Page 58 of A Bride for the Ruthless Duke

Theodore said nothing further the whole of the meal, which was usual, and watched her once more over the wine, which was not, and when she rose at the usual hour and made her good-nights she felt both their gazes follow her to the door, and did not dare to wonder what was in them.

She did not undress. She sent the maid away early, sat by her fire in her gown, and watched the clock on the mantel walk toward ten with a slowness that was its own kind of torment. Twice she half rose to go down and find her husband and tell him the whole of it and let him do what he would. Twice she sat back down, because telling him meant giving up the one hour in two months that was to be hers, and because she could not have borne the level reading look turned on this, and because the part of her that had not burned the letter had never had the smallest intention of telling anyone anything. The fire sank. The clock found the quarter, and then the half, and the small dishonest thing she had become went and fetched the cloak.

At a quarter to the hour she took the dark traveling cloak from the press and put it over the gown and drew the hood up, and she went down the back stairs in her stocking feet with her shoes in her hand, and let herself out by the small side door that gave on the kitchen garden, the door that was hers, that she had come and gone by a hundred times with her baskets, and the irony of using it for this did not escape her and did not stop her.

She looked back once from the edge of the lawn. The house stood black against the stars, every window dark but one, and the one was the study, low and gold at the corner of the ground floor, where her husband sat up over his papers as he sat up most nights, six feet of wall and a shut door from the bed he never came to. She stood on the cold grass and looked at that single light, and the wrongness of what she was doing rose in her so strongly that for a moment she nearly turned and went back in and burned the letter after all. Then she thought of the draper’s window, and the three weeks, and two months of being a useful chair carried from room to room, and she drew the hood lower and went on.

The night was cold and clear and the moon a thin paring of itself, and the park lay silver-grey and enormous, and it was full of small sounds, an owl somewhere over the home wood, the river a faint cold rumor at the foot of the valley, her own breath loud inside the hood. Twice a branch cracked in the dark and her heart stopped and started again. She went down through the silver toward the black mass of trees at the south where the folly stood, half a mile that felt like five, afraid, and under the fear, winning against it, something she had not felt in two months, the high reckless lift of a person who is for once doing rather than being done to, and she told herself with every step that she went only to end a thing and never to begin one, and her feet were soon wet through, and she did not turn back.

The folly came up out of the trees, a little round Greek conceit of pale stone with four columns and a domed roof, the sort of monument a great-grandfather erects when his fortune vastly exceeds his employment. She stopped at the foot of the three shallow steps. The stone stood pale as bone in the thin light, the dark gathered thick beneath the dome, and for a moment she thought the place empty and felt something that was half relief and half a grief she had no right to feel.

Then the dark under the dome moved, and a man came forward to the head of the steps, and the moonlight took him.

“You came,” Vance said softly. “I did not permit myself to hope you would.”

For a moment he was exactly as he had been. The moonlight was kind, and it gave her back the man from behind the curtain at the Davenport ball, the warm voice and the soft fond look, and he took both her cold hands in both of his and she let him, and her eyes were wet before she knew they had filled.

“I came to tell you that you must not write to me again,” she said. “That is all. I wished to deliver my mind to you directly, so that there could be no possibility of a misunderstanding.”

“Then, Pray, deliver it and I shall depart and you will never be troubled by me more.” He drew her hands up against his chest. “But let me first tell you that I was wrong, Ellen, that I have been wrong since the day I let the world’s opinion frighten me away from the only good thing that was ever offered me.”

“You let my poverty frighten you away. Let us at least be honest in the dark.”

“Then I was a coward, and a fool, and I have paid for it every day since.” He bowed his head over her hands. “Do you remember the night behind the curtain at the Davenport ball? You told me you had never once said a true thing to a man in a ballroom, and that you would say one to me. Do you remember what it was?”

“I remember.” Her voice was not steady. “I was a child.”

“You were the most honest creature in that whole gilded room, and I knew it, and I let them carry you off because I had not the courage to be poor at your side.” He pressed his lips to the backs of her fingers, once, the way he used to. “I have rehearsed this a hundred times and I am making a ruin of it. I only wished to say that I never left off. That whatever has been done to you since, whatever cold house you have been carried into, there was one man in the world who saw you and wanted you for no reason on earth but yourself.”

It was the precise shape of the thing she had wanted for two months to be told. It went straight into the soft unhealed place beneath her ribs and found it, and her eyes spilled over without her leave, and she loathed herself for it and could not stop. She had been so long unchosen. She had been bought and shelved and given roses by an unseen hand and a horse with no reason offered for it, and here was a warm voice in the dark saying the one word her whole bruised pride was starving for, which was you, and yourself, and for no reason but.

“Why now,” she managed. “Three weeks silent, and then a letter pushed under my door at midnight. If you meant a word of it, why not come to the house, or write to me openly, in the daylight, like an honest man.”

“Because your duke would have turned me from the door, and you are fully aware of it.” Smoothly, a shade too smoothly, and his eyes lifted past her shoulder toward the black under the trees, the first time, and she was too far gone in her own weeping to mark it. “There was no other road to you. Forgive the manner of it, Ellen. Blame the manner, and spare the man.”

“I do not know what to do with you,” she said. “I came here to send you away and I find I cannot even do that much.”

“Then do not send me away this minute. Stay only this one minute.” He stepped closer, and his arms went round her, and for one half-second it was the embrace she had dreamed of for a year and a half. She felt the rough wool of his coat against her cheek and the old remembered warmth of him and let her eyes fall shut on it, one breath, the single breath she had been promising herself in secret for eighteen months. And then it was not the embrace at all. His grip closed. It went from tender to hard between that breath and the next, his arms locking at her back so that she could not draw away, and the soft look went out of his face like a candle pinched between a finger and a thumb.

“Charles.” She set her hands against his chest and pushed, and he did not give. “Let me go. You are holding me too hard.”

“Just a moment longer.” His voice had changed too, flattened, gone businesslike, his eyes no longer on her at all but lifted past her shoulder toward the trees. “Only a moment, and it is done, and no fault of yours.”

She heard it then. Behind them and to the left, in the black under the trees, the careful crackle of more than one man trying to move quietly over dead leaves, and lower than that, unmistakable and obscene in the stillness, a man’s soft satisfied laugh.

“Who is that?” She went rigid in his arms. “Charles. Who is in the trees?”

“No one you will ever have to look at again.” His mouth was near her ear, almost gentle, which was the worst thing in it. “Hold still. It is very nearly done.”

The whole of it arrived in her at once, in a single sickening drop, the way the floor goes out from under a person on a stair they thought had one step more. The letter, the folly, and the dark she had chosen for herself, the men in the trees with their eyes already full of her. She had not been wanted. She had been arranged.

“You have sold me.” The utterance of it was far more agonising than the initial tight embrace. “You wrote me that letter and you have sold me to whoever is laughing in those trees.”

He did not trouble to deny it, which was the last cruelty, and that silence undid the last of her fear and turned it to something hotter.

“Let me go.” It came out small and then not small at all. She twisted, and clawed, and got one hand free and struck at his face and felt the blow land, and he caught the wrist and gathered her back against him with an ease that frightened her worse than violence would have, and she filled her lungs to scream into the indifferent park, because a scream at least would spoil whatever picture they had come into the dark to take.

A horse came down the path at a hard fast pace.