Page 46 of The Duke
“New South Wales would be too close, you—”
“You were blind to our aunt’s faults, and you’re blind to Richard’s, too. You think I understand nothing, but Kate, you have no idea what price I’ve paid—”
An image came to Kate: herself at seventeen, her raw-boned limbs collapsed beneath her in her rented room. Pressed beneath the enormous loss. The parent who had been the sun to her. The consequences of the sun going out. She had longed for someone—anyone—who could share the weight with her. She had known there was no one.
“Oh,you’vepaid,” Kate roared. “You?My God, the most helpful thing you’ve ever done was stay on the other side of the bloody continent!”
All the colour left Royce’s face. Her nostrils were pinched, her mouth a painful slash. She said hoarsely, obstinately, “Richard has been meeting with Wroth at his club. They are meeting today. No,don’t bother shouting at me again, I’m leaving. I only came for Celine’s sake. Do what you want with the information.”
Royce turned and strode to the door where she almost collided with Celine, who had arrived looking flushed and out of breath. The two women caught hold of each other.
“What’s going on?” Celine asked.
“Royce was just leaving,” Kate said in freezing tones. Somehow seeing Royce and Celine in this almost-embrace was the worst part of a very bad day.
Royce shook her head and bent to kiss Celine on the cheek. She threw a scornful look over her shoulder at Kate and said, “Have you even bothered to find out who would succeed you, should Wroth’s bill become law?”
Then she was gone. Kate dropped her hands to the desk, letting them take her weight, her heart pounding like she’d just been fighting for her life instead of repeating the old, tawdry sentiments she and Royce had hashed out a dozen times or more between them. Was this what Royce meant bydying?
Celine entered the room, quietly closing the door behind her. And Shaw, who had remained circumspect for the duration of Royce’s visit, rushed to the bookcase and pulled down Debrett’s.
Through the churning in her mind, Kate tried to think through the line of succession. It was women, all the way down. After Royce, it went back to her grandmother’s sister, and down through a line of mothers and daughters. She couldn’t think. She’d never had to. Royce was her heir.
For perhaps a minute, the only sound in the room was the frantic turning of pages. The sound stopped suddenly, and Shaw swore.
“It’s Richard,” he said, throwing the book down between Kate’s hands. “Your title would go to Mr. Richard Marcus Howard, if you were disinherited. He’s the next male relative in line.”
She closed Debrett’s and pushed it aside. “He wouldn’t betray me for the title.”
But even as she said it, she saw Richard again, as she’d first seen him. A small boy sitting in the hallway outside the room wherepower resided. A small boy who had witnessed his mother’s humiliation at the hands of the Duke of Howard.
Her legs gave out and she sat.
No.This was what Royce did. The only way she knew how to get attention was by destroying things around her—the most precious things. She had wanted to destroy Kate’s friendship with Richard almost as long as it had existed.
Shaw and Celine stood in close conference, Shaw intently whispering, no doubt explaining all that had passed this day.
Kate needed to tell Celine to leave. Royce had got her off track and wasted her time, putting her mind in turmoil into the bargain. She and Shaw needed to finish drafting their plan, and then begin putting it into action. She took a deep breath, taking control of herself and cooling the hot confusion.
By the time she was herself again, she looked up to see that Shaw had left and Celine was sitting quietly in the chair across the desk from her, waiting. She was dressed in a simple day dress and had a shawl pulled over her shoulders, her hair pinned loosely back, a woman at home who hadn’t yet made herself up for outside company. The expression on her face was becoming familiar to Kate: watchful, intelligent, unpretentious.
“You need to leave,” Kate said. Her voice sounded like she hadn’t used it in days. “Where’s Shaw?”
Celine said nothing, only watching her in that quiet way. Then, at last, “She loves you, you know.”
Of course Kate knew that.Of courseshe knew. It only made it worse.
She opened her mouth to dismiss Celine again, more firmly this time, when a small, niggling memory came clear in her mind and checked her. The night of the Johnson rout, Celine had accused Richard of lying about a glass of ratafia. It was such a small thing, and yet it had obviously made an impression on her.
Had anyone else made the accusation, she would have dismissed it; Richard was honest to a fault. But Celine… saw things other people didn’t.
The situation is more dangerous than you realise.
Kate had thrown herself into defeating Wroth’s Inheritance Bill the only way she knew how: by gathering her might to throw herself against the wall until she made the wallshake. But Lord Wroth would expect her to respond that way. It was the same useless, exhausting impulse that had got her nowhere in the fifteen years she’d spent trying to get her mines back.
Until Celine had given one small push and the whole thing had come tumbling down.
It had been her lifelong habit never to rely on anyone else. Even… even with Richard, her closest friend and confidant, she had maintained a cool, necessary distance.
