Page 59 of A Bride for the Ruthless Duke

She heard the hooves before she saw anything, and then a denser shadow detached itself from the gloom of the trees and a voice came out of it that she would have known at the bottom of the sea, level and cold and entirely without hurry, and it uttered a menacing phrase into the night.

“Let go of my wife.”

Vance let go.

He let go so fast she stumbled, and caught herself on a column, and Theodore Pillard rode out of the shadow into the thin moonlight in his greatcoat with his face like the stone of the folly, and dismounted without seeming to hurry, and did not raise his voice and did not need to. He looked at Vance. That was all. He stood in the wet grass and looked at the man for the length of one long second, and Vance, who had stood in a line of his fellows before the open mouths of French guns and not run, went grey to the lips and could not hold the look.

Vance opened his mouth. Whatever he had meant to bring out of it, some explanation, some appeal to the code that was supposed to bind one gentleman to another, remained in the cold air between them, because there was nothing in the duke’s face to address it to. Theodore did not threaten him. He did not name a second, or a meadow at dawn, or a pistol. He only looked, with the patience of a man who had a great deal of time and a great deal of it already misspent, and the looking told Vance more plainly than any words that he was not worth the trouble of a duel, that he would be attended to by other means at another hour, and would never once see the hand that did it.

The crackling in the trees had changed direction. It was going away now, and quickly, the careful quiet abandoned for speed, and Theodore turned his head a fraction toward the sound and then back, unconcerned, as a gentleman perceives a door to be securely fastened, precisely as he had anticipated. Ellen, shaking against the cold column, saw the why of it. At the mouth of the near path a man had stepped out of the shadow, one of the Wrenfield keepers, with a fowling piece broken open over the crook of his arm and his face turned toward the retreating sound, and at the next path another stood as still as the trees, and the witnesses the earl had set among them to carry away their picture were running from it now as fast as the dark allowed, having come for a ruined duchess and found instead two armed servants and a duke who had been waiting in the cold a good while before any of them arrived.

There would be no picture. There would be nothing to carry anywhere, to any club or any drawing room, and the men in the trees knew it, which was why they ran.

Theodore said not one further word to Vance. He looked at him a second time, briefly, the way a man looks at a thing he has finished using, and Vance understood himself dismissed more completely than any sentence could have dismissed him, and sketched the lowest and worst bow of his life, and went away into the trees at something between a walk and a run, and the dark took him, and that was the end of Lieutenant Charles Vance.

Theodore took off his greatcoat.

He did it without a word, and crossed the wet grass to her, and put it about her shoulders over the cloak, the heavy wool still warm from him and smelling of him, of horse and cold air and the dry particular scent she had learned across a hundred silent dinners and not known she had learned. He settled it at her throat and did not let his hands rest on her a moment past the settling, and he looked at her once, a quick complete look that went over her face and down to the wrist Vance had held and back, and whatever he found there he put away behind the stone of his face before she could read it.

“Come,” he said.

They walked back up through the silver park, the gelding led behind on a loose rein, and he did not speak, and she could not, and the half mile was the longest she had ever walked in her life. The fear had drained out of her somewhere on the folly steps and left a great cold emptiness where the exhilaration had been an hour before.

And into the emptiness, slow and unstoppable as water finding a cellar, came the understanding of what she had done, and what had been done to her. Her husband had ridden out into the dark and seen the whole of it, the weeping and the held hands and the embrace before it turned, and had spoken six words and ended it and was now walking beside her in his shirtsleeves in the cold without a syllable of reproach.

She would have given a great deal for the reproach. A man who shouted could be answered. He who reproaches a lady with the truth of her ignorance yields her a distinct advantage; he grants her a target for her indignation, and thereby the very means to sustain her spirit.Theodore gave her nothing to push against. He walked, and the gelding’s hooves came soft behind them on the turf, and his silence lay over the whole of the park like the cold.

At the small side door, the kitchen-garden door that was hers, he stopped, and she stopped, and he reached past her and lifted the latch and stood holding the door, and looked not at her but at the dark middle distance over her head.

“You should have told me you wished to see him,” he said, very low. “I would have taken you myself.”

It was not anger. That was the unbearable thing, the thing that went into her deeper than any rage could have reached. There was no anger anywhere in it, no heat she could have stood against and felt the cleaner for, only that quiet impossible offer, made too late to be taken, to have done for her the one generous thing she had never in two months imagined she might ask, to have stood at her side in the dark and let her say her piece to the man and carried her home again with her honor whole. He would have done it. She heard, in the flat exhausted level of his voice, that he would actually have done it, and the knowing of that was worse than being struck.

He did not wait for her to answer, which was as well, since she had no answer in her anywhere. He saw her through the door and gave her into the hands of Mrs. Selby, who had been standing in the dim passage with a candle and a face wiped carefully empty of everything it must have held, and who took Ellen’s arm without a word and without surprise, as though receiving ruined duchesses at midnight were a known item of household work.

Then Theodore went up the back stairs to his own study, and shut the door, and did not come to her, and she did not see him again that night.

She stood in the passage in his greatcoat that was still warm from him, with the housekeeper’s silent hand beneath her elbow, and understood that she had not been punished, and that she was not going to be, and that the not being punished was a thing she did not yet know how she was going to live underneath.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“Find Vance. Where he is quartered, where he means to go next, and every man he has spoken to since the regiment came up. I want it by Friday.”

Pearce, who had been roused at five and not yet told why, set down his pocket-book unopened. “Your Grace has not been to bed.”

“No. Write also to Lord Carrow at his lodging. I want to know what the Earl of Greaves has been about this autumn, in town and country both, whom he dines with, whose paper he holds, and whether he has bought any land in this county these five years past. Tell Carrow I ask as a friend and that I will explain when I can, which will be never, and that he is to oblige me regardless.”

“This is the business at the folly last night.”

“You know about the folly.”

“The men you set there came to me before they sought their beds, as you instructed them. They were uneasy. They are not accustomed to being put in trees to watch their own mistress.” Pearce’s voice did not alter, which was its chief virtue. “May I ask how Your Grace knew to place them?”

“A footman. The one I pay to notice things.” Theodore moved a paper without reading it. “He saw a man in a red coat near the kitchen-garden door two afternoons since, studying the house the way a man studies a thing he means to come back to. I did not have the shape of it then. I had enough to set men in the trees, a watcher on the south door, and a horse saddled after dark.”

“You might simply have locked the door, Your Grace. It would have spared everyone the night.”

“I will not lock my wife into her own house.” He said it flatly, and it shut the subject. “Write the letters. And one thing more, for your own ear. The earl is no longer a man I merely keep an eye upon. He has put his hand on something of mine. I mean to take the hand off at the wrist, slowly, and you will help me do it, and we will neither of us ever speak the word revenge, because dukes do not have revenges. They have policy.”