The Duke's Wager (15 page)

But impose she had, she sighed, for here she had already caused a breach between Lady Amelia and the Marquis. This morning, at breakfast, they had hardly spoken to each other, and the conversation, such as it was, was carried solely by Lady Mary’s meanderings about “breakfasts she had known.”

And then there was St. John’s veiled comments about her own future. Could it be that he had discovered that Miss Bekins was indeed in bad financial straits and could not employ her? Was he even now disturbing himself as to what sort of position he could find her in its place? And honestly, she mused, his attitude lately, his increasingly familiar attitude, the easy endearments that slipped from his lips, the unavoidable admiring glances she had intercepted, these might all be part of the effect of any eligible nobleman, but they disturbed her and made her feel unsure of herself. For while she liked him well enough, and trusted him completely, she knew very well that there was no point in entertaining any warmer thoughts about his intentions. For when all was said and done…he was a titled nobleman of great wealth. She was an impecunious commoner, with no standing in any social world that she had yet encountered. And he was beloved to Amelia. While she was, in truth, only an imposter, landed on him by her uncle. No, she insisted to herself, it was time she moved on. But to where?

She was brooding on possibilities she might consider, ways in which she could win free without insulting his honor or hospitality, when she became aware of the fact that she was no longer alone in the wintry meadow. She looked up from the path she had been staring down at as she walked and saw a figure ahead of her, leaning negligently against a half fallen stile.

Oddly enough, her first thought was not one of fear, or horror, or panic, but rather one of amused annoyance. Must he always, the thought came unbidden, be capable of such dramatic appearances? For as if the frozen day itself were in league with him, at the moment she discovered him, a weak ray of sunshine broke through and illuminated him, in all his casual splendor, making an unlikely halo around the fair wind-touseled hair.

He leaned back, at ease, clad in dun-colored skin-tight buckskins, a scarf knotted carelessly about his neck, his dark gold coat accenting the fair complexion, his mobile lips drawn back to reveal even white teeth, and his lucent blue eyes now lit with real enjoyment.

“What?” he said in his distinctive whisper, “the maiden spies the dragon and she does not give a piercing shriek? Or take to her heels? Or swoon, with considerable grace, to the floor? Come, Regina, you disappoint me. Rather than losing your head with terror, you are looking absurdly put out. Petulant, I might say. But the look suits you. As indeed, what does not? You have grown, if possible, even fairer, here in the wilds of the countryside. The winds have not been unkind to you. Your nose does not show a red tip, your eyes do not water—what an extraordinary beauty it is that even the cold enhances. This inclement weather has only brought a rosy glow to your alabaster cheek, only shined your eyes till they sparkle like the sea on a turbulent day.”

She walked up to him, after that first moment of surprise, and said, almost before she was aware of it herself, “Can you not speak straight out? Must everything be couched in that sinister poetry you affect?”

He seemed, for one second, taken aback, and then he let out a genuine laugh, oddly pure in contrast to his hoarse voice. His eyes lit up to the shade of a summer’s day.

“Oh, you are not afraid of me any more! Here’s a new turn. You are so cosseted, so protected, so sure of yourself, that at last you are no longer afraid of me.” His eyes grew grave and he added, “But you should be, Regina, indeed you should be.”

She recognized that what he had said was true; no, she did not fear him here, and now. It was as if she had in some small, hidden part of herself been waiting for him to reappear. The thought of him had so often alternately both chilled and warmed her during the nights when she could not sleep, turning her stomach to ice but also changing her heartbeats to drumbeats. Somewhere here, in the reality of the dappled light of a cold country day, in a meadow, so close to her friends and protectors, she no longer feared him at all. Rather, she looked forward to their encounter.

“No, you are right. I don’t fear you here. For what can you do to me here?”

He laughed luxuriously.

“Oh my dear,” he said, “countless things, I assure you. I could signal to my henchman, who might be hiding in the brush, and toss you into my carriage, which might be secreted down the lane. For I have no honor, or very little, and I do not care for Sinjin’s opinion at all, and whatever Sinjin might say about me would quickly be discounted in the circles we two are best known in. Or,” he went on, after a quick glance under his long lashes at her face, “I might become impatient and toss you to the ground right here, and have my way with you. Only, you are right, it would be very cold, and very uncomfortable, and not at all in my usual style or the way I plan to end the matter. Still, no one would be concerned with your fate at all, ‘Lady Berry,’ once it became known that ‘Lady Berry’ is not quite the titled lady it has been hinted she is. In fact,” he mused, “yours is a very false position, and it has given you a false sense of security. For I’m sure even Lady Burden and His Lordship’s sister would be most put out if they discovered they had been entertaining a fraud—a common chit thrown out of her own family home for her indiscrete carryings-on with a hardened rake. Oh, I would weather it, it would be only, after all, another black mark on a long list. And Sinjin would be winked at, as he and I are cut from the same cloth. But the ladies…ah, I think they would be devastated, betrayed, and uncommonly angry at the little cheat they had taken to their bosoms. For they would not be angry at Sinjin, love, his sister dotes upon him, and Amelia, well…she is not as unaffected by His Lordship as she would like to be thought to be. No, the onus would all be upon you, my love.” And, seeing her arrested expression, he went on, “No, it is a cruel world, Regina, you ought to have thought of that yourself. You ought not to have been cozened into a false sense of security.”

She stood silent, watching the sun play upon his hair.

“Yet, in a sense,” he said softly, “but only in a sense, you are right. Here, and now, you have no real reason to be afraid of me. I did, after all, make a pact with you, and the game is not yet played out, although it draws to a close. But here, and now, yes, you are safe. But as for tomorrow?” He shrugged, and an ugly expression crossed his face. “And tomorrow might come very quickly, love. For although I know you are not yet Sinjin’s mistress, he is, after all, living too close to his sister and her good friend at the moment. I wonder at how soon you two plan on consummating the event? You will not, you know.”

But at this point a sense of such outrage gripped Regina that she scarcely saw the harsh look that had flitted across the usually pleasant face before her. A sense of outrage at her present situation, a sense of fury at the suggestions he was making, a sense of the preposterousness of the present confrontation. That this seemingly angelic man lounging against the stile before her should have forced her into the straits she found herself in, magnified by the humane and polite treatment she had received these past weeks, overwhelmed her sense of proportion. She spoke in fury, she railed against him:

“No! No, all you say is dirtied by your own false perceptions of the world around you. You are to be pitied, My Lord Duke, in that you see your world through eyes that cannot discern good from bad, through a philosophy that has nothing to do with the way real people live their real lives. You are like a man mad for a taste of wine. He does not see the scenery around him, he does not see the people going about their lives, he sees only opportunities to drink, his eye picks out only those places, those establishments, those people, who can provide him with his need. You do not see with any clarity at all, you are so drunk with the need for debauching, for degradation of yourself and others.”

“No,” she went on, shaking her head, “I do not think Lady Burden would despise me. No, I know Lady Mary would not. And I don’t think Sinjin would allow you to merely…come along and destroy my life. I know he would not. He and I…we have no plans for any such arrangement that you speak of. I applied to him for help because my late uncle instructed me to, should I ever need help. And with no self-serving thought, he has assisted me. You are certainly mad. And no,” she said, holding up her head, “no, I do not fear you so much as I pity you from the bottom of my heart.”

“You may well be right to,” he mused, watching her closely, “I do not argue that. But it is ‘Sinjin’ now, is it? Ah well, he is more clever than I thought. So George Berryman was incautious enough to mention the great Marquis to you”

“You knew my uncle?” Regina gasped.

“Yes, of course,” smiled the Duke. “Who among us who ventured into business did not? Only I did not deal exclusively with him, as some others did. An honest man, your uncle, according to his lights, that is, for whoever deals overmuch in business cannot afford to be too honest. As your father soon found out. Ah yes, I know all about you, Regina Analise. I do not wager on dark horses. I make it my business to know all the odds in whatever game I choose to play.”

“Why, for once, without dissimulation, why? Will you tell me why you choose to play this particular game?” Regina demanded, still raging at the slight figure before her. Seeing his closed expression, she softened her voice and almost pleaded with him, “Since there is so much that you know about me, can you tell me something about yourself? Some true thing?” she asked, watching him, realizing that she knew nothing of the actual man that hid beneath the blandly smiling, smooth exterior he presented.

“Some true thing?” He laughed. “Oh my dear, there is no true thing about me at all. But come, sit here beside me and I will tell you all you wish to know about me. There has never breathed a man who would not be pleased to tell all about himself, ad nauseum, to a young and beautiful woman who looks at him as you now look at me. Come and sit with me, Regina love, and I will tell you stories about myself, Oh I will sing you songs of me till darkness falls, and beyond, if that is what you wish. We will talk as old friends, or as new friends, for however long you like. But remember, I am most certainly mad. And placating me, and talking with me, and trying to understand me, will not alter that. I will still keep you to our game. I will still oversee you to make sure you keep to all the rules. But yes,” and he grinned, the expression, the sunlight, the wind-touseled hair making him seem suddenly younger, less threatening, more human than she had ever envisioned him.

She knew then as he waited, smiling, for her answer to his outstretched hand, that she could not turn and walk away from him, as every instinct cautioned her to. She could not, as a proper lady should, run trembling back to the warm security of Fairleigh. She must, she felt, confront him. Meet with him, so that she could reason with him, perhaps even appeal to him. Perhaps she could beguile him into betrayal of his true motives. For she could still not accept that he did all he did out of sheer perverse amusement. Certainly she could, she thought, know him. And all that she had been raised to believe told her that no creature she could know, could still remain an enemy to her. It was against all the sweet logic that Miss Bekins and her father had inculcated her with. Yes, she decided, she would speak with him.

She accepted his assistance, and perched herself up upon the stile beside him. And with the chill wind whipping around them, they talked.

Afterward, she could never reconstruct the conversation of that strange afternoon. They had stayed, talking, no she amended, gossiping like two old cronies, while the sun sank slowly over the horizon. She had asked him questions, he had answered with wit and style. But although he spoke of himself, she could not learn anything about his motivations. He told her about his education, his travels. He regaled her with stories about the society he traveled in, till tears stood in her eyes and she gasped with laughter. He entertained her with anecdotes, he charmed her with rumors, he quoted poetry, and when she capped his verse with the next line, he capped her quotation once again. He showed her a glittering treasurehouse of a mind, but he showed her not one glimpse of the shadows within.

Every so often the oddity of the situation, the strangeness of their meeting was borne in upon her, and almost as if he could read her mind, he would lure her away from her thoughts with whimsy or humor. Ah, she thought, recovering from a wave of laughter he had submerged her in, how likeable he is! But then, suddenly, as if a cloud had passed over his mind as it had over the weakening sun, he spoke slowly to her, “You see then, Regina, that it will not be so terrible, after all, your fate to be with me.”

She opened her eyes as if awakening from a dream, and looked at him. “No,” she said, “this is so absurd, Your Grace, indeed you know it is. For we have spent the afternoon like friends. We have shared our thoughts, you cannot still be…serious about this ridiculous wager.”

“Oh, but I am,” he said seriously. “You see, you do not know me after all. How well you look in sunlight, Regina. Not many of my female acquaintances could say the same, but it suits you well, almost as well as candlelight. No,” he said, taking his hand and turning her chin up, “perhaps even more than candlelight.”

She pulled herself away from him and, trying to keep up a light note, said, “But it suits you too.”

“Only because this afternoon is aware of the signal honor I have given it. I do not go abroad too much by day, see how the sun has tried so valiantly to flatter me, to convince me of its good offices? If it were better acquainted with me, if it knew it had my favor constantly, it would turn and slink behind a cloud. It is only those we hope to win that we put ourselves out for; those we have already added to our list of conquests, we can afford to ignore. When favor is won, it is foolish to go on courting, is it not? But shine as it will, it knows full well that this is not my time of day, I still prefer to be burnt by its sister moon, and bask in her cold silvery rays for my health’s sake.”