Dukes Prefer Blondes (33 page)

“It isn't difficult. I'm perfectly capable of managing a dukedom, thank you—­and of doing so more competently than my father's predecessors.”

“You're making a sad job of managing me, in the present instance,” she said. “But I suspect you're excessively troubled by feelings. Unfortunately, I'm too much out of humor with you to attempt to intervene or translate. I recommend you find something productive to do. Or somebody else to rage at. I have letters to write and one hundred fabric swatches to look at, and both want a tranquil mind.”

He opened his mouth to retort, then changed his mind.

He stormed out of the room, slamming the door behind him.

He heard something shatter against the door.

 

Chapter Nineteen

The mildness and inviting appearance of the weather has induced her Majesty to walk out several mornings this week. Her Majesty has also ­taken carriage airings with the King and her ­Royal relatives.

—­
The Court Journal
, Saturday 5 December 1835

H
eart pounding, Clara dropped into the chair at her writing desk.

She would not make herself wretched thinking about it.

He was impossible.

She snatched up her pen and started yet another list, but her hand was shaking and she was so angry, she tore the paper and spoiled the pen.

She took out a penknife and tried to mend it, but she only ruined the nib. She pushed the chair back, got up, stalked to the door leading to her husband's study, and stomped in. She'd tidied his desk after he left, and it had comforted her to touch his things. It had also comforted her to know he'd object to her touching his things, and she could tease him about it.

Her throat tightened.

She stole a pen from his desk. Not satisfactory. She was still so angry. And hurt.

She'd thought he understood.

Someone
ought to encourage her
, he'd told her parents
. To be herself.

She opened drawers and started rearranging his neat order. She moved the ruler to the small tray where he kept pencils. She took all the writing paper out of an upper drawer and opened a bottom one to put it there.

She reached down to remove what was in the bottom drawer . . . and paused.

Because there, instead of paper or notebooks or anything else related to his work, rested a crumpled bit of tissue paper, loosely wrapped about something.

She set the writing paper down on the desk and took out the parcel from the drawer. The loose tissue paper opened further, giving her a glimpse of soft leather.

She sat in her husband's chair and set the parcel on his desk and fully opened the flimsy wrapping.

Gloves.

A lady's gloves.

Very dirty gloves.

They were plain but of good quality. They still smelled of lavender . . . the scent Davis always kept in among Clara's clothes.

Her
clothes.
Her
gloves. Her plainest pair, the ones she'd worn on the day they rescued Toby.

Only look at your gloves!
Radford had said, so bafflingly furious about such a small thing.

She'd taken them off and—­then what?

When she returned to her great-­aunt's, Davis had said, “Has your ladyship lost another pair of gloves?”

Clara had assumed she'd dropped them in the street when she'd climbed out of the carriage, pretending to an insouciance she'd been so very far from feeling. Or else they'd slipped from her lap and onto the floor of the coach . . . when she and Radford had kissed. She'd supposed the coachman or the next passenger had appropriated them.

She'd assumed incorrectly.

Radford had found them. And kept them.

Her throat hurt.

She heard returning footsteps.

She wrapped the gloves, thrust them back into the drawer, and slid it shut. She dropped the writing paper into its proper drawer and hurried back into her sitting room, taking the fresh pen with her.

She was in the chair at her desk a moment before the door flew open.

By the time Radford stormed back in, she had the pen in hand and a list of some sort—­she had no idea what it was—­in front of her on the desk. Her heart raced and her hand gripped the pen too tightly. She wanted to throw it down and put her face in her hands and sob.

She placed her grandmother's image firmly in the front of her mind and refused to let the tears fall or her mouth so much as tremble.

He closed the door and stalked to the desk. “Dash it, Clara, have I hurt your feelings?”

“Certainly not,” she said. “I take no notice of your irrational ranting and raving.”

He set his hands on the desk, leaned toward her, and looked her in the eye. She met his gaze, chin aloft.

“I've hurt your feelings,” he said.

“You
promised
,” she said.

“Promised.”

“That day. At your trial. I needed to be myself, you said. You'd encourage me to make a spectacle of myself. You—­”

“I remember.”

To her amazement, a tinge of red spread over his cheeks and jaw.

“You spoke of my mind,” she said. “But a little while ago, you behaved as though I hadn't one. You—­”

“Yes, yes,” he said impatiently. “I may have overreacted somewhat.”

“
Somewhat?
You insulted my intelligence. On
no evidence
.”

“Flimsy, I acknowledge.”

“Not flimsy,” she said. “None. Aught.
Nihil
. Unless your great brain is malfunctioning, you ought to know I did my spying as cleverly as you might have done, though you—­”

“I should not have done it quite in that way.”

“Of course not,” she said. “You're a man. You can act more freely. I'm hampered by a strait-­waistcoat of rules.”

“Except the ones I'm so lost to reason as to try to make.”

She wasn't ready to be mollified. “I took no risks,” she said. “I could not have been more discreet. I did not pursue your criminals in any way or acknowledge their existence. I simply
gathered information
, which I presented to your ungrateful self as soon as you'd had time to recover from traveling. And if I had it to do over again, I should do it again, because I'd rather nobody killed you at present.”

“Not
at present
?”

“I'm not in a humor to wear mourning for you,” she said. “I'm already in black for your cousin—­whom I dearly wish I had married instead—­and it doesn't become me, and I'd rather not extend the length of time I must go about looking like a scarecrow, especially on your sorry account.”

He studied her dress. “Black only makes you look a little pale, though your present rage heightens your color. I should not call it unbecoming.”

“Do not try to turn me up sweet.” He was doing it, though. She was hopeless. She wished she hadn't found the gloves. He uttered a few vaguely complimentary words and she commenced melting.

“Clara—­”

“I'm not
Clara
to you. To you I am
my lady
.”

“Your ladyship is doing it too brown. Marry Bernard, indeed.”

“I might have made something of him! I can do nothing with you! Your obnoxiousness knows no bounds.”

“You knew I was obnoxious when you married me. All the world knows it. My picture is in the dictionary next to the word.”

“You're not even
trying
,” she said.

“I don't actually have to try to be obnoxious,” he said. “It comes quite naturally.”

She wanted to throw herself in his arms. She didn't want to quarrel anymore. She loved him, with all his faults. She loved his faults, too.

She reminded herself that the only way to get the marriage she wanted was to fight for it. They could have a partnership, like the one his parents had built. They could have the marriage she'd always supposed was a fantasy. But it wouldn't simply happen because she wanted it.

“I refer to your learning how to be a tolerable husband,” she said.

“Tolerable! My dear girl, that's asking a great deal.”

“I realize we're in the catastrophe phase of this inheritance,” she went on ruthlessly because
my dear girl
made her want to fly into his arms. “But you don't seem to realize that the earthquake has happened to
both of us
. Yes, I trained to be a duchess. But I was not prepared to enter a household that had never been a ducal household or had anything to do with Society or had any thought of doing either, and is completely unprepared—­and in many cases,
unwilling
—­to change its ways.” She added quickly, “You're not to think I blame your parents in the least. It's perfectly reasonable of them to want their peace. But I've been carrying on single-­handedly for this last fortnight—­and you come back only to find fault!”

His head went back as though she'd slapped him.

He straightened away from the desk, and she thought he'd storm out again, but instead he drew in a deep breath and let it out and said, “You have a point.”

“A point!” she said. “I have a hundred points! I could write pages on the topic, had I time. But I must think about curtains for Malvern House. And Mama cannot find half the furniture listed on the last inventory, not but what she says we shouldn't attempt to retrieve it, judging by what remains.”

“I do realize—­”

“You don't, not a fraction of it. The staff at Malvern House is not only too small, but incompetent as well. We'll have to replace all but one or two. Have you any notion how time-­consuming and tedious that is?”

“Surely you don't need to—­”

“It's a house of some forty or fifty rooms. We don't know the precise number because we can't find the most recent floor plans. There are five floors in all, and even Mama's stamina could not withstand more than the main ones.”

He turned away from her and walked to the fire. He folded his hands behind his back and stood there for a time, staring into the burning coals.

The silence stretched out. She could hear the crackle and hiss of the fire and the anxious beating of her heart, which seemed louder by far.

She gazed at him, taking in his tall physique and broad shoulders and the strength and confidence of his long, lean frame. She remembered the lanky boy from so very long ago, defending her honor against a bully who, at the time, had seemed to her the size of an elephant.

She thought of the gloves.

She remembered last night and this morning, in bed, their bodies twined. How she'd missed sleeping with him! Though they'd had so little time to be intimate, she'd grown accustomed to the warmth and strength of his body alongside hers, and the sense of having found at last a place where she truly belonged.

She did belong with him. She'd wanted him and nobody else, and while she wanted a partnership, it ought to be a fair one on her side as well. She needed to take into account the strain he was under, far worse than what she felt.

This wasn't the life he'd trained himself for.

It wasn't the life he'd wanted.

I
liked
my life
, he'd said.

“It's possible I'm not behaving in the most reasonable manner myself,” she said.

“True enough,” he said. “Given the circumstances, it would be more reasonable for you to be in fits, weeping and tearing your hair out. My parents are content to let you do everything, our future home wants an army to put it to rights, and your husband is completely blind to everything but his masculine pride and medieval notions of protecting his property. This, in his primitive view, includes his wife.”

He turned back to meet her wondering gaze. “You see what happens when my emotions take charge,” he said. “I can't see straight, let alone think straight. I react irrationally. What I should have done was congratulate you on your clever form of investigation. Had I known of the situation and you asked for instructions—­and supposing myself in a sane state of mind, which it appears I cannot take for granted lately—­I should have instructed you to do what you did.”

The ache inside eased. “Well said, my learned friend.”

“Does that mean you'll set aside the divorce proceedings, at least for the time being?”

“I'd better,” she said. “Divorce is time-­consuming, and I have so much to do.” Divorce, in fact, was impossible, unless the husband initiated it. All the more reason to sort out sticky marital matters at the beginning.

“Kindly set the blasted house aside, too,” he said. “We need to deal with these villains first, and quickly.”

“We,” she said, and her heart grew light enough to fly.

“Freame's the sort who'll sacrifice even his lieutenants to save his own skin,” Radford said. “No honor among thieves there. I can't say why Squirrel has stuck with him instead of finding another berth, as the other escapees did, but his reasons will not be saintly. As to the third party, I have a likely candidate, and he's not the vicar, I promise you. They sent Squirrel ahead for surveillance. Now all three are here. I don't like the odds. However, it seems it would be grossly unfair and unkind of me to exclude you.”

“Oh, Raven,” she said. She rose from her chair, ready to launch herself at him.

“But first, Lady Bredon, you will be so good as to tell me what else you've done.”

H
er eyes widened and her mouth fell open, displaying the chipped tooth: the permanent reminder of her courage and willingness to defend him, no matter what the odds.

She was willing to fight him, too, and that in itself was heroic.

Obnoxious
was the merest understatement.

His cold logic had at times reduced battle-­scarred colleagues to tears. Never mind the witnesses.

If he reduced her to tears, those would be tears of rage, and a missile would swiftly collide with his skull.

But she collected her composure in the blink of an eye, and gave him a cool stare.

“I haven't had the chance to tell you,” she said. “My first course of action required so much defending and argument. In fact, I suggest we walk in the garden. The day is mild, and the fresh air will clear our heads.”

“My head is perfectly clear.”

“You may think so,” she said. “I shall send for our hats and coats.”

By the time the outer garments arrived and were satisfactorily arranged—­hers, not his—­he was nearly dancing with impatience.

Then they stepped out of the house into the handsome garden his mother had created, which pleased the eye even in winter. He felt Clara's hand tuck into the crook of his elbow, and his impatience dissolved.