The Duke's Disaster (R) (6 page)

This disclosure was supposed to help their marital situation? “I am a disaster now, though still not quite a tragedy?”

“You are my wife.”

Anselm left, closing the door silently behind him. Thea heard him moving about his adjoining chambers as she changed out of her riding attire and restored order to her hair. As she put herself to rights, she reflected on her husband, and how she had spent weeks in his company, weeks observing him, really, and still she knew him not at all.

* * *

“You married yesterday.” James Heckendorn, Baron Deardorff, handed Noah a drink. James, as always, was the picture of blond, blue-eyed gentlemanly decorum, while Noah’s hair was probably sticking out in all directions. “And yet you present yourself in my library today, two hot hours in the saddle away from your bride?”

“An hour and a half.” Noah took the drink and passed it under his nose.

James poured half a finger into his own glass, probably for the sake of appearances. “To marital bliss.” He lifted his glass.

Noah lifted his glass as well, a duke being incapable of wholly discarding his manners. “You’re sincere.”

“I am married to
your
sister,” James observed. “Patience will come directly here to seek me when she returns from her shopping, towing
your
sister-in-law with her, so, no, when I toast marital bliss, I am not being the least facetious.”

“You and Patience are getting on well enough?” Noah knew they were, for Patience was the most misnamed creature on earth. If she were unhappy, her brother would have long learned of it.

“I think you’re at last to be an uncle,” James said, studying his drink. “She hasn’t said, but the signs are there.”

“Signs?”

“You know.” James’s smile was bashful. “A tenderness about the…” He gestured to his chest. “It’s been some weeks since Patience was indisposed, she naps at odd times, and has declined bacon at breakfast.”

“She is either breeding or ill.” Patience adored a crisp slice of bacon. “Congratulations, I suppose. Your mother will no doubt be pleased.”

“I am pleased,” James said with quiet ferocity. “You marry, congratulating yourself on a good, solid match, and then you hum along for a few years, and before you know it, the good, solid match has turned into something altogether
more
. I married Patience thinking we’d suit, but I want to give her children because she’s the best mother my children could have.”

“Impending fatherhood is making a thespian of you.” Noah set down his mostly full glass. “Matrimony has made a fool of me.”

“It’s only been a day since the wedding, Anselm. How could you bugger up an institution that’s been around for thousands of years in only a day?”

“You assume I’m the party at fault?”

“I do,” James said without a hint of hesitation. “You’re the party who rode to my doorstep in the heat of summer, leaving your new bride out in Kent to fritter away the day.”

Noah paced to the window, turning his back on James and his confounded fraternal smile. “My new bride came to me in less than perfect condition.”

“She’s not a twit who just put up her hair, Anselm. Of course she won’t be without a few quirks.”

“It wasn’t a quirk she chose to give to some other man, James.” Though Noah didn’t think Thea had given away her heart, if that mattered.

James took up the place beside Noah at the window. “Despite old wives’ tales, there’s no real way to tell. Patience didn’t bleed, but I refuse to believe she wasn’t pure.”

Not what a brother wanted to hear.

“Wise of you.” Outside the window, two common blue butterflies went flitting around a hedge of honeysuckle. No sooner would both light beside each other, than one would flutter to a different flower. “I wouldn’t want to have to beat you senseless, and Thea would not understand why I came home sporting bruised knuckles. My duchess made sure I knew of her amatory experience when it was too late to seek an annulment.”

“It’s never too late to seek an annulment. Old Kimball set his second wife aside after three years.”

“Because she was barren, and he the last of his line, and they did not suit,” Noah said. “But the man’s a laughingstock, while his barren wife is up to, what, three little darlings with her subsequent spouse?”

Noah aspired to be the first Winters male who was not, at any point, a laughingstock. A humble ambition, but dear to him.

“You are castigating yourself because you consider your wife to be used goods,” James decided. “This is like you, Noah, but where’s the point?”

“That’s just it.” The butterflies abandoned their honeysuckle and flew off toward the roses. “There is no point. Unless I want to make a complete fool of myself, I will keep my mouth shut and content myself with my used goods. I will get sons on her, I will parade her about as my duchess, and I will show her every public courtesy.”

“Because,” James said, “you are a damned saint who never put a foot wrong, never poached on another’s preserves, never misstepped, and couldn’t find a way to undo it in time to prevent harm to another—you alone of all grown men?”

Noah felt an urge to shoot at butterflies, for this very point had intruded on his ride before he’d trotted past the foot of the Wellspring driveway.

“James, you are tiresomely unsympathetic. I hardly recall why I permitted you to marry my beloved sister, and I fear for the happiness of my unborn niece or nephew.”

Noah also feared a little for Thea’s happiness, though he could not have said why such a wayward sympathy should plague him. His own happiness had long ago surrendered to duty, and to satisfaction in an obligation competently executed.

“Allow me to be practical as well as unsympathetic,” James said, opening the window. “My wife has developed an opinion regarding the suitability of your bride.”

The breeze that came in was warm and fragrant—like Thea, damn it.

“You allow this folly of freely expressed uxorial opinions?”

“Give it a few years.” James patted his arm. “We’ll see who is permitted to hold opinions in your household, Anselm. But as to Patience’s views on your bride, she liked Lady Thea very much, and said you’d chosen far more appropriately than she expected you to.”

Allowing a friend to marry one’s sister had distinct disadvantages. “Of course she liked Thea—Thea has been a companion. Thea knows better than any woman how to be agreeable.”

Though she could take Noah to task on the steps of his own home, which had pleased him marvelously.

“Do you know to whom your Thea was a companion before taking the post with Endmon’s tender flower?”

“I do not.” Noah set his drink back on the sideboard, while James was roundabouting toward some point which would be as uncomfortable as it was insightful.

“Thea’s first post was with Joanna Newcomer, dowager Viscountess Bransom.”

“Holy God. Old Besom herself. Papa used to threaten to sell me to her when I was lad, or leave me on her cook’s doorstep.”

“Lady Thea’s second post was with Annabelle Handley, Lady Bransom’s boon companion.”

“Besom and Bosom, according to Meech. A difficult pair, but what’s your point?”

“The difficult pair each left Lady Thea a small bequest and glowing references, as I’m sure you’re aware.”

“My solicitor is certainly aware.” The butterflies came dancing in the window, as if a baron’s private residence should remain open for their inspection. “What is your point, James?”

“I know of these little windfalls because Lady Thea put them in trust for Antoinette and told me I must send the bills for the shopping expeditions to her solicitor, who would pay for them out of those funds.”

Those bills would, of course, be sent to Noah, now that he knew about them.

“So Thea set the money aside for her sister. Decent of her.” Noah had yet to see to Lady Nonie’s settlements, but he would. Soon.

James wasn’t quite as tall as Noah, but he was lanky and fit, with a humming energy that matched Patience’s vivacious nature.

“You feel cheated,” James said, sauntering closer, “because your wife was honest enough to admit you weren’t her very first. Never mind she isn’t your first, or your hundred and first, likely. You will have your tantrums and pouts, as anybody who’s studied the Winters male line will attest.”

A low, telling blow.

“We’re dramatic fellows,” Noah allowed, “or the previous generation was. I am not storming about, threatening legal action, casting Thea into the street.” Though part of him wanted to—the part that wasn’t wondering which bounder had sampled Thea’s charms and then left a gently bred lady to fend entirely for herself.

“Your pride will not allow you the typical Winters histrionics,” James countered as a butterfly landed on his shoulder, opened and closed its wings twice, then flitted off toward the window. “But for one minute, Anselm, think about
her
pride. She didn’t have to say a thing, didn’t have to tell you, didn’t have to let on your suspicions—if your lust-clouded brain had any—were based in fact. And for God’s sake, man, she was an earl’s daughter
in
service
, a lamb to slaughter, considered fair game by most, and completely without protection. But she took the risk of telling you, because for all that, she is decent.”

The second butterfly danced a few inches from the end of Noah’s nose, then joined its mate, darting out the window.

Noah thought uncomfortably of young Corbett’s punishing grip on Thea’s arm.

“The trouble with you, James, is that you are decent and you can’t imagine a female scheming to get her hands on your title.”

Noah muttered this, knowing Thea had in no wise schemed to get her hands on anybody’s title. Marriage had made him daft, or the heat had addled his wits.

“Cut line,” James said, taking a sip from Noah’s glass. “To you, I’m a mere baron, but to some, there is no such thing as a
mere
title of any degree. You’re not thinking this through—which would be gratifying to behold were there not a lady involved. You won’t set Thea aside or you’d be at the solicitors, not wasting my best brandy. You know little about her, but you might like her, might find there’s much to respect about her, and a lapse in her past means little.”

Had it been a lapse or a torrid affair? A recent torrid affair?

Something
else
entirely?

“You want me to give her a chance,” Noah said, the very conclusion he’d been avoiding for the entire ride into Town. Their marriage deserved a chance.

Thea
deserved a chance.

“A little forbearance could only benefit you when you’re hell-bent on getting her with child,” James pointed out. “Have you ever tried to swive a woman you hate?”

“Interesting question, and I see your point. Why not swive a woman I’m vaguely disappointed in? It wouldn’t be the first time.”

The price Noah paid for limiting himself to mercenary unions was a touch of disappointment with the arrangement, and with himself. Perhaps he simply excelled at being disappointed.

The Duke of Disappointment, as it were.

“You are afraid,” James said as another soft, sweet breeze wafted through the room. “Not afraid that Thea’s worse than you fear, but that she’s much better than you think now, and you don’t want to be proven even happily wrong.”

James was noted for his cogent speeches in the Lords, the plaguey bastard.

“Isn’t that my contretemps in a nutshell?” Noah asked, crossing the room to close the window. “I can’t laugh off a lack of chastity in my duchess, not when it was concealed until only by risking my own reputation could I undo my mistake. Now I’m to befriend the woman who treated me thus, James? I wouldn’t know where or how to start.”

Just as Thea hadn’t known how or where to start with a disclosure of her past.

Damn and blast.

Noah’s journey home passed in the same preoccupied blur as had the earlier trip in from Kent.

James, damn his practical half-Dutch, sister-stealing hide, had a point: if Noah did not befriend his bride, he would make it that much more likely Thea eventually became his enemy.

Noah did not need enemies on any front; no man with a modicum of sense did.

James was a canny bastard too. He listened in the clubs, he read the papers, not merely the business pages, and—peculiar notion—he apparently
talked
with
his
wife
. Noah was not about to put his children in the middle of the domestic battles he himself had grown up with, and James had likely seen this.

Becoming friends with Thea was the logical course, except friendship with a woman was something Noah hadn’t experienced—not with a sister, not with a mistress, not with a friend’s wife, or with a neighbor. The undertaking would be awkward, at best.

Assuming Noah’s new wife was interested in having him for a friend.

Six

Absence was not making Thea’s heart grow fonder. Her spanking new spouse of one entire day had departed after luncheon, saying he had to run into Town on business, and would finish the afternoon on the third floor with his botanist.

The presuming man had kissed her cheek, lingeringly, and promised to see her at supper.

“He’s likely off to one of his lightskirts,” she muttered, putting aside the menus the housekeeper had obligingly left for her review. “He likes his spices, according to Mrs. Hurley. Spices, hah.”

Araminthea, you are being ridiculous.
In her head, she endured her late father’s most dire accusation, one typically followed by a cold silence so profound no self-respecting earl’s daughter would remain in the same room with it.

Thea was not ridiculous; she was frightened.

She had married into a family of scoundrels, and had she a male relation worth the name, this information would have been made known to her before she took the awful leap of matrimony. The leap into Noah Winters’s bed, assuming he still wanted her there when he returned from meeting with his solicitors and his mistress.

Mistresses.

Thea had known marriage to Anselm might result in some awkwardness—a lot of awkwardness—after the wedding night, but she hadn’t anticipated jealousy would complicate the emotional waters.

She tapped on a closed door, having no idea where on the vast third floor her spouse might be.

“
Willkommen
!”

Thea opened the door and peered around. “Mr. Erikson. What an interesting room.”

He smiled, pushing his glasses up his nose and gesturing broadly. “Come in please, and we keep the warm with us for my little darlings.”

“It is warm in here.” Thea closed the door behind her, assailed by the scents of rich earth, damp, and green growing things. “This is a conservatory?”

The ceiling and two walls were glass, though some of the top panes were angled out to create the slightest breeze.

“This is my laboratory, I think you would say.” Erikson untied a leather apron, his hands dirt stained. “I’m working on some crosses for His Grace, and up here, we have much light. Would you like tea, Duchess?”

What duch—Oh.

“Tea would be lovely.” Thea came a little farther into the room and sniffed at a peculiar white flower growing on a shiny green vine. “That smells like biscuits.”

“The vanilla orchid,” Erikson said, stoking up a small potbellied stove. “More accurate to say the biscuits smell like the flower.”

“I’ve never seen one before,” Thea marveled, taking another whiff. “And what’s this?”

Before the kettle was even whistling, Erikson was introducing her to each and every plant, explaining its properties and the challenges of cultivating it.

“Anselm wants to make vanilla?” she asked.

“The vanilla orchid is native to Mexico,” Erikson said. “It can be grown elsewhere, but one must know how to pollinate the flowers by hand to create the fruit. I suspect there are bees native to Mexico, or small birds and butterflies equipped to do the job naturally.”

The vanilla scent was delicious, both soothing and sweet. “Interesting. What else are you working on?”

Erickson showed Thea spices, medicinal plants from lands faraway, and a few that were just plain pretty or intoxicatingly fragrant. For others, Erikson could show her only sketches of the blooms.

“Not only you fine lords and ladies go to the ball,” he said. “My beauties also like to put on pretty gowns, though one can’t wear the finery always.”

“Has my husband traveled to all these far-off places”—Thea ran a finger down a soft white petal—“searching for such beauties?”

“Anselm has traveled.” Erikson passed her a plain cup of tea in a chipped white mug. “I travel more. I meet Anselm in America, when he came there for some silly lawsuit. All lawsuits are silly, though, no matter in which country.”

“Anselm traveled in America?” How had Thea not known this?

Erikson downed his tea at a swallow. “As I did, looking for the plants. The natives in all lands know their plants and the magic in them. The Indians know their plants, and I studied with them. You need sugar?”

Thea held out her cup until two lumps had been deposited therein. Erikson was charming, if lacking in polish or perfect English. She suspected his English could be perfect though, because he forgot to jumble up his word order when he waxed poetic about his beauties.

“Erikson.” Anselm’s voice sounded pleasantly from the doorway, though the draft he brought with him was cool. “You are to cultivate my flowers, not my duchess.”

“All beauties benefit from cultivation.” Erikson saluted Thea with a white quill pen. “Close the door, Duke. You let out the warmness, and you’ll give my babies a chill.”

“He’s not right in the head.” Anselm ambled into the room and took up a perch on a stool. He did, however, close the door behind him first. “The poor man thinks plants are people, or something like it.”

“I think they are alive and created by the same God as your arrogant self.” Erikson poured a third cup of tea, added sugar, and passed it to Anselm. “You claim no little worth by association with our Maker, so my plants must surely have His constant regard as well, for they don’t get up to naughty tricks like people do and He made them first.”

“I come here for sermons,” Anselm said to Thea. “These plants are very pious, you see, benefiting from Erikson’s sanctimony, or blasphemy, depending on your church.”

“It was a
garden
from which we fell,” Erikson began.

Anselm held up a hand. “Any luck with the witch hazel?”

Erikson was deftly deflected into an assessment of the conditions that might allow a North American medicinal plant to be grown locally.

Anselm set his teacup down when the botany lecture concluded. “Dear Wife, this has to be boring for you, and we’re keeping Erikson from his assignations with his flowers. Let’s have a proper tea in a proper location, shall we?”

“Of course.” Thea rose, happy to comply with His Grace’s
request
, however much it bore the scent of an order. “Thank you very much for the education and the tea, Mr. Erikson.”

“You must come visit us anytime.” Erikson smiled genially, reminding Thea that behind his glasses, his lectures, and his questionable accent, Erikson was a very handsome man.

“What do you think of our Benjamin Botanist?” Anselm asked as they gained the corridor.

Our
Benjamin. They were to be civil, then. “He’s possessed of a large and active brain,” Thea said, “and he’s happiest when among his beauties.”

“You don’t find him eccentric?”

Anselm was walking along beside her, but Thea had the sense he was matching his steps to her slower pace out of discipline, and they couldn’t be off the third floor soon enough to suit him.

“I think he’s passionate about his science,” she replied, “and if you’re bent on commercial horticulture, he’s a brilliant find. He said you met in America?”

“I was stuck there for nigh a year and a half while I sorted out some breach of contract and trade problems with people I thought were our business partners. It about drove me to Bedlam, to be separated from home and family like that, but one can’t trust a solicitor to deal effectively with a problem when one is nowhere in evidence to supervise.”

One probably could, but His Grace, the Duke of Anselm, would not.

“Eighteen months to settle a lawsuit must be an achievement,” Thea observed as they descended to the next floor. “Where are we going?”

“You didn’t tour the house today?”

“I was shown the public rooms and the working areas on the ground floor. You have a marvelous kitchen.”

“Cook has a marvelous kitchen. I have a marvelous exchequer, and a healthy appreciation for happy domestics. We’re on our way to the library.”

Did Anselm see himself only in terms of his healthy exchequer?

They traversed another winding staircase, made three turns, and went up a few steps to reach their destination—and Wellspring was one of Anselm’s smaller holdings.

“I don’t go in for formal tea very much,” Anselm said as he led Thea to a brocade sofa before which a tea service sat on a low table. “We’re in the country, after all. You toured the public rooms, and you discovered my eccentric botanist in the attics. What else did you do today?”

They were to be
very
civil.

“I visited Della.” Thea lifted toweling off a porcelain teapot painted all over with blue flowers. Antique Sevres, from the looks of it. “I reviewed menus and discussed the kitchen gardens with Cook, and went in search of this library for a book, but got lost twice instead.”

Anselm came down beside her with a sigh that might have been tired. “I’ll show you a map of the place. I loved getting lost here as a small boy.”

The duke had once, long ago, been a small boy. Intriguing notion. “Where did you get off to this afternoon?” Thea asked.

“Nipped into Town.” Anselm’s gaze was on Thea’s hands as she poured their tea. “Dropped in on James and Patience, but the ladies were out doing their part on Bond Street.”

“You rode two hours each way to drop in on people we saw at the wedding breakfast?” As soon as the question was out of her mouth, Thea wished it back. “I’m sorry.” She set her teacup down and rose. “I have no right to ask you that.”

“You don’t,” Anselm agreed, getting to his feet as well, “but when I’m in the saddle, I find it easier to think things through. Come have something to eat. Dinner won’t be for another two hours at least.”

So what was the duke thinking through, and had he also met with his solicitors?

“I’ve asked that after tonight we move dinner up,” Thea said. “I hope you don’t mind?”

“Of course not.” Anselm extended a hand to Thea, but when she thought he’d merely seat her again, he slipped his arm around her waist and drew her closer. “How is it you’ve been racketing around here all day, and you still smell so sweet?”

A husbandly question that went well beyond civilities.

“It’s the soap I use,” Thea said, her arms vining around his waist. “It lingers.”

“Wonderfully.” He bussed her cheek. “I am keeping you from your sustenance, and me from mine.”

“You’re hungry?” Thea slid away, and to her relief, Anselm let her go. What was he about, kissing her that way?

“Peckish. You?”

“The same.” She sat to assemble meat, cheese, and buttered bread on a plate, casting around desperately for a conversational gambit. “When did you acquire the idea of botany as a profitable venture?”

For every appearance said the Anselm finances prospered handily.

“My grandmother loved her gardens, and my grandfather kept a botanist on his staff for her. The plants became a hobby for them, though Grandfather also sold his excess inventory, and I developed it from there.”

Thea passed the duke a plate and started fixing her own. “Did your father share the same interest?”

“He was more of a Town man. Move over, Thea, and we’ll share a plate.”

She obliged, because to refuse her husband would seem standoffish, if not…cowardly.

They ate, but the silence grew and grew and grew some more.

Anselm set the empty plate aside, his long legs ranged beside hers, and sat back to regard her.

“Is something on your mind, Your Grace?” Thea asked, for her mind had become a hash of anxieties, fears, and the odd, stray hope.

Also a few regrets.

In response, Anselm gathered Thea’s hand in his and brought her fingers to his lips.

“I cannot sustain enough anger at you to make it convincing.” He sounded puzzled or perhaps relieved.

“A very small display will usually convince me,” Thea said. “You are entitled to your temper, in any case.”

His grip was warm, almost comforting.

“But if we’re both angry”—Anselm gave her back her hand—“can you imagine the eventual intimacies? I’ve thought about this for much of the day.”

Thea did not ask: Why would
I
be angry? Because in a small, defiant corner of her soul, she
was
angry, and at him, among others, not only at herself.

Though she had materially misrepresented herself to Anselm. There was that.

“Other couples struggle through significant differences,” she said.

“We’re not other couples.” Anselm rose and stood frowning down at her. He was an accomplished frowner, though he had cause to be. “We’ll have to make a go of this, or at least give it a good try.”

There he went, being
not
nice
again, though he probably didn’t even realize it.

“I’m not sure what to say.” Thea got to her feet, but the duke moved to assist her, and so she was right next to him without planning to be there. “One expects to try to make a go of one’s marriage, I hope.”

He searched her eyes for heaven knew what and touched one of the pearl earrings Thea had inherited from her mama.

“We’ll have to try particularly hard,” he said. “I’ll have to.”

“I don’t want that.” Thea moved away, unable to tolerate the resignation in his gaze. “I don’t want to be a chore for you, an obligation, a matter of self-discipline and soldiering on with your burdensome duty.”

“Perhaps you should have thought of that before your ill-timed announcement, Thea.”

For which she would never cease being tormented, apparently. “You would have had me
lie
to you?”

“You did lie to me, or you certainly allowed me to muddle along on the basis of a misrepresentation,” he shot back. “You simply confessed the lie at the most inopportune moment.”

“Right.” Thea’s lips compressed, and she knew,
knew
, she should keep her mouth shut. “And we will not speak of my past unless you’re bringing it up to toss at me like a dead cat when you’re feeling uncertain of your way in this marriage. I will take to wearing a scarlet sign around my neck: I am sorry. I am sorry,
I
am
sorry
, but apologizing is all I can do, Your Grace. I can’t change my past. I can’t unsay the things I’ve said. You set before me an impossible task, because your trust has been destroyed, and I don’t know how to win it back, or why I should take on such a labor of Sisyphus.”