To Marry The Duke (21 page)

Her perfunctory statement was like a bucket of cold water dumped over his head.

“My monthly began yesterday, so there’s really no duty to perform.” Without the slightest hint of disappointment, she turned from him and picked up her candles. “I’ll see you in my room when I’m ripe to conceive in about a week?”

He stood motionless, not entirely sure this woman— speaking with such casual indifference—was his spirited American wife. She almost sounded… British.

She opened the door to leave, but faced him for one more thing. “By the way, Florence was here while you were gone. We had a lovely visit. Talked about all kinds of interesting things.”

Feeling stuck to the floor, James blinked slowly at her.

“Good night,” she said.

James took an anxious step forward. “Sophia—”

She stopped.

“I… I’m sorry.” The words spilled over his lips before he even knew they were on his tongue. Shaken by the sound and feel of them—for he had never in his life apologized to anyone for anything—he stood unsteadily in the middle of the room with no idea what to do or say next.

For a long time his wife stared at him, and he thought he saw her cheeks flush, but he couldn’t be sure in the candlelight. There was something in her eyes, though. Something that looked perhaps like longing. Maybe she wasn’t as confident as she appeared.

“Sorry for what?” she asked.

He thought long and hard about how he should answer that, for what he really regretted was taking her away from the home and country she knew and a family she loved. He had lied to her about Florence and so many other things. He had brought her here to this godforsaken purgatory—where the echoes off the walls resonated with the ghostly howls of an unthinkable past. Then, after all that, he had been cruel to her and had left her here to face all of it alone.

That’s what he was sorry for, and it pressed upon him. He could feel it squeezing around his chest.

“I’m sorry we haven’t been successful yet,” he replied.

“In conceiving a child, you mean?” she asked, searching for perhaps another deeper clarification he wasn’t ready to give.

“Yes.”

She nodded, as if that was the answer she had expected, then left him alone.

Chapter 17

James leaned forward in the saddle, his grip tight on the reins as he galloped across the moors on his return from an inspection of the east drainage ditches. He’d worked hard to keep himself occupied the past week, to forget his worries over Sophia. He accomplished that feat simply by not thinking of her. There were moments when he hadn’t been sure that he could not think of her, but he realized now that he’d always been very skilled at shutting out the world, for there was a time when his sanity required it—when he, as a boy, had had no control over his environment.

James urged his mount over a low, stone wall and landed on the damp grass. He slowed his horse to a walk, however, when he spotted his own cabriolet parked outside a tenant’s cottage, with the top down. He drew closer and found the coachman lying down in the seat, sleeping.

James cleared his throat. The man, who had pulled his top hat down to shade his eyes from the sun, waved at a fly buzzing around his head. James cleared his throat again.

The man raised his hat, saw James, and leaped out of the carriage. There was a flurry of chickens clucking and flapping their feathered wings in the yard. “Your Grace!”

From high up on his horse, James gazed down at the man. “May I ask what you’re doing here with my vehicle? Sleeping in it?”

“I’m here with the duchess, Your Grace. And she told me to sleep. She said I looked tired, and she wouldn’t take no for an answer. She
made
me get in the back.”

James pondered that. It was one of those moments he felt the differences between himself and his wife like a deep, impossible chasm. Not that he didn’t feel a man deserved his sleep, but there were rules to consider, especially when servants were on duty.

James glanced at the front door of the little stone cottage. He knew the farmer who lived here. He was a young, stalwart man. Respectable and dependable. Then again, James spoke with him so rarely. It was difficult to judge a man.

“The duchess is inside?”

“Yes, Your Grace.”

James hadn’t known his wife was out visiting today, but he had made a point to avoid any and all contact with her since their last encounter. She had not voiced any complaints, and the schedule of her courses had freed him of any expectations he or she might have regarding their more intimate relations. At least for a few more days.

Still, a ripple of curiosity moved through him.

“Is her maid here as well?”

“She didn’t want to bring anyone, Your Grace. She wanted to come alone.”

“Alone,” he repeated. Was she doing something she didn’t want anyone to know about? Or was this just another of her errors in protocol?

He would have liked to ask the coachman exactly what Sophia was doing here on this sunny afternoon, but decided against it, for he did not wish to draw attention to the fact that his servants knew more about his wife’s comings and goings than he did.

“How long have you been here?” James asked.

“An hour, Your Grace. She usually stays for an hour.”

“Usually? You’ve been here before?”

The man nodded. “Three times this week.”

“I see.” James looked at the front door of the cottage again and found himself quite unable to be on his way.

He dismounted and tethered his horse to the others in the harness. Carrying his riding crop, he stepped up to the front door and knocked.

A young woman answered. He was quite certain it was the farmer’s wife. He was relieved.

The woman wore a lace cap and a white apron, and she held a small child on her hip. Her eyes widened when she recognized James, and, looking a little flustered, she curtsied. “Good afternoon, Your Grace.”

“Good afternoon,” he replied. “Is the duchess here?”

The young woman stepped aside and held open the door. “She is.”

James removed his hat as he entered the small house. A fire blazed in the hearth, and he could smell food cooking—turnip or something of that sort. His gaze followed a deep crack up the wall to the thick, exposed beams across the low ceiling.

“She’s through here,” the girl said, leading the way to a room at the back of the house. The floorboards creaked beneath the soles of James’s shiny riding boots as he followed.

They pushed through a door, and there he saw his wife with an open book in her hands, reading to an old woman in a rocking chair. The woman wore black. Thin, coarse-looking gray hair fell loose over her shoulders.

Sophia’s gaze lifted as the door opened, and when she saw James, she stopped reading. They stared at each other wordlessly for a moment. James found himself gazing at her in her plain afternoon dress, and imagining her in America—in a wheatfield or something. She’d never looked less like a duchess.

“Who’s there?” the old woman said, and James knew at once that she was blind.

“It’s the duke,” Sophia replied.

“The duke. My word.” The frail woman tried to get up.

Sophia covered the woman’s craggy hand with her own. “It’s all right, Catherine. There’s no need to get up. James, this is Mrs. Catherine Jenson.”

The informal introduction would have exasperated James’s mother, but contrarily, James felt nothing but relief at having, for once, been spared ceremony.

“What are you doing here?” Sophia asked him. “Am I needed at the house?”

“No, I was simply passing by and I noticed the carriage out front.”

“I see,” she said, seeming a little puzzled by his reply. He was puzzled by it himself, because he didn’t know what the bloody hell he was doing here.

The farmer’s wife behind him excused herself to the kitchen.

“Would you like to sit down?” Sophia asked, as if she were completely at home here. “I’m almost finished our reading. Would that be all right, Catherine?”

“It would be an honor, Your Grace.”

“The honor is mine, madam,” James said. “Though I do not wish to intrude.”

“You won’t,” Sophia answered.

He sat down on a wooden bench by the wall.

Sophia continued to read from where she had left off—the Book of Revelation. “
Behold I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me. ”

James listened to his wife’s melodic voice and thought about what she read, and the person she was.

A quiet feeling moved over him. He imagined life in America with no aristocracy, where the class structure was based on wealth rather than accident of birth. He imagined Sophia in that one-room house she had told him about, and wondered with an odd sense of amusement what she must think of this very different world she’d married into. She hadn’t really questioned it in London or on their honeymoon, for there hadn’t been time to contemplate it, he supposed. Nor had she yet at that time experienced the reality of being a peeress. Was it settling in on her now? Would she even be able to adapt to it? Was that why she was here? To escape it for a few hours?

He felt a tremendous responsibility suddenly, to see that she was taken care of and eased into this new life, especially after the way he’d treated her before he’d left for London. The way he’d crushed her fantasies, even though he’d done it for her own good.

It was a novel thought for James, who had never intended to care one way or the other if any wife of his was “settling in.” He had always expected to leave her to his mother to mold and train, and to leave any future children to nannies and nurses to educate. But Sophia was turning out to be a rather formidable substance. She was—unfortunately for his mother—not very “moldable.”

Perhaps if his upbringing had been more nurturing, he might have in the past been more inclined to concern himself with his duchess’s need for assistance and support. What was it about Sophia that was raising this response in him today? A greater sense of familiarity, perhaps? Or was it simply her overwhelming kindness toward this woman?

James watched Mrs. Jenson nod in response to the readings. Sophia finished and closed the Bible.

“That was beautiful, Your Grace,” Mrs. Jenson said.

Sophia knelt on one knee in front of the woman, and took her hand. “Thank you for letting me come. I’ll be back on Monday to see you again.”

“May God bless you,” the woman replied, pulling Sophia’s hand to her cheek. Sophia stroked the woman’s hair, kissed the top of her head lovingly, and gave the Bible back to her.

With an almost crippling sense of awe, James watched Sophia rise to her feet.

A few minutes later, they were saying good-bye to the farmer’s young wife at the front door. She curtsied and smiled exuberantly at Sophia, but seemed afraid even to glance at James. Another man might have been unsettled by it. He was accustomed to it. The local villagers couldn’t help but know certain things about his family’s bleak history.

When the door closed, he and Sophia faced each other in the sunlight.

“You hadn’t told me you started visiting the tenants,” James said.

She pulled on her gloves and walked to the carriage. “You didn’t ask.” The coachman helped her into her seat and she adjusted her skirts. “I want to get to know our neighbors.”

Neighbors. He had never thought of the tenants as neighbors. He glanced back at the cottage door and found himself wondering the Christian name of the farmer’s wife, and the name of their child. He wondered how long ago Mrs. Jenson had lost her sight, and why he hadn’t heard about it, for they did not live far from the castle.

“And it does me good to come here,” Sophia continued. “When I look at dear Mrs. Jenson’s face, listening intently to what I’m reading and finding such joy in the words she cannot read for herself, I feel the peace of God descending upon me. I’m happy to come here and do something for her, James, for the strength and tranquillity it gives me.”

Gazing into Sophia’s clear blue eyes, James began to feel a similar sort of peace and tranquillity descending upon himself. He had never felt anything like it before, and it shook him deeply, from the inside out.

“You really should bring your maid with you,” he said, for he didn’t know what else to say.

“Actually, James, I am considering replacing Mildred.”

He rested his hands on the side of the cabriolet. “Replacing her? But she is very experienced and came highly recommended. She has
always
been—”