Beguiling the Beauty ft-1

by Sherry Thomas

  Footsteps, slow and quiet. He came closer and closer to the door, so close that she could almost hear him breathing. More silence, rife with possibilities. Her heart slammed with anticipation of pleasure. Perhaps he might even speak to her afterward.

  Perhaps—

  The door shut with a calm, deliberate click.

  She belatedly realized that without ever intending to, she’d offended him: He’d considered her invitation a nefarious attempt to consolidate her power over him. And if he’d been at all tempted, he’d now be that much more determined to stay away from her.

  Still, she listened at night, not exactly with hope, but in suspense nevertheless.

  But he stubbornly kept away.

  Christian might threaten her with a divorce, but in the meanwhile, he could not stop this marriage from taking over his life.

  Confidently she’d stepped into the management of the household. It had taken his stepmother years to win over the servants, but his wife had them eating out of her hands from the very beginning. Part of it could be attributed to her beauty. His staff took absurd pride in her comeliness: This was how a duchess ought to look, and all the other dukes could go cry into their first-growth tea.

  But she also courted them adroitly. Both his majordomo and his gardeners had long desired to bring a living vine into the dining room, to rise out of the center of the table and offer his guests the amusement of plucking fresh grapes between courses. Christian had consistently denied them the wish, citing its frivolity. She gave them the blessing to go ahead.

  From her own purse, she allocated funds to Mrs. Collins to make improvements to the servants’ hall. Once she learned that Richards was a connoisseur of wine, she initiated the transfer the late Mr. Easterbrook’s sizable collection of vintage claret and champagne into his keeping. To Monsieur Dufresne, the chef, she promised to import a trained pig, so that he could at last hunt for truffles on the estate among the roots of its abundant oaks.

  And to the lower servants, she presented new uniforms, along with gold buttons for the men and pearl hairpins for the women, which they could keep or sell as they wished. Outright bribery, in his opinion, but it certainly made her very popular. His spiffily dressed staff, buttons shining, hairpins gleaming, went about their daily tasks with a spring in the steps.

  Christian took refuge in the east wing, away from all the energetic changes. The public rooms of the house were in the central block, the family rooms in the west wing. The east wing, long a lonely and somewhat deserted portion of the house, he’d turned into workrooms, an archive that doubled as a secluded study, and a private museum for his collection of fossils and specimen.

  Here he dealt with the correspondence from his solicitors and agents, sorted his notes from his American expedition, and wrote his stepmother every other day to reassure her that he was settling very nicely into married life, that soon he’d have truffle with every omelet and harvest his own grapes between soup and roast.

  While he was able to avoid his wife with some success during the day, there was no escaping dinner or the polite predinner chitchat she was determined to foist upon him. He didn’t know how she managed it, but every night she stunned him anew with her loveliness. And he could swear each day dinner was served a quarter hour later, so that he must withstand the assault of her beauty that much longer.

  The worst, of course, was at night. She left the connecting door ajar at maddeningly unpredictable intervals, sometimes two nights in a row, sometimes not for another four days. When she issued her invitations on consecutive nights, he seethed at her brazenness. When she seemed to lose interest in him, he seethed at her indifference.

  He was damned if she did and damned if she didn’t.

  The dowager duchess’s advice never quite left Venetia’s ear. But how did one make a man listen when he didn’t want to? And when she couldn’t even get him alone for more than a few minutes every day?

  The third time he left his room in the middle of the night, she decided to follow him, keeping a certain distance behind. The house was hushed and still, the coppery flame of his hand candle casting vast shadows. Saints and philosophers, painted upon the ceilings of halls and passages, scowled down at her, as if they, too, did not approve of the underhanded manner with which she’d attached herself to the family.

  He went into the east wing. She hadn’t yet penetrated the east wing, knowing he would be displeased by her incursion. But sometimes one must encroach. Indeed, sometimes one must surround the beloved.

  But whether out of cowardice or curiosity too long denied, she did not pursue him directly into his study, but instead pushed open the doors of his private museum and found the lamps.

  She sighed. She’d overpraised the grounds: This was the most beautiful part of the house.

  The museum was fifty feet long and thirty feet wide, with display cases going all around the walls. From the ceiling hung a skeleton of a Haast’s eagle in midflight. The central exhibit was one of fossilized tusks, an enormous pair belonging to a mastodon, a much smaller pair probably from a dwarf Stegodon, and a straight tusk almost twice as long as she was tall that had once been the pride and joy of a gentleman narwhal.

  “What are you doing here?”

  She glanced over her shoulder. Christian stood in the doorway. She’d only belted a dressing robe over her nightgown; he was dressed more formally in a shirt and a pair of trousers. But the shirt was open at the collar. She had the strongest urge to lick the base of his throat.

  He frowned. “I asked you a question.”

  “It’s fairly evident that I am ogling—your fossils. What are you doing here?”

  “I saw a light on and came to investigate. But I see it’s only you.”

  He moved as if to leave.

  She turned around and took a deep breath. “Wait. I want to know what exactly Mr. Townsend said to you.”

  His gaze swept over her, not a covetous look, but a hard, inscrutable one. “He said, ‘You may yet have your wish, Your Grace. But think twice. Or you may end up like me.’”

  You may yet have your wish. “Did he recognize you? He said something to me once about a Harrow player coveting me.”

  His jaw worked. “Yes, he recognized me. Did he kill himself?”

  After all these years, the question still made her stomach clench. “Yes, with an excess of chloral. He told me that he was going to a friend’s place in Scotland for shooting, but he went to London instead. Three days later, when the agent who’d let us the town house for the Season went to inspect it, he discovered Mr. Townsend in the master’s room, perfectly dressed and quite dead.”

  “How did you know it was chloral?”

  “The agent found a vial next to his hand. He kept it hidden from the police—he didn’t want anyone to know that a suicide took place in the house—but later he gave it to me.”

  “There was no inquest?”

  “Fitz was just able to prevent one. He had the police accept that Mr. Townsend died of a brain hemorrhage, and that in the confusion before his death, he wandered back into a house he knew and lay down to rest.”

  Christian’s face was impassive. She wondered whether his mind went back to their conversations on the Rhodesia concerning her infelicitous marriage to Tony. “How did you find out?”

  “With a visit from Scotland Yard to our house in Kent. And while the police inspector was speaking to me, the new owners of our house came to claim it—it was the first time I’d learned that the house had been sold.”

  She’d been stupefied by the shock of sudden eviction, the threat of an inquest, and, above all, the sheer vindictiveness of Tony’s action. Helena even believed that he’d deliberately committed suicide in the manner he had to provoke police interest, to make the ordeal as ugly as possible for Venetia.

  “Why did he hate you so?”

  She could detect no compassion in Christian’s voice—but no disdain either. “Because he believed that I’d turned him from somebody into a nobody. He’d marri
ed me to have a pretty accessory to garner himself more attention, but the pretty accessory stole all the limelight he craved and left him nothing.

  “I know it makes no sense at all. I can scarcely credit it myself, a grown man resenting his wife for such a reason. But the notice I attracted maddened him—he wanted everyone’s gaze squarely on himself. To that end, he resolved be become an astoundingly successful investor, so that his friends and acquaintances would stop paying mind to the wife and look to him with envy and admiration. And while he was waiting for that to happen, he’d obtain adoration from other women.”

  “Such as the maid he impregnated?”

  “Poor Meg Munn. But maids were an unsatisfactory lot. He wanted his adulation to come from proper ladies, proper ladies who required such things as jewels before they’d admit a man to be impressive.”

  A hint of a volatile emotion traversed his features, but a moment later his face was again unreadable.

  “When his investments turned sour one by one, he kept me in the dark. I didn’t know he’d become mired in debts. I only knew the amount I was allocated to run the household kept decreasing—and I thought that was because he was mean-spirited.”

  Not a pretty confession, only a truthful one. “He must have believed that he’d strike gold on one of his investments. They all failed. It would have been terrifying for anyone, but for him … the implication that he had not been favored by God, that he could fall from grace just like any other ordinary bloke, and that he could do to nothing to stop this plunge into poverty and obscurity—he must have been in hell already.”

  She’d never given a full recital of the facts. Perhaps she should have years ago. Then she’d have realized much sooner that the person Tony had condemned from the beginning was himself.

  And only himself.

  She sighed, whether from sorrow or relief Christian couldn’t quite tell. What he did know was that he wished Townsend were still alive so he could bash in the man’s face and break a few of his ribs besides.

  She twirled the end of her robe’s sash between her fingers, waiting for him to say something—or perhaps simply waiting for him to leave so she could go back to her fossils. As his gaze remained upon her, she cinched the sash rather self-consciously.

  The shape of her body hadn’t changed. The tightened sash attested to a waist just as slender as it had been on the Rhodesia. He would not have guessed that she carried a new life within.

  He hadn’t been in the nursery in a while. There might still be some of his toys and books in there. And, of course, the whole of the estate was one vast playground for a child. “When will the baby be born?”

  Her eyes turned wary. “Beginning of next year.”

  He nodded.

  “I wouldn’t be in such a hurry to speak to your lawyers if I were you.”

  He hadn’t been thinking of speaking to his lawyers at all. “No?”

  “Even they would think you a monster were you to orchestrate a divorce right after my confinement.”

  “How long do you recommend I wait, then?”

  “A long time. I know what happens when a divorce is granted: The woman never gets anything. And I will not be parted from my child.”

  “So you will contest the divorce?”

  “To my last penny. And then I’ll borrow from Fitz and Millie.”

  “So we’ll be married ’til the end of time?”

  “The sooner you accept it, the sooner we are all better off.” His ancestors would have appreciated her hauteur: a fit wife for a de Montfort. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I must have enough rest.”

  He gazed at her retreating back. Foolish woman, did she not realize that he’d already accepted it from the moment he’d said “I do”?

  CHAPTER 18

  Christian had a fitful night—not that he’d known any other kind since she’d disembarked the Rhodesia. But after their encounter in his private museum he could only reel with shame and horror at how wrong he had been. What must she have felt, to have her character twisted and denigrated so carelessly, without the slightest regard for the truth.

  In the morning he stopped by the breakfast parlor. He’d been having breakfast in his study, but he knew she usually had hers in the parlor, with the day’s papers and often a copy of Nature by her elbow.

  She was not there.

  “She has gone for a walk, sir,” said Richards.

  “Where?” The grounds of Algernon House were vast. She could be miles away.

  “She did not inform us, sir. She only said not to expect her before luncheon.”

  “When did she leave?”

  “About two hours ago, sir.”

  It was not quite nine o’clock yet. If she did not come back before luncheon, she’d be out a good six hours. “You let a woman in her—”

  Christian stopped himself. No one else knew of her condition yet. “Send me Gerald. Tell him to hurry.”

  Gerald, head groundskeeper, arrived slightly out of breath. “Your Grace?”

  “Has the duchess asked you any questions about the quarry?”

  “Yes, sir, she has indeed.”

  “When?”

  “Yesterday, sir.”

  “Did she ask for directions?”

  “She did, sir. I drew her a map. She also asked about digging implements and I told her about the cabin with all the tools in it.”

  “Isn’t the cabin locked?”

  “She asked for my key, sir, and I gave it.”

  Ten minutes later, Christian was on his horse, galloping toward the quarry.

  The remains of the quarry consisted of a near-circular cliff with a ramp going down to the bottom. To reach the top of the ramp, he had to guide his stallion up a small hill. The sight that greeted him as he crested the knoll made him lose his breath.

  Standing halfway up the earthen ramp that he’d had built years ago to facilitate access to the higher parts of the cliff was his baroness, complete with the veiled hat that had been such a part of her mystery. She stood with her back to him, studiously chipping away at a promising patch of sediment, late Triassic by the look of it. Setting down her hammer and chisel, she picked up a brush and swept away the debris around an ocher-colored protuberance. All the while she whistled, a lively aria from Rigoletto, her notes bright and exactly in tune, until she hit a sustained high note where she ran out of air and stuttered. This made her giggle.

  At the sound of her laughter, the Ghost of Ocean Crossings Past shouldered through him, a great, muscular longing.

  He did something: tightened his hands on the reins or the grip of his thighs on the flanks of his steed. The horse shifted, struck its hooves against the ground, and let out a rumbly neigh.

  She looked over her shoulder. The front of the veil had been lifted over the crown of her hat; her face was dirty and smudged, her extraordinary eyes largely hidden beneath the wide brim. All the same he felt the familiar upending of his peace of mind, of the ingrained expectation that he should affect the world and those in it, but not the other way around.

  He nudged his mount forward. At the bottom of the slope there was a hitching post. He tied the horse and made his way up the ramp.

  “How did you find me?”

  “It’s not that difficult to guess which part of my estate you may wish to explore. What have you found?”

  She glanced at him, seemingly surprised by his civility. “A very small skull. I am hoping it might be a juvenile dinosaur but most probably not—it’s too far into the Tertiary strata.”

  “An amphibian, by the looks of it,” he judged.

  She did not quite look at him. “I’m still thrilled.”

  A silence spread. He didn’t know what to say. For a man of science, a devotee to cold facts, he had blundered badly, allowing his action to be guided by assumption after ill-supported assumption. “You said you were there at my Harvard lecture in person,” he heard himself say. “Why didn’t you approach me afterward and correct my misconceptions?”

  She sw
irled the bristles of a brush against the skull’s small, sharp teeth. “I couldn’t have shared the most painful details of my life with a stranger who had coldly condemned me.”

  No, of course not.

  “So you chose to punish me instead.”

  She drew a deep breath. “So I chose to punish you instead.”

  His hand tightened around his riding crop. For a moment it seemed that he was about to say something, but he only inclined his head and left: untethered his horse, rode it up the slope, and disappeared from sight.

  Venetia bit her lower lip. She was still unsettled from their conversation the night before, during which she had shared the most painful details of her life, and he had reacted not at all.

  But then he too had shared his most closely held secret and she had thrown it back in his face—with great glee, as far as he could tell.

  She sat down to rest on a hardened clump of soil. After a while, she thought of picking up the hammer and the chisel and chipping away some more at the edges of the skeleton. But her arms were sore and each whack of the hammer had jarred the socket of her arm. It had been a long time since she last dug: Then she’d been an indefatigable child who never ached anywhere; now she was a pregnant woman who didn’t sleep well.

  It would be wiser to be on her way back to the house. She had prepared for her outing with a flask of tea and a sandwich. The sandwich was already gone—eaten en route, as it had taken her longer than expected to find the site. The flask, too, was nearly empty—the day had warmed fast.

  It would be a hot, thirsty walk home.

  The sound of horse hooves and wheels. She spun around, hoping to see Christian. But it was only Wells, the gamekeeper, who’d come in a two-wheel dogcart pulled by a Clydesdale.

  “Do you need a lift to the manor, mum?” said Wells.

  Venetia was surprised and relieved. “Yes, I do. Thank you.”

  Wells carried the bucket of tools back to the shed while she climbed up to the slope to the dogcart.