Jilting the Duke (5 page)

Chapter Six

Aidan arrived at the Wilmot house promptly at two. A solid Georgian, with three floors above the ground level, and one below, the house faced north into the last block of Queen Anne Street, abutting the lower estates of Portland Place. At the corner there, Chandos Street led south to Cavendish Square, to the park—and to his house. After receiving Tom's letter, Aidan had waited until night, then he had traced his path from the now spent flowers in the Cavendish Square garden, out the iron gate, up the block, and around the corner, until he'd found the Wilmot home, several houses in. The ghostly Sophia in the garden had been no ghost.

Lady Wilmot—as he reminded himself to call her—had instructed her staff to expect him. Her butler opened the door at the first knock, then disappeared to deliver Aidan's card. A lithe Italian wearing secondhand gentleman's clothes took Aidan's cloak and gloves. Likely Tom's clothes, Aidan realized with a pang.

Waiting, Aidan felt unexpectedly unsettled. To calm himself, he assumed the posture of an officer at ease. Hands folded behind his back, he turned his attention to a mental inventory of the house. Pocket doors on either side of the entry led to public drawing rooms, but the butler had disappeared instead through a third doorway, leading to the back of the house. A large open stairway curved on his right, up to a second-floor landing, where a large Palladian window filled the whole space with light. On a sunny day, the window could light the front of the house, an efficient floor plan, given King George's regressive tax on windows.

Aidan paid little attention to the hall furniture; it had most likely come with the property. The paintings on the walls offered precise architectural scenes of Italian cities. Tom's choices, Aidan assessed. Rational, intellectual.

No hint of Sophia, her taste, or her preferences. Oddly, he relaxed. In the larger scheme of his life's experiences, this was not so significant a meeting. His own life, the lives of thousands of British soldiers, did not depend on the outcome of his and Sophia's discussions, and he doubted Lady Wilmot would kill him with her penknife if he made a misstep. No, he thought, and breathed deeply, this was simply another diplomatic mission. He would set her at ease, so that he could discover what she held valuable and what she deemed expendable. And when he knew what she hoped to gain and what she was willing to lose, he would know how to proceed. Until then, he would give nothing away.

When Dodsley returned, Aidan followed the silver-haired butler to the back of the house.

* * *

Competent, serious, responsible
. Sophia repeated the words, as she waited for Dodsley to escort Aidan to the library. A woman who could be trusted with the care of her own child. A woman who can command, she heard Phee's voice correct her.

Even in cerulean blue, the dress Tom had sent her was subtle and reserved. She would not greet Aidan in frothy silks and remind him of those silly, ill-educated society beauties he knew best. “Hothouse flowers,” Mary Wollstonecraft had called them, arguing that such women should be educated, if nothing else, to become fine mothers.
I am, if nothing else, a fine mother.
In Sophia's hair, black brocaded velvet twisted through the bun above the nape of her neck, complementing the black ribbons in the dress. Seeing herself in a color other than black, she could almost hear Tom's voice whisper, “Courage.”

Her dress and her house—both chosen for her by Tom—bolstered her confidence. When she had returned from Italy, she had immediately claimed the library for her own. A harmonious room, long and narrow, the library boasted a fireplace in the middle of the interior wall, flanked with bookcases and cabinets on each side. She'd hung Tom's portrait over the mantel, and sometimes she felt as if his spirit comforted her. On the exterior wall, bookcases alternated with tall windows, and beyond the windows, a wide expanse of lawn bordered with flower beds made up the garden.

When she felt anxious and unsettled, the library's order offered a peaceful calm. Order suggested control, a control over her life and circumstances that she had never felt she had.

Treasures from her married life filled the room. Near the garden door stood her easel. In the bookcases behind it, topped by busts of the Greek poet Sappho and the botanist Carl Linnaeus, were her botanical books and her collection of bound woodcuts and engravings. The cabinets below the bookcases held her pots of paint, her cakes of watercolor, brushes, and paper. She rarely painted anymore, but she often used the easel to sketch her botanical illustrations, laying out the image in pencil or pastel, then moving to the desk to trace the lines with pen and ink if the sketch was destined to be engraved. Her portfolio of sketches rested in a wooden frame like those in print dealers' shops, but made of finer wood and more richly finished, a gift from Tom at Ian's birth.

In the middle of the room—across from the windows and in front of the fireplace—stood a low couch with tall curving sides. Ever considerate, Dodsley had moved three chairs from the wall to flank the couch, giving her several choices for seating depending on how the meeting was proceeding.

At the far end of the room stood the enameled partner desk she had shared with Tom. On her side of the desk, looking toward the fireplace and Tom's portrait, were her writing materials: a pot of ink, several tempered quills of different sizes, a penknife, blotting paper to absorb extra ink, and in the drawer, several sizes of writing paper.

Behind Tom's side of the pedestal desk, Sophia had arranged their scientific library. The bookcase to the right, under the bust of the Greek philosopher Hippocrates, held her husband's books and translations: on the top shelf were her husband's books as printed by his publishers—all neat quartos similarly bound in dark green morocco with gilt titles on their spines. As accompaniments to the printed books, the remaining shelves held bound copies of Tom's manuscripts. Each time Tom had sent the fair copy of his book's manuscript to the printer, she had gathered up the original manuscript pages and taken them to a bookbinder.

In opposition to the crisply uniform printed books, the manuscript books varied in size and height, ranging from tall folios to squat octavos, depending on the paper that had been available when her husband had been writing. Each volume evoked a different place and time in their marriage. The folded foolscap paper reminded her of alpine plants and snow; the grape watermarked paper on which Tom had written in a messy brown ink reminded her of oak galls in Italy and of laughing over a scrofulous French novel in a monastery library.

She ran her fingers across the raised bands on the spines. By touching Tom's works, she imagined somehow she could still draw on his strength. The messy pages reminded her of the best part of their marriage: the hours of cooperation, discussing the best angle from which to draw the plant, the right way to describe its habitat. The manuscript books comforted her, suggesting that her life had not disappeared, but remained preserved in the leaves she had saved.

At the end of one row, an open space waited for Tom's last manuscript, now at the binder, and she placed her hand in the gap. If Tom had been like his printed books, even-tempered, clearly ruled, and unambiguous, then Sophia found in the bound manuscripts an image of her life: pages of disparate sizes all bound together with scribbles in the margins, marked out passages, and added leaves.

The transformation from manuscript to printed books offered Sophia the hope that somehow meaning could still come from the disorder of her life. Perhaps she could yet become what she was meant to be. Perhaps some good could come from this co-guardianship.

Sophia moved to stand in front of the long window nearest her easel. From there she could look into the garden, taking strength from the marigolds and forget-me-nots in Ian's bed. She wished to be standing when Aidan arrived, to meet as equals: he was not a suitor to be greeted with an upward glance and a smile upon rising. Nor would she welcome him as a friend with a polite embrace or the offer of her cheek. No, she would nod gravely at his entrance, offer her hand, and gesture him to a seat.

The door opened to admit him. As in the park, something in the air changed with his presence. She turned to face him.

When she had last been this close to him, he had still been a gangly youth, all legs and arms, tall for his age, and thin. Now his height had become lean muscle, and his shoulders were broad in the form-fitting green jacket. She could understand why women speculated about who his next mistress might be. Once more she felt like the sixteen-year-old girl who had first looked into those deep blue eyes and felt her world shift.

His movements reminded her of the panther at the Royal Menagerie, all pent energy. And like the panther, he seemed predatory, coolly assessing her vulnerabilities. She remembered suddenly and vividly the press of her body against his, the passion of his kisses. She could not allow herself the memories: if she remembered, if she trusted him again and told him their secrets, how would she survive when he left again? She breathed slowly and drew herself inward, forcing a pose of indifference.

* * *

When Aidan entered the room, Sophia was standing in the light of the window, and it took some time before he could make out her features. For a moment she was the ghostly Sophia who had met him in the park, and he felt the same elation and panic. Then she moved away from the light of the window and walked toward him, holding out her hand. The illusion of the ghostly Sophia was replaced, more disturbingly, by the actual woman. But emotion still clutched at the bottom of his stomach—not the pressing lust he had felt with other women, but the unfamiliar ache of desire.

He'd forgotten the look of her, and he found himself—propriety be damned—indulging in a long, assessing gaze. Her nut-brown hair carried the same weight and luster as when he had last seen her. Her gray eyes, always large, seemed more pronounced now, and the line of her cheekbones more defined with age. She was, if anything, more striking. But her eyes looked as if laughter had not reached them in many years.

He had not given much credence to Aldine's description; Sophia had always hidden her passion behind a veil of reserve. But this was no veil. It was something else, an absence of engagement, as if she were not in the room beside him, but rather watching from a great distance. Had it not been for the blue vein pulsing beneath the alabaster skin of her neck or the warmth of her hand as he took it up in greeting, he could easily have imagined this woman as a statue of Carrara marble.

“Lady Wilmot.” He brought her hand to his lips, offering the expected formal kiss, his lips barely brushing the back of her hand. But to test the limits of her reserve, he held her hand a moment longer than appropriate. She offered no response to the greater intimacy of his gesture, not even pulling her hand away in dismay or shock. She only looked at him, her eyes remote, before responding gravely, “Your grace.”

“My condolences on the loss of your husband. He was a fine man.” Her reserve angered him, but he kept his voice placid.

“Thank you. I have known few finer.” Her gaze shifted past him to the portrait of Tom over the fireplace. In it, Tom was seated beside a table filled with books and papers, his right hand resting on the table next to an inkwell and pen, his left hand holding a sheaf of papers in his lap. He was looking up at the viewer, as if he had been interrupted in the act of reading. But Tom's smile and the hint of mischief about his eyes suggested the interruption was welcome. Aidan remembered with poignancy many times in their youth when Tom had used that same smile to smooth their paths. The artist had captured Tom's spirit, but he had made no attempt to hide the thinness of Tom's body or the unhealthy red on his cheek.

“When was this painted?”

“About six months before Tom's death, when Frederick Buchanan visited us. I assume you know Buchanan from Harrow as well.”

Aidan listened to her speak. Her voice carried no inflection, as if talking about her dead husband offered her no more pause than she might feel ordering afternoon tea. Further evidence she had not loved Tom at all. But of course Aidan could see that proof in her dress as well. Certainly, the details were black, but the blue was too vivid. At best, the dress only nodded at half-mourning. He tamped down his rising anger. Many widows had not loved their husbands, but Tom had deserved mourning. Sophia should have mourned.

“Yes, I knew Buchanan; he was talented even then.” Aidan tucked the name away: a portrait painter who had spent hours observing minute details would be useful in learning more of Tom's death. “Why did you let Tom be pictured so?” Aidan asked, without turning from the portrait.

“So?” For a moment she sounded perplexed. “Oh, you mean dying? I don't see the portrait in that way. That's simply how Tom looked for much of our marriage and all of Ian's childhood. You might prefer the portrait of Tom in the drawing room, painted before we left England. In it he is younger, healthier, more as you remember him.”

Aidan turned from the portrait to assess the room and its contents. He made his body, his tone, mirror her distance. “May I sit?” He took over the social pleasantries. He would not allow her to assert her place as hostess or as the boy's mother.

“Certainly.” Unruffled, she held her hand out to the seating facing the fireplace, and Aidan chose the sofa, leaving her one of the three chairs remaining. She chose for herself the middle chair, neither too close nor too far away. It was, Aidan noticed, the diplomatic choice, saying neither “I wish to be confidants” nor “I prefer to remain aloof.”

“Would you like some tea?”

“After our discussion. I don't think we'll find this conversation too onerous?” His smile said “have confidence in me.” To emphasize his comfort, he leaned on the arm of the couch and stretched his legs out to the side. Such a pose, drawing attention to the leanness of his frame and his long, muscular legs, displayed his form to its best advantage. “I was surprised to receive Tom's letter after so many years.”