The Duke's Wager (16 page)

“Yes, surely,” Regina said, “once we have won a friend, we do not go on ‘courting’ his friendship, because we know ourselves secure in it. Still, once we have a friend, we do not ignore him, rather we are at ease. There is comfort in not having always to be on one’s best behavior.”

“What lovely friends you must have, my dear,” he said. “Perhaps if I too were poor and defenseless, and beautiful, I would have such friends. But then, I have found that it is very easy to befriend someone who has less than I. Someone who looks to me for favors. They are so easy to please. They are so willing to accommodate. They are so eager for friendship.”

She recoiled from him. “No,” she denied, “that is not friendship, that is patronage.”

“Ah,” he said, “you’ve put your little white finger on it. For I have found that when a man has wealth, influence, and position, he is hard put to tell the difference between friendship and patronage.” He spread his hands in a gesture of dismay. “How is a man to know what is asked in friendship, and what is requested as patronage?”

“Friendship,” Regina said, feeling foolishly like a governess explaining a moral lesson to a stubborn small charge, “is freely given, without expectation of recompense, of anything—except for the hopes of a return friendship.”

“Then I think,” he smiled, “that on the whole I prefer patronage. At least I can well afford that. It costs me really very little, whereas any freely given trust and concern would well bankrupt the little resources I have of those remarkable feelings. That could well cost me more than I care to lose. Don’t look so outraged, my love, you will find that there are a great many men like me in this world. A great many who prefer those sorts of well-defined relationships, such as employer and employee, debtor and benefactor, king and subject. For example, my lovely little headmistress, do you honestly think Sinjin offers you free use of his house, his resources, and, I am sure, his heart out of friendship?”

“No,” she admitted, for even she could not claim to be the Marquis’s friend. “But,” she said, “he offers me comforts—not out of patronage, either, rather out of a debt of honor to my family.”

“Oh, Regina,” sighed the Duke, his face strangely gentle in the fading light, “you are such a fool.”

“You know,” he said, more briskly, “that I will eventually hurt you, perhaps only a little physically, but I certainly will hurt your pride, your sense of decency, your image of yourself. I will show you a Regina Analise that you never dreamed existed. I, likely, by the time I am done, will have you despising yourself, as much as, or more than you will come to despise me. For I will show you what a traitorous body you are locked into. I will pit the demands of that body against all the high reasonings of that well-furnished mind. And I will win. But with all that I will do,” he went on, ignoring the horror that had come into her eyes, “I will not break your heart. No. Never that. For I will never ask you for that. That I will leave to your own self. But you are too generous with that poor organ, Regina. You are almost promiscuous with it. And never doubt, it will be broken. For you will give it where you should not. Take care with it, Regina. I will have you, no matter what. But I should rather have you intact, in all ways. I should prefer it. But you are such a little fool.”

She stood and shook out her skirts, tears welling in her eyes. She did not understand him. She had spent the whole of the afternoon with him, she had thought she had come to some easy ground of acquaintance with him, and now that evening had almost fallen, the slight, elegant man beside her was as much of a stranger, as much of a threat, as ever. She would not speak; she only turned to return to the house.

He stayed her with one arm; the strength of it held her still, she neither struggled after his first touch, nor moved a pace to escape. He pulled her to him so that they stood close enough to be mistaken for one figure in the empty meadow. She felt the warmth and strength of him held in check, and irrationally, was content to stand there for those moments, so close as to almost touch, so far as to only stare into each other’s eyes. What she saw flaring in his, and what she suddenly did not wish him to discover in hers, forced her to drop her gaze to her shoetops. Only then he stirred, and recollected himself, and released her, only holding her lightly with a touch upon her hand.

“I will see you at the Squire’s ball,” he said, looking down into her lowered eyes.

“No,” she said, “I shall not go.”

“Oh, don’t be foolish,” he said. “Once again, we will meet on neutral ground there. Even I do not seduce women at a country squire’s ball. Especially not when mine host, the Squire himself, has plans for me becoming his son-in-law. You must come to see at least how many ‘friends’ I do have. How well received I am in society.”

“The Marquis has said that I must not,” she said, childishly even to her own ears.

“Why not?” he asked.

“So that you would not discover me,” she answered.

“Ah, but I have, so now you may come.”

“I cannot dance,” she said, despising herself for her weak answer. “I have not the right gowns.”

“All that is nothing,” he laughed. “Surely you have more spirit that that, Regina. You will not cower beneath the bed, while I caper at the ball?”

“No,” she cried, her eyes flashing. “No, I shall be there. But I swear, it is the last you will see of me. For after that, I will be gone. Gone on to decide my own future. As you stipulated. And then you can find some other poor creature to torment for your pleasure. But not me, I swear it.” And she tore herself from him and ran back to the comforting lights that began to appear in the windows of house beyond them. She felt anger at herself for her undignified haste to be away from him, and for her complete capitulation in the matter of the ball. Surely he must be laughing now, she thought disgustedly, at the success at which he had manipulated her response.

But the Duke of Torquay, leaning back against the stile where she had left him, was not laughing. The look in his wide blue eyes was rather the look of a dreamer, but his tightly clenched fists surely did not signify a pleasant dream.

*

“But where have you been?” Amelia greeted her. “Sinjin and I were becoming worried. We thought you were in your room, but as the darkness came we….

“We almost organized a search,” Sinjin said, coming toward her and taking her hands in his. “But you’re frozen! What were you doing out so late?” he demanded, almost in the tones of an angry father, Regina thought.

“I was talking with the Duke of Torquay,” Regina said, with a shadow of a smile.

When they had bundled her off to the study and bade Lady Mary to take dinner without them, both Amelia and St. John turned their full attention to Regina. She sat huddled in a large chair by the fire, fortified by St. John’s perennial cure for the chill, a glass of brandy, feeling very much like a truant schoolgirl. Amelia’s face showed worry and concern, but St. John, standing by the fire, seemed to her to be gripped by some inner tension, so abrupt and cold was his manner.

“No,” she explained again, “no, I did not think to run back to you. Because,” she said, appealing to St. John’s grim countenance, “I thought, I really thought, that if I could speak with him…reason with him, I could solve the whole of it.”

“And did you?” St. John asked coldly.

“No,” she sighed sadly. “For all we talked, for all I said, for all he heard…he is unchanged. I cannot understand….” she trailed off.

“Of course you cannot, that is the whole point. You have no experience with such a creature,” St. John said. “And you were a fool to try to reason with him.”

“That is much the same as he said,” Regina murmured softly.

Amelia spoke. “And how did you leave it with him, Regina? Did he threaten you? Did he make any…advances?”

“We only spoke. And he said that he was looking forward to seeing me at the ball. When I told him I was not going, he taunted me for my cowardice. I’m afraid I lost my temper. I told him that I was not afraid, that I was going.”

St. John made a muffled exclamation and Regina said hurriedly, “But you needn’t worry about that. For I have thought the whole thing out, and I, of course, shall not go. For I shall not be here at all. It is time, it is past time,” she said imploringly to St. John, “that I was gone from here. I have already stayed too long. This flight of mine has gone on too long.”

“Yes,” St. John agreed.

“Sinjin!” cried Amelia in shock. “How can you say so? How can you countenance Regina’s leaving us when you have not yet heard from her relatives? It would be like casting her to the wolves.”

“I said nothing about her leaving,” he said. “She shall stay, and stay with the full accordance of all of us. But she shall no longer hide. No more futile flight. You will come with us, Regina, to the Squire’s ball. You will come in full sight of Torquay, and he will be made to see that he cannot frighten you. And that he cannot have you.”

But seeing Amelia’s quick look toward him, he smiled. “Have you, that is to say, in any construction of the word.”

“I don’t want to go,” Regina said stubbornly. “I don’t desire to go. I don’t wish to go. I only want to leave here.”

“You are understandably overwrought,” St. John said. “There is only one thing. For other reasons,” he explained to Amelia, not looking at her, “it would be better if she remains…incognito. If she remains silent as to her visit here.”

Amelia gave him a long look and rose from her chair.

“Of course,” she said stiffly. “But now, perhaps these dramatics have taken away your appetites, but I assure you, they have only whetted mine. I will join Mary at dinner.”

St. John stood looking into the outer distance until Regina said quietly, “I really do not want to go to this affair, you know. And I really don’t understand why you insist on my staying here. And I don’t understand why I am still to play the role of ‘Lady Berry.’”

St. John came over to her and raised her from her chair.

“I know you do not, little one,” he said caressingly, his expression softening. “But do you not trust me now? Did your uncle not give you to my care? Do you doubt me now? Have I ever done any wrong toward you?”

“No, to all those ungrateful things,” Regina said, feeling ill at ease in his light grasp. “But I grow weary of this all, I am not fashioned for such…as Amelia put it, ‘dramatics.’”

“No,” he said, “you are not. And you will not have to continue in them for much longer. There is a new development, Regina. But no, now is not the time to speak of it.” He traced a light caress on her cheek with his hand, and sighed. “No, not now. Now we must have dinner. Now we must make friends again. Now you must trust me. Do you, Regina?” he asked, looking deep into her puzzled eyes.

“Of course,” she said. “I would not be here otherwise. It is as if you were…family to me now.”

“But not father, I hope,” he laughed, “nor brother. Preferably something at the same time much closer, and much farther.” And with a laugh, he offered her his arm, and said, with mock solemnity, “To dinner then, Lady Berry.”

X

“Make a curtsy to your father now, My Lady, and greet him warmly, for he has come a long way just to see you,” the governess commanded, and obediently the little sallow girl dipped and swayed, and executed a neat little mockery of a curtsy. Only there is no mockery in her eyes, her father thought, with a curiously unreasonable pang of discomfort somewhere in the region of his chest as he gravely regarded those clear blue eyes, so uncannily like his, yet so completely alien to his. For they gazed at him bereft of expression, vacant and cold.

Not an auspicious meeting, he thought wryly, wondering again whatever had possessed him, why in the world he had obeyed that vagrant impulse, as unnatural and beguiling as a breath of spring air in his December room; that maddening impulse to be quit of the Squire’s vast company. And to quit that admittedly deadening company for a return to his ancestral home, for a return, as it were, to the scene of his capital crime in begetting this unloved, and unlovingly begotten child. Age, he reasoned sardonically, encroaching age, it must have been. Only that would account for this absurd urge to finally see what I have left this earth heir to, to see what I have given my name and fortune to. And, he admitted, a not unreasonable urge to free himself from the saccharine entanglements the Squire’s unlovely daughters seemed to be inviting him to.

The ball being a fortnight away, the Squire and his dependents had regretfully let him go from their guest quarters, blaming the pre-gala commotion in the household for his unexpected departure and promising themselves a dead set at him the night of the ball.

“Oh, the carpenters make such a racket, I do apologize, Your Grace,” the Squire’s wife had lamented. “But, indeed, we must have lovely lacy indoor trellises around the ballroom to bedeck with lovely blossoms for the illusion of spring, you know?”

“The housemaids’ deuced commotion, all that bustling about, and scraping and polishing, can’t blame you for quitting us, sets a fellow’s teeth on edge, all that smell of beeswax and soap. But you know how women are about such folderol,” the Squire had commiserated heartily.

But they had been more than anxious about his departure, even though he had assured them of his return the weekend of the ball. They had been desolate at his leaving.

Amazing, he had thought, as the Three Graces waved him farewell with real tears in their eyes, amazing how acceptable I still manage to be. Not in the highest circles, of course, but then the Squire’s household is far from those exalted reaches. But still, he had wondered in real bafflement, they have heard all the tales of my adventures in that demimonde which is as unreal to them as their little lives are to me, and yet, they positively yearn for me to bestow my tainted name upon one of them. “Come away from the Dungheap for a moment, My Lord Duke,” they call, “and join us in wedded bliss. But be sure to bring your fortune with you, and wipe your feet please, before you walk us down the aisle.” A great deal more than my feet must be wiped clean, my dears, he had countered to the silent enticements, a great deal more; my entire past, I do believe, my dears.