A Duchess to Remember (16 page)

Oh, confound it! She wasn’t developing a tendre for him, was she? Physical attraction was one thing; she’d be lost if she started fancying herself in love with the Duke of Ashburn.

Resolutely, she turned her thoughts back to the reason she’d accepted this perilous invitation. Jonathon’s papers were here somewhere, waiting for her. When might she have a chance to speak with Ashburn alone? When could she begin the search?

Would he and Lady Arden chatter on about nothing forever? Cecily’s impatience built and built, until she felt like a volcano, ready to hurl rocks and steam and lava in every direction.

Ashburn regarded her with a degree of amused understanding that made her want to hit him. “Perhaps if you ladies are not too fatigued by the journey, I might conduct you on a tour of the house.”

He glanced toward the magnificent vista that spread like a jeweled tapestry before them. “Or there are some pretty rambles if you are feeling more energetic.”

Lady Arden smiled. “I have letters to write, dear boy.” A large sapphire flashed as she flicked her fingertips in a shooing motion. “But you young things ought to take advantage of the clear weather while you can. Run along, both of you. Just be sure to return before dark.”

This was Cecily’s chance. She was on her feet before Lady Arden finished her last sentence. “I should like to see the house, if you please, Your Grace. I hear you have a fine … porcelain collection.”

It was a safe bet, since almost every noble household had a fine porcelain collection.

“Indeed.” The smallest tic at the side of his mouth showed Ashburn’s appreciation of this particular gambit. “I believe there’s a nice little assortment of knickknacks somewhere.”

He bowed and waited for Cecily to precede him into the house.

“Your subtlety never fails to astonish me,” he murmured as they stepped through the long windows into the relative cool of the library. “This way.”

Without further explanation, he led her up a flight of stairs and along a corridor to a saloon papered in pale green silk damask. The walls were lined with cabinets full of exquisite, eggshell-thin porcelain.

Breathtaking. Quite simply … Cecily looked about her in wonder.

She had never been an aficionado of art or music, but porcelain, now … The delicate beauty, the shapes, the luster, the way the colors came vividly to life on that medium, had always fascinated her.

Here was a room she could spend days in. Or she might if she did not have a far more vital mission at this house than to dwell in artistic appreciation.

“A nice little assortment,”
she echoed, dryly ironic. “But you know I did not come away with you to look at porcelain.”

However, as usual, Ashburn missed nothing. He had caught her expression of surprised wonder. With a curious quirk to his lips that she now took to be his version of a full-blown smile, he said, “Nevertheless, I think you ought to spend some time here, if only to answer Lady Arden when she quizzes you about it.”

Ignoring her protest, Ashburn drew her hand through his arm and led her from one cabinet to the next.

His touch, his nearness, sent her senses careering. Her body went first hot, then cold. Her heart skipped and jumped in her chest.

Stop it!
She commanded her wayward self to fall in line with her reason. The mind, her cousin Xavier had always told her, was a more powerful instrument than the body. Why couldn’t hers seem to seize control?

Ashburn was about to pass by the largest cabinet in the room when she stopped him.

“What about this one?” She indicated it with a wave of her hand.

“Ah.” Ashburn remained silent for a time, while Cecily inspected the contents.

She immediately identified the service as Sèvres. Predominantly turquoise, the collection of plate showed a series of vignettes.

While she might appreciate the excellence of the artist’s technique and the sheer decadence of the gilt decoration, the ornate extravagance of this pattern was not to Cecily’s taste. The Chinese porcelain farther along better pleased her sense of harmony and restraint.

“This,” Ashburn said at last, “is my favorite part of the collection.”

She regarded him with a sinking feeling that had no business striking her at that moment. She had marked him as a man of great taste and discernment; certainly his appreciation for the rest of the collection in this room showed him to be so. Yet, this rather overdecorated set was the one he preferred?

Even if she were the greatest devotee of Sèvres, she could not think this service a superior example of that factory’s wares. She thought the subject rather banal, for one thing: a pair of lovers, all powdered and patched. They were clothed in the dress of a bygone age in shades of pearl gray, pink, and pale blue—a rather insipid combination, she thought.

Ashburn turned to her, and that faint glimmer of a smile was in his eyes again, taking the edge off her disapproval. “Your expression is an excellent mirror of your feelings, Lady Cecily. I am forced to defend my choice.”

“Not at all,” she said politely. “It is a very fine set.”

“But that is not the reason I like it.” He hunted in his waistcoat pocket, then produced a small key.

Cecily wondered why he kept that key with him rather than leaving it in the lock as he left the others. She watched Ashburn’s hands as he unlocked the cabinet and opened the glass doors. He wore no gloves. She became acutely aware of how large and strangely rugged those hands looked against the delicateness of the plate as he selected one and brought it out to show her.

His handling of the piece was dexterous and light and practiced, as if he did this often. She regarded him with renewed interest. She’d thought he cared only for steam engines and automatons and other innovations.

“Do you see the two lovers?” he said, tilting the plate so the sunlight did not glare from its surface.

How ridiculous that the mere mention of that word
lovers
from him should set her pulse fluttering madly. Trying to appear unconscious of what lay thick in the air between them, she nodded.

Cecily examined the brushwork with critical, reluctant appreciation. “They are beautifully executed.”

He gave an odd, almost embarrassed laugh. “They are my parents.”

Her gaze flew to his, her lips parting in surprise. For some reason she could not name, she flushed.

She looked again at the plate in his hands, then turned to stare with fascination at the rest of the set.

It was some moments before she could bring herself to speak. She sensed him next to her, heard his breathing, felt the warmth from his body. She even smelled him, an indescribable masculine scent of mingled horse leathers, shaving soap, wool, and something she thought might be his sun-warmed skin.

Oh, dear Lord, was she so weak that she was drawn to the way this man
smelled
? How utterly ridiculous!

Determined to master this awful jumble of emotions, Cecily focused her attention on the collection of vignettes, following the narrative as it progressed from one plate to the next.

“It is the tale of their courtship,” he murmured.

She nodded, for in those vignettes a saga of love lost and reclaimed unfolded as clearly as if it had been written in words.

Her throat seemed to close up. “They must have been very much in love.”

Her voice sounded unsteady. She didn’t know why the notion that Ashburn’s parents had known such passion and tenderness should unsettle her so much. That a collection of plates she’d immediately dismissed as prosaic could convey such a wealth and depth of emotion troubled her more than she could express.

Softly, Ashburn said, “Other men own plate commemorating the battles they’ve fought, the nations they’ve conquered, the trophies and honors they’ve won from their king. My father commissioned this. Because winning my mother was the crowning glory of his life.”

As he spoke those words to her, she felt a monumental shift inside herself. His parents had experienced something precious and oh, so rare. Theirs was a great love story, a story worthy of being immortalized in porcelain. Each piece spoke of hope and pursuit, surrender, separation.…

“This one,” Cecily said, pointing to the plate depicting a ship sailing away from shore, a small male figure on deck staring back toward land. “Where did he go?”

“My grandfather shipped Papa off to France. In the hope, I believe, that my father would forget his infatuation among the delights Paris had to offer.”

“And the next?”

He returned the plate he’d been holding to its stand. “Ah, the next shows my mother, boarding the packet to go after him.”

“Oh!” She laughed. “I think I should have liked your mama.”

“A most determined lady,” he agreed. His voice changed timbre. “Or so I believe.”

She looked up at him, a question in her eyes.

He didn’t meet her eye, but stared into the china cabinet, his attention far away. “My mother died in childbirth with me. My father soon followed her. They say he died of grief but that is not true. He succumbed to a deadly fever several months later.” He glanced down at her. “I am told he used to bring me here.”

Her reaction was barely a breath. “
Oh
…”

His lips twisted a little, as if the notion gave him an equal amount of pleasure and pain. She sensed he did not often show vulnerability to anyone, but this loss was too deep even for him to conceal.

Did he blame himself for his parents’ deaths? Such a reaction was not logical, but when was the heart ever governed by reason?

Almost without her volition, she laid her hand on his forearm and pressed it.

His arm seemed to grow rigid at her touch. She saw his jaw work once, twice. Then without fuss or ceremony, he laid his hand over hers, as if accepting her offering of comfort.

And Cecily felt a curious sense of peace in that silent gallery, though the current of excitement never entirely left her. She suspected it never would while she was in his presence; she almost grew accustomed to this sharp edge of anticipation whenever the Duke of Ashburn was near.

She sensed somehow that the feeling of peace was the more dangerous of the two.

He gestured. “Do you see the final one?”

Cecily looked at the larger piece he indicated. A spill jar this time. When he removed it from its niche and placed it in her hands, it was cool to the touch. She felt the weight of it, and saw that it was singular, not only in shape, but in subject as well. The painting included a third figure. A baby. A chubby, healthy babe cradled in his mother’s arms.

“You,” said Cecily.

Ashburn’s face was carefully blank, but she knew better than to trust his expressions by now. His eyes didn’t lie, she discovered. They’d darkened subtly, turning from that golden brown to a mysterious tortoiseshell. She saw sadness there. Of course he would feel sorrow for the parents who had loved so passionately and whose love he had never known.

She examined the brushwork on this piece and discovered that while the subject matter was the same, the style was distinct from the others, as if a different artist had painted it years after the rest of the service was complete.

In the painting, each parent had one arm thrown up in an expression of joyful welcome and wonder at the blessing of this small life.

“That was my father’s gift to me,” he said quietly. “The most valuable part of my inheritance, in fact.”

She turned the jar around to see what the cartouche on the other side of it depicted. A cherub with a harp, leaning one dimpled arm on the family escutcheon.

This design was repeated on the back of the other plates, she’d noticed that. But it seemed like an odd piece of prescience to show the solitary figure of a small boy with the family shield now firmly in his grasp. A responsibility that was his alone.

What must it have been like, to have grown up as Ashburn had, without even the memory of his loving mother and father? With no siblings, nor, she suspected, anyone who was truly his?

At least for the first six years of her life, she’d known what it was like to be cherished by doting parents. At least for ten years, she’d had Jon.

And later, her Westruther cousins had become as close to her as siblings. She did not know this for a fact, but she sensed Ashburn wasn’t particularly close to anyone.

She turned the spill jar once more, revolving it in her hands until the three glowing figures faced her again. She stared at it a moment longer, then carefully replaced it in the cabinet.

“Thank you for showing me,” she said. But she did not feel grateful, precisely. She felt … raw. As if it were her soul and not Ashburn’s that had been stripped bare with this new revelation.

Ashburn closed the glass doors of the cabinet and locked them, pocketing the key. He took a deep breath, then exhaled it and rubbed his hands together. “Now, let us attack those attics.”

Much as she’d longed to look for that incriminating letter, it seemed obscene to insist upon it now.

Instead, she lightly touched his arm again and said, “We do not have time enough to search before dinner. Why don’t you show me the rest of the collection while we’re here?”

Chapter Twelve

Later that evening, as he led Lady Cecily upstairs to the attics, Rand surprised himself by revising his former strategy.

He’d lured Lady Cecily Westruther to his home on false pretenses, allaying any qualms of conscience by telling himself he did it with the purest motives.

That justification no longer sat well with him.

Something had altered between them today. The strange elation he’d felt at having her so close had all but swamped the pain of talking about his parents. The mere touch of her hand had given him a solace he’d never expected to find.

Not only that, it had also given him hope.

She’d judged his mood so well that she’d given him precisely what he needed. Less would have indicated her disinterest; more would have embarrassed him. Could she truly be indifferent to him if in that moment she had provided what he didn’t even know he sought?