“What is that?” Sir John said, riding up alongside Alban.
Alban supplied the name, and then said, “It goes back to before the first Duke of Alban was ceded this property. I always stop to look at it. It makes me sad, and yet inspires me. I don’t know why.”
“You don’t know why it inspires you, or why it makes you sad?”
“Both, I suppose. But I always look at it,” Alban said, pointing and tracing the outline of the ruined roofline, “and think that it is like a very old person. Look, the two windows left are like eyes, but they are just black holes. It’s like the old fellow has gone blind, and I can’t help but be sad.”
“And yet it inspires you?”
Alban thought for a moment, then tried to explain. “Because it has survived so long, even blasted and ruined as it is. It is so ancient, no one is quite sure how long it was there before it was destroyed in the wake of Henry Tudor’s ascension to the crown. They tried to pull it down but it resisted, and so remains, unusable but somehow alive.”
“You are a fanciful fellow, aren’t you?” Orkenay said, riding up on the other side of Alban. “Are we going to arrive at Boden House today by any chance? I’m perishing for a drink.”
They rode a few more minutes, up another long slope, and then—
“There it is,” Alban said to his companions. “There’s Boden House.”
They had halted their mounts at the crest of a long slope and gazed down at the valley on the other side. Boden House, a limestone manor house of ample dimensions, was set on the hillside, clinging like a stubborn ram. Just beyond its mossy walls a forest of beech and alder spread down, and a private road led through the woods to Bodenthorpe Cottage, a lovely little three-story brick home with walled gardens and thick hedges, where Lady Eliza lived. Beyond that again, a few miles distant in the valley, was the village of Loxton.
“Gloomy,” Orkenay said, gazing around at the fells that stretched on as far as the eye could see and disappearing into the mist. He shivered. “I still need that drink, but I think I shall ask for mulled wine. Damned cold in these hills.”
Alban glanced over at him and chuckled. He still felt the excesses of the night before, but he never let it affect his plans for the next day. He might not have chosen Orkenay as his companion again if he had the chance to go back—there was something oily in the man’s demeanor that had always made him uneasy—but in that moment all he knew was that he was home, home in a way he hadn’t felt in a long time.
Taking Orkenay’s increasingly pointed hints, Alban rode on, followed by his friends, and soon they turned onto the long winding lane that led them to the hunting lodge. Greeted by the staff and by his own valet, who had been sent ahead with orders to hire extra staff for the months he would be in residence, Alban left his companions to settle while he, impatient, exited Boden and walked through the woods to his aunt’s house.
Would she be watching for him out the window? Or would she be out walking the property, as restless as always?
Of course, she didn’t know the exact time, nor even the exact day of his arrival, so unless her serving staff had seen them coming she would be just going about her business. That appealed to him, stealing up behind her, mayhap, and covering her eyes. Of course she would know in an instant it was he, but how lovely to surprise her for just that moment.
He rapped on the front door but then entered, too anxious to wait. The hall was as dark as he remembered, but spotless, with brasses shining and the mingled scents of beeswax and the floral aroma from the heaped bowl of chrysanthemums tickling his nose. A maid entered the hall and started, then curtseyed.
He stared at her. “You have very much the look of Mrs. Ranulph, my housekeeper at Boden.”
“M’mother, yer grace,” she said.
“I have come to see my aunt. Where would she be?”
“In the front parlor, to be sure. She doesn’t stray much beyond that after tea.”
“Well, that is unlike her!” Alban said. “She always loved to wander after lunch, up the hills and through the forest.”
The girl gave him an odd look and didn’t answer.
“I’ll go in to see her, then. Don’t announce me. I want to surprise her.”
Three
Kittie knit steadily but also watched her employer, who sat facing the window. Though she seemed the picture of serenity, Lady Eliza was fretful. Kittie thought she knew why. The woman had not said one word to her nephew in any letter in the time that Kittie had been there about her increasing blindness. Why, Kittie was not sure.
From what she could piece together the encroaching darkness had started even before the duke’s last visit. When the duke did come north last and stayed in Lady Eliza’s house rather than Boden, it was during the awful time following the duchess’s abandonment of her husband and her subsequent death in a boating accident. Lady Eliza had likely not wanted to add to the duke’s understandable sorrow during that time, but why not in the intervening years? Surely it was natural to share that information with her closest and most beloved relative? But no, Lady Eliza had remained sequestered for those three years, not even letting the news leak out to her other relatives; there were not many she was close to, for some reason Kittie did not clearly understand. That there was some mysterious sorrow in Lady Eliza’s past Kittie had so far surmised, but what it was she had no idea.
Still, it seemed to Kittie that it would have been natural to confess her failing eyesight and ask Alban to come up for a visit before it was gone entirely.
And yet she hadn’t.
“Shall I ring for more tea, my lady?”
“No, Kittie. I shall float away if I have one more cup.”
“Would you like me to read to you?”
“No! I can hear your needles clacking away, my dear. Don’t stop for me.”
“But it would be no trouble—”
“No! Stop fussing, Kittie. I know what this is about, and I will handle it in my own way.”
Kittie fell silent and resumed her knitting. But her heart would not stop thumping and her fingers trembled. The duke was coming, likely that day or the next. The very man whose portrait hung in the dining room, and whose visage she had examined every day for almost three years . . . and he would soon be there. She had conned over his letters, reading them to herself much more often than even to her ladyship, and she had oft examined the miniature of his wife and her last, resentful letter. Having been married once herself in a far from perfect union, she was looking for clues, perhaps, as to how their relationship had broken down to such an extent that the woman had felt compelled to take the extreme measure of abandoning her marriage.
What could make a woman married to not only a duke but the Duke of Alban desert him? From his aunt’s reports—and who should know him better?—he was one of the handsomest, most sophisticated, kindly, gentle men of his rank ever to grace that position. Every man, woman and child in Swaledale, without exception, had only praise for the duke as a landowner, gentleman, master and relation, distant or near.
And yet the social censure of abandoning one’s husband was not a step taken lightly by any woman with a scrap of dignity, much less a duchess, and the daughter of a duke, as the duchess of Alban had been. Something had made her life intolerable, but without knowing the lady, Kittie could guess all she wanted, she would never truly know.
But she would soon know the duke, would meet him and see him, perhaps daily. She glanced down at her knitting and felt a flush rise to her cheeks. She stretched out the lengthy stocking, one to fit the dimensions of a very large man, and thought that perhaps she would put this project away for the time being, for it would surely not be seemly to be working on a duke’s stocking while the duke was present. Such intimate apparel had ribald connections in many a cruder mind.
She heard a commotion in the hall and rose from her chair, but not before the door swung open.
And there on the threshold was the man himself, larger, older, even more handsome than his paintin
g. She felt as though she would faint.
• • •
Alban paused in the doorway and drank in the homely scene. His Aunt Eliza he spied immediately, seated as she was by the window in the stream of sunlight. And then . . . he stopped abruptly. There was a lovely woman—glossy auburn hair, tall, voluptuous—half risen from her chair, knitting hanging loosely from one hand.
“Y-your grace,” she stuttered in cultured accents.
“Alban!” Lady Eliza cried, turning in her chair but not rising.
“Aunt Eliza,” he said, and swiftly crossed the room in just a couple of strides. He bent over to hug her, overwhelmed by how glad he was to be there, and how happy to see her again.
Her fingers touched his face and hair as he hugged her to him and knelt by her side. For a moment he didn’t trust his voice, but then he held her away from him and stared at her, drinking in the familiar angularity of her bony face and the homely hook of her nose, her iron gray hair coiled as always into a simple bun, and last but not least, her eyes. Always, her piercing gaze had had a way of finding the secrets of his heart and demanding he share his sorrow or his happiness with her, his most beloved relative.
Her eyes. There was an odd silence in the room. He could feel rather than see that the young woman was standing behind him, breathlessly waiting for something, some acknowledgment or word of release from Lady Eliza. He examined his aunt’s eyes, wondering if their unfocused and hazy look was emotion, or—
“Aunt Eliza, are you quite all right? Is anything . . .”
She clutched his hand and held the back of it against her weathered cheek, rubbing it against the softness of her skin. “I am so glad you have come, Alban,” she said.
Her voice was tremulous with emotion and husky. That was unlike her. Alban glanced over his shoulder at the young woman still standing there.
“Mrs. Kittie Douglas, your grace,” she said, dipping a curtsey.
“You’re the companion? I had imagined . . . but never mind.” He turned back to his aunt and gazed steadily into her eyes. She seemed to stare back, and yet there was some subtle difference in her gaze, some lack of knowledge, some . . . lack of sight. The pupils were milky-looking instead of clear black.
All the strength left Alban and he slumped to the floor at her feet. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he cried. “When did this happen?”
“Alban,” Lady Eliza said, tugging at his hand, urging him up. “Do not disintegrate on me.”
“How long?” He pulled a chair close to her with his free hand and sat across from her, tightening his grip and staring at her.
But she seemed lost for words.
Mrs. Douglas came forward and knelt by her employer’s side and he was distracted for a moment from his discovery. There was something soothing about the woman, her very presence. She was beautiful, but there was something more.
“It didn’t happen overnight,” the woman said, her voice gentle, “but did accelerate about a year and a half ago. We had been trying to save her sight by not taxing it too severely before that, but the doctor said there was nothing that could be done. It is some kind of degeneration of the eyes, the left worse than the right, but the sight gone now from both.”
Eliza reached out with her one free hand and found Mrs. Douglas’s and squeezed. The younger woman tucked a stray gray tendril from Lady Eliza’s bun behind her ear and the older woman turned her face and let her companion’s hand briefly cup her cheek. Alban could see between the two women not just reliance and gratitude and devotion, but true love, as a daughter for a mother might have.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked, his voice harsh and grating against the warm quietude of the room.
Lady Eliza released his hand and sat back, straightening. But she didn’t let go of Mrs. Douglas’s hand, he noticed. It was like a cord of strength stretched taut between them, with a pulse of energy that flowed back and forth, giving both some needed vigor.
“I didn’t want to bother you with my—”
“You could not confide in your nephew, the one who means as much to you as any son could, you once told me? I don’t believe you.” He stood and paced angrily. “What a selfish thing to do, not to allow me the time to come see you, for us to walk and talk as we used to before your sight—”
“Stop!” Mrs. Douglas stood, too, and swiftly said, “Are you most angry at Lady Eliza, your grace, or yourself? For surely you could have come up any time in the last three years without such a reason. Do not berate her for your own failings.”
“Enough,” Eliza scolded. “Both of you. I will not have you at daggers drawn over me. I will be honest, nephew, if you will come and sit down again and stop that infernal pacing. You too, Kittie.”
Alban forced his ire back down, though that was not an easy task. But as the analytical cast of his mind once more functioned, he recognized his outburst as spurred by fear; fear of the vast change that had taken place in his aunt’s life, and yet she had done it alone. Or, not alone, but with only a stranger as companion.
Ah, and there was a strong thread of shame in his eruption: shame that he had never asked after her health; shame that he had noticed so little on his last visit, so shrouded in his own grief as he had been; shame that he had not made the effort to come see her long before her blindness closed in.
Mrs. Douglas had already sat back down and was bundling her knitting into a cloth bag. Alban took the seat opposite his aunt again and searched her face. “So it is total?”
“For a while I could see some dim images in very strong light, but that is gone now. It is total.”
“How did it happen?” He took her hands in both of his and cradled them.
“I have known for a long time it was happening. This same thing happened to my mother before she died. I recognized the symptoms.”
“How brave you are,” Alban whispered.
“Oh, but I am not. I have railed, I have begged, I have turned away from God, accusing Him of all manner of outrages. But when all that was done, there was nothing left but acceptance. Kittie helped me with that.”
He turned and caught the young woman staring at him with an expression of such earnestness and yearning that it caught him off guard. What beautiful eyes she had, big and very blue, and a beam of sunlight touched her hair just them, setting it aflame with coppery highlights. Her gown was blue, almost the color of her eyes but unfashionable; even as plain as it was, though, it couldn’t conceal the loveliness of her lush figure.
When she caught his returning gaze she glanced away shyly. He felt an unwilling stir of attraction, surprising since the object was a woman so unlike his usual amours. She was tall and voluptuous, built on a larger scale than any woman he had ever been attracted to before. His usual conquests were petite and slim, dark-haired and with an olive complexion.
He tore his gaze away and returned his attention to its proper object. There was a smile on his aunt’s face, a sly expression of smug self-congratulation that he could not imagine a source for. He dismissed his reading of her countenance, for it couldn’t be right.
“She’s beautiful, isn’t she?”
“Lady Eliza!” Mrs. Douglas said, standing and pacing away in agitation.
“She is,” he agreed, enjoying the companion’s discomfiture as his aunt clearly was. Lady Eliza was still the same, he was happy to note, in some ways, not loath to enjoy herself at someone else’s expense. “So,” he continued, still trying to adjust to this new situation. “What now? Are you happy here still, Aunt, or would you like to move to London, where it might be easier to get around?”
“Easier to get around in London? Not true. I know this house so well I have no trouble navigating here. And even the garden . . . before my sight was completely lost Kittie and I set it up with stone markers along the path so I cannot go astray. And I have a pony cart and can even use it alone, for old Lily knows the way to Loxton with no interference from me, and once there I have acquaintance aplenty to help me.”
“Yo
u don’t drive to the village alone?” he said, aghast.
She chuckled. “I knew that would astound you. I said I can do it, not that I do. It was enough, I found, to simply know that I could. I go to the village with Kittie, for it is much more pleasant to be on her arm anyway.”
“You seem to have accepted all of this,” he marveled. “No matter what you say about railing against God.”
“I have had time,” she said simply. “And what cannot be changed must be accepted.”
“Are you sure it is permanent and irreversible?”
“I am. I went to see a very good man in Edinburgh a year and a half ago . . . we went,” she amended, indicating Kittie with a wave of her hand. “He has seen this condition before and they simply do not know how to stop it from happening. I had spectacles at first that helped, but now . . .” She trailed off and shrugged.
“You knew this was happening even when I was last here,” he said, troubled by his own self-absorption.
“I was having trouble with my eyes,” she admitted. “But I wasn’t sure it would end in blindness. My mother, though she had the same condition, died before becoming completely blind.”
He sighed, weary.
“You have had a long journey, Alban. You must have come over here immediately as you arrived, or we would have had advance word of your arrival at Boden. Go back and rest. We will visit later, when you’re more rested.”
He stood, holding on to her hand, squeezing it, then releasing it. “I should go and see to my guests.”
“Who have you brought?”
“One of your favorites. You will be glad to meet with Bartholomew Norton, I think. He is much changed from his youth, though.”
“What, no longer the melancholy poet?”
Alban laughed, appreciating as always his aunt’s incisive character descriptions. “Well, I don’t know if he writes poetry anymore, but yes, he is still melancholy. He’s . . . he’s in a bad patch just now.”
“We’ll make him feel better,” Lady Eliza said. She reached out and her companion was there in a second. Eliza took her hand, then released it as she rose. The companion stepped back; it was like a choreographed dance.
The Duke's Secret Seduction Page 3
