“Say it, Your Grace. You have come this far.”
“You do not command me.” He swung back to face her. A vein was beating at his temple. “I am the duke.”
“Say it!”
“Your mother!”
The name ricocheted off the stone walls. Her hands balled into fists.
“She’s not mad!” Her voice broke high and raw. “There’s nothing wrong with her! She loves nature, that’s all!”
“She can love naturewithshoes on!” He was pacing now, his hands on his hips. “Any hint of you possessing your mother’s illness will not only ruin our reputation but the child’s as well!”
She went still. Her shoulders dropped. When she spoke, her voice was quiet. “What does it matter? I shall be dead within a fortnight.”
All the air left his lungs. The fire spat.
She believed it. She married him anyway.
He turned and walked out of the kitchen without another word. His boots were loud on the service stair. At the top, he stopped and put one hand against the wall and stood there. The plaster was cold under his palm. His chest was heaving.
A servant opened the door then hastily closed it.
He remained until he was numb.
The carriage took him back through Mayfair at a walking pace, for the rain that had come down through the night was coming down still at four o’clock, and the streets between Brooks’s and Iredell House were thick with the slow crawl of other carriages and the steam of horses going home.
Henry sat with his hat on the seat opposite and watched the water travel down the glass. He had been at the club five hours. He had drunk nothing, transacted no business, and offered nothing to the three men who had attempted, each in his turn, to draw him into conversation.
A week. He had been married a week, and he could not make his mind behave.
She was in every room he was in and in every room he did not. She was in the smell of the house, she was in the ledger Mrs Greer had brought to him that morning, she was in the corridor at midnight in her bare feet.
And she was in the bed. The lie she had told him. He did not know whether he was angrier at her for the deception or at himself for not seeing it, and the fact that he could not separate the two made him useless for anything except sitting in a leather chair at Brooks’s watching rain.
He had meant to confront her. He had composed the conversation twice in his head. Both times the answer was so obvious it did not require her voice to deliver it. A woman and her unmarried sisters ruined by a duke’s word had one remedy. A husband who believed the ruin was real. Because the alternative is the workhouse or worse. He could not find it in himself to punish that.
And beneath it, quieter and less admissible: he could not raise the subject without saying aloud his foolishness in believing she was experienced. His brisk manner with which he took her only to leave her room without a word of comfort. And then he had spent the night considering an annulment as thoughshewere the one who had committed the injury.
So the anger sat where anger sits.
You hardly touch me either.
He put his hands over his face and sat there.
His first wife had been with child when she died. His second—he had begun staying the night, sleeping beside her, when she was met with an accident. His third, he had started learning what pleased her, and she had begun to answer him, and within the month she was dead.
And he could not touch her. Not the way he wanted to. Every wife he had allowed himself to want had died for it, and whatever logic told him, his body would not forget.
He rolled his shoulders. He could not dwell on this.
He told the coachman to take the long way through the park, and sat through Hyde Park Corner three times, before giving up and naming Iredell House at last.
The footman opened the carriage door. Cold air came in at him, smelling of wet stone and coal smoke. Henry climbed down and went up the steps and Patten opened the front door before he had reached the top of them.
“Your Grace.”
The hat went into one of Patten’s hands and the greatcoat into the other, and Henry stood at the foot of the staircase with the rainwater on the marble around his boots. Patten coughed.