The Captive (5 page)

She beamed at him with every bit as much guileless goodwill as his staff showed, and Christian had to look away. He resumed his slouch against the mantel, where the fire’s warmth could work its magic on the permanent ache he’d absorbed from the cold, damp stones of the Château’s lower reaches.

“You mentioned an inquest, my lady.” He’d already forgotten her name again, though it would come to him when he was trying to recall where he’d put his pocket watch.

She dabbed butter on his scone and considered the effect, much the way some women held their embroidery up, the better to admire it, then added a bit more butter.

“I was told an inquest was a formality, Lord Greendale being a peer. Nonetheless, it was unpleasant in the extreme, Your Grace, and were it not for the assistance of my barrister, I shudder to consider the consequences. Jam?”

He’d missed most of what she said, because his attention was fixed on the fourth finger of her left hand, which sported a slightly odd bend to the second joint.

“You’re not wearing a ring.” Perhaps her rings no longer fit. His certainly didn’t.

“I’m no longer married.”

Neither was he. The thought still caught him by surprise and unsettled him, which would have pleased Helene. “I gather your union wasn’t happy?”

“No, it was not, hence the unpleasantness at the inquest. Your scone.” She brought him the plate with its pastry, the closest she’d come to him, close enough for two things to register in his awareness.

She was physically small. He’d gathered that in some casual way when she’d stormed his desk and swept past Meems, who boasted a certain dignified height.
How
small she was surprised him.

She seemed larger when she was in motion, her hands moving, her voice crisp and demanding. Maybe that was part of what kept her twitching about, making noise—the need to cast a larger shadow than the Creator had given her.

The second fact to register as she held up his scone to him was that it took resolve on her part even to approach him. Her hands were steady, and her eyes held no particular emotion, none at all.

How often had Christian labored to the limit of his soul for a taste of indifference?

And yet, Lady Greendale carried a wonderfully feminine scent, the sort of scent that would get her noticed in close quarters rather than ignored. Her fragrance was sweet and floral, though neither cloying nor faint, but also held a hint of the exotic, if not the daring.

No one and nothing had smelled good at the Château, excepting possibly, in the opinion of the cats, Girard’s damned lavender.

Christian took the scone from her. “My thanks.”

“You weren’t always so ducal,” she said, stepping back.

“Ducal, am I?” He was exhausted and unable to sleep; he no longer registered things like hunger or thirst, and he could barely write his own name legibly. Pity the peerage if those attributes were now ducal.

“All the silences, the hauteur, the brooding glances. You do them very convincingly. I hope you don’t plan to approach your daughter like this.”

She was casting that big shadow again, instructing him from the superior height of her familiarity with a child Christian did not know as well as he should. “I will deal with Lucy as I see fit, and so will you.”

He half sought an argument with his small invader, but she merely resumed her seat on the sofa and tore off a bit of orange peel.

Then munched on it—on the orange
peel
—as casually as if she were a prisoner bent on avoiding scurvy.

“You call your daughter Lucy. Her mother wouldn’t allow nicknames. She was Lady Lucille to all and sundry, even me.”

“She liked to be called Lucy when she was younger.” He had no idea from whence that assurance came, but he trusted it. The girl was his firstborn, after all. For the early years of Lucy’s life her parents had had no heir to distract them from their only baby.

“Then I shall call her Lucy too.” She smiled at him, not the fatuous, beaming-idiot smile he saw so often, but something softer and more personal, more inward.

A door slammed down the hall, and Christian nearly dropped his damned scone right on the carpet and vaulted behind the sofa.

“Oh, do come sit.” She rose, took him by his left wrist, and tugged him to the sofa, releasing his hand as quickly as she’d seized it. The riot of reactions that caused had him setting his plate down with an audible racket.

God in heaven, what had he got himself into?

Gilly declined Mercia’s offer of immediate hospitality, took her leave on a silent prayer she’d done the right thing for her young cousin, and repaired to the Greendale town house.

Her London residence—her former London residence—was a comfortable, even opulent town house, but every room reeked of old Greendale’s cigars, and his effects were everywhere. Humidors, bootjacks, snuffboxes, and riding crops littered the premises like so much scent from a prowling tomcat.

She would miss none of it, and neither did she make any effort to organize or pack away Greendale’s personal property. Let Marcus deal with the lot, and may he have the joy of it.

Gilly departed from the town house the next morning, trying to dredge up some pang of loss at leaving one of her marital homes, the staff, anyone…in the end, she stooped to pet a black-and-white house cat, but the beast tried to bite her as she scratched its chin.

She wanted to swat the wretched feline into next week—Greendale would have kicked it into the street—but she patted its coarse head and climbed into her coach.

When she arrived at Mercia’s town house—mansion, more like—she was surprised to find him at breakfast in his library.

“Your Grace hasn’t slept.” Not that Gilly had slept much, either.

“A tea tray, Lady Greendale?” He gave the butler a pointed look before his arctic gaze settled back on Gilly.

“No, thank you, Your Grace.” The butler hovered, despite Gilly’s demurrer, which would not do. “It’s Meems, isn’t it? Perhaps you’d be good enough to attend me in the family parlor in twenty minutes or so, Meems? And I’ll need to speak with His Grace’s housekeeper as well.”

The butler bowed, his face expressionless, and withdrew while Gilly appropriated a chair across from the duke’s enormous desk.

“One should begin as one intends to go on.” She offered Mercia a smile, and got exactly nothing in return. His expression suggested English was no longer his first language, and he had to mentally translate all communication—words, gestures, everything—into some system known only to him.

He would not appreciate displays of compassion—Gilly never had herself—so she made none, though at his wedding, he’d been a much sunnier gentleman; also likely a much healthier gentleman.

“One should, indeed, begin as one intends to go on.” His plate held half a buttered scone, nothing more, though the library was redolent with the scents of ham and bacon.

“You truly do stay up all night, don’t you?”

“I do not sleep much at any hour. Today, when I might have napped the morning through, I must away to the tailors, lest my court attire embarrass those who behold me in it.”

His own embarrassment was apparently of no moment.

“You dread this outing.” And that was puzzling, because lazing about the tailor’s was supposed to be as much gentlemanly fun as hanging about at Tatt’s or Jackson’s.

“I most assuredly do not look forward to being poked and turned and handled like so much puppetry. Here.” He pushed a daunting stack of papers across his desk at her. “You will politely decline these invitations. Pressing matters require my presence at the ducal seat, et cetera.”

“You have no secretary?”

“He had the great good fortune to marry well in my absence. Were I not serving King and Country, I would no doubt have prevented such insubordination.”

Was he
joking
? Complaining? As he tore off a small bite of scone, Gilly had no way to tell.

“You’ll hire another, though?”

He chewed his bite of scone while Gilly waited for an answer and wished she hadn’t been so hasty in declining a reprise of breakfast. The bacon smelled divine, and that scone looked as light as summer clouds.

“Hiring an amanuensis, my lady, would involve running an advertisement, or notifying the agencies, wouldn’t it? And that would require lingering here in Town, and
that
would require accepting at a minimum the invitations extended by the other ducal households, and
that
I am unwilling to do.”

His voice, always pitched softly, dropped even more as his scold continued.

He was not her husband, to scold her for no reason. This fact somehow got tangled up with Gilly’s longing for the bacon she’d declined, with the lingering smart to her finger from the cat’s bad behavior, and with years of sleepless nights.

“Your mood leaves something to be desired, Your Grace.” And in lieu of bacon, Gilly would not mind being served an apology for that state of affairs.

He paused with another small bite of scone halfway to his mouth. Greendale would have been on his third scone by now, crumbs everywhere, butter streaking his chins, and that realization only made Gilly more irritable.

“I beg my lady’s pardon.”

“Don’t do that with me.” Gilly got to her feet, and braced her hands on the desk, as if she might appropriate some of the furniture’s bulk and weight. “I spent eight years married to a man who thought his every flatulence and eructation should be greeted with awe, when in truth he was a cretinous excuse for a human. I understand that you’re tired and cranky, but so am I. If you beg my pardon, you do it sincerely, not with exquisite condescension that implies I have the wits of a small child.”

Mercia’s chewing slowed, then came to a halt.

Oh,
feathers
. This had happened twice already since Greendale’s death. Twice before, some furious creature with no sense had taken control of Gilly’s mouth and flown into a rage over nothing. The first time had been with Mr. Stoneleigh after the inquest; the second time had been when the vicar had come round after the funeral, apple cordial on his breath, inquiring after Gilly’s spirits.

Mercia had committed no such blunder, and yet, Gilly wished Meems would return with the damned tray.

“I’m sorry,” she said, straightening. “I don’t sleep well, and the cat ripped my glove, and I wanted bacon—” He’d think her daft, and not be far wrong.

Mercia patted his lips with his serviette and rose, bracing himself on his hands as Gilly had. He leaned close enough that Gilly could smell sandalwood over the ambient scent of breakfast.

“Can you ply a needle?”

“Of course.” Hadn’t he heard her outburst? She’d used the word
flatulence
, for pity’s sake, and Mercia was a
duke
.

He leaned farther over the desk, only inches between his nose and hers. “Can you sew with sufficient skill to spare me a trip to the tailor’s?”

Where was Meems? Where were her wits? “If you want me to alter an existing set of clothes, I can do that, provided I have some time.”

He stayed right where he was, allowing Gilly to note that His Grace had a white scar across one earlobe.

“I am due at Carlton House the day after tomorrow for a private audience at two of the clock.”

The day after tomorrow was…soon. “Well, then, yes. You put on what you intend to wear, inside out, and I can take in the seams.”

And the whole time they’d had this exchange, his expression had been as unreadable as a sphinx’s. And yet, Mercia was more concerned about dodging this outing to the tailor’s than he was about Gilly’s rudeness.

“I’m more than competent with a needle, Your Grace.” She’d had to be, as few clothes as Greendale had permitted her.

“I’ll meet you in my sitting room in an hour. The maids will help you get settled.”

He left her just like that. A slight bow, and he was gone, the remains of his scone forgotten on the desk. Gilly shifted around to his side of the desk, sat in his chair, and started to pour herself a cup of tea, only to find the pot was filled with hot water, not tea.

An unpeeled orange sat near a plate of crispy bacon and an artful pile of translucent slices of ham.

No eggs, no toast, no kippers.

Eccentric, then. Lucy’s poor papa had become eccentric.

Gilly ate the orange and half the bacon, which was every bit as good as bacon could be, and spent twenty minutes each with the housekeeper and the butler explaining that His Grace would be removing to the country early for the summer. Next she organized the invitations by date and collected the household sewing kit.

When Gilly knocked on the door to the ducal sitting room, she heard nothing granting her permission to enter, so she pushed the door open a few inches.

“Your Grace?”

“I said come in.”

“I didn’t hear you. You might consider speaking above a whisper, you know. My goodness, you have dropped some weight.”

“In the neighborhood of four stone.”

He stood near his dressing-room door, barefoot in white satin knee breeches and a white linen shirt, both of which were turned inside out. The shirt was cut to billow gracefully about his arms and looked merely very loose, but the breeches were in danger of falling off his person.

What had those dratted French done to him?

“Whatever you do, please do not allow your pins to pierce my flesh.” He spoke with an odd, measured cadence, as if the same words, spoken by a lesser man, might have escaped through a clenched jaw.

Did tailors have so little understanding of their thimbles?

“I will not stick you,” she said, unwilling to bait him when he was so obviously dreading the exercise. “We’ll start with your breeches, because they’re the more complicated.”

He paced off to the window, his shirt billowing, one hand on the waistband of his breeches. “Now? Don’t you want to measure something, or consult your pattern cards first?”

“Now,” she said, slipping a pincushion onto her wrist. “All you need do is stand still.” She dropped to her knees and patted the rug before her, as if she were coaxing a puppy out from under the sofa. Even though it was early summer, he had a fire in his hearth, and Gilly was grateful for the warmth.

He crossed the room and fisted and flexed both hands, like a pianist preparing for an opening cadenza, or a prizefighter about to step into the ring and put up his fives. Gilly slipped two fingers under the hem of the right leg of his breeches, her knuckles sliding along the skin of his bony male knee.

His Grace inhaled as if she’d jabbed him with a pin.

“What do you recall of Lucy?” she asked, because conversation was all she could offer him by way of distraction.

“Very little. She seemed a bright child, but Helene was not well pleased to have produced a girl, at first. I rather liked my daughter. She was a baby, nothing more, but she was my baby.”

Had Helene ever called the child “my daughter” or “my baby”? The girl, Lady Lucille, her ladyship, our firstborn—Helene had used any of those—but not “my daughter.” And Gilly was certain Helene had never admitted to liking the child.

Though Gilly liked the girl—had liked her ferociously at first sight and still did.

“Who chose her name?” Gilly pinched up the outside seam of the breeches, appalled at how much extra material there was. Did charging around after French infantry cause a man to drop nigh sixty pounds?

“I chose her name, for Lucifer, bringer of light. Her mother hated it.” His Grace reported a dispatch from the marital past rather than a regret or a boast.

“But Helene doted on the girl.” Rather than turn him, which would require touching the duke or ordering him about, Gilly scooted around him on the floor.

“That came later, and I am convinced Helene’s attention to Lucy was mostly because Helene was jealous of the baby.”

“Jealous of her own child?” Gilly rose on her knees to gather the seam over his bony hip. At his sides, his hands flexed again.

“I took to stopping by the nursery at odd times during the day. Lucy was a jolly child, and I enjoyed her company. Helene got wind of—
what
are you doing?”

“Taking in the waistband, lest your breeches come down when you bow before your sovereign.” She slipped her finger inside his waistband and gathered a substantial tuck of fabric.

“I appreciate that my clothing should fit, but must you—?”

“Done,” she said, withdrawing her hand. “We’ll do the other side now. Helene objected to the attention you showed your daughter?” And what topic should she throw at him next, because an abundance of fabric needed to be taken in.

“Not objected, exactly. But she informed me my interest in the child was unseemly. A daughter’s upbringing was her mother’s province, and I was not to make a nuisance of myself. By that time Helene was carrying again, and I humored her.”

“Most of us humored Helene,” Gilly said around a half-dozen pins, though she’d loved her cousin, even if Gilly had been thrust at Lord Greendale while Helene had become a duchess.

“Will this take much longer?”

“Not if you hold still. I told Meems you’d be removing to Severn. He said he hasn’t heard from the house steward there for several months. Mrs. Magnus suspects foul play.”

She started up the second outside seam, pondering Helene’s version of Lucy’s upbringing. Helene had claimed Mercia had lost interest in Lucy, not that he’d been shooed from the nursery. Somehow, Gilly could not see anyone, not even Helene, shooing this man anywhere.

But then, she couldn’t see him in a nursery either, much less dandling a baby on his bony knees.

To take in the second side of his waistband, she rose and gathered the material as she had the first side, her fingers inside the waistband, next to his shirt.

Up close, he was still solid, for all the weight he’d lost. He stood motionless, not even breathing, and she soon had his breeches done, sporting pins all along his outside seams.

“Now you change breeches,” she said, stepping back. “You remove these carefully so as not to disturb the pins. We cut the seams open, sew them up as they’ve been pinned, and they’ll fit more closely. Leave your shirttails out all around when you come back.”

He stalked off to his dressing room—where was his valet, and why couldn’t that worthy tend to this little exercise in sartorial expedience?

The shirt was more complicated, because taking it in required Gilly to stand directly next to His Grace as she pinned and tucked. She positioned him with his side to the hearth, his hand extended so his fingers rested on the mantel.

Across his shoulders, the garment fit well enough. On the side where Gilly worked, the duke obligingly kept his hand outstretched. On the other side, he was back to opening and closing his fist in a slow, unhappy rhythm.