But she was not a child any longer, and she was all done being polite. It was time the dowager learned that her new daughter-in-law would not be broken.
Picking up her skirts, Sophia marched to the door, pulled it open and swept out into the corridor. Marion was just disappearing around a corner. Sophia ran after her. She reached her at the top of the wide staircase in the main hall.
“Wait!” she called out. Marion stopped and turned. Heart racing, Sophia approached her. “I’ve had quite enough of this.”
“I beg your pardon?” Marion replied indignantly.
“I’ve had enough of your critical, disdainful tone. If you don’t like me, that is your choice, but your son has married me, and I am here to stay. I am the mistress of this house and I expect from now on to be treated—at the very least!—with civility.”
Marion glared at her in dumbfounded shock, then without one retaliating word, turned to hurry down the stairs. Typical, Sophia thought. Raise your nose in the air and ignore the lowly unpleasantness of emotion.
Sophia stood at the top of the staircase, feeling triumphant at last. For days she had struggled to cling to her self-confidence and fit in with these cold, unfeeling people. She had been agonizing over her husband’s cruel withdrawal, endlessly analyzing why he didn’t want to love her, and wishing for answers that were simply not going to come. Not if she continued to feel like a victim.
No more. Starting this minute, she would seize the reins. She would live here as duchess on her own terms. She would never again allow her mother-in-law to intimidate her, nor would she allow her husband to think that she was going to be a simpering, emotional burden, pining away for him. When he returned from London, he was going to learn that his American wife was stronger than that. He was going to learn that he would have to do some fancy footwork to gain back her regard.
With a mental “so there,” she returned to her boudoir to redo the invitations. After that, she would take a buggy out to visit some of her husband’s tenants and see what she could do to give something of herself to those who needed her, and those who would welcome her.
Two weeks later, James returned. He had been gone for a month. It was late in the evening—past eleven. He entered his rooms to find the fire already burning and Thompson waiting dutifully with a glass of brandy on a tray.
“Ah, just what I need.” James picked up the glass and took a deep draught. He tugged at his neckcloth and sat down.
“Welcome home, Your Grace.”
“Thank you, Thompson. It was a tiring journey this time around, don’t you agree? It seemed so much longer than usual.”
Probably because he’d had to deal with more problems concerning Martin. Since his suspension from Eton, the boy was not behaving himself at the home of their aunt Caroline.
Just then, a knock tapped at the door. “Enter,” James called out.
The door swung open, and his wife stood there in the threshold wearing a white dressing gown with a shawl around her shoulders. She held a large brass candelabra. Her hair spilled down over her shoulders in thick, wavy locks, and the candlelight glimmered in the deep blue of her eyes.
Feeling a sharp surge of arousal at his wife’s staggering beauty, James stood up.
Without ever taking his eyes off Sophia, he said to Thompson, “That will be all.” The valet obediently took his leave.
Sophia walked in and closed the door behind her, then set her candles on a desk. “Welcome home,” she said, somewhat reservedly.
“Thank you.”
She stared at him for a moment and made no move to dash into his arms, as she might have done during their honeymoon. Instead, she held her chin high and spoke in a clear, steady voice. “You didn’t write to me while you were gone, James. For that matter, you neglected to even tell me that you were leaving in the first place. Why did you leave without saying goodbye?”
James let his gaze sweep down the full length of his wife’s slender body. His eyes fixed for a second on her tiny bare feet, then rose again so that he could look her in the eye when he answered her question.
Words, however, seemed elusive to him, like fluffy feathers on a breeze that he was clumsily trying to grab at.
He tried not to concern himself too much about it. Their separation—though unpleasant at times—had provided the much-needed proof to him that everything was normal. That he was still in control. He’d managed to justify all the cruel things he had said to her the last time they spoke, and he’d even managed to forget about her completely for certain extended periods of time during the days.
But not at night. Never at night.
That, however, was manageable, he told himself, for it was only lust. He’d felt lust for women before and he’d never lost his head over it, and he would not lose his head over Sophia.
He tipped his glass and downed the rest of his brandy. “The decision was a sudden one.”
“I would prefer it,” she said matter-of-factly, “if, in the future, you would inform me, in advance, of any planned trips away from the castle, and in such circumstances, I must insist that you kiss me good-bye.”
He studied her expression—austere with a hint of arrogance.
He had expected wrath. She certainly had good reason. If not wrath, then tears. At the very least, some form of pleading. Instead, he was hearing a set of clear and simple ground rules. He wasn’t quite sure what to make of it.
“Agreed,” he replied, gazing at her ivory face and the rigid set of her jaw.
“Good.” She padded across the floor toward him with a determined look in her eyes, and his trousers tightened around an arousal he did not even consider resisting. He had been a whole month away from his wife and seeing this self-assured air of hers, without any of the tears he had expected to come home to, pleasantly surprised him.
He was all of a sudden hotly in the mood for sex.
She stood before him, her full lips moist and inviting, her perfume like a potent aphrodisiac to his senses. He laid his palm on her cheek and stroked her bottom lip. She closed her eyes and kissed his thumb, then took it into her mouth and sucked on it. The heat of her mouth sent a wild yearning through him.
He took her face in his hands and lowered his lips to hers, but she gently pulled back.
Momentarily stalled, he opened his eyes.
Sophia stepped away from him. “I’m sorry, James, I won’t be performing my wifely duty tonight.”
Her perfunctory statement was like a bucket of cold water dumped over his head.
“My monthly began yesterday, so there’s really no duty to perform.” Without the slightest hint of disappointment, she turned from him and picked up her candles. “I will see you in my room when I am ripe to conceive. In about a week?”
He stood motionless, not entirely sure this woman—speaking with such casual indifference—was his spirited American wife. She almost sounded... British.
She opened the door to leave but faced him for one more thing. “By the way, Florence was here while you were gone. We had a nice visit.”
Feeling stuck to the floor, James frowned at her.
“Good night,” she said.
James took an anxious step forward. “Sophia—”
She stopped and glanced over her shoulder.
“I’m very sorry.” The words spilled past his lips before he even knew they were upon his tongue. Shaken by the sound and feel of them—for he had never in his life apologized to anyone for anything—he stood unsteadily in the middle of the room.
His wife stared at him, and he thought he saw her cheeks flush with color, but he couldn’t be sure in the candlelight. There was something in her eyes, though—something that looked perhaps like longing. Could it be she wasn’t as confident as she appeared?
“Sorry for what, exactly?” she asked.
He thought long and hard about how he shoul
d answer that, for what he really regretted was taking her away from the home and country she knew and a family she loved. He had lied to her about Florence and so many other things. He had brought her here to this godforsaken purgatory—where the echoes off the walls resonated with the ghostly howls of an unthinkable past. Then, after all that, he had been cruel to her and had left her here to face it all alone.
That’s what he was sorry for, and it weighed upon him.
“I am sorry that we have not yet been successful,” he replied.
“In conceiving a child, you mean?” she asked, searching for another deeper clarification, but he couldn’t seem to give her one.
“Yes.”
She nodded, as if that was the answer she had expected, then walked out and left him alone with his demons.
Chapter 18
James leaned forward in the saddle, his grip tight on the reins as he galloped across the moors on his return from an inspection of the east drainage ditches. He’d worked hard to keep himself occupied the past week, to forget his worries over Sophia. He accomplished that feat simply by not thinking of her. There were moments when he hadn’t been sure that he could not think of her, but he realized now that he’d always been very skilled at shutting out the world, for there was a time when his sanity required it—when he, as a boy, had no control over his environment.
James urged his mount over a low, stone wall and landed on the damp grass. He slowed his horse to a walk, however, when he spotted his own cabriolet parked outside a tenant’s cottage, with the top down. He drew closer and found the driver lying down in the seat, sleeping.
James cleared his throat. The man, who had pulled his top hat down to shade his eyes from the sun, waved it at a fly buzzing around his head. James cleared his throat again.
The man raised his hat, saw James, and leaped out of the carriage. This was followed by a sudden flurry of chickens clucking and flapping their feathered wings in the yard. “Your Grace!”
From high up on his horse, James frowned down at the man. “May I ask what you are doing here with my vehicle? Sleeping in it?”
“I am here with the duchess, Your Grace,” he quickly replied while clutching his hat to his chest. “And she told me to sleep. She said I looked tired, and she wouldn’t take no for an answer. She ordered me to get in the back.”
James pondered that. It was one of those moments when he felt the differences between himself and his wife like a deep, impossible chasm. Not that he didn’t feel a man deserved his sleep, but there were rules to consider, especially when servants were on duty.
James glanced at the front door of the little stone cottage. He knew the farmer who lived there. He was a young, stalwart man. Handsome, James supposed. Respectable and dependable. Then again, James spoke with him so rarely. It was difficult to judge the man.
“The duchess is inside?”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
James hadn’t known his wife would be out visiting today, but he had made a point to avoid any and all contact with her since their last encounter. She had not voiced any complaints, and the schedule of her courses had freed him from any expectations he or she might have regarding their more intimate relations of late.
Still, a ripple of curiosity moved through him. “Is her maid here as well?”
“She didn’t want to bring anyone, Your Grace. She wanted to come alone.”
“Alone,” he repeated. Was she doing something she didn’t want anyone to know about? Or was this just another of her errors in protocol?
He would have liked to ask the driver exactly what Sophia was doing here on this sunny afternoon, but decided against it, for he did not wish to draw attention to the fact that his servants knew more about his wife’s comings and goings than he did.
“How long have you been here?” James asked.
“An hour, Your Grace. She usually stays for an hour.”
“Usually? You’ve been here before?”
The man nodded. “Three times this week.”
“I see.” James looked at the front door of the cottage again and found himself quite unable to be on his way.
He dismounted and tethered his horse to the others in the harness. Carrying his riding crop, he stepped up to the front door and knocked.
A young woman answered. He was quite certain it was the farmer’s wife, and he was relieved.
The woman wore a lace cap and a white apron, and she held a small child on her hip. Her eyes widened when she recognized James, and, looking more than a little flustered, she curtsied. “Good afternoon, Your Grace.”
“Good afternoon,” he replied. “Is the duchess here?”
The young woman stepped aside and held open the door. “She is.”
James removed his hat as he entered the small house. A fire blazed in the hearth, and he could smell food cooking—turnip or something of that sort. His gaze followed a deep crack up the wall to the thick, exposed beams across the low ceiling.
“She’s right through here,” the girl said, leading the way to a room at the back of the house. The floorboards creaked beneath the soles of James’s shiny riding boots as he followed.
They pushed through a door, and there was his wife with an open book on her lap, reading to an old woman in a rocking chair. The woman wore black. Thin, coarse-looking gray hair fell loose over her shoulders.
Sophia’s gaze lifted as the door opened, and when she saw James, she stopped reading. They stared at each other wordlessly for a moment. James took in her plain afternoon dress and found himself imagining her in America—in a wheat field or something. She’d never looked less like a duchess.
“Who’s there?” the old woman asked, and James knew at once that she was blind.
“It’s the duke,” Sophia replied.
“The duke. Upon my word.” The frail woman tried to get up.
Sophia covered the woman’s thin, boney hand with her own. “It’s all right, Catherine. There’s no need to get up. James, this is Mrs. Catherine Jenson.”
The informal introduction would have exasperated James’s mother, but contrarily, James felt nothing but relief at having, for once, been spared ceremony.
“What are you doing here?” Sophia asked him. “Am I needed at the house?”
“No, I was simply passing by and I noticed the carriage out front.”
“I see,” she said, seeming a little puzzled by his reply. He was puzzled by it as well, for he didn’t know what the bloody hell he was doing there.
The farmer’s wife behind him excused herself to the kitchen.
“Would you care to sit down?” Sophia asked, as if she were completely at home here. “I’m almost finished our reading. Would that be all right, Catherine?”
“It would be an honor, Your Grace.”
“The honor is mine, madam,” James said. “Though I do not wish to intrude.”
“You won’t be intruding,” Sophia answered.
He sat down on a wooden bench by the wall.
Sophia continued to read from where she had left off—the Book of Revelation. “Behold I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.”
James listened to his wife’s melodic voice and thought about what she read, and the person she was.
A quiet feeling moved through him. He imagined what her life in America had been like—with no aristocracy, where the class structure was based on wealth rather than accident of birth. He imagined Sophia in that one-room house she had told him about and wondered with an odd sense of amusement what she must think of this very different world she’d married into. She hadn’t really questioned it in London or on their honeymoon, for there hadn’t been time to contemplate it, he supposed. Nor had she yet, at that time, experienced the reality of being a peeress. Was it settling in on her now?
Would she even be able to adapt to it? Was that why she was here? To escape it for a few hours?
He felt a tremendous responsibility suddenly, to see that she was taken care of and eased into this new life, especially after the way he’d treated her before he’d left for London. The way he’d crushed her fantasies, even though he believed he did it for her own good.
It was an unusual thought for James, who had never intended to care one way or the other if any wife of his was “settling in.” He had always expected to leave her to his mother to mold and train, and to leave any future children to nannies and nurses to educate. But Sophia was turning out to be of rather formidable substance. She was—unfortunately for his mother—not very “moldable.”
Perhaps if his upbringing had been more nurturing, he might have been more inclined to concern himself with his duchess’s need for assistance and support. What was it about Sophia that was raising this response in him today? A greater sense of familiarity, perhaps? Or was it simply her overwhelming kindness toward this woman?
James watched Mrs. Jenson nod in response to the readings. Sophia finished and closed the Bible.
“That was beautiful, Your Grace,” Mrs. Jenson said.
Sophia knelt on one knee in front of the woman and took her hand. “Thank you for letting me come. I’ll be back on Monday to see you again.”
“May God bless you,” the woman replied, pulling Sophia’s hand to her cheek. Sophia stroked the woman’s hair, kissed the top of her head lovingly and gave the Bible back to her.
With an almost crippling sense of awe, James watched Sophia rise to her feet.
A few minutes later, they were saying good-bye to the farmer’s wife at the front door. She curtsied and smiled exuberantly at Sophia but seemed afraid and unable to meet James’s gaze.
When the door closed, he and Sophia faced each other in the sunlight.
“You didn’t tell me you’ve been visiting the tenants,” James said.
She pulled on her gloves and walked to the carriage. “You didn’t ask.” The driver helped her into her seat, and she adjusted her skirts. “I simply want to get to know our neighbors.”
To Marry the Duke (American Heiress Trilogy Book 1) Page 16
