Page 30 of The Duke
She’d lost herself.
“Next time I tell you someone is dangerous,” Kate said thickly, “you will listen.”
She didn’t know what rejoinder she expected (You can’t tell me what to do) but Celine merely studied her and hummed, a sound of sympathetic understanding. It was a hair-raising sound. What could this immoral wretch possibly think she knew about the Duke of Howard?
“Well?”
Celine said, “I already said I got it wrong,” and stuck her tongue out.
It shocked a laugh out of Kate. Good God, such bad grace in conceding she might not know all there was to know at twenty-four bloody years old! This peevish, erotic young woman was who Burnley would breakfast with every morning for the rest of his life.
The thought sobered Kate. She looked at her watch and stood. “We’d best get you home before the hour gets any later. Bond Street is no place for a young woman in the evening.”
Celine’s brows went up. “Robbers? Your footmen can see them off.”
“No,” Kate said, then stopped short. She found herself at a loss. It was a stupid thing to be embarrassed about, however, so she made herself say, “Prostitutes. The prostitutes come out in the evening.”
Which made Celine laugh and laugh and laugh.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Celine woke, sickeningly, from a dream. When at last she flung the bed curtain back, the room was dark and empty, illuminated by a faint glow from the banked fire. She couldn’t have been asleep more than two hours.
She felt like death, but her heart was pounding, her body alert. She wouldn’t get back to sleep. She wrapped a blanket over her shoulders, then built up the fire again. Within minutes, the flames were happily chewing over the logs.
She stared moodily into the fire.I got it wrong, she thought.I thought I knew everything about Lord Royston because I thought I knew the duke. And I got it wrong.Awake, she was still smarting from the events on Bond Street, which had been a humbling reminder. She had misunderstood something fundamental about the duke the night they’d met, too, and suffered the shock of discovering the duke’s identity.
Her growing awareness that she didn’t understand the duke yet wrestled with her resentments, her grievances. Her pain had not been answered.
The flames leapt and spat.
Logs! Just one of the thousand household details that stopped her in her tracks, and to which she was slowly growing accustomed. Not long-burning, efficient coal or smoky, pungent clods, but dry logs that burned cleanly and smelled sweet and tangy, like Christmas. And there was a fire lit in every room. Wax candles, in every room.
This was the house the duke had returned to three years ago.
Those last few months in Paris, they hadn’t even been able to afford tallow. She, Mathilde, Louise, and Marie. Four women who had travelled very different paths to the same place: a shared attic room and a shared profession. She realised she had been dreaming she was drowning Mathilde on the garret floor.
Mathilde’s colouring had been very like hers. The same long black hair, the same pale skin and dusky lips and eyelids. But Mathilde’s eyes had been a softer green. Hazel. She and Mathilde had very often been taken for twins—especially when deprivation made its mark, erasing all that might have differentiated them.
But Mathilde had drowned in private. Her wet, choking breaths had characterised the last few months. In many ways, it felt like it had happened in another lifetime, another universe, but in reality, it had been fewer than two weeks since Mathilde died.
She pressed her hand over her heart and breathed out, trying to ease herself.
She had escaped Paris, but she must have brought some small part of it with her, stuck in her own flesh. And if she brought it out and examined it here, where she was comfortable and safe, it might scare her to death.
She smirked. Long may it wait.
On impulse, she fetched her canvas boots, which she’d stashed beneath the bed, shamefully aware the maids must know they were there. They felt stiff and dirty, the cream-and-red stripes faded to grey. They looked like refuse, not shoes. She threw them into the fire and watched them blacken and burn.
They had carried her all the way from Paris. Destroying them exhausted her.
Yet when she looked at the bed, the drowning dream seemed to hang about it somehow, ready to fold her back into itself.
She couldn’t go back.
She wandered the house like an unhappy ghost and found her way into a portrait gallery on the second floor. The lamps had long since been doused, so she could only make out the paintings in the outer glow of her candle. They seemed to be of dukes past, thestyles of both painting and clothing showing the passage of time. Nearing the end of the gallery, she was drawn to the portrait of one woman in particular, and raised her candle to it.
The woman commanded the eye. Her hair was darker than the current duke’s, a honey blond, and she was older. Perhaps forty. She had a mature, dominating air and clear brown eyes that looked directly at Celine.
