Christmas with the Duchess (30 page)

Emma was taken aback by Julia’s violence, but she said calmly, “Forgive me, Julia. I have been looking for you everywhere. I knew you must return to your room to dress for dinner. I wanted to speak with you privately.”

Julia regained control of herself. She knew that her hair and dress were disheveled, and she knew that the duchess had noticed. Turning on her heel, she strode to her dressing table. Seating herself, she reached for her hairbrush, a pretty ivory-handled object that had been a wedding gift from her mother. “Really?” she said coolly. “What about?”

“I’ve spoken to your mother,” Emma said quietly. “She told me you are thinking of leaving your husband.”

Julia half turned in her seat, her eyes glittering with hatred. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? You’d like it if Nicky and I were divorced. Then you could have him all to yourself!”

“No,” Emma said firmly. “Absolutely not. I assure you, any feelings I may have had for your husband vanished in a puff of smoke when I learned how he’s been treating you. I am on your side, Julia. I would like to help you.”

“You would like to help yourself to my husband!” Julia accused her.

Emma sighed. “No, Julia. A thousand times, no.”

“How he has been treating me,” Julia muttered, turning away. She laughed bitterly, pulling her hairbrush through her hair with rough, jerky movements. “You know perfectly well he’s never touched me. I’m sure it was all your doing. You would not marry him yourself, but you could not bear to think of him touching his own wife. Did you make him promise to be faithful to you? Is that it?”

Emma sat stunned. “What?” she said faintly. “What are you saying, Julia?”

“He’s never touched me,” Julia hissed. “My marriage has never been consummated, and it’s all because of you! How dare you sit there telling me you’re on my side!”

Emma was on her feet. “What do you mean he’s never touched you?” she cried in disbelief. “You told your mother he never let you alone! You described a living nightmare!”

“What was I supposed to tell her?” Julia said sullenly. “That my husband doesn’t want me? That he is in love with another woman? A woman
ten years older
than he?”

Emma shook her head. “That is not true.”

“You were with him all morning, ma’am! Do you deny it?”

“There is nothing going on between your husband and me, Julia,” Emma said firmly. “That was finished long before he married you. I am shocked—
shocked
—to hear that your marriage has not been consummated.”

“Shocked, and saddened, I am sure,” Julia said sarcastically. “Pardon me, ma’am, if I don’t believe a word you say! Now, if you don’t mind, I should like to dress for dinner.”

“Yes, of course,” Emma said mechanically. “I beg your pardon for the intrusion.”

Julia loudly summoned her maid, and Emma hastily left the room. Reeling from the unpleasant scene with Julia, she went back to her sitting room. She sat down at the pianoforte and began fingering the keys for relief, her thoughts racing.

“There you are,” Colin said, breezing in. “I heard your noise. Shall we go down together? What do you think of my cravat this evening? My man is trying something new.”

Emma closed the instrument with a bang. Within moments, she had poured out the whole story to her twin brother.

Colin was obliged to sit down. “Not consummated?” he repeated in astonishment. “Well, there is one bright feature, at least. They will require no divorce. They can simply have the marriage annulled.”

“Julia blames me. She thinks Nicholas is in love with me, that he loves me still. Do you think it might be true?” Emma asked him quietly. “He told me he loved me last year, of course, but I never took him seriously! But if he’s been in love with me all this time—I mean,
really
in love with me! How he must be suffering.”

“And how you long to
relieve
his suffering,” Colin drawled.

“But I cannot,” Emma whispered. “Even if the marriage were to be annulled, I—I could not
marry
him.”

“Why not?”

“I am as good as thirty-one,” she explained. “He is twenty-one. When I am forty, he’ll be thirty. And when he is forty, I shall be—”

“Don’t say it! I forbid you.”

“And, of course I have my children to think about,” she said.

“They need a father figure, don’t they?” Colin said.

“No,” said Emma. “They would hate it. At my age, a woman should live for her children, shouldn’t she?”

“Oh, absolutely,” Colin agreed. “You are Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi. You cannot marry again. You should kill yourself for even thinking of it.”

“I am
not
thinking of it,” Emma said firmly. “Oh, Colin! How could he let me believe that he’d brutalized Julia? The things I said to him—!”

“Did he admit it?”

“He didn’t deny it.”

“But that’s not the same thing,” said Colin. “Aunt Harriet taught me that.”

“But why would he let me go on thinking it? Why didn’t he tell me the truth?”

Colin pronounced himself equally bewildered. “You’ll have to ask him for an explanation.
I
never let people think the worst of me.”

Emma shook her head. “I don’t think I should talk to him. It’s too dangerous.”

“Dangerous for whom? You or him?
Are
you in love with him, Emma?”

“Of course not.” Emma rose from the pianoforte. “I don’t know. In any case, it doesn’t matter. Even if I loved him, I could not marry him. It would be cruel to excite his expectations.”

“It would be cruel to let him think you do not care for him,” said Colin.

“I never said I cared for him,” she said sharply. “I—I am not indifferent to him, but that is not the same thing, you know. It’s hopeless. Oh, why cannot he be a normal, selfish, heartless, promiscuous man?”

“Ah,” said Colin, “but, then you would be indifferent to him.”

Emma frowned at him. “I think your cravat looks ridiculously complicated,” she said petulantly. “It looks like it took you all afternoon.”

“Thank you,” he said, pleased. “I like it, too.”

At dinner, Charles Palafox was seated to Emma’s immediate right. The conversation turned on the planned visit to Wingate. “The duke has proposed that we make the excursion on Sunday, the seventeenth. Would that be convenient for your grace? If not, I fear it will have to be postponed until after Christmas Week.”

Emma could think of no excuse, and on the day after the hunt took place, a large party, comprising three vehicles, set off for Wingate at an early hour. Mr. Palafox gallantly drove his fiancée and her mother in his smart black-lacquered phaeton. Colin drove his nephew Grey in his curricle. Princess Elke, Julia, and Augusta Fitzroy were to go on horseback with the duke and Major von Schroeder. Emma and Flavia Fitzroy were just settling into the duchess’s barouche, when Nicholas appeared.

“Forgive my tardiness,” he apologized, climbing into the barouche and taking his place opposite the two females.

Emma could not meet his eyes, but she said pleasantly enough, “I did not think you were coming with us, my lord. We nearly left without you.”

“Julia will not be happy until she has seen the place,” Nicholas answered. “She fears it may be grander than Camford Park.”

“Oh, dear,” Flavia said in dismay. “This makes us a party of thirteen! That is an unlucky number,” she explained.

Nicholas smiled at his sister-in-law. “You forgot to factor in the servants, Cousin Flavia.”

The plainest of the Fitzroy sisters blinked at him. “My lord?”

“They are people, after all,” he told her. “Let’s see. The duchess has her driver and her postilions. Three or four grooms are with us on horseback. Lord Colin has his tiger with him, as does Mr. Palafox. I’d say we are at least a party of twenty, and that is a safe, comfortable number, is it not?”

“I suppose so,” Flavia said uncertainly.

Wingate was a spacious, though not palatial, mansion of pale gray stone, built in the Palladian style that had been so much in vogue at the turn of the century. The housekeeper greeted them at the door, and they spent the better part of two hours going over the rooms of the house while the servants drove on to a pretty stone pavilion some distance from the house to lay out the picnic the duke’s party would be enjoying later.

In her determination not to be alone with Nicholas, even for a second, Emma kept her arm firmly linked with Flavia’s, but he outflanked her as they stopped to admire the view of the lake from the tall french windows of the morning room.

“Cousin Flavia,” he called from the doorway. “I believe your mother is looking for you. You will find her in the drawing room.”

Emma resigned herself to the confrontation she had been dreading.

“You have been avoiding me,” he accused her, the moment they were alone.

“Not at all.”

“I waited two hours for you yesterday at the stables,” he said.

“The stables?” she repeated, frowning. “Oh! Your riding lessons.” She laughed nervously. “I assumed it was understood, my lord, I-I cannot be your teacher.”

Again, he blocked her way. “You laid some heavy charges at my door,” he said. “I was so shocked, I could not defend myself. Let me do so now.”

“There is no need,” she said quickly. “I have spoken to Julia.”

“To Julia!” Anger kindled in his eyes.

“She has told me the truth, Nicholas.”

His voice rasped as he tried to keep from shouting. “The truth? That I am some rapacious animal? Julia is incapable of speaking the truth. The truth so rarely serves her purpose, you see.”

“She told me that your marriage has not been consummated.”

“Ah,” he said, after a brief pause. “She has recanted her lies, then? Well! I am all astonishment.”

“So am I!” said Emma. “How could you let me think you were capable of—of hurting Julia on purpose?”

He raked his fingers through his hair. “I could not believe you said it to me! I thought—I thought you knew me better than that, Emma.”

“I did not want to think ill of you,” cried Emma. “It broke my heart. But you seemed to confirm it. Julia
is
unhappy, and you
are
the cause, but it is not what I thought. Oh, Nicholas, what do you think you are playing at with that poor girl? She is near the breaking point. She is the sort of person who withers without affection, or, at least, admiration.”

“Always, you take
her
side,” he complained. “She
tricked
me into marrying her. Can you not understand how that makes me feel? She has no right to expect marital bliss. It was always my intention to annul the marriage.”

Emma stared at him. “Your intention! What do you mean?”

“Just because she caught me in a trap doesn’t mean I can’t climb out of it!” he said. “If her victory is hollow, she has no one to blame for it, but herself. As long as this farce of a marriage remains unconsummated, it is no marriage at all. In the eyes of the law, I am still a bachelor, and she is yet a spinster.”

Emma shook her head in disbelief. “Are you mad?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You mean to marry again?”

“Perhaps.”

“But of course you must marry again,” she said impatiently. “It is your duty to provide Camford with an heir.”

Nicholas shrugged. “My cousin, Lady Catherine, is married. Her son could be my heir.”

She looked at him in amazement. “You would be content to let someone else’s son inherit
your
title and
your
estate?”

“I don’t really regard it as
my
title or
my
estate, you know,” he replied. “I never did. I’m just a sort of placeholder. It seems fitting to me that Catherine’s son should inherit. I don’t suppose I will ever marry again. There won’t be any need to. Once my nephew is born, I think I’ll return to the sea.”

“Of course,” she said faintly. “Your first love.”

“If I could build myself a yacht, I’d like to sail around the world. I don’t suppose,” he went on, “that
you
would be interested in sailing around the world with me? I still love you, Emma. I always will.”

The simplicity of his words took her breath away.

“Oh, Nicholas,” she said sadly.

“I know you don’t want to marry again,” he said quickly. “I’m not asking you to. I just want to be with you. I should prefer to be your husband, of course, but I believe I could be content with something—with something less.”

Emma shook her head. “I’m afraid I’m not a good sailor,” she said, trying to make a joke. “I get horribly queasy just crossing the Channel. If Paris were not on the other side, I shouldn’t bother at all.”

“We could live in Paris, then,” he said quickly. “I don’t care. As long as I am with you, I don’t care about anything else. I have tried to forget you, Emma. I thought I was close to success, but the moment I saw you again, I knew it was no use. I have never felt like this about anyone in the whole course of my life.”

Emma felt tears gathering behind the bridge of her nose. “I’m sorry, Nicholas.”

Without another word, he dragged her over to the window, paying no attention to her protests. Taking her face in his hands, he forced her to look at him. Sunlight fell directly on her face.

“What do you think you’re doing?” she complained.

“I’m going to ask you a question. I want to see your eyes when you answer. Do you love me, Emma? Do you feel anything for me? Am I a fool?”

“That is three questions.”

“Here’s a fourth,” he said roughly, giving her a shake. “Is this a game to you? Because it is life and death to me.”

“I am sorry, Nicholas,” she said. “I cannot return your feelings. And I have a lover already,” she added. “I don’t need another.”

“No, you don’t,” he said, frowning. His hands released her face. “You have no lover.”

“Of course I do,” she insisted. “I always have a lover.”

“Who? Palafox?”

“Certainly not,” she said sharply.