When You Wish Upon a Duke (26 page)

“I came here tonight for the single purpose of speaking a word or two to Sir Henry about the plans for the Wey Navigations, but though this is his house, I’ve yet to see him,” Lord Willoughby was complaining. “Nothing but these jabbering young fools that are his wife’s friends. Her ‘set,’ they are called. Bah, I would call them something else entirely, were I not a gentleman.”

He held his glass out for a servant to refill. “The problem is that young wife of his. Vain, silly chit. No good can possibly come from a young wife.” He frowned at March, majestically swaying back and forth. “You, Marchbourne. You have a young wife as well, do you not?”

“I do.” March did not see the need to point out that, being a young man himself, a young wife made perfect sense. “But while my duchess is young, she is neither silly, vain, nor a chit. She is the eldest daughter of the late Earl of Hervey, and I am honored that she is my wife.”

“Hervey, eh?” Willoughby squinted, clearly striving to recall the name. “Died young, with only a gaggle of girls? John Wylder, the fourth earl. I recall him now. His daughter must have brought you a pretty penny.”

March smiled. In truth, he never thought of Charlotte’s fortune. He’d plenty of his own, and besides, that wasn’t why he wed her. “My lady has much to recommend her.”

The howling crowd at the gaming table sounded again, and Lord Willoughby visibly shuddered.

“Like savages,” he said succinctly. “Pity the poor gentleman who must wake to such racketing in his bed each morn.”

But March was instead thinking of his own wife, in her own bed, and how much he’d like to be there with her.

Lord Willoughby was still grumbling, more to his brandy than to March.

“Painted, spendthrift young hussies, all of them,” he said. “They wouldn’t recognize a decent woman if they stumbled over one.”

“Then you shall meet my duchess,” March said. “Come with me, Willoughby, and I’ll present her to you, so that you might see that youth and decency, yes, and beauty, too, are not exclusive.”

Lord Willoughby made a final disgruntled snort of skepticism. “Then amaze me, sir,” he said. “I’ll gladly bow before your paragon.”

March bowed, and turned to lead the way back to the room where he’d left Charlotte. He was looking forward both to seeing her again and to making Willoughby eat his tiresome words. Eagerly he searched the tables, hunting for Charlotte’s unpowdered dark hair and the curling black plume. He spotted Lady Finnister’s lavender-dusted hair first, in the center of a noisy crowd of hard-bitten gamesters. Likely she’d know where Charlotte was, and March headed toward her.

But at that moment, the crowd at the table whooped and crowed again, celebrating another’s good fortune. At first March thought it must be Lady Finnister herself, which seemed entirely in keeping with her personality. Then he realized it was the lady beside her, the lady with the black plume in her hair. As March watched, stunned, Charlotte took up two of the pearly little fish from the table, and made them first bow to the cheering onlookers, then turn and kiss their tiny fishy lips together, as if congratulating each other. The crowd loved it.

“Flagrant, wanton creature,” Willoughby sputtered behind him. “Shameless, shameless!”

Reluctantly March could almost agree. At once he pushed his way past the others to reach Charlotte, laying his hand on her shoulder. Laughing, she turned about, and her eyes lit with obvious pleasure.

“March!” she exclaimed happily. “You’re just in time to see me triumph. Verily, verily, I am the luckiest fisherwoman of the evening.”

Her eyes bright and teasing, she made the two fish markers kiss once again. Surely she didn’t mean for the markers to represent themselves, did she? Newlywed fish, kissing to the delight of every last raucous soul here in Finnister’s parlor?

“Charlotte, please,” he said, all he could think of to say in the circumstances. If she’d made a show of the lovesick fish when they were alone in her bedchamber, he would have laughed as loudly as anyone else—perhaps even more loudly. But he was a private man, and this should have been a private entertainment. He’d always prided himself on possessing a certain dignity in public company, a reserve that was part of his rank, and he’d expected the same from his duchess. Didn’t Charlotte realize that there was not one iota of dignity about kissing fish?

Clearly she didn’t, not the way she was grinning. “I won, March,” she said proudly. “Quite monstrously, too. I told you I’d skill with gaming, didn’t I?”

Belatedly March noticed the sizable mountain of glittering markers before Charlotte’s place. When he’d told her to play and enjoy herself, he’d imagined a discreet little game for ladies, not the kind of perilously high stakes that led to duels and ruin.

And talk. Damnation, all London would be chortling over his bride’s boldness and daring with a wager in mixed company as well as those infernal kissing fish in
her fingers. Yet here she was, still smiling up at him over her shoulder, so blithely, so innocently, that he really was at a loss for the proper words.

So of course he said improper ones. “Shall we leave, ma’am?”

Her brows rose sharply with surprise. “Now?”

He took a deep breath, a breath that sounded as loud as a gust of wind in the suddenly silent room.

“Now,” he said. “If you please.”

“As you wish.” She slid from the chair, shaking out her skirts. “Let me gather my winnings—”

“No, leave it,” he said, glancing at the towering pile of markers she’d won. “You’ve no need of any of it.”

Charlotte bowed her head and nodded, outwardly agreeing as she placed the two last little fish on top of the pile. But bright red patches had appeared on her cheeks, and her lips were furiously pinched as if to bite back words that should not be said. Lady Finnister patted her arm in consolation, and the others around the table remained silent, too, not from embarrassment or shame, but from the hope that the Duke of Marchbourne would say some delicious, scolding, scandalous thing to his wife that could be repeated.

March, however, would rather be damned than oblige them. He’d already spoken enough—more than enough, really. In silence he took Charlotte’s hand, and in silence he led her from the table.

“I won fairly, March,” she began again. “Truly. I didn’t cheat, or cozen, or—”

“No, Charlotte,” he said. “Not now. Not here.”

And in silence, the Duke and Duchess of Marchbourne left the house.

In all her life, Charlotte had never encountered anything so deep and inscrutable as March’s silence.

Other people might refuse to talk, but his silence now was something entirely different. It reminded her of a well: she could lean over the side and peer deep into the bottomless darkness, but no matter what she said or even shouted into it, only her own words answered.

This was the silence he kept as they left the Finnisters’ house, and the same silence that was her chilly companion on their way back to Marchbourne House. It accompanied her past the waiting servants and up the marble staircase, and when she started toward her own rooms, March wordlessly made it clear that she was to continue with him to his rooms instead.

He sent the servants away and shut the door so that they were alone, and when he motioned for Charlotte to sit, she perched on the very edge of his settee with her hands clasped tightly together. There was a well-tended fire in the grate before her, as there was in nearly every hearth in Marchbourne House, but she felt none of its warmth, not with his silence filling the room, and she kept her cloak pulled around her shoulders. She watched as he crossed the room, poured himself a glass of wine, and drank it down with his back to her, still without a word.

Finally she could bear it no more.

“Clearly I have erred in some fashion, March,” she began, speaking to his back, “and I am sorry for distressing you. But until you tell me exactly where I have misstepped or given offense, I can neither explain nor apologize any further. Nor will I beg forgiveness for sins I have not committed, nor—”

“Stop, Charlotte,” he said without turning. “You’re not making sense.”

“Hah,” she said. “And here I thought that was your specialty this evening.”

“Mine?” He wheeled around to face her. “You would tell me that I am the one lacking sense?”

“Yes,” she said as evenly as she could. She did not wish to quarrel with him again, but she didn’t wish to be trapped into being a meek little mouse of a wife for the rest of their lives together, either. “I will tell you so, because it is true. You encouraged me to divert myself by joining the play at the gaming tables while you spoke to your associates, and I did exactly that. You
told
me to do that, March.”

“I didn’t tell you to act like a professional gamester and win so extravagantly.”

“But the entire point of playing
is
to win!” she exclaimed. “Fortune smiled on me tonight, true, but I also warned you that I was a good player. Yet you didn’t believe me, did you?”

“I didn’t say that,” he protested. “Not at all.”

“You expected me to lose,” she said, unable to hide her disappointment. “It’s just like the riding, isn’t it? You do not believe me to be accomplished in any way. Or is that what a duchess is supposed to do? Not try to excel? Would you rather I were an unaccomplished dullard, unable to do anything for myself?”

“Not at all,” he said quickly. “It’s more that a peeress
shouldn’t, ah, call attention to herself quite so boldly. You had every eye in the room watching you play.”

“You would rather I’d lost?” she asked. “You’d rather I’d been one of those ladies who fuss and fluster at a gaming table, and cannot even keep the cards in their fingers?”

He didn’t answer, which was answer enough.

“Very well, March,” she said. “But why stop at that? If you do not wish me to be noticed, then I will cease to follow fashions, and dress instead in the plainest of Quaker gray. I will give up my stays, and cut my hair short. I’ll wear an untrimmed cap that ties beneath my chin, and cover my bosom with a thick coarse kerchief.”

He frowned. “There’s no need to be so dramatic, Charlotte.”

“It will be the last time, I promise you that.” She pulled the black plume from her hair and tossed it aside, then unhooked the heavy pearls from her ears. “And you had better take these, too. They cause too much notice, you see.”

He ignored her outstretched hand with the earrings. “It wasn’t just how much you won, Charlotte,” he said. “It was that business with the markers, pretending that the fish were, ah, kissing.”

She flushed, and let her hand with the earrings slowly drop to her side. “I did that to make you laugh,” she said. “I thought you’d be entertained. I realize now that I was woefully mistaken.”

“I
was
entertained, Charlotte, or at least I would have been if you hadn’t chosen to entertain everyone else in the room as well. They were laughing at us instead of the fish, Charlotte, picturing us as—as besotted newlyweds.”

“Which I rather thought we were,” she said, her voice brittle with disappointment. “How foolish of me!”

“We are the newlywed Duke and Duchess of Marchbourne,”
he said. “We are not some newlywed Darby and Joan, frolicking in the hay to amuse the rest of the village.”

He set the empty glass back down, tapping it lightly on the table before he finally left it. Wearily he crossed the room, finally coming to stand before her. “What am I to do, Charlotte? Can you tell me that?”

With one hand she pulled the cloak more closely about her shoulders. “What should you do with me?”

“Of course with you,” he said. “What other meaning could I have?”

She looked up at him. With the fire behind him, his face was in shadow, and she couldn’t make out enough of it to tell his mood. His voice was resigned, which frightened her. What if, after tonight, he’d decided that he was done with her? A husband—especially one who was a duke—could do that with a wife who didn’t please him. What if he sent her away to live alone in one of his distant houses, so she’d never trouble him again?

If he banished her, her heart would break.

She bowed her head, staring down at her wedding ring, the firelight dancing off the clustered diamonds.

“Are you that unhappy?” he asked.

Surprised, she looked up swiftly. “Unhappy? You believe that I’m unhappy?”

“It’s the reason for your discontent, isn’t it?” he said, his voice heavy with sadness of his own. “If you were happy being wed to me, then you wouldn’t be so restless.”

“But I am neither restless nor unhappy, March, not at all!”

“Then why do you cry when I come to you at night?”

She caught her breath. “I—I did not know you noticed.”

“How the devil could I not notice?” he asked, his frustration clear. “I try to treat you with every respect and courtesy, every kindness, and yet still you weep.”

“I—I can’t help it,” she confessed miserably. “I don’t know why. You are gentle and courteous, as kind a husband as can be, and yet—”

“I love you.”

She looked up sharply. She wasn’t sure that she’d heard the words from him, or only imagined them.

“I love you, Charlotte,” he said again, more strongly this time. “I love you, and I cannot imagine my life without you in it.”