Page 43 of The Duke
She hadn’t imagined it: She could still make out the dark, hulking figure by the bed. It took a step towards her, and she skittered back, though there was nowhere else to run. She turned and snatched the fire poker. She brandished it, but the towering figure strolled towards her, unconcerned, laughing in a voice as hoarse and ephemeral as smoke.
“That won’t be necessary, Miss Genet.”
“I would say it’s entirely necessary,” she said, her voice distorted by the rushing in her ears.
Then the figure came into the circle of firelight, and Celine’s fingers went nerveless around the poker. It dropped with a clatter to the hearth.
The firelight revealed a brute of a woman. Easily an inch taller than the duke, with a broad, rough-hewn physique that brought to mind a boxer laying larger men flat in the ring with elemental violence.
She wore a mix of plain leather and gold. Her breeches and short jacket were made of soft, worn suede. The collars of her shirt gaped open, making visible a long gold chain that hung from her thick neck and disappeared somewhere beneath her waistcoat. Her hair was shaved to the head at the back and sides, the brown hair on top short and unkempt. Multiple small gold hoops pierced her earlobes.
Her left eye was covered by a brown leather eyepatch, and around it, the skin was darker, twisted. Her mouth had a muscularity to it somehow, the cheeks firm and imposing.
She had never encountered a woman like her, but was reminded of men who sometimes came to the pleasure houses. When those men appeared, everyone went very quiet, and sometimes afterwards, one of the girls turned up dead.
The intruder righted the seat Celine had knocked over and sat in it. She gestured Celine to the other. “Sit with me. Let’s talk.”
She considered simply sayingno. She considered what those powerful, gold-ringed hands would feel like around her neck. She sat.
“You’re going to keep the poker?” The voice was amused.
“Yes.” She had fumbled it off the floor and held the end tucked in her elbow, the point facing forward like a lance.
The woman was as relaxed as though she were by her own hearth fire. Her hooded eye watched Celine, disregarding the poker entirely. “Do you know who I am?”
“No.”
“I am Markham,” the woman said in her hoarse, whispering voice, “the Wroth bastard.”
Celine gasped like she’d just jumped into freezing water. She had helped the duke deal Lord Wroth a significant blow this Friday past. She wondered, briefly, whether she was going to make it through the night alive, then didn’t let herself consider it again.
She was shaking, shivering throughout her whole body and unable to stop. Words surged up in her, weapons she wanted to throw.Does Lord Wroth send you to do all his dirty work, like a dog let off the chain? Is that all a bastard’s good for?But she sensed instinctively that Markham would only laugh. That she did far worse deeds on Lord Wroth’s behalf than menace helpless young women in their bedrooms. Like setting explosives in a mine, for example.
Perhaps if Celine made a run for it, she could reach the door and wake the house, screaming bloody murder. The duke’s rooms were all the way down the other end of the hall, but it was a straight run. The duke wouldn’t be frightened of a mad bastard.
“I wouldn’t,” Markham said, all trace of amusement gone. “If you are very lucky, and exceptionally fast, you will make it maybe three paces before I catch you and have you under me. You do not want that.”
Her stomach clenched anxiously. “You would rape me?”
“I would fillet you.” Markham produced a small, wicked knife and turned it so that its fine edge caught the firelight. “Unless you could be very still and quiet.”
Fresh alarm prickled over her scalp and down her back.
Markham turned her head, her one eye catching the light just like the knife. “But then, do you really want to call for the duke? She is worse than I am.”
The dukewasworse. Markham was threatening to hurt her, but the duke had taken her all night, making her feel such things, then left her for dead in the morning. Why would she run to the duke for safety?
And yet she realised with desperate surprise that she would. She wanted the duke.
“You see, I have a theory, Miss Genet. I believe youdoknow how bad the duke is. And more than that, I believe you have some proof of it. Kate Howard”—the name was awful spoken in that voice, like it scraped painfully up Markham’s throat—“doesn’t give a fuck about some French gentleman she knew a long time ago, and she certainly does not give a fuck about that gentleman’s daughter. That is not who she is. Which makes me think it is not who you are. Am I getting warm?”
It frightened her how warm.
“You needn’t look so alarmed. Whoeveryouare is not relevant. The Duke of Howard has done something very naughty, and my father is angry with her. I only need your help to punish her.”
Markham didn’t know the part Celine had played in taking the mines from Lord Wroth. Of course she didn’t. Why would anyone think of the French ingenue who had been in London a little less than a week?
The adrenaline that had been flooding through her began to abate at last. The tide went out of her head and didn’t wash back in. In the quiet it left, she could hear they had been speaking French all this time. Markham spoke the French of docks and commerce.
