Eloisa James - Desperate Duchesses - 6 (28 page)

"There's a crest on the carriage door," Villiers said.

"Oh well, then I expect it's Astley," Lisette said.

"What?"

She turned to look at him. "The Duke of Astley, of course. Didn't you hear at dinner last night? His wife has died. He will have come for Eleanor." Villiers grabbed her arm. "What do you mean?"

She frowned until he loosed his grip and then she bestowed a smile on him. "I said, it's the Duke of Astley, come to fetch Eleanor, of course." "But—"

"Oh, I forgot. You probably don't know. They were in love as children. And then he was forced to marry a woman named Ada. That was so sad." "How on earth do you know all this?"

"I told you! We used to play together as children, and we still correspond occasionally. At any rate, Astley—I think his name is Gideon, though I haven't met him—loves Eleanor. And she loves him.

So I expect he's come for her."

"He's come for her?"

Lisette looked up at him. "Eleanor is not the sort of woman whom any man would forget," she pointed out.

"Of course it's not Astley," Villiers stated. "His wife is barely in the ground." He held out his arm.

"I shall go outside to see," Lisette said, and she actually dashed off without waiting for his escort.

Villiers decided that the code of gentlemanly behavior did not insist one had to trot after a fleeing woman, so he walked into the entrance hallway at a measured pace.

Never mind the fact that he was fighting an impulse to walk faster and faster. Of course it wasn't Astley. Though it wouldn't matter to him if it were. He had no wish to marry Eleanor; he was to marry Lisette. The only thing that bothered him was the fact that there would be a tremendous scandal if Eleanor bolted with the Duke of Astley a few days after his duchess died.

Impossible. He knew Astley. The man defined the word
conventional.
Astley would think as prudently as he himself had when choosing Lisette as a wife. Astley was a rational man.

Dukes had to be rational men. They couldn't simply dash off and do whatever they pleased. He quickened his pace. The carriage likely held Lisette's father, which was all to the good, because he should extend a formal request for Lisette's hand in marriage. Not to mention the fact that someone had mentioned a purported betrothal between Lisette and the next-door squire Thestle's son. Not Roland, but another one. That would have to be dealt with, he supposed.

There was always the chance that Gilner would refuse him, based on his bastard children, or Lisette's existing engagement. But now that he'd had a close look at the Gilner estate, he doubted it.

Gilner was clearly not a stickler for propriety. His daughter was chaperoned by a woman who brazenly lived with her devoted friend.

Moreover, from what he could see, Lady Marguerite spent a good deal of her time traveling. No severe elderly relative was part of the household, assigned to serve as a damper so that a suitor couldn't court Lisette whenever and wherever he wished. In fact, if he wanted, he could probably waltz right into Lisette's bedroom and deflower her.

No one would even notice, most likely.

Not that he would do it, because—

He walked down the front steps feeling like a fool. The carriage did not have the Gilner crest. A small group was standing in front of the steps, and Lisette turned around, waving.

"Leopold! Do come!"

He walked over, knowing the truth of it in his gut.

"You see?" she said happily, slipping her fingers into his. "I told you so!"

Eleanor was locked in the arms of a man.

Not just any man either. Gideon, Duke of Astley, was a particularly beautiful man. Not terribly tall, but who needed height when he had that profile? Villiers took a deep breath.

Gideon was kissing Eleanor in front of her sister Anne, Lisette, the butler, three footmen, assorted groomsmen—and Eleanor's own mother, the duchess. Who was smiling, Villiers realized with another jolt. Not with the kind of barbed acceptance with which she greeted the news that he, the Duke of Villiers, was marrying her daughter, but with a kind of wild, surprised joy.

And Eleanor? He could see only the back of her head, but Gideon's hand was rumpling her hair, holding her with such tenderness that even he, coldhearted bastard that he was, felt...something.

"Isn't it romantic?" Lisette said, squeezing his hand.

It took everything he had not to pull away from her.

"They love each other so much. She waited for him. And he came to her the very first moment he could. I suppose he's been thinking of her every day for years." He could just imagine that.

Unfortunately.

The Duchess of Montague was smiling with a fierce happiness that Eleanor hadn't seen since her brother gained his majority. "Just wait until your father learns of this," she said to Eleanor, more or less under her breath. "He'll be so pleased."

They were leading Gideon to the drawing room, since her mother had graciously allowed that her daughter might have a short unchaperoned conversation with the duke.

"It's utterly mad, of course," she continued. "We'll have to deny all rumors. The duke should be mourning Ada; of course, he
is
mourning Ada. We won't announce anything. We'll keep it entirely secret. You'll have to drop Villiers. But no one knows of your engagement to him; it will be a seven-day wonder."

"Villiers is going to marry Lisette," Eleanor said flatly. She glanced back to find that Gideon had been caught by Anne. She felt a qualm, given Anne's express dislike for Gideon, but her sister seemed to be behaving politely enough.

"Lisette's father won't be happy with that. Gilner will have to come home now. I can't imagine that he wants his daughter to marry Villiers, not with those children of his in the picture."

"Villiers is a good man," Eleanor said. "And a duke."

"What's more, there's the question of Lisette herself," her mother continued, not even listening. "The other night the squire rattled on about his elder son being engaged to Lisette, but it was clear to me that the man was desperate to save his son. The poor boy has been living abroad for years, ducking the marriage."

The conversation felt both morbid and ill-bred, so Eleanor moved to a sofa and sat down, hands folded.

"I'll allow you fifteen minutes together," her mother said. "No more than that, if you please. I can't have the servants gossiping more than they're already likely to do. I suppose Astley will spend the night, but I'll instruct him to leave tomorrow morning. This really is a most disgraceful visit." She looked entirely happy.

Gideon appeared, and the duchess slipped out, closing the door firmly behind her.

Eleanor felt as if she were having one of those odd experiences described in the papers by people who claimed to have encountered a ghost. Surely this Gideon could not be the living, real Gideon? But there he was, standing in the doorframe, apparently solid and real.

Yet the Gideon she had known for the past few years, ever since his eighteenth birthday, was polite, unfailingly mannered, and distant. Entirely correct behavior for a married acquaintance.

This
Gideon had feverish eyes, so fervent that her own dropped, which meant that she saw he was holding a sparkling object in his right hand.

A few weeks ago she would have flown to him. Now she sat primly on the sofa. She could feel the weight of her panniers on either side of her legs, holding her down.

Gideon didn't move either. "You're so beautiful," he said finally. All she felt was a wave of embarrassment because his voice was thick with emotion.

She opened her mouth and said just the wrong thing. "I'm terribly sorry about Ada's death." His face went slack, as if the only thing holding him together had been the fire in his eyes. "I apologize!" she cried, jumping to her feet. "I didn't mean to bring up such a painful subject."

Grief was much easier to sympathize with than love, or whatever emotion he had been displaying before she mentioned Ada. So she fetched him from the doorway and brought him over to the sofa and patted his hand, just as the sister of a good friend would do. Like any acquaintance with a warm affection for a newly widowed man.

"You should know that I concluded all ceremonies for Ada before travelling here," he said.

Eleanor managed a weak smile. "She was Quaker. Did you know that?"

And, when Eleanor shook her head, "Her father permitted it. She was quite devout. I wasn't... I'm Church of England, of course. But! liked her rector, Mr. Cumberwell. He buried her immediately at St. John's in Westminster. Quakers have a very simple ceremony."

Eleanor curled her fingers around his. "I'm glad that she found solace."

"I told Cumberwell to take her portion and endow a chapel in her memory. He refused because he said she wouldn't have liked that. So we're giving the money to a Foundling Hospital instead,
I
don't want it."

"Ada loved children," Eleanor said soothingly.

"I shouldn't be here with you," he said, "but I couldn't stop myself."

She resisted the impulse to shrink back on the sofa, to stop the conversation before it could start.

There was something indecent about all the emotion in his eyes, as if she were seeing something she had no right to.

"I feel shame," he said, hardly pausing for breath. "But shame is something a man can learn to live with. I felt shame years ago because of our love, because of the way we—we were together. The shame I feel now is nothing compared to that."

Eleanor was starting to feel ill. In some remote part of her mind she wondered whether she could stage a faint, in order to force him into silence. He was still turning that sparkling thing, a ring of course, a diamond, in his fingers. They were long and too slim, she thought. Almost prehensile. Grasping.

And then she caught her own thought, as if someone else had said it, with an echo of shock. She was thinking about Gideon.
Gideon.
The man she loved. The most beautiful man in the world.

But when she looked at him now, she saw little to admire. The sharp planes of his cheekbones seemed too thin, almost hollowed. His chin didn't have even the shadow of a beard; he hadn't had facial hair at eighteen, and perhaps he simply never developed it.

Some part of her mind insistently compared that to the line of another jaw, another man's jaw...

"I shouldn't be here," he said miserably, "but I had to come. Because of Villiers." Eleanor started. It was as if he had read her mind.

"You can't marry Villiers; it's absurd. It's disgusting," Gideon said. "I couldn't allow such a thing to happen, couldn't allow such an abomination, not when I knew you were really waiting for me. I felt as if I would be turning my back on God Himself if I did not save you from that marriage."

Eleanor fruitlessly tried to think of a comment. Was she supposed to agree that she'd been waiting for him for years? She would sound like the worst sort of wet hen.

But Gideon didn't seem to require an interlocutor anyway. "Ada died without pain," he said.

"Wonderful," Eleanor managed. Though that didn't seem quite the right response either.

"She was walking across the floor of the library, they told me, and she started to cough. I know people thought she was malingering," Gideon said, "but she wasn't. A coughing attack was a terrible thing, once it started. She would bend over and hack so violently that I felt as if her lungs must be injured."

"I saw it once," Eleanor said, putting her hand over his again. The one that wasn't holding the ring.

"I was terrified for her."

He shuddered. "You couldn't not be. Sometimes I wouldn't go home at night, simply because I couldn't bear it. It looked so painful, though she said it wasn't. She was
appallingly
brave."

Eleanor murmured something.

"I used to wish that she would just scream at me, or at fate, or someone. But she never did." His hands clenched and then he opened his right hand and looked down at the ring as if surprised to find it there.

"No," Eleanor said quickly. "No."

"It's the only solution," he said. "I love you, and you love me. I always loved you, even before you noticed me." "You did?"

"You can't have been more than thirteen when I came home with your brother the first time. But you were already yourself." He ran a finger along her eyebrow. "You were already laughing in that way you have."

Eleanor couldn't stop herself. "What do you mean?"

"Other women smile. Or when they laugh, it comes out a pinched sound. Your mouth is so wide."

He fell silent, to Eleanor's relief. She'd never thought of her mouth as
wide,
and it wasn't an image she particularly cared to dwell on.

But then he started talking again. "I brought this ring with me because it's the ring I should have given you years ago. It was my mother's. I never gave it to Ada."

"I don't think we should have this conversation now," Eleanor said.

His eyes were burning again. His skin seemed drawn too tightly over his bones, and yet he was still Gideon. The same dear Gideon whom she had watched so hungrily at fourteen, had smiled at shyly

—and then not so shyly—at fifteen, the boy she had lured to kiss her at sixteen...

"You miss her," she said.

"No!" he said, almost violently. "I hardly knew her. We lived in the house like a brother and sister."

She touched him on the shoulder and it was the way it used to be, finally. She met his eyes and she knew what he was feeling, just the way she used to, when she thought they were two hearts beating as one. She held out her arms. "It's all right to miss her," she said He fell forward, head on her shoulder, still protesting that he didn't miss his wife at all. That he hardly knew her.

Until he began weeping.

Eleanor didn't manage to escape to her bedchamber until very late that night. By then her nerves felt like the strings of a violin, pulled too tight and vibrating helplessly. She had a bath, dismissed Willa, put on her nightgown, and wrapped herself in a dressing gown.