When the Duke Found Love (28 page)

“Quite ordinary things, truly,” Diana said, thinking of how Lady Enid would likely wish nothing better than to discuss babies and breeding with an experienced expert like her sister. “It’s not as if she carries musty old books about with her to the park.”

“I’m glad for Sheffield’s sake she doesn’t,” Charlotte said, but it was clear from her voice that she was no longer thinking of Lady Enid. “Look at me, Di, if you please.”

Diana laughed nervously. Did it show in her face that she was no longer a virgin? Could Charlotte see some new wantonness or experience in her expression that hadn’t been there before?

“I don’t know why you wish it, Charlotte,” she said, reluctantly turning toward her sister as she’d been bid. “You know my face as well as anyone.”

“Perhaps instead I know it too well,” Charlotte said, studying her thoughtfully. “When you left today, all I saw was that dreadful dull habit, plain enough to make a Quaker dowdy. But now I see how lovely you’ve grown, Diana.”

Tears welled in Diana’s eyes. “Oh, Charlotte,” she said. “You needn’t say such things.”

Charlotte smiled fondly. “Why shouldn’t I, when they are true? You’ve changed so much, and here I’ve scarcely noticed. You’re not my little country sister any longer, but a true London beauty. Ah, Sarah, at last, and high time, too. You’ll have to hurry to make Lady Diana presentable for supper.”

The maid dropped a guilty curtsey. “Forgive me, Your Grace,” she murmured, already beginning to lay out Diana’s clothes for the evening. “Her ladyship will be ready, I promise.”

“I trust so,” Charlotte said. She set Fig down on the floor and rose, pausing to smile over Diana’s shoulder at their reflection, side by side, in the looking glass. “My dear little Di! If Lord Crump’s affection has already wrought such a change in you, then I can scarce wait for the magnificent transformation once you’re wed.”

She kissed Diana’s cheek and turned to go, leaving Diana too choked with roiling emotion to do more than nod in return.

Oh, how she wished that Charlotte hadn’t reminded her of Lord Crump! If there was any true change to her, it would be Sheffield’s doing, not Lord Crump’s, more to her sorrow. But Charlotte wouldn’t know that, or anything else. For one long, tantalizing moment, Diana considered confessing all and unburdening herself to her wise older sister, the way she’d done so many times before. Charlotte would know exactly how to make the best of this disastrous situation. With her usual calm efficiency and discretion, she’d take over from Diana and arrange everything that needed arranging.

But not yet: not yet. For now her best path was to hope that she wasn’t with child, and hope, too, that Sheffield kept their secret.

And Heaven preserve her, it was a great deal to hope for, on both counts.

The next evening, Sheffield sat before the fire in his library, listening closely while Marlowe explained all he had accomplished on Sheffield’s behalf during the day.

“The hackney’s driver will collect Dr. Pullings at the gate on the north side of St. Anne’s, sir,” Marlowe said, standing before Sheffield with his book of notes in his hand. “Thence the driver will stop on the opposite side of Bedford Square from Lattimore House, where Dr. Pullings will step down and cross the Square by foot. At the stroke of one, Lady Lattimore will leave her house by the garden door, sir, and meet Dr. Pullings, and they will leave together in the hackney.”

Sheffield leaned forward in his chair, drumming his fingers on the mahogany arm. Marlowe was generally very good with details, but he’d never planned an elopement before, and Sheffield did not want this one to have any flaws.

“You are certain the driver is to be trusted?” he demanded. “He will keep his silence?”

“Given what he is being paid, sir, I believe he will,” Marlowe said. “He will convey her ladyship and Dr. Pullings to the dock, where they will take their passage to Calais. Then the decoy couple will take possession of the hackney and will make their way broadly across the country toward Scotland. Their goal, will be to make themselves remembered, so as to leave a trail if Lord Lattimore chooses to pursue.”

“Oh, he will,” Sheffield said. “Lady Enid is his only daughter, and he already has a strong dislike for poor Pullings. The captain of the vessel has agreed to wed them?”

“Yes, sir,” Marlowe said, briefly glancing at his notes. “Captain Stewart. He was most obliging.”

“Good, good,” Sheffield said with satisfaction. The captain had been his suggestion, and he was proud of it. The laws against clandestine marriages had tightened considerably since his own parents had eloped, requiring banns to be published and church weddings for a marriage to be valid. But having the marriage performed by a ship’s captain could still override those stipulations, even if a marriage on board a ship in the Thames stretched the definition of a wedding at sea. “By the time Lattimore discovers Lady Enid is gone, they should be safely wed and beyond his reach.”

“Indeed, sir,” Marlowe said, sharing Sheffield’s satisfaction. “I have also taken great pains to keep from any mention of your name. Everything has been arranged as if by Dr. Pullings, and no other.”

“Then all we can do has been done,” Sheffield said, smiling. “It’s up to them to be married and live their lives in conjugal bliss.”

This all sounded tidy and neat, and with the ever-competent Marlowe to do the tidying, it doubtless was. Yet while conjugal bliss lay before Lady Enid and Pullings, a whirling firestorm of scandal would face Sheffield in the morning when word of their elopement spread through London. Sheffield wasn’t dreading it. In fact, he was almost looking forward to weathering the scandal for the sheer novelty of the experience.

First he expected a chagrined and furious Lattimore to arrive soon after breakfast, bearing the letter for him from Enid explaining that she was terribly sorry, but she was breaking their betrothal to marry Dr. Pullings. He would then make the most grievous long face imaginable before Lattimore, and sigh and groan as if he truly were a disappointed bridegroom.

By noon, he expected the first inklings of the elopement would have begun to creep through society, no matter how hard Lattimore would try to suppress it. Scandals often had a perverse life of their own, and this one was bound to grow and spread like a noxious weed.

By nightfall, it would be discussed by everyone in his acquaintance as they dressed for the evening. By the time they left their houses, their servants would be speaking of it, too.

By midnight, he’d be the butt of endless jests and bawdy cleverness at his clubs, and by dawn, the whole tale would be trimmed and embellished and served up for breakfast reading in every lurid paper in the city. Asterisks would take the place of the letters in his name to stave off the charges of libel, but they’d fool no one. The handsome, womanizing duke, abandoned by his noble-born bride for a dull country parson: how could tattle be juicier than that?

Before this, Sheffield had always been depicted the villain in such pieces, the sly thief of virtue preying on unhappy wives. Now the proverbial shoe would be on the other foot, and for every person who might pity him, he imagined there would be a goodly number of husbands (even ones whose wives he’d never poached) who’d gloat and say he deserved this treatment. Not being wed to Lady Enid, he didn’t believe he was actually entitled to cuckold’s horns, but he was also certain there’d be at least one crudely drawn cartoon that would give him a rack of fresh antlers anyway.

None of it mattered. He’d bear ten times—no, a hundred!—the abuse and mockery for the sake of the same prize. Diana, his Diana, or so she could fairly be now. He’d give the scandal one day, perhaps two, and then he would call at Marchbourne House and ask for her hand.

He’d thought of little else since they’d parted. It wasn’t just that she’d nearly knocked him nearly senseless with her delicious eagerness when he’d made love to her, or how beautiful she’d been with her blue eyes heavy-lidded and her gold hair tousled and her clothes half torn away, or the breathy moan that she’d made of his name, or even how he’d thought he’d truly found paradise buried deep in a woman’s body. It wasn’t even that he’d been the one to claim her virginity.

Well, if he were honest, it
was
all those things. But mainly, absolutely, it was because she was the woman meant to be his companion through life. It was as simple, and as complicated, as that. He’d found her, and this would be the end of his searching. He had no concern for Crump, or the marquis’s claim to Diana. Sheffield wanted her, and he was confident she wanted him in turn, and that was that. She was fated to be his lover, his wife, his duchess—even his sultana.

His Diana.

“You have the ring from Boyce’s?” he asked Marlowe, his thoughts already racing onward to the moment he’d slip his mother’s emerald on his own bride’s finger.

Marlowe bowed slightly and drew the familiar shaped box from inside his coat. “I kept it close, sir.”

“Very good.” He took the box, opening it slowly, as if fearing the magic of the ring would somehow have disappeared. No: it sat nestled in the velvet, as bright with fire and memories as it always had been. He studied the ring, smiling to himself, and thought of how proud he would be to see it on Diana’s hand.

It was so pleasing a thought that he must have thought it a good deal longer than was realized—long enough that Marlowe finally had no choice than to make the gentlest of throat-clearings to draw him back. He closed the box, setting it on his knee.

“Thank you, Marlowe,” he said, smiling still because he could not help it. “You have executed everything with your customary thoroughness, and I’m grateful for it.”

“Thank you, sir,” Marlowe murmured, bowing his thanks in return. “It is my pleasure and my duty.”

Sheffield was indeed satisfied to have so trustworthy a man to handle his affairs, no matter how complicated those affairs became. Yet to his surprise, Marlowe seemed to be hovering, with something unsaid left in the air between them. That was not like Marlowe, who was generally the very soul of discretion.

“That is all, Marlowe,” Sheffield said, not chiding, but making it clear that their conversation was done.

Yet still Marlowe remained, with whatever he longed to say making him linger. Almost imperceptibly his gaze flicked down to the ring box.

Then Sheffield understood. All that Marlowe knew was that his master was going to great pains to extricate himself from an engagement, yet he had been asked to retrieve the late duchess’s ring, a ring of considerable value and history with no lady to wear it. Marlowe knew nothing of Lady Diana Wylder that would explain either the ring or Sheffield’s smile. No wonder he dared to be so inappropriately … curious. That same curiosity would only be shared and endlessly magnified tomorrow by the rest of London.

He looked down from Marlowe to the box on his knee and, smiling still, covered it with his hand, cupping his palm protectively over the box and the ring inside. He was sorry that Marlowe felt so curious, but not so sorry that he’d explain. Until the ring was safely on Diana’s finger, his secret—no,
their
secret—would remain exactly that. When the time was right, the whole world would know. He’d shout it to the highest church spires himself.

But not yet. Not yet.

The next day, Diana sat in the garden of Marchbourne House with Charlotte and her children and an assortment of nursery maids. Sheltered by the tall brick walls, the garden was warm and filled with sunshine, with the leaves in the trees still a bright spring green and no sign of the rainstorms from earlier in the week. Simply dressed in her old country clothes, which were well covered with Fig’s fur, and with her feet bare, Diana sat on the grass and tossed a stuffed ball back and forth to Jamie, Lord Pennington. Jamie was more enthusiastic than skilled, and though he waved his arms and thrashed about and made a good deal of noise, he seldom actually caught the ball, forcing Diana to go crawling after it. Not that she minded. Chasing after a stuffed ball helped to take her thoughts from Sheffield and everything else—and there was considerable everything else—connected with him.

Chasing the ball or not, she thought of Sheffield constantly. She could not help it. She looked at the pond, and remembered how he’d pulled her into the water with him. She sat on the settee in her mother’s sitting room and thought of how wickedly and thoroughly and divinely Sheffield had made love to her on his mother’s settee. She thought she heard his laughter and his voice wherever she turned, and imagined his carriage drawing up before the house when none was there.

She had as good as banished him from her life, yet still she longed to see him again, and she’d been disappointed that he’d sent no little fond letter yesterday, no acknowledgment of what they’d shared on that settee. Perhaps that silence was customary with him and ladies once he’d made a conquest. She didn’t know; she’d no experience with being conquered. But although she’d told him she’d no wish to hear him declare his love for her, that was exactly what she craved most.

To be sure, she realized the perversity of such desires. Just because she’d been a fool once with him didn’t mean her foolishness carried over into all other corners of her self. But it did seem that the more she tried to be firm and stern with that self, the more she pined after what would be ruinous to have.

And so she tossed the ball to Jamie and praised him even when it fell through his chubby fingers, and tried her hardest not to think of all that she, too, had let slip away.

“You almost had it that time, Jamie,” she said, striving to sound encouraging. “Toss it back to me now, and we’ll try again.”

“I have it now, Aunt Diana,” he said, holding the ball tightly in both hands. He wrinkled his snub nose at her, making what she guessed was a fierce and menacing face. “I have it, and I’m going to
su’prise
you.”

She made a face back at him, curling her fingers into claws. “You cannot surprise me, little man,” she boomed in a deep, ogre-ish voice. “No one surprises
me
!”

He shrieked with delight and hopped backward, still clutching the ball. “I will! You’ll see, Aunt Diana, I will, I will!”