The Duke's Governess Bride (7 page)

‘Faith, your Grace, I’ve no wish to poison you,’ she said. ‘You look like a small boy faced with a foul-smelling physick.’

He sighed dolefully. ‘If I drink it, will you let me have my coffee afterwards?’

‘An entire pot of Wilson’s best, if you wish it,’ she said. ‘But you must make an honest effort, else I won’t take you anywhere today.’

‘I suppose there’s no help for it,’ he said, manfully taking up the cup with fingers too large for the dainty porcelain handle. ‘Must obey the governess.’

Though he tipped the cup to drink, the chocolate was almost too thick to do so, not quite a pudding, nor a drink, either. What it was for certain was wonderful, redolent of spices and flavour, warm and rich, and exactly sweet enough to satisfy. It delighted his tongue and his stomach, the pleasurable sensation of contented well-being spreading through his limbs as well. She was right: he’d never tasted anything like it, and he tipped the cup again, wanting more.

‘Should I send for Wilson’s coffee now, your Grace?’ While her expression was studiously impassive, her eyes shone bright with amusement in the grey winter sunlight. ‘Or would you care for another dish of chocolate?’

He held his cup out to be refilled. ‘You tell me, ma’am.’

She laughed and poured the chocolate. As he drank again, she took a two-tined fork and plucked up a piece of the ham. The meat was sliced so finely that she could twist it into a rosette on the tines of the fork, offering it to him.

‘That looks as thin as the sorry ham they serve at Vauxhall Gardens,’ he said, turning suspicious again. ‘Flimsy, tasteless rubbish, unfit for any man.’

‘It’s not the same, I assure you,’ she said. ‘It’s far, far more delectable than that, and not at all like that thick, fatty bacon you devour at home.
Prosciutto,
it’s called. Try it now, while the chocolate lingers on your tongue, and let the flavors mingle.’

This time he trusted her, taking the entire twirled rosette of ham from the fork into his mouth. Magically, the saltiness of the meat melded with the fading sweetness of the chocolate to make something entirely different. It seemed that beyond the spices of the chocolate and the spices of the ham’s curing, he could also taste the dark mystery of the cocoa along with the sweet summer grasses that the pig had eaten. He’d never tasted anything like it, especially not for breakfast. It was not only beyond his experience, but beyond his powers to describe as well.

She knew it, too, her mouth curving up in a mischievous, knowing grin as she twisted the fork into the ham once again. ‘
That
is how Venice tastes, your Grace, or rather, how it tastes so early in the day. We can have another lesson at each meal, if you please.’

‘Oh, it pleases me,’ he said. He took another sip of the chocolate, but instead of reaching for the fork with the ham, he leaned forwards and opened his mouth. She hesitated only a moment before her smile blossomed into a grin, and she fed the ham to him. He made a rumbling sound of happiness as he chewed, and finally winked at her by way of thanks.

Startled, she sat back in her chair, the fork still in her hand, but then she laughed softly, too, as much at her own surprise as with him. Best of all, she blushed, her cheeks turning nearly as rosy as the cloth on the table.

If this was his breakfast lesson, why, he could scarce wait for dinner.

‘Who taught you this?’ he asked, intrigued by the notion of his prim English governess indulging in something as sensuous as this unexpected combination of ham and chocolate. Or rather, a governess he’d mistakenly judged to be prim. Clearly there was far more to her than he’d ever realised before. ‘Where did you learn it?’

‘It’s scarcely a secret, your Grace,’ she said, so deftly dodging his question that at first he didn’t realise she’d done it. ‘The Venetians do relish their chocolate. Why, two hundred years ago, cocoa beans were of as much value as gold coins.’

‘More fool them, I say.’ He reached for another fork to finish the ham. He’d had the rare pleasure of her feeding him before, but he didn’t wish to test her—or himself—too far by expecting her to do it again. There were limits, limits he’d already come close to crossing, and besides, he was hungry. ‘Chocolate for gold!’

‘For other things, too, your Grace.’ She lowered her voice to a conspirator’s whisper. ‘They say there was a time when a slave could be bought for the sum of a hundred cocoa beans.’

‘A man’s life for beans?’ he asked as he ate. ‘That doesn’t seem a fair price.’

‘But ’tis true,’ she said. ‘I had it on the best authority. And more—that a dozen cocoa beans would buy the luscious favours of the most wanton courtesan in all the city for a night.’

Richard choked on the ham.

‘Do you need help, your Grace?’ she asked frantically as she rushed to stand behind his chair and began thumping him on the back. ‘Wilson! Wilson, come at once! His Grace is in distress!’

‘Hush, hush, I’m fine,’ Richard sputtered, gasping for breath. ‘Now sit, and be still.’

She sat, barely, on the edge of the chair with her hands clasped tightly in her lap and her face screwed up with concern. ‘You are certain you are recovered, your Grace? You are sure?’

‘Of course I am,’ he said, taking a deep, heaving breath. ‘You took me by surprise, that was all.’

‘I, your Grace?’

Damnation, what right did she have to look so astonished? ‘Yes, you, Miss Wood. To hear you speak, ah, to speak with such freedom—’

‘Of the courtesans?’ she helpfully supplied. ‘Venice is famous for them. Or should I say infamous? You may not be aware of this, your Grace, but it is a historical fact that at one time there were more courtesans in Venice than in any other city in Italy.’

‘In the past, you say?’ The historical past meaning yesterday, he supposed, when he’d not even disembarked before the whores had come rowing right up to the boat. Either Miss Wood was a complete innocent, or she must have the blinders of all polite women in place to have missed them.

‘Yes, your Grace, the past,’ she continued charmingly, falling back into her schoolroom manner. ‘The courtesans then were like the great ladies of other places, living as high as queens. They must have been very beautiful and accomplished, for all that they were—were not very nice women.’

‘Oh, no, not at all.’ Deliberately he helped himself to a bun. A round bun, about the size of his fist, bristling with plump raisins and glazed with white sugar icing. Exactly. If he concentrated on the bun, on each and every infernal raisin, then perhaps he could not be thinking the thoughts he was thinking about his daughters’ governess.

‘But then history is often like that, your Grace, isn’t it?’ she continued, blithely unaware. ‘Our own British history’s not always as honourable as it should be, though I don’t believe even wicked old Henry Tudor tried to barter cocoa beans for courtesans.’

‘Who told you of the, ah, value of cocoa beans?’ he asked. ‘I trust it wasn’t the bear-leader hired in my name.’

‘Signor Gaspari?’ She smiled at the notion, a chink in her schoolroom manner. ‘Oh, no, your Grace, he is the very soul of decorum. No, I heard it from another, though I cannot recall exactly where.’

In those few moments, Richard sensed more than she was telling. Could she have met someone here during the few weeks she’d been here alone, someone who’d taught her how to taste chocolate and ham together and to speak so easily of courtesans? Could that be the reason that she seemed so different from how he remembered her?

Could the ever-respectable Miss Wood have had an intrigue?

He studied her with new thoughtfulness. She might not be a young girl any longer, but there was an intelligence and animation to her, an eagerness, that gave beauty to her features in a way that he’d never noticed before. In the silvery winter light of Venice, she looked more delicate than he’d remembered from the bright country sunshine of Kent. Here she returned his gaze levelly, without hesitation or fading deference, and that was different, too. She
was
beautiful, really, with her round little face and luminous blue eyes.

‘Do you be needing me, your Grace?’ Wilson stood in the doorway, clearly peeved at having been called down for what he perceived as a fool’s errand. Behind him hovered Signora della Battista and one of her footmen, her expression filled with more curiosity than concern. ‘We heard Miss Wood shouting, your Grace, loud enough to raise the very dead, and—’

‘No one’s dead, Wilson,’ Richard said curtly, pushing his chair back from the table without looking at Miss Wood. He felt foolish now, almost guilty, for no reason at all. ‘And no one’s in any need of help, either.’

Wilson glanced pointedly at the chocolate pot. ‘None of your coffee, your Grace?’

‘No.’ Likely he looked a great fool, too, sipping hot chocolate with a governess in his nightclothes. ‘I am finished with breakfast, and I’ll be dressing now for a day out of doors.’

‘Out of doors, your Grace?’ Wilson asked. ‘On the water?’

‘Out of doors, Wilson, and on the water, and into the very sky if it pleases me to do so.’ Richard nodded, striving for nonchalance as he walked past them, or at least as nonchalant as he could be in his bare feet and dressing gown. ‘In addition to the proper clothes, I’ll ask you to arrange what is necessary for keeping warm while in the open. Miss Wood will be my guide, and I will be going wherever she suggests.’

Chapter Seven

‘I’
ve heard enough tales of that infernal bell tower, Miss Wood,’ the duke said. ‘No more
campanile,
if you please.’

Jane looked at him sideways, using the hood of her cloak as an excuse to keep from turning her face fully towards him. She wasn’t sure if she could, anyway, she was that close to being frozen stiff. The coals in the tin foot warmer beneath her petticoats had long ago lost their warmth, and with it she’d lost the feeling in her toes as well as in her fingers. The weather had turned much colder overnight, and the breeze that came down the canals from the open sea felt less like the customary summery caress and more like an icy slap.

Yet the duke had insisted they survey the city by gondola. On other, balmier days, Jane had thought a gondola was a fine, elegant method of travel. She’d come to love gliding through the watery streets, with the gondolier at his oar behind her and Signor Gaspari sitting at her feet while he described everything they saw.

But this morning was different. Without Jane’s knowledge, poor Signor Gaspari had been summarily dismissed. As the duke’s new guide, Jane had at once volunteered to sit in the guide’s place on the plain bench, but the duke wouldn’t hear of it. Instead she must sit with him, beside him, as uneasy equals. His Grace insisted. There was no argument.

And sitting on the gondola’s cushioned bench with a man as large as the duke was, well,
intimate.
No matter how Jane tried to ease herself apart from him, the sleek narrowness of the gondola’s design pushed them together, and she couldn’t help touching her arm against his arm, her leg against his, her hip against his. The way that Wilson had tucked them in together beneath fur-lined rugs as if they were in bed only made the arrangement cosier still.

In retrospect, it had been her own fault, feeding the duke the ham with the chocolate at breakfast. She’d intended it to be instructional, not seductive, but his Grace had clearly misinterpreted, and considered the simple gesture as something more than she’d ever meant it to be. It was not as if he’d attempted any new familiarity, or said anything to her that was disrespectful, but she sensed the difference just the same in how he looked at her, even listened to her speak.

Somehow she’d lost that invisibility that servants had in most households. He’d stopped treating her like a governess, but as a person, or worse, as a woman, and however subtle the change might be, it still unsettled her. How was she supposed to respond? What was she to say, to do, to think, sitting like this with his thigh pressed shamelessly against hers beneath the rug? She sighed with agitation, her breath coming in a little pale cloud before her face.

‘Forgive me, your Grace,’ she said, finally answering his question. ‘But isn’t that the reason you asked me to attend you in this way? To learn about Venice? Surely there is no single landmark in the city that contains as much history as the
campanile
at San Marco.’

‘I’m sure,’ he said, shifting his body more squarely towards hers. His face was ruddy from the chilly air, his dark gold hair tossing lightly beneath his cocked hat of dark grey beaver. He didn’t seem affected at all by the cold, partly because of the heavy cloak he wore over his coat, but mostly, Jane suspected, because he was simply of warm and hearty temperament, accustomed to riding across the lands around Aston Hall in every kind of weather. Now he yawned, stretching his arms before him. ‘I do believe I’ve learned enough for one day.’

He wasn’t smiling, making it impossible for Jane to tell if he was speaking in teasing jest, or perfect seriousness.

‘I’m out of practice with learning, Miss Wood,’ he continued ruefully. ‘These days my head can accept only so much knowledge, and no more.’

She doubted that. ‘Then I must be the poorest of teachers, your Grace, if, after one morning, your head is already stuffed beyond capacity.’

‘I didn’t say that, did I?’ he asked with a smile. ‘It’s more a question of the topic than the teacher. I’m sure if you spoke of something other than history, then I might again be your best pupil.’

‘What subject is more pleasing, your Grace? Mathematics, philosophy, geography—’

‘Something more personal, perhaps,’ he said. ‘Something of more interest to us both. Such as why you permitted my daughter Mary to fall in love with this man Fitzgerald.’

Jane caught her breath. So this was the true reason for this junket, to give him the opportunity to interrogate her. She’d not escape from him here. In a gondola in the middle of the Grand Canal, she was as good as trapped, and they both knew it.

‘I didn’t mean to surprise you,’ he said. ‘That is, I did mean to surprise you, but not in a malicious way. I wish to know the truth, that is all, and without permitting you the time to contrive a practised answer that would—’

‘I have told you nothing but the truth in regard to both your daughters, your Grace,’ she said swiftly. ‘Lord John has a great deal in common with Lady Mary, and she with him. There was no “permission” to their attachment at all, and I do not believe I could have stopped their friendship even if I’d tried. Mutual interests led to a delight in one another’s company, and love soon after followed.’

She hadn’t meant to run on so long, but he’d listened, and he hadn’t interrupted, either, the way he usually did. He’d simply…
listened,
and now that she’d realised it, she blushed.

‘The short of it, your Grace, is that they fell in love,’ she said, ‘and I am certain that neither has ever been happier.’

‘In love, you say?’ he repeated, watching her so closely that her flush deepened further. ‘You speak as if from your own experience, Miss Wood. You have been in love yourself?’

‘I, your Grace?’ she asked, stunned. However was she to answer so personal a question?

‘Yes, you, Miss Wood,’ he said. ‘Surely you must have some experience with love yourself if you were so quick to recognise it in my daughters.’

‘Love.’ She could not bear his regard any longer, and in confusion lowered her gaze to her frozen fingers.

‘Aye, love,’ he repeated, more softly. ‘Is there something wrong with your hands, Miss Wood?’

‘They are cold, your Grace,’ she said. ‘It is my own fault.’

‘But easily rectified.’ He lifted the edge of the fur-lined rug, inviting her to slip her hands within. ‘Here, tuck them in. I’ll warm them fast enough.’

She shook her head, determined not to succumb to such a scandalous temptation. To let him warm her hands against his body, beneath luxurious fur!

‘Thank you, no, your Grace,’ she said, still addressing her fingers and not him. ‘Next time I shall put aside my vanity, and wear my heavy woollen mittens.’

‘You won’t speak to me of your old loves, will you?’ he asked. ‘I am sorry. Last night I realised that, despite all the years you have been in my employ, Miss Wood, I know very little about you.’

‘But you do, your Grace!’ she exclaimed. ‘You know that I was born in Hertfordshire, that I was schooled by my father, that I speak French and read Italian, that I can teach mathematics for ladies, composition, painting in watercolours, and—’

‘That is nothing,’ he said with such an all-encompassing sweep of his arm that the gondola rocked from the force of it. ‘Anyone who reads your references will know that much. But it was not until last night that I learned your eyes are the same shade of blue as the lilacs that grow beneath the dovecote, back at Aston Hall.’

She gasped, made speechless by his audacity. Yet as soon as her gaze rose to meet his, she realised how wrongly she’d judged that audacity—his words weren’t meant as an idle gallant’s compliment, but as a confidence, a gift of unadorned honesty to her.

To
her.

And if he’d never noticed her eyes were blue, how was it that she in turn had never noticed his were neither blue, nor green, nor brown, but a blending of all three that was as unusual and as complicated as the duke himself was. His life out of doors had carved little lines around those eyes, radiating outward like the rays a cartographer would draw around the sun, lines that became more pronounced when he smiled. He was smiling now, and she felt her own lips curl upwards in shy response.

Yet to her surprise, this time he was the one who looked away first, staring off past the gondolier and his sweeping single oar and towards the chilly grey canal.

‘I met Lady Anne Hailey at a Twelfth Night ball,’ he began, so softly that Jane had to lean closer to hear. ‘I was down from school for the holidays, a cocky young whelp with a fearsome opinion of my own worth, while she was so young she’d not yet even been presented at Court. But she tamed me fast enough. She had red ribbons in her hair and freckles that she hated, and when she laughed I thought it was the merriest sound I’d ever heard. She’d no more use for the foolishness of the ball than I did, and she led me outside to see the moonlight on the fallen snow. She kissed me first that night, and in the summer, we were wed. She was my first love, aye, my duchess, and my only love, and then too soon, she was gone.’

He sighed, a little puff of old grief and warm memories in the chilly air. Wistfully Jane doubted he even recalled she was there with him, he was so lost in the past. Yet he had shared a part of himself with her that he kept buried from everyone else at Aston Hall, and the confidence touched her so deeply that she felt tears well up in her eyes. He’d trusted her with his duchess, and in return she could not keep back her own old sorrow.

‘I was sixteen, and he was twenty-two,’ she said, the long-buried story now coming out so fast that the words tumbled over one another in a tumbled rush. ‘His name was George, George Lee, and he was a lieutenant in his Majesty’s navy, visiting his uncle in our parish. And he was handsome, handsome as the day, with the sunlight on his gold lace and buttons. I’d walk with him through the orchard beneath the apple trees, and he told me of all the foreign places he’d seen and battles he’d fought. I’d never known anyone like him, and when he asked me to wait for him, I said yes.’

She’d never forget George. She never tasted apples without thinking of him, of how the boughs overhead had bowed beneath the weight of the ripening fruit above them, and how the heady sweet scent had filled the late-summer air. He’d let her see there was a world beyond that orchard, and taught her how to dream of it. And he’d kissed her, too, just the once beneath the apple trees, before he’d left.

‘Did you love him, then?’

She blinked, like a drowsy sleeper wakened too soon.

‘I did,’ she said, sadly. ‘I loved him, and he me. I promised I’d wait for him. I would have done anything for him, anything at all.’

‘And yet you are here.’

Jane shook her head, the old sorrow reduced by time to a dull ache, but an ache that had never quite abated. ‘He sailed away, and though I waited, he never came back. His ship was lost with all hands off Gibraltar.’

Being a parish minister, her father had had much experience with bearing sorrowful tidings, and he’d waited until they were alone in their parlour before he’d showed her the paper from London with the news. She’d stared at him in shock, and refused to believe what he was so gently telling her. Instead she had snatched the paper from his hands and run to the orchard to read it for herself. Surely Father had misunderstood the news. Surely there had been survivors. But there had been no hope to be found in the tersely worded announcement from the naval office, and not even she could pretend her George would return. She’d dropped to her knees and wept until she’d no tears left, there among the last mouldering windfalls in the dry autumn grass.

‘I trust you haven’t shared that gloomy tale with my daughters,’ the duke said solemnly, jarring her from her reverie. ‘Young females can be melancholy enough without having their heads filled with stories of doomed lovers lost at sea.’

She stared at him, so wounded she could scarcely force the words from her mouth.

‘How—how can you speak so, your Grace?’ she stammered. ‘How is my—my loss any less than your own?’

‘Because Anne was my wife, my duchess, the mother of my children,’ he said, as if this explained everything. ‘I do not intend to belittle your grief, Miss Wood, but I don’t believe our…ah…our losses are comparable.’

She shook her head, silently rejecting his hideous, selfish
belief.
How could she ever dream they’d something in common? He was her master, not her friend, her superior in every way. He certainly wasn’t her confidant, and now she could not bear to be in his company another moment.

‘Forgive me, your Grace, forgive me for everything.’ She rose upright in the gondola, impulsive rather than wise, and the narrow boat pitched precipitously. Though she caught at the black-lacquered side to save herself, she refused to sit again, looking past the startled duke to the man at the oar.

‘If you please, gondolier,’ she called in Italian. ‘Draw to the side, here, and put me out at once.’

The man nodded, doubtless deciding the English lady was mad, and deftly steered the gondola towards the side of the canal.

The duke reached out to steady her, his fingers firm around her arm. ‘Here now, Miss Wood, none of that. I won’t have you tumbling over the side.’

She looked at him sharply, her hurt now flaring into anger. ‘You needn’t concern yourself, your Grace, not for me. My loss would not be comparable, would it?’