s standards. He longed for privacy to examine his own thoughts, and perhaps a fire to sit by.

Sir Bertram seemed to have the same idea. Once inside, after making the proper introductions of the new master to servants too well trained to evince any trace of surprise, he suggested they part ways until dinner.

“Tired, hungry men make for poor discussion,” he said. The surprises of the last few days seemed to have rubbed the cool urbanity of his veneer thin. He moved with sharp twitches and starts like a spooked horse, his fingers clenching and unclenching. Frederick needed no further persuasion.

“Will you be wanting a bath?” Edward asked, after Frederick had retired to his chamber—a room that, while clean and recently aired, boasted the colorless wallpaper and faded curtains that spoke of long abandonment.

“I’m not sure.”

“It’s no trouble, Your Grace.”

Frederick offered up a wry smile. “You forget. I know firsthand just how much trouble drawing a bath takes.”

Edward coughed, but he couldn’t disguise the subtle upward tilt of his lips. “Then I might have another idea for you.”

“Oh?”

“I could give you a more thorough tour of Neigent Hill. I’ve never been here myself, but Maiden knows my father told me enough about it.”

“And how did Old Grubs become an expert?”

His valet’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. “Your father spent every summer of his youth here, Your Grace. It’s where he met your mother.”

That caught Frederick by surprise, but then, he’d never learned a great deal about his father, from his mother anyway. Her grief had always seemed to sit in her throat like a great black stone, so that every scrap of information about his sire had to be pried out from under it. His father had black hair like him. His father was a good man. His father preferred Blue Flutter tea instead of Green Leaf.

He is gone
, Frederick remembered his mother saying. He could almost feel the warm grip of her hands on his face, how her eyes had focused on his own.
You are enough for me. Let us speak of happier things.
So a man was erased from memory. His old haunts abandoned. His name silenced.

Was this what true love was? Something so brief and so painful every memory of and connection to it had to be burned out of existence? Frederick tensed with a shock of sympathy, a likeness to his mother he’d never recognized before.
Neither of us were strong in the face of pain. We both chose to hide rather than face it.

He turned to Edward, sloughing off his weariness like an old cloak. Now that he had returned to his old life, he deserved to know of his past. All of it. “Show me.”

With sleet pounding against the windows and jagged ice sprites capering outdoors, Frederick’s valet confined their tour to the inside. Frederick saw the nursery, a room flanked by wide windows, papered in bright yellow. The schoolroom, with dusty slates still bearing the pale outlines of practiced spell-letters. His father’s study, a warm, narrow room lined with bookshelves and an enormous slab of a desk crouched at the end, underneath a tall window swathed in heavy drapes.

The skeleton staff, strengthened by an influx of new hired men and women, had performed an admirable job rendering Neigent Hill habitable again. The air smelled of lemon polish and beeswax, salamanders scampered in every hearth, and banisters gleamed as if they’d never spent so much as a day without the familiar touch of a human hand. Still, even the most ingenious of housekeepers couldn’t disguise the large, dark squares across the wallpaper where portraits had once hung.

Edward caught him staring. “They are still here, Your Grace.”

“What are?”

“Your father’s portraits. My father always told me that the fourth Duke of Snowmont never liked keeping too many pictures of himself at his primary residence. He didn’t have the streak of vanity his ancestors had, so he kept most of them here at Neigent Hill. They were stored away at Mr. Littiger’s request last month. Perhaps you should see them.”

Frederick nodded, and his valet led him up several staircases, past the guest rooms, past even the cramped chambers where the servants slept, to the attic—a dead landscape of dull, stacked shapes draped in wrinkled sheets and dust.

His hand brushed one of the sheets, and he slowly fisted his hand in the fabric. He didn’t have to do this. He could leave his father to molder in an attic. He didn’t even remember the man. Lord Phineas Cleighmore, Fourth Duke of Snowmont, had never existed in Frederick’s mind as anything but a name. He meant nothing to him.

But he meant something to my mother.
He seized another fistful of cloth and pulled.

The sheet fell away in a choking cloud of dust, revealing a tall, life-size portrait of young man posed in a hunting scene, a wind-rifle in one hand, a loyal gnome at his feet, and an airy scenting-sylph perched on one shoulder. Long, lean, with straight black hair braided into a queue in the antiquated style before the Blight, he met the viewer with a bold stare instead of glancing off into the distance.

“Your father must have been about your age in this picture,” Edward said.

The artist knew his craft—he’d caught the gleam in the elder Snowmont’s hair, the subtle shading of the delicate, near-transparent air spirit. He and his father shared the same slightly off-kilter nose, the same jawline, the same…

Frederick sucked in a gulp of dust-clogged air. Eyes of a piercing blue—the recipe of the pigment no doubt a closely guarded secret—almost seemed to glow within the painting, demanding the focus of the viewer.
No.