Page 48 of The Duke
“Can you still doubt it?” Celine asked gently.
Kate pulled herself away from the awful, seductiverightnessof it with some effort. “But just because something sounds very neat, doesn’t make it true,” she said. “I cannot believe Richard has thrown me over and put himself so wholly in Lord Wroth’s power. I will not believe this of him, simply on the word of Royce. I know you like her, Celine, but she has told worse lies about him in the past.”
Has she?a small, horrid voice asked.Or was she always telling you the truth?But she couldn’t let herself think what it would mean—how very much she’d got wrong—if Royce had been telling the truth.
“Then go,” Celine said simply. “Royce claims Richard is meeting with Lord Wroth as we speak. Richard will either be there, or he won’t.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
He won’t be there, Kate told herself as she fought her temper in the evening traffic.He won’t.
But already her mind was testing the idea of Richard’s betrayal. It was as though her memories had been turned at right angles, revealing a new version of events.
Richard had pointed her towards Lord Burnley as a suitor for Celine. What if it hadn’t been out of a blindness to Burnley’s ugliness butbecauseof it?
If it hadn’t been for Celine’s cleverness about Lord Pecke’s bill, Kate would no doubt have suffered a political embarrassment. If Celine hadn’t wished to wed Lord Burnley, Kate would have suffered a social embarrassment, too.
Yet the moment Celine had shown herself willing to be courted by Burnley, Richard had reversed course and begun courting her himself.Let me have her.Had it signalled a potential turning point, of which she had been unaware at the time?
What heartache might she have saved herself, had she agreed to the match? Would twenty thousand pounds and a beautiful, clever wife have satisfied Richard?No.The thought came to her wholly formed.His desire for consequence cannot be sated.
She urged her horse up onto the footpath, its metal shoes clattering and ringing, joining the evening din.
As though she’d admitted something, memories came faster, surer. Richard standing beside Burnley at the rout, ensuring the comparison made Burnley appear even uglier. Richard always probing, always prying, asking whether Celine might have presumed onKate in some way, asking after Kate’s business in Paris, this powerful concern he had for her always turning up new pieces of information. Richard’s awful, embarrassed consciousness of being discovered in her seat at the club. How, for all his railing against injustice, he never risked his own consequence like Pecke did.
And Royce…
He always wanted you to himself. He poisoned you against me before I ever met him.
When Kate met Richard at university, Royce had only been back in England for six months. She’d come back wild, destructive in a way Kate didn’t understand, and angry all the time. But Kate had been ready to go toe-to-toe with her. She’d followed Royce into gambling dens and alleyways, out of married countesses’ bedroom windows, and one memorable time, onto a sloop all the way to Bergen. She had picked up after Royce, paid her debts, washed her, expected her for dinner, talked to her about what was in the papers.
And… Royce had been getting better. So slowly it was barely progress. Growing less wild, spending more time in the rooms Kate rented back then, above a coffee shop in the Strand. She had begun talking about the future; she had sometimes seemed on the brink of confiding in Kate.
Then Richard had introduced himself to Kate and made himself indispensable. He had made his thousand innocuous comments about Royce’s misdeeds, his thousand exhortations for Kate to find it within herself, somehow, to forgive Royce. When Royce leapt off a cliff soon afterwards, Richard’s steady hand had been on Kate’s shoulder, stopping her from leaping off after.
She rode blindly past her own club, and on to Lord Wroth’s.
She was not a member, but she was only distantly aware of the majordomo considering and then discarding the idea of refusing her entry. Chairs scraped as members stood to greet her. She ignored them. In one of the quieter rooms she came upon Richard, seated in a cosy trio with Lord Wroth and his daughter Lord Vespasian.
She had expected it, and yet on a primal level she must still have thought Richard wouldn’t be here.
It was as though she saw not only Richard now, nearing his midthirties, a seasoned politician in a fashionable black coat, but also Richard as a bewildered boy in a too-tall chair sitting outside the duke’s study. Richard at twenty, in a coat that didn’t cover his bare wrists, making himself known to her in the university dining hall with a tremble in his voice and a light in his eyes. Richard at twenty-five, breaking his hand on a wall when he failed his first bar exam. Richard at twenty-eight, nearly falling off London Bridge as he crowed his happiness out over the sleeping Thames because he’d won his seat in Parliament.
They had travelled so much of the way by each other’s side, and yet he was here, meeting with Lord Wroth, right where Royce had said he would be.
When he saw her, his face went red, then white. He shot to his feet. He looked for a moment like he might flee, and then like he might faint.
She didn’t have a constitution that could feel the pain of his betrayal. What she felt was cold—a dense, unnatural cold forming a wall around her that nothing could penetrate. This morning, Richard had lived within that wall, beside her. Now, from one breath to the next, he was outside it.
She turned from him and focused on Lord Wroth, who had gained the decisive upper hand. With Richard, and all Richard knew, Lord Wroth now had the means to pass his Inheritance Bill. She could no longer doubt that Celine had seen his plan clearly.
Lord Wroth wore the comfortable morning dress of a gentleman and was relaxed in his leather armchair, one leg crossed over the other, the newspaper set down temporarily over his knee.
His handsome face showed none of the amused superiority with which he normally regarded her, and no sign of discomfort at being discovered with Richard. The enmity between them, which for the past fifteen years had fallen into something of abureaucratic lull, had at last come fully into the open. In his eyes was only a satisfied consciousness of having raised his fist to squash her.
“I know how you plan to pass your bill,” she said, breaking the silence. “I have no patience for a mutual pretence at ignorance.”
“Oh?” Lord Wroth said mildly, waving an invitation for her to continue.
