“Taking in the waistband, lest your breeches come down when you bow before your sovereign.” She slipped her finger inside his waistband and gathered a substantial tuck of fabric.
“I appreciate that my clothing should fit, but must you—?”
“Done,” she said, withdrawing her hand. “We’ll do the other side now. Helene objected to the attention you showed your daughter?” And what topic should she throw at him next, because an abundance of fabric needed to be taken in.
“Not objected, exactly. But she informed me my interest in the child was unseemly. A daughter’s upbringing was her mother’s province, and I was not to make a nuisance of myself. By that time Helene was carrying again, and I humored her.”
“Most of us humored Helene,” Gilly said around a half-dozen pins, though she’d loved her cousin, even if Gilly had been thrust at Lord Greendale while Helene had become a duchess.
“Will this take much longer?”
“Not if you hold still. I told Meems you’d be removing to Severn. He said he hasn’t heard from the house steward there for several months. Mrs. Magnus suspects foul play.”
She started up the second outside seam, pondering Helene’s version of Lucy’s upbringing. Helene had claimed Mercia had lost interest in Lucy, not that he’d been shooed from the nursery. Somehow, Gilly could not see anyone, not even Helene, shooing this man anywhere.
But then, she couldn’t see him in a nursery either, much less dandling a baby on his bony knees.
To take in the second side of his waistband, she rose and gathered the material as she had the first side, her fingers inside the waistband, next to his shirt.
Up close, he was still solid, for all the weight he’d lost. He stood motionless, not even breathing, and she soon had his breeches done, sporting pins all along his outside seams.
“Now you change breeches,” she said, stepping back. “You remove these carefully so as not to disturb the pins. We cut the seams open, sew them up as they’ve been pinned, and they’ll fit more closely. Leave your shirttails out all around when you come back.”
He stalked off to his dressing room—where was his valet, and why couldn’t that worthy tend to this little exercise in sartorial expedience?
The shirt was more complicated, because taking it in required Gilly to stand directly next to His Grace as she pinned and tucked. She positioned him with his side to the hearth, his hand extended so his fingers rested on the mantel.
Across his shoulders, the garment fit well enough. On the side where Gilly worked, the duke obligingly kept his hand outstretched. On the other side, he was back to opening and closing his fist in a slow, unhappy rhythm.
“Other side,” Gilly said, feeling a pressing need to conclude their business. She might have done so without incident, except she’d left the wrist cuffs for last.
“Shall we sit?” she suggested when he was sporting pins up both side and arm seams. “We’re almost done.”
“You’re faster than the tailors.”
“I’m not as exact, and I have no need to impress you with the care I take,” she said, finding a seat on the sofa. “Give me your hand.” He sat and offered the right one first. She put his knuckles against her thigh and gathered the fabric around his wrist. “One doesn’t want to have to move the openings for the sleeve buttons…” She took a pin from her cushion and marked how much to take in. “Other one.”
He hesitated, then extended his left hand. She took that one too, put it in her lap, then drew in a breath.
This single, prosaic appendage was some sort of key to the rest of the man. The palm was broad, the nails clean and blunt. As male hands went, this one should have been elegant, and the first three fingers were. The fourth finger was scarred, however, as if burned, the nail quite short. The smallest finger was missing the very tip. Not enough was gone to disfigure the nail, but enough to suggest a painful mishap. The joints of the last two fingers weren’t quite right either, as if they belonged on the hand of an arthritic coachman.
Gilly tugged at the fabric, intent on completing her task. She’d come across her share of disfigurements, as the lady of any manor might. Stableboys’ toes got mashed, scullery maids suffered the occasional burn, smallpox survivors abounded, and children with less than perfect features were born to the tenants.
But Mercia wasn’t a stableboy, scullery maid, or yeoman’s eleventh child. On him, such an injury was blasphemous. Gilly hadn’t wept since long before her husband’s death, and the ache in her throat and pressure behind her eyes took a moment to decipher.
“It isn’t pretty,” the duke said. “I should have warned you.”
“You’re probably lucky to still have these fingers,” she replied, but inside, inside she was collapsing with outrage on his behalf. He wouldn’t want pity though, no fawning, no tears.
Certainly, no tears. Tears were never a good idea. Gilly’s husband had wasted no time instructing her on the matter of useless tears.
“I can no longer write comfortably with it,” he said, as if his hand were a quill pen in want of attention from a good, sharp knife. “With a glove on, it suffices for appearances’ sake.”
“It pains you, then?” Of course it hurt. Any visible scar hurt, if for no other reason than it reminded one of how the scar arose, and memories could be more painful than simple bodily aches.
“I rarely feel much with it, though I can predict approaching storms. Are you quite through?”
“Almost.” She put in one last, completely unnecessary pin, and let him withdraw his hand before she could weep over it.
She didn’t even know Mercia and might not like him if she did know him, but to have endured such suffering made her hurt for him. Men did stupid things without limit—duels, wagers, horse races, dares, bets—and war had to be the stupidest.
“My thanks.” He stood as soon as she sat back, no doubt glad to be done with the whole business.
“Can you get the shirt off without stabbing yourself? It wants caution. Here.” She didn’t wait for his invitation, but started lifting the hem. She was presuming, but she’d been married for years and years, and his valet was not on hand—if he had a valet—and the shirt was full of pins…
“Really, Lady Greendale, you needn’t.” He reached out as if he would still her hands, but stopped short of touching her. “I can manage, if you’d simply…”
“Close your eyes.” She wasn’t tall enough to lift the shirt over his head unless he bent forward, which he did, allowing her to extricate him from his voluminous, pinned up, inside-out shirt. She stepped back, glad to have the maneuver safely concluded, and carefully folded up the shirt. “There. All done.”
He turned toward his dressing room, and Gilly couldn’t help the sound that came from her. She moaned, an involuntary expression of dread and horror and even grief. He turned to face her, shirtless, and his eyes were colder than ever.
“You insisted, my lady.”
That he’d taken his back from her view helped not at all, for his chest was every bit as disfigured as his back.
***
Over Meems’s sniffy, tenacious protest, Gilly had insisted Mercia be allowed to rest right through dinner the previous night. Meems was in the same excellent rebellious form the next morning, and perhaps of the opinion that a mere interfering countess needed to learn her place in the household.
For Meems was male and must inflict his opinions on all in his ambit.
“His Grace hasn’t stirred, your ladyship, not that we can hear.”
“Not that you can hear?”
“He sleeps with his doors locked, milady.”
Meems’s grave deference notwithstanding, he was happily anticipating how Gilly would see His Grace awakened through a pair of locked doors.
“You’ve tried calling out?”
“If the sitting room door is closed, that would
do little good, milady.”
“Then I’ll wake him myself.” She set her teapot down as quietly as she could, when she wanted to bash the thing over the old man’s head. “You’re heating His Grace’s hot water, are you not?”
“But of course.” He had the temerity to fall in step nearly on the heels of her slippers, until Gilly turned and glared at him at the foot of the stairs.
“Surely you’ll see personally to the duke’s breakfast tray, Meems?”
He indulged in a peevish sniff, then took himself back to the kitchen stairs without a word. Meems was piqued because he wanted to show his duke off before Polite Society for what remained of the Season, but Mercia was not an exhibit in a public circus.
Gilly tapped on the door to the sitting room and heard nothing in response. “Your Grace?” She leaned her ear against the door, and still…nothing.
And yes, the door was locked.
She extricated a hairpin from her bun and went to work. The lock was well oiled—give Meems credit—and Gilly was skilled, and soon the mechanism gave with a satisfying click. The bedroom door was even easier, and there he was, the eighth Duke of Mercia, facedown in his great four-poster monstrosity.
Gilly closed the door behind her, mindful of His Grace’s privacy, and approached the bed.
If she hadn’t known better, she might have thought the duke dead. He was that pale, as if he’d wandered beyond even the reach of the sun. In his utter immobility, he looked exhausted, like he’d been on forced march for weeks. A castaway quality to how he sprawled among his crisp, white sheets and blue satin pillows suggested he was resting deeply.
“Your Grace?”
His hand—the right hand, the perfect one—slid under his pillow, and his cheek twitched.
“Mercia? Your Grace?”
She was on the verge of reaching out to shake his shoulder, when he rolled onto his back. Gilly took a blinking moment to comprehend he held a wicked-looking knife in his hand. The blade gleamed in the morning light, brighter than any tea service, bright as jewels.
“Good morning, Your Grace.”
“What the bloody hell are you doing here?” Not his near-whispered drawing-room voice, but the rasp of a savage, one who’d use that lethal knife on any and all comers.
He’d snarled a question at her.
“I’m leaving, of course, in a moment. Your tray is on its way, though, and when you’ve broken your fast, I’ll await you in the library.”
***
Though she’d seen many of his scars—by no means all—the countess hadn’t left Christian’s household, and this pleased him more than it should. Of course, she might depart still, probably would, in fact, but she hadn’t run off, a silly note in her wake referencing pressing business or whatever polite fiction women resorted to when terrified out of their wits.
By a scarred, emaciated duke wielding a knife, may God have mercy upon him.
Christian dressed in waistcoat and shirtsleeves—hang the bloody cravat—and stepped into a worn pair of Hessians that had once been nearly painted onto him but fit him loosely now. As he brushed his hair back into its queue—barbering required proximity to scissors too—a footman appeared with a breakfast tray.
The scent of bacon in close quarters, of any cooked meat, nearly drove Christian to retching. “You will please take that down to the library.”
“Of course, Your Grace.”
He didn’t recognize the man, didn’t recognize half his staff, and it had been only two years since his last leave had sent him pelting through London on a lightning spree of self-indulgence.
Helene had disdained to come up to Town for more than a week of it, and he’d applauded her stubbornness, if anybody had cared to ask. What an idiot he’d been, and what a silly twit he’d married.
And yet, he’d give anything to be that idiot again, and for the silly twit to be at his side now, sniffing and judging and trying to tell him what to do.
He paused outside the library and rolled his shoulders as if he were loosening up for a cavalry charge. The countess, being widowed, no doubt had a dower house, but she’d struck him as a woman who’d rather be around family than moldering away on her late husband’s estate.
He opened the door, rehearsed contrition at the ready.
“I do apologize for intruding on your slumber, Your Grace.” The countess was in good looks this morning, dressed in a black gown that showed her figure to great advantage. Three years ago, he would have stolen a kiss to her cheek.
Idiot did not begin to cover the matter.
“You need not apologize in the slightest, my lady, nor do I sense that you are genuinely sorry.” His breakfast tray waited on the low table before the countess, so he took a place more or less beside her. “Your intent was to rouse me, else you would not have gone through two locked doors to achieve that end.”
“Your orange?” She handed him a plate of fruit, the orange peeled and divided into sections for him. “I’ve told the kitchen they’d best be seeing to the preparation of the foods you enjoy regularly. They’re happy to do it, you know, even to peeling your oranges. I did this one myself. Tea?”
“Without the tea.”
Cautiously, he took a bite of orange. The scent of it was appealing, particularly when blended with the countess’s soap-and-flowers fragrance.
“I’ve basted up your clothes from yesterday’s fitting. If you can spare the time, we’d best see how they do. Scone?”
“Please.”
“Meems is moping,” she went on. “He wants you to sport about Town for a bit so the household might have bragging rights on the lost duke.”
“Lady Greendale—”
She wrinkled her nose, as if a foul scent had wafted in through the open window, which was silly when the window looked out on the gardens where honeysuckle bloomed in riot. “You can’t blame them, really, but I told Meems you were needed at Severn, which you are. Butter?”
“Countess.”
She wound down, as he’d hoped she would, and sat with the scone on the plate in her lap, the butter knife balanced beside it.
“I apologize for what you saw yesterday.”
Before he’d fallen asleep eighteen hours earlier—and before he’d nearly held the lady at knifepoint—he’d come at the problem a dozen different ways in his head. To apologize or express regrets? To apologize deeply, profoundly, sincerely? To be heartily sorry, most sorry, most heartily sorry… Endless words, and none of them sounded quite the note he wanted.
He was not sorry to be alive—only living men could achieve revenge—but he was sorry his misadventures had visited themselves on her in even a minor, indirect, visual way.
“I was married for some years, Your Grace, and to a man who thought a wife’s first responsibility was to valet her husband on all but formal occasions. I would not have taken your shirt from you had I not been prepared to see you en déshabille. Any apologies are due you from me, and you have them.”
He considered forcing the point, but she was passing him his scone, the butter having been liberally applied.
“Might I have a bite of your orange?” She didn’t meet his eyes, and Christian had the sense her question was some kind of test.
Women were the subject of many a campfire discussion among Wellington’s soldiers, and a point of rare agreement among men who drank, fought, swived, and killed daily: there was no understanding women. Not their minds, not their moods, not their passions or lack thereof. Christian was confident the French soldiers, the Dutch, the Russians, the Hessians, they all had the same discussions, and all came to the same conclusion.
“I am happy to share.” He held up a section, and she leaned over and took it between her teeth, as he had previously.
And she chewed tidily, sparing him a small, smug smile.
She was staying. That’s what her little demonst
ration was about. She wasn’t running off because of an awkward moment, wasn’t succumbing to matronly vapors, wasn’t flinching at the sound of distant cannon.
He offered her another section.
Five
The last night before Christian and Devlin St. Just had arrived in Paris, they’d camped beside yet another farm pond, and St. Just had bluntly asked Christian when he planned to bathe properly.
“My scent offends you?”
“You’re as tidy as a man can be when he bathes regularly in a bucket,” St. Just said. “But you face the generals tomorrow, and you’ll want to look your best for them.”
A great deal went unsaid around Devlin St. Just: you’ll want to look your sanest for them, for example.
“I was accosted at my bath,” Christian said, unrolling his blankets. “One moment I was in that frigid, clean water, scrubbing away, thinking dirt was the worst part of soldiering, the next I was surrounded by grinning Frenchmen, a half-dozen rifles aimed at my naked backside.”
St. Just rummaged in his saddlebags. “And that was the start of it. Thereafter you were probably denied the opportunity to be clean, or it was forced upon you. Shall I throw you into yonder pond?”
The offer was as sincere as it was insightful. St. Just was an inch or two taller than Christian’s six feet and two inches; he was as fit as the devil and damned quick.
“That won’t be necessary.”
“Fine, then.” St. Just pitched a bar of hard-milled French soap at Christian’s chest, but Christian’s right hand wasn’t up to the challenge of catching it. The soap smelled of roses and mint. “In you go. I’ll just clean my weapons here while you scrub up.”
St. Just offered one of his rare, charming smiles, this one with a bit of devilment in it. And then he extracted a knife case from the same saddlebag and opened it to reveal six gleaming throwing knifes. A brace of elegant pistols that looked to be Manton’s work followed, a short sword, and of course, his cavalry saber as well.
“Point taken.”
Christian would be well and thoroughly guarded while he bathed, and still, he dreaded the necessity to strip down before another human being.
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