by Juliana Gray
“Perhaps she should have chosen differently,” Wallingford heard himself say, entranced all at once by the nimbleness of Abigail’s fingers as she arranged the saddle and straightened the girth, by her gentle, candid voice, by the way she revealed herself to him without fear.
“Yes, but the institution itself! Would you mind going around the other side, Your Grace, and catching the girth?”
Wallingford went around obediently and found the girth strap, hanging down from Abigail’s side of the saddle. He grasped it and drew it upward, toward the buckles.
“You, for example. You’re one of the greatest men in England. If I married you—I speak hypothetically, of course—I should have to be a model of propriety, a . . . a pillar of society! It’s exactly what ruined Alexandra.”
Wallingford slipped the straps into the buckles and tightened them. “If I asked you to marry me—I speak hypothetically, Miss Harewood, and purely for the sake of argument—I daresay it would be because I liked you well enough as you are. I wouldn’t want you to change.” The reckless words left his lips before he could pause to think about them.
“But I couldn’t help it. We couldn’t help it. It would be inevitable. All this lovely freedom, to do and say as I please, to live here in this marvelous crumbling pile and milk the goats in the morning . . .”
“We are still speaking hypothetically, I trust. The bridle, Miss Harewood, if you will.” Something light and airy seemed to be invading the region around his heart, filling the warm hollowness. His pulse was smacking away with unexpected force in his neck. He held out his hand for the bridle and was shocked to see his fingers trembling.
“Oh, of course. I don’t want to be your wife. I’ve told you that already.” She placed the bridle in his hand, and foolishly he looked at her face, at her dancing tip-turned eyes, at her radiant smile. “Aside from the stifling effects of marriage itself, there is your character to consider.”
He snatched the bridle away. The airiness in his chest collapsed upon itself with a puff. “My character is perfectly good.”
“Oh, of course. You’re quite the most interesting libertine I’ve ever known. Here you are, after all, making a determined effort to study and so on. You’re marvelously intelligent, really. And for all your bluster, you do have a genuine . . .” She paused. “A genuine power to you. An inner dignity, quite apart from your title.”
“And how do you think you know all this?” He fumbled awkwardly with the leather straps, concentrating with fierce intent on the physical puzzle in his hands instead of the metaphysical puzzle standing before him.
“I’ve watched you. With your horse, with your friends. At dinner, when we’re all together. As I said, you’re a nonpareil among libertines.” She sighed and shook her head. “But you are, after all, a libertine.”
Lucifer snorted wetly into Wallingford’s gloved hands.
“I am not a libertine.”
“And rakes don’t reform,” she went on, as if she hadn’t heard him. “It’s the greatest and cruelest myth perpetuated on womankind, by nature and by literature. A man of libertine nature doesn’t change his ways, not even if he falls in love, not even if he marries for love. Sooner or later, his instinctive natural craving for new female flesh overcomes whatever love and loyalty he feels to his wife. Look at your own father.”
“God, I hope not,” Wallingford muttered. “He’s been dead these fifteen years or so, and wasn’t much to look on even when alive.”
“You see? To a duke, who can obtain any woman he likes with a snap of his fingers, regardless of his personal charms, sexual fidelity isn’t simply beyond his capability. It’s beyond his comprehension. The spreading of valuable ducal seed isn’t simply his right, but his duty to humankind. I say, are you quite all right?”
“What did you just say?” Wallingford gasped out, between spasms of coughing.
“I suppose that was rather an unsuitable thing to say, for an unmarried lady.” She did not sound repentant.
Wallingford closed his eyes. He drew in a calming breath.
“Better?” Abigail asked cheerfully.
He lifted up the bridle. “How the devil does this go on?”
“Oh, just offer it to Lucifer. I daresay he knows where to stick his nose.” Her voice was full of laughter.
Ducal seed. Had she really said that?
Wallingford blinked at the arrangement of leather and steel in his hands and forced his mind to concentrate. That must be the bit, there at the end; evidently the nose went there. He offered it to Lucifer with suitable humility.
Lucifer stared, incredulous.
Abigail sighed. She came up behind him, fragrant with the scent of lemons and blossoms, as if springtime itself had soaked into her skin. He tried not to breathe, but it was no use. She was still warm and supple next to him, her delicate female hands closing over his crude male ones, and his chaste body leapt to prominent life, his ducal seed clamored for release.
“Like so, Wallingford,” she murmured. “Lift the headstall, that’s it. Now fasten the buckle behind his cheekbones. There we are.”
His fingers fastened the buckle clumsily. The ground was tilting slightly underneath him. Abigail’s hair brushed against his cheek like a caress.
“I hope I haven’t offended you. I didn’t mean any insult. Your nature is your nature; it would be like blaming a lion for being a lion.”
“Of course.”
“I wouldn’t want you any other way, in fact. You suit me perfectly.”
The blood drummed in his ears. “Miss Harewood,” he said, turning.
She was even closer than he thought. A choke rose up in his throat.
“Yes, Wallingford?” she asked, a little breathless.
He opened his mouth and closed it. She waited patiently, while the sun turned her skin to gold, and tilted her face toward his.
Wallingford squeezed his eyes shut against her. “The reins, Miss Harewood,” he said. “If you will.”
* * *
Wallingford rode beautifully, like a man who knew his horse inside and out. Abigail loved that about him, too. She had expected him to ride well, having already seen him with Lucifer in the stables, but it had still been a pleasure to watch him that first morning, moving without a trace of effort, like a centaur in the early light. She watched him now, as he made his way down to his appointment in the village, whatever it was. Some willing widow, perhaps.
Something tickled her hand. She looked down at Percival, who was nibbling her sleeve with a goatly mixture of hunger and curiosity. “He’s awfully handsome, isn’t he, Percival? I don’t think he even knows how handsome. Everyone’s always gone on about his brother, and of course they’re right, Roland’s terribly beautiful, but . . .” She scratched the goat’s head and watched Wallingford appear and disappear among the olive trees. “But Wallingford, it’s as if he’s carved from granite. All that beauty, and he hides it among the stone. Do you know what I mean?”
Abigail looked down at Percival, who had stopped chewing her sleeve and simply stood there with his eyes closed, savoring the scratch of her fingers between his ears.
“Of course you know,” she said. “You’ve a lot in common, goats and dukes.”
* * *
The Duke of Wallingford kept his shoulders straight and his gaze fixed on the road before him, until he was quite sure Abigail could no longer see him through the trees.
She was far away, quite at the other side of the stables, and yet he could feel every detail of her: the gloss of her hair in the morning sunshine (she never wore a hat until midday), the yellow of her dress as it wrapped about her slender body, the strength of her gaze as she followed him along the track. The remembered feel of her hands upon his, her scent in his nose.
Trouble, Giacomo had said.
“As if she were sent by my very grandfather, expressly to test my will,” said Wallingford to Lucifer, as they walked down the track into the sunshine. “To see how long I can hold out before misbehaving on
ce again. To show me how incapable I am of restraining myself.”
The very fibers of his body seemed to stretch back down the track toward her.
You think you deserve to enjoy sexual congress with some mere acquaintance, against the wall of your own mistress’s conservatory, simply because you can.
They passed a few olive trees, spotted with nascent fruit, and as each shadow passed over his skin, Wallingford felt with pain the shutting-off of Abigail, and then the relief of restoration an instant later. He had, by now, ceased to wonder at the sensation. He accepted it as a temporary affliction, another inconvenience to endure.
“That’s why I can’t quite banish her from my thoughts,” he went on. “Because I can’t have her. A quite natural human response. The situation’s comical, really. The girl, the artless virgin, wants to have an affair with me, and I—I, Lucifer—am the one adhering to virtue. It’s a trial of the most bitter kind. And yet . . .”
They were past the trees now, and turning around the bend. Just like that, she was lost to him.
And yet at least I have the satisfaction of refusing her. He thought the words, rather than said them aloud. They didn’t quite make enough sense to put out there, into the world. He had come to this wilderness in order to avoid his grandfather’s medieval notions of arranged marriage, but he had also come to avoid temptation itself, to see if his grandfather were in fact right. To see if he could last a year without self-indulgence of any kind; to see if he could find some cure for the dogged dissatisfaction haunting the recesses of his soul; to see if there were some finer, better, stronger-souled Wallingford lurking beneath. Someone like Finn or Roland; someone whom people might actually like rather than merely respect; someone whom a woman like Abigail Harewood might actually love rather than collect as a trophy.
That last thought had sprung without warning from the depths, and Wallingford actually started in the saddle with the shock of it.
“Going mad,” he said aloud.
He put Lucifer into a canter.
The wager. At the time, it had seemed like the worst kind of stupidity, the kind of pride-driven impulse to which dukes should not be subject. He had blamed that damnably provoking Lady Morley and her teasing. She had sounded almost exactly like his grandfather.
Now he was grateful. Whenever he felt himself slipping, whenever the temptation of Abigail’s rosy round bosom threatened to poleax his last tottering pillar of willpower, he remembered the wager.
He had transformed his private promise into a public one.
He was committed.
Lucifer cantered around the curve in the road, and the red rooftops of the village came into view, nestled below him like a cluster of russet flowers.
My dear boy, has the entire conduct of your adult life ever suggested your usefulness for anything else?
“I can do this, old boy.” He could not say whether he was addressing the horse or himself. He slowed Lucifer down to a trot, the better to negotiate the rocky slope of the final stretch of road.
By God, I’ll show the old bastard.
SIX
Abigail adored every aspect of her life at the Castel sant’Agata, but she especially enjoyed breakfast.
“Jolly splendid of them, to find kidneys and kippers for us,” she said, tucking in half an hour later with all the gusto of an Englishwoman eating her morning ration of organ meats. “I wonder how they managed it.”
Lilibet was chewing her toast with all the gusto of an Englishwoman eating roof shingles, seasoned with coal dust. There were just the three of them at the moment, Abigail and Lilibet and Philip, three tiny outposts of humanity set around the broad swathe of the ancient trestle table. The gentlemen made a point of breakfasting early, and Alexandra made a point of breakfasting late. “I suppose one can order these things,” she said. “There are hundreds of English in Florence.”
“Yes, but how would they know?” Abigail rested her cutlery against her plate in a pregnant pause. “Don’t you think there’s something a bit odd about the old place?”
“I don’t know what you mean. It’s an old castle, that’s all.” Lilibet lifted her teacup and closed her eyes.
Abigail tilted her head and observed her cousin’s face, which seemed rather pale and ghostly itself at the moment. She could not understand why no one else sensed the undercurrents drifting about the Castel sant’Agata; to Abigail they were as obvious as the sunshine in the morning.
“Really? You don’t feel it? As if there are ghosts hanging about every corner?”
“Ghosts!” Philip bounced in his seat. “Real live ones?”
“No, darling,” said Abigail. “Ghosts are generally dead. But real dead ones, certainly.”
Lilibet sent her a quelling frown. “What nonsense. Ghosts, indeed.”
As she spoke, a parcel of air seemed to brush the back of Abigail’s neck, making it tingle.
She turned to the doorway, where Signorina Morini stood quite still, headscarf like a bright red slash against the shadowed corridor behind her, teapot and toast rack in her hands. She was regarding Lilibet with a pensive expression.
“I have more toast, Signora Somerton, and more of the tea,” she said.
“Thank you, Morini. Are the gentlemen about yet? Lady Morley?” She asked the question with casual indifference, as if it were not common knowledge that the gentlemen and the ladies never breakfasted together, rarely lunched together, and only dined together because of the supreme inconvenience of having dinner at any other hour.
Morini stepped forward into the dining room, sparing not a glance for Abigail. Abigail was not surprised. She’d been trying for weeks to hold a private conversation with the dark-haired housekeeper of the Castel sant’Agata, to no avail. Every time Abigail entered into the kitchen, Morini slipped away on some urgent task, her skirts swishing behind her, the faint scent of baking bread dissolving into the empty air in her wake. Like a wraith, Abigail thought, with just a touch of pique: pique, because surely no one else in the house was better suited to speaking with a wraith—to getting to the bottom of her wraithlike secrets, as it were—than Miss Abigail Harewood.
Even now, Morini was focusing all her solicitous attention on Lilibet. She placed a fresh rack of toast on the table next to the countess’s plate, tilted the teapot above her empty cup, and answered her in a private tone. “Signore Burke, Signore Penhallow, they both had the breakfast, it is an hour ago. Of the duke, I see nothing.”
Abigail set down her fork. Enough was enough.
“Morini,” she said, quite loud, “I wonder if I could have a few words with you on the subject of ghosts.”
Morini’s hands froze in place around the teapot.
“Morini! The tea!” exclaimed Lilibet.
Morini straightened the pot just in time. She stood for a moment, holding the pot with both hands, and glanced at last at Abigail. A short glance only, a tiny stroke of lightning, and then she turned back to Lilibet.
But still, a glance. That was progress.
“Ghosts,” she said. “Of ghosts, there are none.”
Abigail smiled. “Something else, then? Because I think the air’s humming with them.”
“Is nothing, signorina. Only the old stones, the wind rattling the old walls. You are wanting more tea?” She offered the pot, and this time her eyes met Abigail’s with resolution, with intent and dark-eyed meaning.
Abigail tapped her finger against the table and returned the housekeeper’s gaze. Not a muscle moved in Morini’s face, not a flicker. The teapot in her hands, the clothes on her body: everything was still and focused on Abigail.
The tingling began again at the nape of her neck.
“I see,” she said. “Yes, more tea. I like your blend extremely, Morini.”
“But what about the ghosts?” Philip broke in cheerfully, reaching for his mother’s toast.
“Darling, don’t reach. There are no ghosts, Morini says.” Lilibet took the toast from Philip’s fingers, spread it thickly with butter
, and returned it to him.
“No ghosts,” said Morini. She shot another glance at Abigail and swept from the room.
Abigail lifted the teacup and rested it against her chin. The shadowed passageway outside the door seemed full of secrets. “She’s lying, of course. Did you see the look she gave me?”
“Nonsense. Philip, for heaven’s sake, don’t lick the butter from your toast. It isn’t considered at all polite.”
Abigail leaned back in her chair and tapped her finger against the rim of her teacup. “Very interesting.”
“I assure you, he doesn’t do it often . . .”
“Not the butter, Lilibet. I mean Morini.”
“Why? Surely you don’t think she’s hiding something.” Lilibet wiped her hands on her stiff linen napkin.
“Of course I do,” said Abigail. She set down her teacup and rose from the table. “And I mean to find out exactly what it is.”
* * *
Upon his return to the castle, the Duke of Wallingford found himself obliged, for the first time in his life, to unsaddle his own horse.
He found he rather liked the exercise, though he should never have let it become known among his acquaintances at the club.
He liked, for example, the little sigh Lucifer gave as the girth loosened and the saddle and cloth slid from his smooth back.
He liked the way Lucifer’s coat quivered and shone, as he brushed it afterward.
He liked the quiet of the stable, the slow drone of passing flies, the scent of hay as he refilled the net in Lucifer’s stall. He liked leading the horse outside and setting him free again in the paddock, to enjoy the sunshine and the clean, new-washed air, the soft early grass underfoot, the scent of growing things.
“Rather a nice holiday for you, isn’t it, old chap?” he said, latching the gate and setting his elbows atop the edge. Lucifer tossed his head and took off, giving his hind legs a little kick, frolicsome as a colt in the limpid spring morning. His hooves thumped the turf in a reassuring beat. Wallingford felt his lips stretch slowly into a . . . what was it?
