Page 102 of The Duke Undone

“I can hear Mr. Barrett buzzing.” She came slowly into the glasshouse. Inexcusable, really, to skive off her lessons. She didn’t care.

“I wanted to see you, to say happy birthday, properly.”

Aside from the low buzzing—a fly bumping high in the glass dome, not Mr. Barrett—her footsteps made the only sounds. The light fell thickly, warm and muffling. A strange timidity made her tiptoe.

“Anthony?”

At last, he rolled his head on his neck and looked at her. A smear of blood tracked across his forehead.

“What . . .” She ran to him, but he held up his hand, stopped her.

“It’s nothing. I hit my head on that bloody bracket.”

She slowed, took in the bottle balanced on his knee. He slugged from it, then placed it behind him on the sill, out of her sightline. A strange mix of boldness and slyness. He didn’t seem himself, or rather, he seemed the self she knew least.

A bleakness started to unroll within her, a long, blank scroll.

Swiftly, she walked to the marble bench, picked up the newspaper-wrapped package tied with green ribbon.

“For you,” she said. “Happy birthday.”

His face changed. It wasn’t anticipation. It was closer to dread. She pushed the present into his hands. He tore the newspaper clumsily, and her stomach sank. He looked at the miniature; then his gaze shifted to her. His eyes looked empty.

“I know you might not want a portrait of yourself,” she said hastily. “It’s for you to give to Effie, when you find her.”

She’d felt foolish, working on it during their week of silence, but she’d persisted. She’d thought, at certain moments, that the miniature might function as an exorcism, ridding her of her obsession. In the end, she’d seen it as something else entirely, something she had to give him no matter what.

A talisman for his sister’s return.

He stared at the portrait, at his own painted eyes. Then he propped it on the sill by the bottle and looked away.

After the storm of tenderness she’d experienced the night before, it was odd to feel suddenly so flattened. She’d imagined that on this day, of all days, he’d grin, caper, dance, do a bloody headstand.

He must have met first thing with his solicitors. The visit hadn’t gone well. She opened her mouth to ask, but he spoke first.

“Let’s run away.” His voice was so low she doubted the words.

“Run away?” she said. “Are you mad?”

“Mad,” he said, and suddenly his voice was wild, and he stood, enfolding her in a brutal embrace. He was damp with sweat, radiating heat. She could smell the alcohol. Instinctively, she stepped back, and he let his arms drop.

“Let’s get married madly in Scotland,” he said. “Let’s live in a cottage, or something even more picturesque, a gorse mill, and eat bannocks of oats. I’ll break horses and you’ll paint lairds in their drafty castles.”

She blinked. The dimples didn’t flutter in his cheeks. His face was stark.

“What are you saying?” Her eyes found the bottle on the sill, measured the level of the dark, sun-struck liquid. How much had it contained when he’d started?

He swiped at the blood on his forehead. He looked pale.

“I gained nothing. No, it’s worse. I lost everything.”

“You did not inherit?” Now she understood his wildness. But not yet how it came to be. She glanced at the floor, at the ripped newspaper, a penny rag that spilled ink on all the day’s scandals, large and small, real and invented.

“Was it . . .” She hesitated. “The drinking?”

He laughed, a chilling laugh. It froze her blood to hear him so mirthless. He spun around, swept up the bottle, and slugged from it again, like a parched man might slug from a canteen of water.

“No.” He shook his head. “It turns out there’s another proviso.” He returned the bottle to the sill, perhaps to avoid her eyes.