The Confessions of a Duchess (32 page)

How had he known?

She was sure that none of the people who knew about Hattie would have told Dexter about his daughter. Even if they disapproved of the secret Laura was keeping, they would never betray her or place Hattie’s future in jeopardy. Did someone else know the secret of Hattie’s parentage? Icy fear crept along Laura’s skin to think of it. Was someone watching and waiting, stirring up trouble, ready to expose the past? She could not bear to think of her daughter in such danger. But if no one had told Dexter, how could he have known?

She had never seen Dexter so angry. She had seen his fury, his disbelief and his pain etched so clearly on his face. It had shaken her to the soul because she knew he was a man who sought to protect others, not to harm them, and yet he had looked at her as though he wanted to hurt her as much as she had hurt him. She had been so afraid when she had seen the rawness of accusation in his eyes. Afraid of what he might do to her, afraid of what might happen to Hattie now that her father knew the truth.

Laura raised her head and stared through the window at the dark closing in outside.

How had she expected Dexter to feel? Shock must be the least of his emotions. She tried to imagine what it must be like for him to discover so suddenly and so shockingly that he must have fathered a child. It was impossible to guess the depth of his pain and betrayal.

She had hurt him badly, beyond forgiveness. The fact that she had done so for Hattie’s sake would not make Dexter’s pain any the less. She could only hope that she could explain it to him and make him understand.

The long case clock in the hall chimed the hour of five. Laura straightened her shoulders, stood up and smoothed her gown. She needed to change. She needed to send a note to Miles. And Hattie would be waiting for her to share nursery tea. She hoped she did not smell of brandy. Despite her distress, she had no desire to appear as one of the gin-swigging mothers of a Hogarth drawing.

She had less than an hour until Dexter would call. The clock ticked down the seconds and she felt full of panic. She had so little time and no idea at all what she was going to say.

LYDIA WAS ANXIOUS. She picked at her food and scanned the guests at Sir Montague’s dinner table for the twentieth time that evening even though she knew that her lover was not present. She had not seen him that day except for a brief moment when she had caught sight of him deep in conversation with another man at the pump rooms. He had looked through her, cut her dead as though she were of no importance, and Lydia had felt crushed even though she had told herself that it was all part of their secret. She tried to comfort herself with memories of the endearments and assurances he had heaped on her after they had made love the previous night at the masquerade ball, but now that memory distressed her, too. She wondered if she had run mad to allow herself to be seduced in the moonlight.

It had seemed so romantic at the time and she loved him so much that she had given herself to him with no thought for the consequences. But now for the first time she felt a chill. He had not said anything about meeting again. Only the warmth of the ring he had given her, as it rested between her breasts on its gold chain, gave her some reassurance.

She toyed with her iced fruit until her mother put out a hand and snatched the spoon from her grip. It fell onto the table with a tinkle that sounded loud in the sudden silence.

“Stop fidgeting!” Faye Cole’s whispered hiss seemed to echo from the walls.

“Really, Lyddy, what is wrong with you tonight? You are drooping like a wet lettuce!”

“There is nothing wrong, Mama,” Lydia said. Faye was particularly cross with her today, having witnessed her dance with her lover at the masquerade the night before. She had badgered and badgered Lydia for his name and when Lydia had pretended not to know what her mother was talking about, Faye had actually thrown a hairbrush at her. Fortunately it had missed but Lydia had known that her mother’s temper, always unreliable, was now on a knife’s edge.

“Then
smile!
” Faye hissed. “Smile and look as though you mean it or you will never catch a husband!” She accompanied the words with a rictus grin so wide Lydia thought it would not have looked out of place on the Guy on the bonfire.

Lady Elizabeth shot Lydia a sympathetic look across the table. Lady Elizabeth, Lydia thought bitterly, would never tolerate such treatment. She wished fiercely that she had the sort of spirit that had prompted the ladies of Fortune’s Folly to defy Sir Montague’s Dames’ Tax. Her parents had insisted that she come to Sir Montague’s house and accept his invitations, all in the interests of marrying her off, when in her own heart she wanted to be as rebellious as Lady Elizabeth. But there was still time…

She stood up and pushed back her chair. “Excuse me,” she said to the table in general. “I do not feel quite well.”

Faye looked up, astounded. “Lydia! Come back here! Come back, I say!” Lydia walked to the door with her mother’s scolding tones ringing in her ears. A footman opened the door for her and she walked through with a word of thanks and no backward glance. The passageway outside was empty of servants for Sir Montague kept as small a staff as he could in order to save money. The passage was cold because the door to the courtyard was open and Lydia could hear the faint sound of men’s voices talking.

As she drew closer, her evening slippers silent on the stone flags of the floor, the conversation ended and a man came through the doorway and into the shadowed passage.

Lydia stopped.

“It’s you!” she said. “Oh, where have you been? I have been wanting to see you all day—”

He was at her side in a single step, his hand grasping her arm tightly, silencing her.

“Hush! I am not supposed to be here.”

Lydia realized that he was dressed for the outdoors in a heavy black cloak. He smelled of fresh air and wood smoke. Her head spun at the scent of his skin and the memories it evoked of the previous night. The urgency in him held her quiet and excited her, too.

“But why not?” she whispered. “You live—”

This time he silenced her with a kiss. It was blissful. Her head spun all the more.

“Did you see anyone else?” he asked when he let her go. It seemed like an odd question to Lydia but she was feeling so distracted from the kiss that she barely questioned it.

“I thought I heard you talking to someone,” she confessed, “but I was not sure.” He kissed her again. This time she could feel relief in the way that he held her, before it gave way to a different kind of urgency.

“Come on,” he whispered. He pulled open a door and bundled her through. It was pitch-black but Lydia thought she could smell beeswax and silver polish.

“Where are we?” she asked, bewildered.

“In one of the storerooms.” She could hear a smile in his voice even though she could not see him in the dark. His hands were suddenly busy on the fastenings of her gown.

Lydia gasped.

“We can’t do it here!”

“Yes, we can.”

Lydia thought of her mother finishing her dessert in the dining room and felt a huge, wicked wave of defiance. She could be wild after all, she thought. It was easy to rebel.

“So we can,” she whispered.

“MR. ANSTRUTHER, YOUR
grace.”

It was precisely six o’clock when Carrington showed Dexter into the drawing room at The Old Palace. Laura had been trying to read a six-month-old copy of the
Ladies
Magazine
whilst she waited, but she might as well have been holding it upside down for all the sense it made, and in the end she had cast it aside with an exclamation of exasperation and had gone to look out of the window. It was already dark and the moon that had shone the previous night was obscured by cloud. The night felt gloomy and threatening. She had let the curtain fall back into place and turned for comfort to the glow of the fire, trying to warm herself before it.

Laura took a deep breath as she turned to face Dexter. She felt anxiety and dread in almost equal measure. The guilt gnawed at her, making her pulse pound and her head ache with tension. In the long moment whilst they waited for Carrington to close the door and leave them alone, she noted that Dexter was looking particularly elegant, as though he had made a special effort with his appearance that night. His linen was a pristine, perfect white, his pantaloons were without a wrinkle and his boots had a high polish. Something about the effort he had made with his immaculate attire combined with the unyielding expression in his eyes made Laura’s heart ache with loss.

“Will you take a glass of something with me, Mr. Anstruther?” she asked. She smiled wryly to think of her mother’s advice on the appropriate behavior of a duchess at a time like this.

“When your lover visits to discuss the illegitimate child you kept a secret from him,
offer him a glass of wine….”

That one had most definitely not been in the dowager duchess’s handbook.

“Thank you,” Dexter said.

Laura poured him a glass of wine and he took it, but then set it aside immediately as though it was of no interest to him. His entire attention was focused on Laura, silent, watchful, his stance speaking of tension and antagonism.

“Hattie is my daughter,” he said and it was a statement, not a question.

“Yes,” Laura said.

She saw something ease in his face at her words, as though, despite everything, he had expected her to deny it. She felt again the pang of guilt at the hurt she had caused him.

“I knew she must be as soon as I saw her,” Dexter said. His tone hardened. “Had you been deliberately keeping her from me so that I should not guess?”

“Not really,” Laura said. “I had no notion that you would recognize her.” She cleared her throat. “How did you know? I did not think that she resembled your family at all.” She remembered the moment in the long gallery when Hattie had glanced up at her in a way that had been exactly like Dexter. Resemblance was sometimes a matter of small gestures rather than appearance.

“She has something of my air of determination about her,” Dexter said. “And then there was this.”

He held out a little locket to her. Laura took it, her fingers slipping a little on the catch. Inside was a picture of a child whose likeness to Hattie was so sharp that it made her catch her breath.

“My half sister, Caro Wakefield, when she was five years old,” Dexter said dryly.

“You may have heard of her referred to as my father’s ward. That is a polite fiction to cover the fact that she is his illegitimate daughter and part of the Anstruther miscellany.”

“She has the same blue eyes as you,” Laura said. Her throat felt thick with tears.

Looking at the likeness, accepting for the first time that Hattie was part of a wider family, was an extraordinary feeling.

“Whereas Hattie’s are darker, I think. Hazel, like yours.” Laura looked up. They were talking so easily, so superficially, but beneath the surface she could sense all the pain and heartbreak and anger that lay between them. She felt cold through and through.

Dexter ran a hand through his hair, disordering it still further. “I can see that the timing fits,” he said. “In fact I am surprised that I did not think of it before. You had told me at the time—at Cole Court—that you and Charles were estranged. But then a year or so later I heard that you had had a child and I thought…” He shrugged, his tone tipped with ice. “I thought it was just another lie that you had spun me.”

“It was not,” Laura said.

Just another lie…

She felt so miserable.

“No. I realize that now. Hattie’s resemblance to Caro puts her parentage beyond doubt.” Dexter looked at her. “Caro’s looks come from the Anstruther side of the family.

My brother Roly also has that coloring. The fair hair and blue eyes are from my mother’s side.”

“I should have thought,” Laura said. She hesitated. “Hattie did not resemble you. So I assumed…”

“That I would never know?” There was such hostility in his Dexter’s tone that Laura felt as though her heart was shriveling up to hear it.

“I suppose so.”

“You did not intend ever to tell me?” The latent fury in his voice pinned her down.

“No.”

She felt the accusation in his silence.

“Why should I tell you?” Laura knew she sounded defensive. “Charles was still alive when Hattie was born. Everyone assumed she was his child and I was not going to suggest anything to the contrary. Think of the scandal if the truth of her parentage had come out, Dexter! It would have caused nothing but trouble.”

“Still so concerned to preserve your reputation?” Dexter sounded scathing. He paced across the room, the pent-up fury latent in every line of his body. “I know it has been your prime concern all along.”

“You are mistaken,” Laura snapped. “It was Hattie I have sought to protect all along.

That was why I kept the secret. Do you think I wanted her branded a bastard, growing up under the shadow of her mother’s disgrace?
That
was why I never told you.” Dexter recoiled from her, dislike flaring in his eyes. “You thought that I would broadcast your so-called disgrace to the world and condemn our daughter to ruin?” His tone flayed her. “What sort of man do you think I am?”

“I never thought that you would do it on purpose,” Laura said. She spread her hands appealingly. This was all so much worse than she had imagined. The stark disgust on Dexter’s face made her feel guilty and miserable for the choices she had made. “I was afraid,” she said simply. “Scandal has a way of leaching out and damaging those who least deserve it, no matter how one tries to keep it secret.” She made a desperate gesture. “You know that it would take only the slightest whisper that Hattie was illegitimate to cause a huge scandal.”

“I can understand why you did not tell me whilst Charles was alive,” Dexter said.

“But to keep the secret after his death—”

“What else was I to do?” Laura burst out. “Did you imagine I would calmly write to remind you of our night together and inform you that you had a two-year-old daughter?

Besides,” she said, turning away from him, “I knew your opinion of me. I thought you would doubt that Hattie was your child and then I would have put her in danger all for nothing.”