The Confessions of a Duchess (22 page)

Miles had looked smug. “Her ladyship said it was too private a matter to tell the constable,” he said. “Sir William was a bluff Yorkshire man with a reputation for dispensing tough justice. She did not feel it would enhance his standing for it to be known after his death that he wore a ring with a lock of her hair in it that was engraved with her initials. Sentimental nonsense, he apparently called it, and only did it to please her.” Nat laughed. “How on earth did you get her to divulge that to you, Miles?” He paused. “No, forget I asked that. How stupid of me. I can guess.”

“Not my type, old chap,” Miles said. “And even I have some standards with regard to the seduction of recently bereaved widows.” He stopped. “Though now I come to think of it, do you remember Lady Compton—”

“Spare us,” Dexter said. “So the ring was missing when his body was brought back?”

“Correct,” Miles said. “Taken by the murderer, presumably.”

“Why would he do that,” Nat said, “when Sir William’s silver hip flask and his snuffbox were not taken?”

“As a trophy, perhaps,” Dexter said. “Or to prove to someone else that Sir William was dead.”

“To prove it to Sampson,” Miles said, “if he were the instigator. Find the ring and we have found the murderer?”

“Possibly,” Dexter said. “Although he may have destroyed it, or given it to his mistress, or done any number of things with it.”

“Vanity says he would not destroy it,” Nat said.

Certainly Warren Sampson was not wearing Sir William Crosby’s ring that night. He had greeted Dexter with a firm handshake and his usual bonhomie, and apart from an ostentatiously huge diamond cravat pin he wore no jewelry at all. His gaze had lingered on Lydia Cole for rather longer than politeness dictated and Dexter had seen her blush, but with discomfort rather than pleasure, he thought. The Duke and Duchess of Cole had been very civil to Sampson and had invited him to join their party but Sampson had declined, choosing to sit a few seats away with the Wheeler family instead.

Dexter tried to find a comfortable position on the spindly legged chair. The prospect of the evening ahead was difficult to bear. He had Lydia once again placed next to him and Faye penning him in on the other side. Lydia was habitually silent, her head bent in apparent rapt concentration on her reticule. Faye was staring at him in an attempt to bludgeon him into starting yet another unsatisfactory conversation with her daughter.

“Lydia and I were saying just now how very
ill
the dowager duchess is looking tonight,” Faye said. She leaned forward to engage her daughter, obliterating Dexter’s view of the room. “Were we not saying that, Lyddy? Did we not comment that Laura looks every one of her
four and thirty years
tonight and then several more?”

“You were saying so, Mama,” Lydia said, looking up briefly. “I thought she looked very well and very pretty, as she always does.”

“The dowager duchess?” Dexter said. “Is she here tonight?” Faye leaned back and he was at last afforded an unobstructed view of the recital room. Sure enough, Laura was opposite, taking a seat next to Alice Lister and Lady Elizabeth Scarlet. She was wearing a silk gown in dowager purple, but if that was supposed to be her concession to her status Dexter thought that she had failed spectacularly to look like a respectable widow. To his eyes the gown looked far too rich a hue and far too tightly wrapped about her slender curves to be remotely frumpish. A matching purple silk shawl was draped around her shoulders, dipping down to a diamond clasp between her breasts.

She looked like a present that he wanted to unwrap there and then, sumptuous, provocative and gloriously tempting.

Desire and outrage fought a brief battle within Dexter. Surely Laura was still far too weak to be out of her bed let alone attending a public concert. She might look very well indeed—Lydia was quite right—but she had evidently paid no attention
whatsoever
to the warning he had given her to take no risks and stay away from danger, for she had ventured out alone and unprotected except for Alice and Elizabeth, which was just about the most foolhardy and stupid thing she could possibly have done. The protective fury stirred in Dexter as he thought about it. He had hoped that she had taken heed of his words to her the previous day, yet here she was, defiant, determined and independent, all the qualities that he deplored in the woman he would want as his future bride and yet found strangely attractive in Laura….

Their eyes met. Laura acknowledged him with the barest of nods, as though he was a mere acquaintance, and turned back to her conversation with Alice. Dexter seethed with frustration. She looked so cool, as though their reckless, inflammatory and thoroughly outrageous lovemaking in the wine cellar had never occurred and he had not spent the rest of the night in intimate circumstances with her.

It infuriated him that she was so composed.

He wanted to take her in his arms there and then and smash her self-possession to smithereens. He wanted to shake her and ask her what she thought she was doing to willfully ignore his instructions. He wanted to kiss her until she was breathless.

Faye was still talking. “She never had the looks to carry off the role of duchess, poor ungainly creature. Duchesses should have style and poise….” Dexter got up and walked across to where Laura was sitting, ignoring Faye’s outraged gasp and the ill-concealed curiosity of the other concertgoers.

“A word, if you please, your grace,” he said through his teeth. He took her elbow in his hand, remembering at the last minute not to hurt her injured arm, and pulled her to her feet.

“What on earth do you think you are doing?” Laura uttered, as he drew her a little distance away from the others behind the sparse concealment of a nodding fern.

“I could ask the same of you,” Dexter returned. “I hardly expected to see you here tonight. Have you lost your sense to do something so dangerous?”

“Attending a musical recital is scarcely a perilous occupation, Mr. Anstruther,” Laura said haughtily.

“Now you are willfully misunderstanding me!” Dexter could feel his temper slipping out of control and his voice rising. “You are barely up from your sickbed and already venturing out without so much as a servant to protect you! Must you indulge your appetite for destruction in such a reckless way? Did I not expressly forbid you to do anything that might put you in harm’s way?”

A spot of pink color burned along Laura’s cheekbones. Her hazel eyes snapped.

“Forbid me?” she said scathingly. “Just who do you think you are, Mr. Anstruther?”

“I am the man you spent the night with not two days ago,” Dexter said. “Or had you forgotten? The coolness of your acknowledgment of me might lead me to suspect it.” Laura’s luscious mouth tightened to a thin line. “I thought it in both our interests to forget that,” she said sweetly. “And as you recall, I am suffering
severe
amnesia over the whole affair.”

Dexter’s anger tightened to the point where he forgot everything else. “Your apparent amnesia is much exaggerated, I believe,” he said, “but I shall be happy to remind you of what happened between us at any time and place you choose—”

“I have come to tell you that the concert is about to start.” Miles’s smooth voice cut across them. “Also that Fortune’s Folly already has a town crier and so does not need you to make any further announcements, Dexter. It is scarce discreet to indulge in an argument behind nothing more substantial than a potted plant.”

Laura gave an exasperated sigh, turned her back and walked away and Dexter, suddenly conscious of his surroundings, made his way back to his seat. Lydia avoided looking at him. Faye Cole gave him a look of fury barely masked by a cold smile. The orchestra struck up the first chord and the soloist burst into song.

The concert was almost as poorly attended as Sir Montague’s dinner had been. Most of the ladies of Fortune’s Folly were absent with the rather odd result that three-quarters of the audience were gentlemen. Half of these left during the interval when they realized that they were baulked of their prey and went to the Morris Clown to drown their sorrows. By the end there was only Dexter, Miles, Lydia Cole and her mother, Laura, Alice, Lady Elizabeth and half a dozen other people left in the room. The German soprano engaged for the evening sang with increasing stridency as her audience diminished and finished by stalking off the stage to a ripple of lame applause.

“A word of advice, old chap,” Miles said laconically as he and Dexter prepared to leave. “Try to keep your eye on the main target.” Then, as Dexter looked blank, “Miss Cole, Dexter. You have been staring at Laura all evening, rather than at her cousin.” Dexter ran a hand over his forehead. “I need to speak to her grace again,” he muttered.

“I really would not advise it, old chap,” Miles said, not unsympathetically. “I realize that there is something between yourself and Laura but it can come to nothing. She has no money at all, and I would have thought she was scarcely the type of woman to meet your exacting requirements. She is far too independent.”

He nodded toward Lydia, who had managed to escape her mother for a second whilst Faye visited the ladies’ withdrawing room and was staring rather fixedly at a group of gentlemen who were chatting by the door. “You could do worse, you know,” Miles said.

“The mother may be appalling but Miss Cole is a quiet, biddable girl—just what you want—and her fortune is more than respectable.”

“I know,” Dexter said. Lydia Cole fulfilled every criterion on his list. She was pretty enough, well bred and submissive, and the thought of marrying her turned his blood cold.

He could not understand it. A few short weeks ago he would have been glad to marry a woman for whom he felt no more than lukewarm liking. It fitted his notions of how a convenient marriage should operate, with no wild feelings on either side to disturb the surface calm. It was what he had thought he wanted and he could not understand why his feelings had changed so radically. All he knew was that to make an offer for Lydia when he burned for Laura seemed impossible.

“I am not sure whether I can make Miss Cole an offer,” he said slowly.

“This is business, Dexter,” Miles said, his voice hardening. “Try. You cannot afford to hesitate.” He gave Dexter a consoling clap on the shoulder. “Court your heiress with a bit of passion, old chap. At the moment it’s painful to watch. Act the part of the ardent suitor and make it convincing. Sometimes we all have to make sacrifices for the greater good.” A cold breath of wind swept through the room as someone opened the main door and stepped out into the night. The candles flickered and a servant moved swiftly to cut off the draught. And in that moment the coldness of memory trickled down Dexter’s spine, setting him shivering. He looked across the room at Laura. She was responding to some comment of Alice Lister’s as they walked toward the door together. There was a smile curving her lips. The candlelight shimmered on the hazel of her eyes, making them look warm and deep and mysterious. Dexter suddenly felt very odd, as though a puzzle he had not even been aware that he had been trying to solve had finally slipped into focus.

“What did you say?” he said.

Miles had taken a few steps away but now he turned back, a perplexed look on his face. “I said that we all have to make sacrifices for the greater good.” When Dexter did not reply immediately he added with a touch of asperity, “For the sake of your family, old chap—”

“Before that,” Dexter said. “You said
act the part and make it convincing.
” Miles shrugged, clearly puzzled. “Makes the wooing sweeter, even if your heart is not in it. I know it sounds cynical but it’s for the best, at least until the knot is tied and it is too late.”

After a moment, when Dexter did not respond, he frowned. “Are you quite well, old fellow?”

“Perfectly, thank you,” Dexter said, although he felt as though he had been hit over the head with a club. “Don’t wait for me. I shall be along directly.” Miles nodded and went out, still looking puzzled. Dexter saw him pause in the hall to speak to Laura and Alice. He saw Laura tilt her head up for Miles’s kiss and the light gleamed on the curve of her cheek and shimmered on the golden chestnut of her hair. Then she, too, was gone. The sound of voices died away and Dexter stood in the empty hall whilst the musicians collected their stands and sheet music and the servants started to douse the candles.

“Act the part…make it convincing until it is too late,”
Miles had said and his words had hit Dexter like a ton of bricks and taken him back to Laura’s broken whisper the night before when he had carried her up to bed after resetting her arm.

“I had to make you leave…”

It had not been feverish and drunken nonsense. He remembered that moment in the wine cellar and Laura so soft and sweet in his arms, confiding a little drunkenly that she had wanted him that night at Cole, but that what she had done had been wrong in so many ways.

He felt cold in his bones.

He thought of the Laura Cole who held the respect of all who knew her, who embraced a cause to help others, who was always trying to save people like Carrington. He thought back four years to the Laura who had made such tender, passionate love to him and whispered endearments to him in the heat of the night. That was not the same woman who had turned him away the next day with hard, cold words. He had been so angry that for four long years he had been blind to the truth. But now he knew.

Act the part…Make it convincing…Until it is too late…

They had been swept away by emotion that night, but in the morning Laura had thought that she had done a terrible thing and the only way she could think of to put matters right had been to send him away. She had not wanted him to ruin his life, his career and his family’s future. She had pretended that she had not cared, that it had been no more than a game to her. His stomach dropped as though he had stepped off a tall building into thin air.

He knew he was right. He knew it with every instinct he possessed. That was the same Laura Cole who paid incompetent servants in order to save them from poverty, who tried to help the ladies of Fortune’s Folly escape the Dames’ Tax, whose cousin spoke with admiration of the causes she had embraced and the people she had tried to help.