Only a Promise (19 page)

He stared at her bent head in silence as she drank her tea and kept her eyes lowered. He had thought of Chloe as an essentially placid woman who wanted only the seemingly simple things in life in order to be happy—marriage, home, motherhood. She had suffered disappointments and real pain in her life and had finally settled for a bloodless bargain that had nevertheless brought her the rudiments of contentment—until his announcement a few days ago, anyway. Now he was not so sure about her. She was beginning to seem to be very much more than the woman he had taken her for. And the more fool he for believing that anyone could be simply a few things and nothing else.

He had not expected to like her—
really
to like her. He had expected—and hoped—to be indifferent to her.

He opened his mouth to speak, but she spoke first as she set down her empty cup and saucer.

“I will be ready to go to London with you,” she said. “The day after tomorrow, is it?”

“Yes.”

He wanted to say more. He wanted to . . . apologize to her? For what? For the fact that his grandfather had died so soon? He wanted to . . . comfort her? But how? He wanted to . . .

He wanted. Always that longing, that nameless yearning.

“Thank you,” he said. His voice sounded abrupt, even cold.

C
hloe sat in an opulent carriage emblazoned with the ducal coat of arms and drawn by four magnificent black horses. It was driven by a stout coachman with a large footman at his side. Four hefty outriders rode beside it, two on each side. All six men were resplendent in the ducal livery. Everyone they passed on the road to London stopped in awe and stared, the men doffing hats and pulling on forelocks, the women dipping into curtsies. Ralph was out there riding too, most of the time well ahead of the carriage, just occasionally alongside it, perhaps to make sure Chloe had not taken fright and jumped out. He looked less conspicuously gorgeous than any of his servants. When he rode far enough ahead, he probably escaped any particular attention.

It seemed absurd to Chloe that as a result of that hurried wedding in the tiny chapel two weeks ago she was now a
duchess
and therefore worthy of all this pomp and excessive security—not to mention the services of a maid. Mavis, Mrs. Loftus’s niece, was sitting inside the carriage with her new mistress, her back to the horses, and was looking fair to bursting with pride. Chloe had
gone virtually unnoticed and unguarded and unattended on her journey to Manville Court just a few months ago.

Whenever they stopped at an inn for a change of horses, she was bowed and curtsied and flattered into the finest private parlor and plied with all the best refreshments the house had to offer, even though she suffered slightly from motion sickness and was never very hungry. Ralph remained outside in the inn yard each time to oversee the grooming of his horses. Even the fresh, new ones were his, sent ahead from the ducal stables so that the magnificent blacks would not have to be exchanged for inferior horseflesh. Sometimes Chloe wondered if anyone realized that he was the duke who owned the carriage and the horses and employed the servants and was married to the duchess then partaking of refreshments in the best parlor.

He never rode inside the carriage with her, even when it rained for a whole hour. And it was not just Mavis’s presence that deterred him, Chloe believed. He never traveled inside any closed conveyance when it could be avoided, he had explained to her back at Manville when she had realized he intended to ride his horse the whole way. She wondered if it had anything to do with the time when he had been wounded and had been transported long distances in the close confines of various coaches. Or if it had something to do with her.

And she wondered if the whole of their married life would mirror the first two weeks. Occasionally they had talked,
really
talked, and she had felt they were drawing closer to each other, perhaps even becoming friends. And there had been that one night . . . But even at the time she had known it was only about sex—
his
word—
and not in any way about love or even affection. Even so, it had been pleasant—strange understatement—and it had seemed to bring them closer until it had been brought to an abrupt end by their quarrel in the middle of the night.

Most of the time he was withdrawn and treated her with a remote though courteous reserve of manner. His eyes were empty of any depth. He was, in fact, as he had been from the beginning of her acquaintance with him. Despite their marriage and the necessary intimacies of the marriage bed, despite the occasional conversation, the occasional kiss, the half a night of sex—to use his word again—nothing was different. And how could she complain? Their marriage was progressing much as they had agreed it would.

She could not even be angry with him any longer for the fact that they were on the way to London. He
had
said they would live quietly in the country after their marriage, but he could not have foreseen the change in their circumstances coming quite as soon as it had. And he was right about duty—both his and hers. Duty summoned them to London, where he must make appearances at court and in Parliament and where both of them must mingle socially with their peers.

And so here she was on the road to town in opulent splendor, with homage being paid to her as though she were someone of great importance, which, she gathered, she was. Would she ever grow accustomed to it all? She might have found some humor in the situation if she had not been so consumed with dread at the prospect of facing the beau monde yet again.

But face it she must. And face it she
would
.

And then at last through the window on one side of the carriage she could see water in the distance, a large body of it. The River Thames.

“We are close to London,” she observed to Mavis, who pressed her face close to the window and looked eagerly for her first glimpse of a tower or church spire.

Chloe thought back to her own excitement as she approached London for the first time six years ago. Her long-ago self would not have been at all surprised to discover that the streets really were paved with gold.

*   *   *

His life had changed far more drastically than he had realized during the past two weeks, Ralph soon came to understand—and it was not just his marriage and his acquisition of the title and all the duties and responsibilities it had brought with it. It was . . .

Well, yes, actually it was just those things.

Getting himself from Manville Court to London was no longer a simple matter of mounting his horse or climbing up to the seat of his curricle and conveying himself along the king’s highway at whatever pace he chose. Now there was a duchess to convey there with him, and somehow the duchess was a larger entity than just Chloe. She was a grand, precious, fragile commodity and had to be borne from one place to another in pomp and luxury and safety. Or so the servants decreed, and servants, Ralph was also discovering, could be quite tyrannical when it came to doing what they perceived to be their duty to ducal employers, for their own sense of consequence was at stake.

How Chloe enjoyed the very public procession through the countryside he did not ask. Though he
almost did when it rained and he was half tempted to join her in the carriage. He was feeling amused despite the discomfort of the rain, and amusement was something that had been so rare with him for a long time that he had felt the urge to share it. He imagined them enjoying a good laugh together inside the carriage over the spectacle they were presenting as they moved across the countryside with minimum speed and maximum visibility.

He did
not
join her, however. He remembered just in time that whenever they had drawn closer to each other in the past two weeks than they had agreed upon, he had ended up feeling an inexplicable sort of panic and had taken a hasty step back. It would be best not to share his amusement with her. Besides, she had her new maid with her.

The rain soon blew over anyway, and he was glad he had remained out in the fresh air.

The fact that his life had changed almost beyond recognition was even more apparent after he had ridden into Portman Square and the ducal carriage and all its outriders as well as the laden baggage coach had come clattering and rumbling in behind him. Ralph would have been willing to wager a significant sum that windows about the square were suddenly bristling with spectators gathered to watch the show. He did not look to see if he was right.

Stockwood House had been basically his for a number of years now. He had come and gone as he pleased, always well served by the staff, but never obtrusively. Now the double doors were thrown back—both of them—and the butler stood in the doorway, stiff and
stately in what was surely a new uniform. And behind him, if Ralph was not very much mistaken, the whole of the staff was lined up in formal rows. It was going to be his wedding day all over again, he thought, wincing inwardly.

He was not usually particularly observant when it came to servants, but he would have had to be blind not to see that every member of staff was also clad in a new uniform and that the hallway in which they were being paraded was positively gleaming with polish. If there was one speck of dust in the whole sizable entry hall, Ralph would be surprised.

He heard so many mutterings of “Your Grace” over the next few minutes that his head fairly buzzed. He could only imagine how Chloe must be feeling as he took her hand upon his sleeve and led her up the steps and through the doors. If she did not flee back to Manville without stopping to remove her bonnet, he would be a fortunate man.

But she surprised him. Instead of simply nodding graciously to left and right and continuing on her way up to the relative privacy of the drawing room or even all the way up to her own apartments, she stopped and smiled and spent well over half an hour working her way along the lines. She carefully spoke to everyone, moving from one side to the other, repeating the names the housekeeper murmured to her and occasionally asking a question of a servant—and stopping long enough to listen to the answer.

“Thank you, Mrs. Perkins,” she said when they had come to the end of the line. “Would you have a tea tray sent up to the drawing room immediately, if you please?
And perhaps you and I could meet in the morning and become better acquainted. I will wish to go down to the kitchen too to speak further with Mrs. Mitchell. How splendid everyone is looking. And every
where
too.”

Mrs. Mitchell, Ralph seemed to recall, was the cook.

“The house has always run perfectly smoothly without any effort on my part,” he told Chloe when they were alone in the drawing room a few minutes later and she was removing her bonnet and fluffing up her short curls with both hands. “You must not feel obliged to exert yourself to any great degree.”

She smiled at him, and there was something almost impish in her expression.

“Your grandparents have not been here for a number of years, have they?” she said. “And your mother has her own London home. There has been just you, then. Stockwood House has been a bachelor establishment. I daresay the staff has enjoyed fussing over you as though you were a child incapable of looking after himself. They would look less indulgently upon your wife, however, I do assure you, if it seemed that she was incapable of looking after
her
self and—more importantly—
you
.”

Good God—
as though you were a child incapable of looking after himself
. There could not possibly be any truth in her words, could there? He clasped his hands behind his back and frowned.

She brushed her hands over the creases in her traveling dress.

“
This
is what I wanted, Ralph,” she said. “Oh, not on quite as grand a scale, perhaps, and certainly not in London. But those are relatively minor concerns. I wanted a home of my own and a husband. I wanted to be able to
run the one and care for the other. I will not be unhappy while I am at home here.”

“Only when you have to move beyond its doors?” he asked her.

Her smile became more rueful.

“I have had the chance to listen to only one of Graham’s sermons at church,” she said. “But I will always remember it. He said that if we can only face our worst fears and move forward into them and through them instead of cowering or turning tail and running as far from them as we can, then we will never have to fear anything ever again. It seems an overly simplistic idea, it is true. What if we face up to a charging bull instead of running for safety as we ought? We would never have a
chance
to fear anything again. But I am sure he went on to explain the sort of thing he meant, and I understood without even having to be told. I have always been inspired by his words and thought it must be wonderful to be able to act upon them.”

“Your worst fear is facing the beau monde again, I suppose,” he said.

“Yes,” she agreed, “it is, foolish as that may seem to you. By Graham’s standard, I have already been a failure two separate times.”

“Most of us have been,” he told her, “at least two separate times.”

She tipped her head to one side and regarded him in silence.

“It will be different for you this time,” he said. “You will have me by your side, and you will find the courage to make a stand.”

“And you will have me by yours,” she said, sending
inexplicable shivers along his spine with her words. “And
you
will have courage.”

A footman carried in the tea tray at that moment, and a maid followed behind him with a cake. In former times the manservant would have poured his tea, and the maid would have cut the cake and set a slice on a plate for him. Today, however, Chloe dismissed them with a smile and a word of thanks and performed those offices herself.

There was something undeniably disturbing about the changes in his life, Ralph thought. There was a very definite loss of independence, of privacy. He could ignore servants, though never with unkindness, he hoped. He could not ignore his wife. And this was what she had wanted, what she had made her bargain for—a home and a husband. Him, in other words. She intended to
care
for him.

And beyond the home, he could no longer go wherever he wanted whenever he wanted, with no one to please but himself. For one thing, he was no longer just the Earl of Berwick with his relatively meaningless courtesy title. He was an altogether grander being from whom much was expected. And for another, he was a married man with a wife’s feelings and well-being to consider. And this particular wife had been brought to town against her will and dreaded having to set foot beyond their door. He could not simply abandon her.

It was one thing to accept responsibility for a role, an inanimate thing, a dukedom. It was quite another to feel responsible for another person—his wife, who was nervous and unhappy about what was facing her. It felt suspiciously like taking on an emotional bond, and he did
not like it one little bit. Not liking it, however, would not make it go away.

“A little milk and one sugar,” she said, setting his cup and saucer down at his elbow.

Exactly right. He was almost irritated by the fact. He did not have any idea how she liked her tea even though he had watched her pour it and drink it numerous times.

He had the uncomfortable feeling that Chloe really was going to make him comfortable.