The Ugly Duchess (17 page)

Gismond had the impulse to clutch his own neck, but luckily he remembered the pristine beauty of his starched neck cloth in time.

“Where have you been during the last seven years?” Mr. Pinkler-Ryburn inquired.

“Spending my time with cutthroats.”

Mr. Pinkler-Ryburn drew himself straight and squared his shoulders. “Then, if you would be so good as to answer a question, sir. By what name was I ridiculed in school, a name which you never yourself used?”

For the first time a smile softened that savage face. “Pink,” the man said. “They bloody well called you Pink.”

If there were any in the room who believed that Pink secretly wished to be duke, they knew at that moment that they were wrong, for he threw his arms around his cousin as if he had discovered his own long-lost brother.

It was such a mesmerizing sight that not everyone on the dais noticed immediately that Lady Islay—now the Duchess of Ashbrook—had fallen into a dead faint and toppled into her neighbor.

It was her own husband, the returned duke, for one had to assume that he had the right to the title now, who saw the furor, brushed off Pink’s embrace, and leapt directly off the dais.

Gismond committed the impropriety of stepping forward, the better to see. (As he told his wife sometime later, it was better than a play.)

The duchess lay, still and white, against Mrs. Pinkler-Ryburn. She didn’t stir when the duke bent over her. A moment later His Grace straightened, holding his wife in his arms.

(“A play,” Gismond repeated that night. “Her head against his shoulder, if you take my meaning. All hero-like, except, of course, no hero looks like that.” He couldn’t explain himself. “It was his expression, maybe, not a patch of nervousness or even excitement. As if this sort of thing happened to him every day of the week.”)

Wearing easy confidence like an ermine-trimmed cloak, the duke strode back to the dais and stood before it, holding his wife in his arms. He nodded up to the Lord Chancellor. “I do believe that my cousin, Mr. Pinkler-Ryburn, will withdraw his petition for declaration of my death.”

“Yes!” Pinkler-Ryburn said immediately, his voice coming with a gasp. “Absolutely. The man’s not dead. Not at all.”

At that, the duke actually threw back his head and laughed. And even though it showed that terrible white scar again, Gismond almost found himself laughing as well. But he had never flouted ceremony in such a fashion in his life, and he did not intend to start now.

The peers, though . . . there was an eruption of unrestrained laughter, the kind that follows and relieves pent-up tension.

(“He’s got a charming laugh,” Gismond told his wife hours later. “Looks a proper savage, but when he laughed, it was an
English
laugh.”

“What’s an English laugh?” she asked skeptically. “And what was he doing, standing around talking to people while his poor wife was in a dead faint? I certainly hope and trust that
you
would never treat me so cavalierly, my dear.”

Gismond manfully pushed away the thought that he would be utterly unable to pick up his wife—who outweighed him by more than a few stone—let alone carry her more than a step. “I shall not,” he promised solemnly. “Never.”)

Twenty-three

T
heo’s first thought was to flee. The savage, sunburned man on the dais could not, simply could not, be her James.

The way the man stood in front of all those lords, shoulders wider than anyone else’s, the way his eyes calmly moved over the room, the color of his skin, his tattoo, and the way his hair didn’t even touch the nape of his neck . . .

James didn’t look like that, and he didn’t act like that.

But, of course, she was wrong. It was actually the scar on James’s neck that convinced her. She gasped at the sight, her heart gave one huge thump, and the room turned hazy.

She climbed back from a pool of darkness to find herself clasped in James’s arms as he walked across the chamber. Something deep inside her instantly recollected the windy, outdoors smell of him, even though his voice was nothing like what she remembered.

As her head cleared, she became aware of a sardonic note of amusement in her husband’s voice as he conversed with the peers on the dais. There wasn’t even the faintest concern in his voice for her, for the woman—his
wife!
—in his arms.

She instantly decided not to open her eyes. The last thing she wanted was to meet the pitying gaze of those in the chamber, given that James could not have displayed his utter lack of concern for her any more flagrantly. It wasn’t an experience that she would wish on her worst enemy.

One had to assume that her husband had been lurking around London for days, waiting for the moment when he could charge into the House of Lords like a marauding Visigoth and shock her into a swoon.

It wasn’t that she would have expected him to throw himself into her arms if she’d known he was returning. They had parted in anger, after all. But they were
married.

He could have halted this farce before it even started. He could have pretended that he cared about her opinion, that he bothered about her enough to tell her he was alive before informing an assembly of nearly two hundred. Such a public shaming felt like a punishment. Her heart beat painfully in her ears. She hadn’t felt this mortified since first glimpsing the “ugly duchess” etchings.

It made her feel unloved, unlovable, as if the very ground shifted under her feet, as if all the years of transforming herself into a swan had come to nothing, obliterated by the fact her husband hadn’t even bothered to visit her when he returned to London.

All the anguish she had felt after James left, when everyone concluded that he couldn’t bear to stay married to such an ugly woman, flooded back. Some of those etchings had depicted James fleeing with an arm thrown over his eyes. Theo had felt reduced to a cipher of a woman then, and she felt it again now.

She kept her eyes closed while James finished his conversation, walked through the chamber and out of the building, and gently deposited her on the seat of the carriage. He was so big that the vehicle actually swayed when he climbed through the door.

“You can wake up now,” he said. There was that thread of laughter in his voice again. Laughter? He thought this was
amusing
—to make people who had loved him go through the agony of declaring him dead?

James had never been pitiless before. He had never been contemptuous.

She stopped pretending and sat upright with a jolt, eyes open. After all these years, her husband was across from her again. Yet everything had changed. James had become a
pirate.
A criminal. His eyes were dark and unreadable, yet they somehow still spoke of arrogance and power. She had no difficulty believing that he had forced people to walk down the plank.

Her fingers curled around the edge of the leather seat, holding on for dear life.

“Good Lord,” she said, not quite under her breath. His skin was bronzed by the sun, and the dark blue flower under his right eye was arresting, up close. It was like some sort of alien word, in a language she didn’t understand.

The sight of him filled her head with ridiculous comparisons. Englishmen weren’t—they were white, lily white. With
white
skin. They didn’t inscribe flowers on their skin.

Not James. He looked fifty times more alive than the white-skinned gentlemen they’d left behind in the House of Lords, and that tattoo . . .

It was a flower, but not a frivolous one. It was sinister. Frightening, even.

Her fingers gripped the seat more tightly. She would never in a million years have thought that she could fear her childhood friend. But now she did. Only an idiot wouldn’t be uneasy in this man’s presence.

“Good afternoon, Daisy,” he said, as calm as if they had parted no more than a month or so ago.

She couldn’t think what to say. Mr. Badger had described the tattoo as being worn by a ferocious pirate called Jack Hawk: should she mention the name? Then she met his eyes, and as quickly as it had come, her fear evaporated, and an incandescent rage took over. James was regarding her with amusement. There wasn’t the faintest sign on his face that he acknowledged the gravity of the ceremony he had just interrupted.

And yet she had been genuinely moved by the formal declaration of his death. She had been struggling not to cry, thinking of the way the old duke would appear in Staffordshire every now and then and inquire whether she had heard anything from his son. That a son could treat his father with such indifference was contemptible.

Angry or not, her instincts warned her to remain calm. “Welcome to England,” she said, finally. She reached up, unpinned her veil, and placed it on the seat beside her.

James merely nodded.

“May I ask what moved you to return?” she asked, quite as if he had been on a short trip to Wales.

“I nearly died after having my throat cut. It’s a trite commonplace, but having a brush with death does give a man to think.”

“You certainly made a dramatic entrance.” Theo was never more proud of herself than when her voice contained not even a drop of reproach. Exquisite self-control had got her through the humiliations of her past, and it would serve her now. She refused, absolutely
refused,
to let James know how much his nonchalant attitude wounded her.

“Yes. I should add that I had no idea you would attend the ceremony.”

“Would it have made any difference to you?”

He tilted his head just slightly to the side, and for the first time she saw a mannerism that she recognized from the old James. “Yes.”

“Where have you been staying in London while you waited for the ceremony?”

He frowned with what seemed to be genuine confusion. “My ship only docked last night. I went to the town house first to tell you I was alive; the butler was kind enough to inform me that I had better scurry over to Westminster or I might not arrive in time to save myself from dying, so to speak. As I calculated it, I would have been dead seven years on June sixteen. I thought I had several weeks to convince everyone that I was among the living.”

“The paperwork would have cleared Chancery by your death date, thus ensuring that there was no delay between dukes.”

“I was glad to see that Cecil showed no particular reluctance to lose the title he almost inherited.”

“None. In fact, he wanted to wait another year or so.”

“So it was my wife who wished to be freed on my seven-year anniversary.” His voice was colorless.

She smiled at him as politely as any duchess at a musicale. “Only because I had no evidence of your continued existence, nor reason to assume it, I assure you. How did you find the house this morning?” Theo forced herself to relax her fingers, but she could not bring herself to fold them in her lap. Instead she reached for the strap by the window and hung on as if they were madly turning corners rather than sedately making their way toward Berkeley Square.

“I was there only for a matter of minutes. I dropped the baggage I brought with me and went directly to Lords.”

She was unable to stop herself. “By ‘baggage,’ surely you mean
booty?
”

“So you know?” Perversely, he grinned at that.

She was so enraged that she felt her throat closing. But she schooled her voice again. “We had been told of a possible connection between you and a pirate called the Earl and another named Jack—Hawk, was it? Cecil and I were reluctant to believe that you had entered into that profession.” She left silent the obvious addition:
more the fools we.

“Life is full of surprises,” James replied, most unhelpfully.

It might have been the flare of her nostrils; his eyes narrowed and he seemed to grasp a hint of her feelings.

But what he said next did not reflect that. “The traffic around London has become appalling; it took so long to get to Lords that I actually thought I might be forced to play a resurrection scene.”

The carriage was finally coming to a halt. “I am glad we were spared that,” Theo remarked.

“Your butler told me that you left at seven this morning,” he said, in a voice that carried an undertone of possessiveness. “The ceremony didn’t begin for some time thereafter.” James was missing for seven years, and now he thought to return home as the master of the household?

“I paid a visit to your father’s grave,” she replied, gathering up her reticule and veil as a groom opened the carriage door. “He often asked for you before he died. This morning, I wanted to tell him before I took the step of declaring you dead. A foolish gesture—in more than one way, it seems.”

For the first time, he flinched; she saw a flash of deep pain in his eyes.

And she was glad. As she stepped from the carriage, Theo was truly shocked by just how glad she was. She felt as bloodthirsty as any pirate.

There was one more thing that she needed to clarify. Well, there were many, but this one would not wait. Once in the entrance, she nodded to Maydrop, and he instantly opened the door to the drawing room.

James followed her, and when she turned to face him he merely looked at her, waiting, an eyebrow raised. She remembered that look. Years ago, his raised eyebrow had evidenced the curiosity of a boy; now it clearly signaled the supreme arrogance of a man.

For a moment her heart quailed: what was she to do? She would
not
live with a pirate, with a scarred, uncivilized excuse for a duke. She was probably the most controlled—if you like, the most refined—woman of all her acquaintance, but now her heart was beating so fast it felt as if it might fly from her chest. Still, she pulled herself together.

“The Bow Street Runner who hypothesized that you were the Earl was quite certain that you couldn’t be Jack Hawk,” she said, stripping off her gloves so that she didn’t have to look at him.

But she could see him through her lashes. He was lolling back against the wall as no gentleman would. “Your Runner was wrong there.”

“One of his reasons for that conclusion was that Hawk had, if I caught his meaning correctly, left illegitimate children all over the East Indies.” She did meet his eyes then, dropping all pretense of civility and making sure that her own eyes expressed the contempt she felt for a man who had not bothered to return for years, not even to console his aging father; for a man who, given what she knew about pirates, not only stole for a living but had ordered people down a plank to a watery grave. For a man who had betrayed his marriage vows and then deserted his own children, uncivilized and illegitimate though they may be.

James was silent for a moment. The boy she remembered would have yielded to her glare, but the man just crossed his arms over his chest and looked at her thoughtfully. “You seem rather angry. When I left England you were in this state, and I had hoped that time had changed your displeasure.”

“I was angry then because you married me under false pretenses. Our marriage has been irrelevant to me for many years, though not, it seems, as irrelevant as it was to you. Still, I can assure you that I no longer feel more than mild pique at your deceit with regard to our marriage. However, I will ask you again, Duke, did you indeed leave children behind? Or did you bring them home with you? Are your offspring the
baggage
that you mentioned?”

The silence that fell over the drawing room was like the crack of a whip: it had ferocity, as if the air had been sliced in half.

“Your Bow Street Runner was incorrect,” James repeated, just before Theo was about to go investigate the nursery herself. “I have no children, illegitimate or otherwise.”

“Really?” she said coolly. “Are you quite certain? Am I to believe that you bothered to check on me nine months after you left England?”

“I sent a man to do so.”

“A pity you didn’t ask that man to assure the duke of your safety.” Ashbrook’s last thought had been of his long-lost son, though even in the deepest rage of her life, she did not say that. It would be too cruel.

“I did not think of my father as old. Stupidly, I never imagined that he might die before we managed to reconcile. It is one of my many regrets.” But James said it lightly. “In fact, the news of his death transformed me from the Earl into Jack Hawk.”

She waited, but he did not elaborate. Apparently he felt no obligation to explain anything more to her. She walked from the room and up the stairs without another word.

A
half hour later, in her bath, Theo thought of the obvious solution to this unimaginable turn of events. She sat up so quickly that water sluiced from her shoulders and slopped onto the floor. “I need Boythorn,” she said aloud.

“Beg pardon, Your Grace?” Amélie turned from where she was folding stockings.

“Please ask Maydrop to send for my solicitor, Mr. Boythorn,” Theo said, standing up. “I should like him to attend me first thing in the morning.” Of course one could dissolve a union if a spouse returns from a years-long absence with a reputation for walking people down the gangplank. In ordinary circumstances, it was difficult—nearly impossible—to obtain a divorce. This was not an ordinary circumstance.

In fact, she was quite certain her arguments would triumph. The Regent himself would dissolve the marriage, if no one else. He had done so for the wife of Lord Ferngast, after Ferngast joined the Family of Love and demanded that she share her bed with all and sundry. Lord Ferngast hadn’t
killed
people.