The guilt that had scored him after Mouse’s surprising declaration had put Grey into a bit of a panic. He owed her a duke, he had decided. However he had to accomplish it, for Mouse’s pains, she deserved to be a duchess. She deserved the respectability, the reputation that had been stripped from her through no fault of her own.
So he had gone to plead his case once more—or to threaten, cajole, or bribe, if need be, and to his surprise, the butler had admitted him at once and shown him into the dining room, where the duke, dowager duchess, and Mr. John Darling had clearly been just about to sit down to supper.
Four place settings materialized on the table. Four.
“Do sit down, Granbury,” Davenport said. “You have a disquieting tendency to loom, and it upsets my digestion.” His nose was healing well, but the bruising had faded from purple to a sallow yellow that looked revolting. His eyes still looked somewhat blacked, but it seemed even the ruin that Grey had made of his face could not throw off his perpetual good humor.
“Ah,” said the dowager duchess. “So you’re the one who broke my son’s nose and gave him the perfect excuse to avoid being seen in public.” She was an elegant woman who had to be at least fifty, though Grey would never have known it to look at her. She had an ageless face, as if time itself had quailed at the thought of marring it with anything so gauche as wrinkles, and her hair was still a beautiful glowing blond that wouldn’t have shown grey easily even if some strands had had the poor form to slip into it. “Did he at least deserve it?” she inquired as she took her seat.
Grey recalled with perfect clarity the rage that had swept through him at the sight of Davenport clasping his hand around Mouse’s wrist. “Yes,” he snarled. “He did.” And since he had apparently been invited to dine, he, too, slid into his chair.
“Good.” The dowager duchess sipped her wine. “I don’t think I could have forgiven you for making a muck of my son’s chances this Season had he not truly earned it.” So at least Grey now knew why Davenport hadn’t been in a frothing rage himself over the assault—he’d been handed an incontrovertible excuse to avoid society events.
“Mother,” the duke sighed. “I tell you, when I am ready to take a wife, you will be the last to know.”
“Don’t you mean the first?” the duchess inquired.
“No,” said the duke, sulking into his wine, which provoked a chuckle from Darling.
Regrettably, that drew the duchess’ attention. “And you, my darling Darling—”
Darling groaned. “Your Grace, I wish you would not use that tedious appellation.”
“It’s not tedious, it’s darling, and you are not getting any younger.” The duchess sniffed, as if mortally offended that no male present deigned to take much of an interest in her opinions on when they ought to subject themselves to matrimony. Which Grey assumed to be immediately.
“You’ll have to forgive Mother,” Davenport said to Grey, sotto voce. “She’s a meddler.”
“I heard that, and I am not a meddler,” the duchess said, narrowing her green eyes at her son. “I simply believe that life would go so much smoother if you came to realize that I know best.”
Bowls of soup appeared on the table before them, and the fragrant broth wafted up to Grey’s nose, but turned his stomach. Mouse had not left her room all day, and the house had been as still as the grave. She had requested no food, nothing to drink. He grabbed for his spoon and considered making an attempt to eat, but feared he might embarrass himself if he tried. Instead he reverted to his old habit, to confirm to himself that he had not lost his mettle, and clutched the spoon in his fist.
“So, Granbury,” Davenport said, in a transparent attempt to steer the conversation away from the subject of marriage, “what brings you here?”
“Mouse,” he said. “She needs a husband. She needs a damned duke.”
“Get out,” Davenport ordered flatly, gesturing toward the door.
“I beg your pardon,” the duchess interjected. “But who is Mouse?”
“Lady Serena Tyndall,” Darling supplied between sips of soup, looking as if he hadn’t a care in the world. “Granbury’s mistress.”
“Oh.” The duchess blinked. To Grey she said, “That poor, dear child. I’m afraid I cannot recall meeting her. Is she very lovely?”
“She is—” Of course she was lovely. It was just that it was perhaps the least remarkable thing about her. She could play the pianoforte like a demon or an angel, depending upon her mood. She had more courage in her little finger than most men possessed in their entire bodies. She was intelligent and kind, witty and entertaining. And she had said she loved him. “She is lovely, yes,” he settled on, and willed the spoon to warm in his fingers like they always had. “She would make any man an admirable wife.” But not him. Never him.
“Well, I cannot like her father,” the duchess said, and then turned her attention to her son. “But, my dear, you do require a duchess.”
It was one thing for a duchess to champion a young woman who had been sorely misused, but quite another for a duchess to suggest that such a woman might make an acceptable duchess, and Grey stared, openly surprised.
Aware of his regard, the duchess patted her mouth daintily with her napkin. “It is not common knowledge,” she said. “But before I married the late duke, I was an actress. Not one of any renown, really, but—we’ll say simply that I came with my share of scandal when I married. It would be hypocritical to demand an unblemished reputation in another lady, especially when it is undeserved.”
“She wants me married,” the duke growled, “and she doesn’t particularly care how that gets accomplished.”
“My dear, you are getting up there in years—”
“I am eight and twenty, Mother! I’m hardly a doddering old man! And I am not marrying the Tyndall chit simply because he”—Davenport jabbed an accusatory finger at Grey—“isn’t man enough to do the job himself!”
The accusation struck a little too close to the truth for Grey’s taste, and so he cast back, “She deserves a bloody duke, and so that is what I will give her, however it must be done.”
Darling cleared his throat. “And she wants a duke?” he inquired.
Blast his uncanny memory, for it called forth an impeccable image of Mouse’s stricken face, a perfect echo of her reedy voice. I don’t want any of them. I only want you. His cravat once more began to feel like a noose about his neck. “She’s three and twenty,” he said. “Sheltered. Naïve. She doesn’t know what she wants.”
“My God,” Davenport said. “She told you, didn’t she? She told you she wanted you, and you refused her. Why the devil would you do a fool thing like that?”
Because he could never give her what she deserved. He’d been ennobled only a handful of years ago, and his blood was as common as it came. She would never have social position or respect or prestige. She would lose everything to which she had been entitled. All of society would know that she had lowered herself to be his wife, that she had tainted her exalted bloodline which stretched back hundreds of years, pure as snow. Perhaps they would think even that she had had to wed him, that she had been trapped into an unwanted marriage—the captive bride taken to lend a veneer of legitimacy to Grey’s recent pretensions to nobility.
Eventually, he would be like a chain around her ankle, dragging her down into his coarse, common world. Perhaps she wouldn’t notice at first, how he had stained her. But when that first blush of young love faded, she would realize that he had ruined her in truth. That there would be no clawing her way back to her glittering, glistening world. That her presence would never be anything more than suffered, tolerated, just as his had been.
“I don’t deserve her.” The words seemed to have been dragged out of his lungs, a confession he had never expected to make.
The duchess made an inelegant, scathing sound in her throat. “Well, of course you do not,” she said. “It’s common knowledge among women that no man deserves his wife. Which is why it is so satisfyin
g to see them put forth the effort to do so.” She pressed her lips together, and her eyes watered just a bit, and Grey suspected she was reflecting upon a memory of her late husband.
Just a few hours ago, Mouse’s eyes had watered like that—but certainly not with anything approaching fondness. A queer sort of lump rose in his throat, formed of guilt and shame and a hundred other profoundly painful emotions he’d thought he’d long lost the ability to feel.
“I gave her a list,” he said. “Of suitable husbands. I told her to pick any one she liked and I’d snare him for her.” He clenched his fingers around the bowl of the spoon in his hand.
Darling whistled. “Granbury,” he said, “you’re an idiot.”
He was. Of course he was. But…. “She wouldn’t be happy with me,” he said. “She thinks she would, but she has no idea how many doors would be closed to her if we married. How much she stands to lose.”
“Fewer doors than would be closed to her had she remained your mistress, certainly,” Darling said. “It is only by the grace of Her Grace’s incessantly wagging tongue that she was restored to any sort of respectability at all.”
“My darling Darling,” the duchess said in a syrupy sweet voice. “Mind your tongue unless you wish to find yourself called Darling Darling by all and sundry.” Though by her expression, Grey suspected that it mattered not whether Darling minded his tongue—she intended to spread it anyway.
Darling heaved a longsuffering sigh. “My point is that until recently she had already lost all respectability. Had she been so very unhappy, then?”
“No,” Grey said. “No, she—she thrived.” Thinking back, he recalled that she had seemed somewhat annoyed by the fact that she might have found herself back in the bosom of Ton society once again. I wish someone had asked me what I wanted, she had said. As if she might have declined the opportunity, if she had been given the chance. As though she had found her less-than-respectable life preferable to the one she had lived before.
There had been a time that Grey had promised himself—and Mouse—that she would have everything she had ever wanted, but at some point that promise had changed in his mind. That she should have everything, whether or not she wanted it. Instead he had resolved to give her the best that he could give, or buy, or manipulate his way into possessing. The best of everything, and of course it stood to reason that he had not met his own exacting standards, because he was the worst of it all. Because he had judged her deserving of so much more than him. And so the nature of his promise had changed, and he—he hadn’t even asked her what she wanted.
Instead she had told him, had laid herself bare there in his office, and he had told her—
He had told her that her love was the invention of her young, romantic mind. He had patronized her, crushed her tender regard beneath the heel of his boot, as if it merited no more consideration than a loathsome insect.
“So she was happy, then,” Davenport said. “She was happy—even without a sterling reputation. Without the acceptance of Ton society.”
She had been. Until he had stomped it out of her. What she was now, he did not know, because he had been too cowardly to see what damage he had wrought.
“She was happy,” he managed. And she might have continued along that way indefinitely, because while she might have had every material advantage, what she had truly lacked for was love, and if he had given her that—
If he had given her that, she would have been happy without any of the rest of it. She would have taken it, and treasured it, and damned the rest.
Instead he had given her only disappointed hopes, the same as every other man in her life. When it came down to it, he had been no better than her father, charting her life for her, deciding where she would go and what she would do.
Whom she would wed.
She had bowed to his wishes, because what else was there for her to do? He had already refused her and cut her pride to ribbons. And if he had sent to her one of the men on that wretched list—if he had managed to bring one of them up to scratch—she would likely have married the man. Because she simply did not care any longer.
The neck of the spoon bent abruptly. He’d forgotten it was in his hand. As he stared down at the twisted bit of metal in his palm, he saw the echo of Mouse’s desolated posture in it. The bowl crooked at the neck, a dramatic dip that looked as if the spoon was bowing its head.
Bent.
Just as he’d sworn Mouse would never do. Not to anyone.
What had he done?
Dear God. What had he done?
Chapter Twenty Six
“I never asked before,” Mouse said later that afternoon as she hefted the beating broom over her shoulder and collapsed into the chair opposite Grey’s, having just beaten a hallway rug to within an inch of its life, “but what did my father do?”
It was a question Grey had given up on her asking, since she never had before, and weeks ago he might not have considered it any business of hers, but now that she had asked at last, he found he was not certain precisely what to say. So he tossed a damp washcloth at her, with which she began to wipe the sweat and the dust from her face and arms, and said finally, “I hardly know where to begin.”
Mouse gave an elegant little flip of her hand, which, ungloved, was rubbed red and raw from the repetitive motion of beating out the rug. “One generally begins a story at the beginning,” she said. “I assume there is one.”
“Yes,” he said. “I suppose I just did not expect you to ask for it. You never have before.” He watched as she smoothed the washcloth down her arms, wiping away dust and leaving a glistening sheen of moisture on her skin. A light scattering of newly-acquired freckles across her shoulders glowed golden in the sunlight.
“Well,” she hedged, “I suppose I wasn’t interested, then. I suppose I—” She hesitated, directed her gaze to the floor, and heaved a sigh. “I suppose I thought that if I knew what he had done, I…I might have agreed with you.”
Grey could well imagine how a woman who had been snatched from the comfort of her home and ruined for no fault of her own would not wish to identify with the man who had forced her to it.
She let the washcloth drop to the ground with a wet splat and nudged it with her toes. “I am, after all, my father’s daughter,” she said in a dull little voice, as if she thought this was some glaring judgment against her character. As if this alone were justification for her current circumstances—like a conscious choice she had made, rather than an accident of birth.
“No,” Grey said. “You are your mother’s.”
Mouse stilled, her brows drawing together for a moment, until her face softened at last. “I forgot that you knew her,” she said. “I wish I had.”
But she had been so young when the countess had passed away. Of course she could not remember. And the earl was so unsentimental a man, it was doubtful that Mouse possessed anything to connect her to the mother she could not recall, as if half of her had simply…vanished.
Briefly, Grey thought of the pearls that Mouse’s brother, Hugh, had wagered away at the gaming hell. It had been an odd impulse to commandeer them—a rash one—and yet he had taken them, and tucked them away in a drawer in his office. And now he wondered if somewhere in the recesses of his brain there had lurked all this time the vague intention to…save something for her.
It was an uncomfortable thought, and so he scrubbed his hand over his jaw and said, “My father was your father’s man of business for many years.”
“Oh?” Mouse rested her elbow on the table and caught her chin in her hand, leaning forward with interest.
“They rubbed along well together, by all accounts,” Grey said. “But Andover had risen to his title early, and he had developed certain appetites for luxury, which he could by no means afford. Instead he spent indiscriminately, frivolously, and might well have imperiled your family with his excesses.”
“A trait he has passed down to William and Hugh,” Mouse said sourly.
“Just so,” G
rey acknowledged. “However, my father, in his spare time, fancied himself something of an inventor. Though he lacked the financial backing to make his inventions a reality, he, with his fondness for your family, saw a way to improve both of their fortunes.”
“A partnership,” Mouse said. “My father’s money and influence. Your father’s inventions.”
“Indeed.” Grey drummed his fingertips on the surface of the table. “It was a simple enough invention that started it—a method for marking dice that did not affect their weight. It insured that no one could substitute weighted dice and bilk a club out of a fortune. It was, in fact, wildly popular. It should have made them both fabulously wealthy.”
“But it did not?” Mouse asked, and he could hear the suspicion in her voice, the dawning dread.
“No, it did not. You see, Andover had forged my father’s signature and transferred the patent to himself. Legally, my father owned nothing. He received none of the value of his own invention. Andover was, once again, flush with cash. And though Andover had stolen my father’s patent, who would ever value the word of a commoner above that of a peer?”
Regret lived in Mouse’s tragic grey eyes. “I would,” she said softly.
But she knew the sort of man her father was. Ton society as a whole had neither known nor cared, because he was one of their own. It would not have mattered to them whom he had fleeced, because noblemen were intrinsically above the law, beyond reproach.
“My father was no longer content to remain in the service of a man who had so wronged him,” Grey said. “But his greatest mistake was in spreading the truth of the tale about. Andover could afford a great many things, but allowing a commoner to blemish his sterling reputation—however deserved—was not one of them. And so he told tales of his own, and soon my father found himself without work, with bills coming due, and a wife and a child to care for.”
Pressing her lips together, Mouse slid her free hand across the table and brushed his knuckles with the tips of her fingers, a comforting gesture. He turned his palm up, and her hand settled into it, clasping his own.
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