The Scandalous Duchess (23 page)

I hesitated.

‘He wants you with him, doesn't he?'

‘Yes, my lady.' It was an unequivocal response to an unequivocal question, and I expected an eruption of her fury against me.

‘He wants you, not me!'

The Duchess halted an arm's length from me. When she stretched out her hand I almost flinched, recalling the affair of the salt cellar, but it was only to pick up the letter, which she allowed to fall before she had read more than one line of it. Her regard had the hardness of flint within it. I expected her refusal, and she knew it.

‘If I refuse to give you permission,' her voice grated, ‘would you defy me?'

Which cast the decision fairly into my lap. To defy the Duchess so openly would fling her lack of authority over me in her face, and yet I did not hesitate. If Constanza had planned to forbid me, to exhibit my lack of power as the Duke's mistress compared with her own as his wife, she had failed. I knew where my life lay and I had within me the strength to stand before her without the degradation she had envisaged.

‘Yes, my lady. I would defy you.'

I held her gaze as the air drew taut with tension between us, the girls sitting motionless as if they too were aware of the critical balance of power here. Here was a new layer in our relationship, wife and mistress, and, now certain of the Duke's love, I would not retreat.

‘Can I stop you?' Constanza demanded, eyes wide and fathomless, fingers slowly clenching into fists at her side.

‘No, my lady,' I said softly, my defiance coming readily to my lips. ‘Not unless you resort to chains and a dungeon.'

Her laughter was brief and hard, lacking any humour.

‘So what do I say?' She swung away from me, then back again, the motion of her skirts wafting the letter from table
to floor. She paused, her tongue skimming over her lips. ‘Go to him.'

So this was the decision she had come to. I could barely believe it, my body still tensed against her expected rebuttal.

‘Do you not hear me?' she repeated. ‘Go to him.'

There was the outcome I had hoped for, and relief swept aside every other emotion, but here was no time for triumph. I knew what it must have cost the Duchess to give me the victory. She had my compassion, even thought she would have despised it, but the only thought in my mind was that I need never fear the extent of her authority again.

‘I am grateful.' I curtsied. ‘Do I take any message, my lady?'

‘I care not. I will not see him. He has no thought for me.'

Which caused justice to take a hold. ‘But he does, my lady.'

‘How can you say that? When he has banished my damsels to some distant place of confinement? So I am punished!'

I could think of no reply. The Duke had ordered the gossiping damsels to Nuneaton Abbey to learn discretion, but any attempt on my part to defend the Duke was superfluous—the Duchess marched out, leaving a palpable lightness in the air of the schoolroom. I inhaled sharply, pondering what I had achieved in my troubled relationship with Constanza, until I grew aware of Philippa standing quietly beside me.

‘Are you going to see my father?' Without asking permission, she picked up my discarded letter, and I allowed it, since her tone was not judgemental. I let her be.

‘Yes. I am.'

‘Will you come back to us?'

It was a question that startled me in its maturity. Philippa was old enough to understand the implications of that recent exchange, and condemn me for the choice I had made. She was no longer the little girl who had clung to my skirts when I had left the household after her mother's death. I must tread carefully here if my authority over her, and our affection, meant anything to me. I did not want to read disdain in her youthful regard, and so I tweaked the soft folds of her coif, raising the glimmer of a smile.

‘Do you want me to?' I asked lightly.

Philippa did not answer. Instead: ‘My father says here that he has missed you.' She looked down at the letter that was still in her hand as if she had every right to read it. ‘It does not say that he loves you. I thought he would have written that.'

I stiffened, unable for a heartbeat to dredge up a reply, then decided that she deserved my honesty, and I her disapproval if she chose to give it. Philippa could not be cushioned from what the household knew and she had the right to respond as her growing mind saw fit, even if her disdain hurt me.

‘How do you know that he does?' I asked.

‘I've seen him look at you.'

‘And he gave you a merlin,' Elizabeth, who had joined her sister, added.

I raised my brows at a logic I could not follow. ‘So he did. The Duke gives many presents. He is a very generous man.'

‘Yes.' Philippa picked up the point, tapping her sister on her neatly braided head with the letter. ‘He gives costly gifts. When he does not care about the receiver, he gives a silver cup, jewelled and with a cover. But to you he gave a
merlin, because he knows you enjoy hunting.' Then, after reading to the end: ‘My father says he wants you to be with him. Is it a sin, when my father is wed?'

I regarded her steadily. ‘It is not what I would advise for you.'

‘I think I would want a husband of my own,' Philippa agreed, returning to her seat and the exploits of Lancelot and Guinevere, another adulterous couple. ‘But it must make you very happy. To be so greatly loved.'

Astonished at her calm acceptance of a relationship that might justifiably have stirred her to rank disapproval, I could think of nothing to say other than ‘Yes, it makes me very happy.'

And, oh, it did. Deliriously happy, as it did in that moment. It had the power to stir the flames of the most intense joy that could be imagined when we were together. That it could cast me into a pit of despair when we were parted was a consequence of that love that I must accept.

But I said none of that.

I was packed and gone within the day, stopping only when the other Philippa, my sister—and far less accommodating of my disgraceful lifestyle—made her way to my side in the courtyard.

‘Will this happen often?'

‘When he needs me.' I was trenchant.

‘And you need him.' How blistering she could be, in so few words.

‘Yes. When I need him. When will I ever not need him?' Short of time, risking a rebuff, I stepped forward and hugged her before she could retreat. And since she did not, we kissed, a sisterly reconciliation of sorts.

‘Give him comfort,' she whispered.

‘I will.'

Constanza's acquiescence had instilled in me a new power, an assurance that seemed to grow within me with every breath I took, with every mile I covered towards The Savoy.

The Savoy was uncomfortably quiet to my mind, without children's voices, the servants solemn and soft-footed. As if there was an illness in the house. Or a death. I did not like it.

‘Where is my lord the Duke?'

‘In the library, my lady.'

‘I will announce myself.'

I did not knock, and he did not hear as I opened the door, absorbed as was often the case. He sat at a table where the light fell on his work, but, unusually, it did not seem to me that he saw the documents in front of him or the contents of the coffer to his right. Rather his thoughts were far away, taken up with some planning, some regret perhaps. Some ghastly scene from events in Aquitaine. Always lithe and rangy, I thought he had shed weight that he could ill-afford, but then starvation was no respecter of rank. I walked towards him until I stood at his side as once before. And as on that first time, I placed my hand on his shoulder.

For a long, wordless moment his gaze held mine, in its glitter a great distancing and a wealth of grief and disappointment that wounded my heart. The failed campaign had touched him heavily.

‘John…' I said. There was nothing else to say.

Then his self-command was back in place, and he smiled as if for me to be there with him was the most natural thing in the world, the most looked-for blessing. As if there were
no restrictions on either our movements or our loyalties, and in the face of such a welcome I felt tears gather in my throat, and my heart seemed to be so swollen with love for him that it filled my breast so that I could scarcely breathe.

‘I wanted you to come.'

‘Yes.' I took the liberty of touching his cheek with my fingertips, the gentlest of caresses. ‘If you recall, you ordered me to do so.'

How sure I felt in my decision. Constanza had given me leave, not just by her dismissal but by her rejection of the Duke's suffering in her cause. Her lack of compassion, her vicious criticisms of all he had done, her lack of interest in his present state, had presented to me the freedom I needed to leave Tutbury and be openly with him here. None of which I explained. The Duke would not see my need for permission, or even necessarily understand that guilt still had a habit of perching like a hungry raptor on my wrist. Sometimes I was impatient with that wily bird. But Constanza's condemnation of her husband had ensured that the raptor took wing: I was free of conscience.

The Duke had captured my hand, and was engaged in kissing his way across my knuckles in what could be construed, my fluttering heart announced, as light-hearted seduction.

‘I will listen, if you want to tell me how bad it was,' I offered, still uncertain of his mood.

‘No.' How wrong I had been, for there was suddenly no control at all in his face. Nothing at all of light-heartedness. Only rampant desire in the rawness of his voice. ‘This is not the time for exchanging views on English policy.'

Standing abruptly, arms sliding around my waist, he clasped me close, his mouth hot and demanding on mine.

‘You will stay.' A command.

‘As long as you need me.'

‘For ever.' He framed my face in his hands. ‘Before God, I want you, Katherine. I want you now.'

I shivered at his expression, at the slide of his fingers against my throat before he all but dragged me to the chamber I used at The Savoy, delighting me with his concern for my comfort in familiar surroundings despite the hot emotion that drove him.

‘When did you last sit at ease and laugh and talk of inconsequential matters?' I asked, striving to keep the moment free from high drama.

‘Laughter? What's that?' He was already loosening his belt, sitting to unlace his boots with urgent fingers.

‘Do you realise how long it is since we were last together?' I asked.

‘I'm sure you will tell me,' he replied, actions governed by intense need.

‘Almost a full year.'

‘Then we will celebrate our reunion. We have spent enough time apart. We will spend no more. Stop talking, and come to me.'

Then high drama overtook us, and neither of us was in a mood to deny it as the Duke stripped me to my shift, and then took even that from me, trailing his fingers over the silvered lines of past child-bearing. They were not too disfiguring in the soft glow of costly candles whose flickering hid the worst ravages, and he knew them well anyway. I did not flinch from his appraisal.

It was a reunion of passion, tumbled and heated with no time for soft seduction. I had no need of it, and the Duke was stirred by an inner need to re-own me. It was a statement of love and longing and joy in being together again, a rejection of the failure and despair across the sea. Pain and loss were fast subsumed beneath the fire of lust that used no words, no endearments, nothing but the slide of flesh against flesh, hot kisses on even hotter skin. We feasted on each other, a glorious celebration in the end, to prove that love could conquer all and give relief from anguish.

What was there to say? We were together and our love could burn as brightly as the sun at noon, or as softly as the lapping of a kitten's tongue.

He made me laugh anyway, and I reciprocated, my lips and fingertips explored anew the ducal skin. He made me sigh too for notwithstanding the driving force, the Duke sought my pleasure as well as his own.

‘Allow me to caress the arches of your delectable feet. I think I have neglected your feet.'

I was devastated by his success. My whole body was light with exultation.

‘You cannot imagine how I have missed you,' he said, pinning me to the bed.

‘Of course not,' I agreed. ‘I have been far too occupied to give you a second thought.'

My eyes were wet with tears, which he kissed away with tenderness. He understood all that I would not tell him. He knew how hard it was for women to be left behind and imagine the worst.

‘My love for you knows no end,' I informed him when we at last took time to draw breath.

‘For which I thank God,' he replied, and he was smiling at last.

Yet although I slid into some species of exhausted sleep in his arms, I knew that, as unconsciousness claimed me, he lay awake.

I woke to find him gone from the bed, but he had not left me. In shirt and hose he was stretched out on the low window seat, back propped against the stonework, a little pottery bowl in his hand. I thought that he was at ease, until I realised that the scene beyond the window did not take his attention. So I had not dragged his mind from the loss of English life for long, or from whatever it was that had now placed its hand on him. Grief, I would have said, studying the stark lines. I lay and watched him for a little while, shocked to see such torment. He was eating steadily from the bowl, as if the delicacy would assuage his worry as well as his appetite.

Eventually when I could remain apart no longer and the dish was empty—how could I enjoy my own happiness when he was clearly bleeding from some inner wound?—I wrapped one of the linen sheets round me since no other garment came to hand and walked slowly to stand at his side. But there I was even more disturbed, for although he acknowledged me with an arm sliding comfortably around my waist, a mask instantly fell into place to hide the rank despair of minutes ago. The mask was good, the muscles of his face relaxed and I followed his lead, calmly relieving him of the dish, placing it on the floor beside us, because I dare not tap the ugly depths of that distress.