“I rather doubt that.” With a vicious gesture, Hugh ripped his mask away, revealing his true face to the invalid viscount. The man paled as Hugh strode forward, reaching the bed and peering over. “Tell me, what did you say to my wife?”
“Your wife? Ah, you mean my daughter?” A slow, malevolent smile crossed his face. “Why should I tell you?”
“Because,” Hugh said in a deceptively even voice, “I will stop at nothing to find out, and if need be, I will ruin you and your estate better than you ever could.” So saying, he took a vase of dead flowers sitting on the bedside table and hurled it at the wall. The vase shattered with a satisfying crash.
No one came running.
“You have no one left to defend you. No one left to mourn you. The one person in the world who might have felt something for you, you chased away. You will die alone and in pain, and I hope you live just long enough to regret it.” Hugh ripped the bedsheets away, seeing in disgust that at some point in the night, Lord Barnsley had soiled himself. Either he was incapable of changing, there was no one prepared to do it for him—a likely event—or he didn’t care enough to do so.
Hugh didn’t care. But he did enjoy the panic that lit Lord Barnsley’s eyes.
“They call me ‘the Beast of Somerset,’” Hugh said, taking a lamp and hurling it at another wall. What did it matter? He would shortly own this place. “No doubt you think you know what that means. Well, I’m here to tell you how very wrong you are. I have no intention of letting you hurt my wife without consequences.” He turned back to Lord Barnsley, letting a sneer twist his lips, knowing he looked like a monster.
For the first time, he reveled in it.
Christiana preferred his face without the mask. What did he care for the opinion of others?
“Did you think I would despise my wife?” he asked, planting his hands on the bare mattress and leaning down. “Did you think I would hate her as much as you no doubt hated your own wife? By God, you are pathetic. She is better than you will ever be, and I will spend the rest of my life showing her how very much I respect and adore her.” Lord Barnsley flinched, and Hugh gave a slow, vicious smile. “How does it feel to have your daughter loved by a monster?” He pressed even closer, wrinkling his nose at the stench. “How does it feel to have your daughter loved by a duke?”
Lord Barnsley spat; Hugh moved back in time for the globule of saliva to land harmlessly on the bedclothes. “Love her, do you?” the man snarled. “Well, she’s not what you thought you were getting—the daughter of a viscount and of pure birth.”
Shock lanced through Hugh. His hands curled into fists. “What?”
“She isn’t mine,” Lord Barnsley said, his eyes alight with an almost feverish glow. “Her mother was a whore who lay with anyone who would open her legs. Christiana is the daughter of a stableboy.”
Hugh searched the man’s face, searching for a lie. But all he found was smug cruelty. Maybe it was truth; maybe it was a deception designed to wound.
It didn’t matter.
She was his wife. She could have been born in the stables, could have been born to a washerwoman and a miner. Could have been the bastard child of a good-for-nothing man who wanted nothing to do with his ill-begotten offspring.
She was his; he cared about nothing else.
And so he smiled. “Enjoy the remainder of your days, Lord Barnsley. I hope they are as miserable as your manners.”
Lord Barnsley’s smirk slipped. Evidently, he had been expecting a different reaction. Perhaps one of outrage, even anger that such a truth had been kept from him. Disbelief.
Hugh felt plenty of that. But not at the prospect of Christiana’s lowly birth. No, his anger came from the idea that her own father could use such a fact to cause pain. He was despicable.
Hugh paused by the door. “You know,” he said, as though in contemplation, “having now had the dubious honor of meeting you, I can safely say I might prefer it if her father were a stableboy.”
And with that, he left, not deigning to look back even once.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Christiana had neverbeen in the local inn before, and she found it to be a small, rather smelly building. Wakeford was not along the Great North Road and had no particular claim to the population of England as a whole; thus, there was little traffic through the village. The inn functioned more as a tavern than as a place of rest, and as she sat in the small room she and Baxter had procured for themselves, the merriment from below seeped through the floorboards.
She was a duchess. But, perhaps for the first time in her life, she felt small.
Baxter left the room to find some fresh linens, several coins in her pocket, and Christiana allowed herself some time for the shock to seep in.
She might not be her father’s daughter.
Was that a relief or a travesty?
If she were the daughter of a local stablehand, then it meant she did not have the lineage she had claimed all her life. It meant her father had, knowingly or otherwise, raised a bastard. Perhaps that had been preferable to admitting his wife had been unfaithful—though Christiana knew for a fact that her father had not been faithful to her mother, either. Theirs hadbeen a fractured marriage, filled with disgust and dislike and resentment. If they had ever loved one another, that love had faded long before Christiana was old enough to remember it. All she could remember was her mother fighting to escape the life she had entered into with the viscount and Lord Barnsley drinking to forget.
And the debts. So many debts.