The Duchess War

by Courtney Milan

  Chapter Eighteen

  It was odd, Robert thought, that his outlook could change so completely in twenty-four hours. Two days ago, he’d made an offer of marriage. He’d been full of hope and desire and longing. And today…

  “So, you see, Your Grace, we are at an impasse.”

  Robert was seated in his parlor. Captain Stevens stood before him, a sheaf of papers laid out on his table.

  “I cannot announce that it is you who authored the handbills,” Stevens said. “To give such sentiments the imprimatur of a duke would leave the rabble with no reason to hold back at all.”

  Robert could scarcely listen. His mind was still fixed on that letter. It was a good thing he’d been sitting when Stevens had brought it out and told him that his own mother had paid Minnie to obtain it, or he might actually have stumbled.

  She could have just said no.

  “You, yourself, will likely face no consequences.” Stevens frowned. “But if I detect your sincerity correctly… For every handbill that you author, I will have one suspect arrested and imprisoned.”

  “Without proof? Knowing that they are not involved?” Robert’s voice was quiet.

  “It’s all of a piece,” Stevens said. “Someone must pay. If nobody does, we all will. I cannot—the law cannot—be flouted in this manner.”

  Even through the roaring in Robert’s ears, he recognized what Stevens was doing—threatening him by threatening others. He’d known that someone was behind the convictions for criminal sedition—convictions that should never have happened. He’d wanted to draw out whoever it was that had perverted the law.

  At least he’d succeeded in that. He made a mental note to have Stevens removed from office. Just as soon as he had a chance to gather his wits.

  “I see,” Robert said. “Well, thank you for your time.”

  “But—”

  Robert was already standing, leaving the room without so much as a glance back.

  He paced in his library, waiting for his emotions to catch up with him.

  But in the end, what triumphed was a surprising sense of calm—as if he’d been through a sandstorm, and it had scoured away the excess, unreliable flesh of his emotion, leaving only his bones behind. Bones didn’t yearn. Bones didn’t wish. Thank God for that.

  He didn’t feel the slightest bit of anger as he asked his staff to have a horse readied for him. The road to her great-aunts’ farm was long, but he didn’t feel a sense of annoyance at the minutes ticking by. He didn’t feel anything at all.

  He didn’t feel anything when he threw his reins over a hitching post. Not one twitch from his chest as he knocked on the door. It seemed as if he were wrapped in muffling cotton, as if the entire world had gone mute around him. The door opened soundlessly, and he could scarcely hear himself request to see her.

  The drawing room where he was shown might have been devoid of all furniture, for all that he noticed it. He didn’t sit. He didn’t look. He only waited, knowing what might come.

  She opened the door.

  Perhaps, deep down, he’d feared that when he saw Minnie once more, he’d be so overcome by his feelings that he would forgive what she had done. He’d built up an image of her, expanding on things she hadn’t said, words she’d never spoken, until he’d imagined himself enamored of a woman who didn’t exist. But when she walked in, he didn’t feel anything.

  She was small, and she drew in on herself. All the magic had gone from her. He felt nothing but a dull ache where she had once been.

  He was safe, thank God. Safe from himself.

  “Your Grace,” she said simply.

  He inclined his head to her.

  It was the first time in all of their acquaintance where she had treated him like a duke. It was the first time that he’d wanted to be treated as one. Dukes didn’t need to explain. They didn’t need to beg. They just did, and nobody ever questioned their actions.

  “You must know why I’m here,” he said.

  She bowed her head. Distantly, he noticed that she looked miserable. There were dark circles under her eyes. And that light he’d seen in them—that beautiful light that had seemed to fill the room—was utterly extinguished.

  He didn’t care. He didn’t care about anything any longer.

  “Your Grace. I owe you an explanation.”

  “I don’t want an explanation.” Ice didn’t listen.

  “But—”

  “I don’t care why you did it,” he said. His words seemed to ring out with a hollow, staccato sound. “I don’t care how much my mother paid you. I don’t care about you at all.”

  She flinched. “Then let me assure you—”

  “I have even less wish for your assurances.” Not, he realized, that she’d ever given him any. He’d been the only one providing them. He’d fooled himself into thinking that if only she knew him, if only he could explain to her, that she might…what?

  That she might care about him, too. Just a little. She’d known who he was, what he wanted. He’d told her his dreams, his secret wishes. He’d offered her everything.

  And he hadn’t been enough.

  His own delusion, once again. His own foolish daydream, built up around someone who scarcely noticed him.

  The difference was that this time, he wasn’t going to be the one watching someone else walk away. He wouldn’t be the one waiting hopelessly for letters that never arrived.

  He made himself breathe evenly, until that sense of benumbed calm returned. Swathed in cotton? No, cotton was too light to hold the entirety of him. He was buried in sand, each grain a weight pressing against his chest, so heavy that all other sensation was blocked. He didn’t feel anything at all, and he liked it.

  She must have seen something of what he didn’t feel flit across his face, because she bowed her head. “I’m so sorry, Your Grace.”

  “I don’t want an apology,” he snapped.

  “Then why are you here?”

  “Simple,” he said. He wished that he’d been sitting down, only so that he might stand at this moment. “I’m here to say good-bye.” He strode to the door and then turned. She was gaping at him. “And now I’ve said it.”

  And on those words, he strode out.

  It seemed to take ages to traverse the hall back to the entry and another age to get his hat and cloak. He could hear his heart racing in his chest.

  This time, Minnie would run after him. She would throw herself at his feet and beg for clemency, and he—why, he would take great satisfaction in not even glancing down. He would brush her off his shoes like so much dust.

  He wouldn’t forgive her. To forgive her, he would have to care, and to care, he would have to let himself feel.

  But she didn’t come, and so he never had to decide what to do.

  Breakfast with his mother the next morning suited Robert’s dark mood all too well. The clink of her teaspoon as she stirred in sugar interrupted a silence that seemed weighted down by a hundred conversations they’d never had. Today, he was in a mood to be irritated.

  The duchess set her cup down with the finality of a builder slapping bricks in mortar, finally, and looked at him.

  “I suppose,” she said, tilting her chin in the air, “that you agreed to see me because you’re angry about what I did.”

  He simply folded his arms and looked at her.

  “I didn’t tell her what to do, mind,” she said. “That, your Miss Pursling decided on her own. But yes, I admit it freely. I did pay Miss Pursling five thousand pounds to refuse your offer in as ungracious a manner as she could.”

  His mind blanked. It took every ounce of will that he had to keep his arms folded, to keep staring at her. But this time, his silence didn’t produce any comment. She simply took another sip of tea, leaving him to make sense of the confusion he felt.

  “You paid her to refuse me,” he said.

  She nodded.

  Stevens had said—he had said most distinctly—that Miss Pursling had been paid to find out his secrets. He
’d thought she intended to entrap him. He’d thought that the attraction had been all on his side. He’d remembered, with chagrin, the way she’d pretended to be withdrawn and shy, and wondered how it was that he hadn’t noticed this element of untrustworthiness.

  “Why, Mother,” he finally drawled. “I didn’t know you cared.”

  For all the sarcastic cast of his words, there was a good deal of truth to them. She’d never done anything that could be termed remotely motherly. Interfering in his marital prospects was almost as good as a kiss on the cheek from her. It was…touching. Infuriating, too. Wrong. High-handed. But…touching.

  She sniffed and looked away. “It was just money. Don’t make anything of it.”

  “On the contrary. I am excessively grateful. If she can be bought off so cheaply, it’s best that I know it now.”

  She watched him for a few moments, as if she didn’t believe that he could be so calm, so unruffled.

  “I told her,” his mother said, “that if her betrayal was bad enough, you’d never think of her again. It turns out I was right.”

  She seemed to take no joy in her victory. She didn’t smile. There was no hint of gloating in her voice.

  “You are too forgiving,” she said, “until you don’t forgive at all. So tell me. At what point did you finally give up on me?”

  He sucked in his breath. “What an odious assumption. I never had any hope of you.” He couldn’t look at her as he spoke, though. She’d had too many letters from him to believe that.

  “It was your father’s funeral, wasn’t it?”

  He did not even allow himself to blink.

  “You wrote me beforehand, asking me to come. Now that he was gone, you said—”

  He slammed his fist on the table. Tea splashed everywhere. “Asked you to come?” Now he looked at her, glaring. She didn’t shrink back from him. She didn’t glower in return. She simply looked at him calmly, as unruffled as she always was. She might have been a china doll for all the response in her eyes.

  “I didn’t ask you to come,” he said quietly. “I begged. Did you know, I honestly believed that you would take me back with you? I had convinced myself that the only reason you put off knowing me better was that you could not abide my father’s presence. That once he was gone, we might have a chance. When you weren’t at the service, I told myself you would come after it was finished. When you didn’t come then, I convinced myself that you’d wait until everyone else had departed. Finally, I said that once it was dark and nobody would know, you’d come and get me. Until that day, I believed—I don’t know how, as I had no evidence of it—that it was only my father that kept us apart. But it wasn’t that. You didn’t care.”

  “No,” she said softly. “I didn’t.”

  “Did you ever? Or do you hate me as much as you hated him?”

  “As much?” She frowned. “I would say that I hated you in a different way.”

  He wished he could find that imperturbable calm he’d had just a few moments ago. Even though he’d known it had to be true—even though he’d suspected that his mother disliked him—to hear it spoken out loud made it real. Even after all these years, after all that time he’d spent making himself indifferent to her, it still cut.

  “Those first months,” she said, “when your father took you from me—I thought I’d never breathe again. But I could not let him know how important you were. If I had, God knows what he might have threatened you with. So I woke every morning and dressed and went in company. I laughed when things were funny and expressed sympathy when they were not, all the while feeling as if a cavern had been made of my chest.”

  She didn’t look as if she’d ever had anything inside her chest, so smoothly did she speak.

  “By the time you were three, you were a trap for my heart. Every word that came to me of you, every short visit your father grudgingly allowed, was like a wall closing in around me. The more adorable you became, the more certain your father was of my return—and the more he’d threaten me. I had to pretend not to care. After a while, I became so good at pretending that…that perhaps I stopped caring in truth. And yes, I resented you every time you made me feel anything.” She shrugged, nonchalantly. “But what was I to do? Stay with him? I tried it. But by that time, he was impossible. After that last time, when you were nine… I spent an evening barricaded in my room, with him bellowing and pounding on the door, threatening to…” She gave him another sidelong look. “I believe if he had not been quite so drunk, matters would have become exceedingly ugly. I couldn’t stay. And legally, you were his. What was I to do, except stop caring?”

  Robert shook his head. “Every time you left, he used to tell me it was my fault. That I had failed to captivate you. That I should have been more—”

  More lovable, although his father had never used that word.

  She looked at him. “When your father died, I assumed he’d made you over in his image. By the time I realized it wasn’t so…” She shrugged again. “By then, it was too late to salvage anything of mother and child. Luckily, by then, I didn’t care. I didn’t feel anything at all. So now, knowing I’m far too late to do anything, now…”

  She looked up at him.

  “Now,” she said, “I find I still don’t care.” Her eyes glistened momentarily, and she looked away, her jaw squaring as she clamped her lips together.

  “I see,” he said in puzzlement.

  “I really don’t care. I can’t. I don’t know how anymore.” So saying, she took out a lace-edged handkerchief and dabbed at her eyes.

  “Are you…”

  “No. I never cry.” She met his eyes fiercely.

  “I see,” he repeated.

  And he actually thought that he did. This trip—her visit out here, her ham-handed pronunciations, her foolish interference—maybe she didn’t care. Maybe, after all these years, she’d forgotten how to care about him. But she was trying to. She made him think of a foal just-born, struggling up onto spindly legs, attempting to stand and falling down flat.

  She sniffed again. “By the time I figure it out,” she said, “you’ll have given up on me entirely. It seems a fitting punishment.”

  She set down her handkerchief and glared at him, daring him to contradict her.

  Once, when he was young, she’d come for a visit. He’d run out to meet her at the carriage. He didn’t know how old he had been at the time, but he remembered hugging her knees, as high as he could reach.

  She hadn’t touched him back, hadn’t even bent to pat his head. She’d simply glanced at him, told him to show some decorum, and kept walking.

  So he didn’t move to touch her now. He didn’t think she would like it, and he felt too raw to risk a rebuff.

  “Well, then,” he said briskly. “Thank you for taking time from your indifference to meddle in my marriage prospects. I thought she was made of sterner stuff. Apparently.”

  “Oh, no,” the duchess said. “I approve of her. Find another girl just like her, but a marquess’s daughter this time.”

  “You know,” he said, “I have no idea who her people really are. Pursling isn’t even her real name.”

  “No?”

  “She was born Minerva Lane.”

  At that, his mother gasped aloud. “Minerva Lane?”

  “You know who she is?” He looked at her in surprise. “She told me it would be a scandal.”

  “Scandal? Her? No.” She shook her head violently. “Scandal is what happens when girls are too easy with their favors—a simple matter to overcome, one that can be papered over, if not forgotten, by a good marriage and enough money. Miss Lane wasn’t ruined, Robert. She was destroyed. Utterly destroyed.”