Disciplining the Duchess

by Annabel Joseph

  He truly didn’t wish it. He stared down at her hands clasped in her lap, at the skirt of her silk dress, the muted embellishments and trim that suited her station perfectly. With her blond curls and the stylish garments now available to her, no one could fault her appearance. She was more beautiful than Gwen, more beautiful than any of the ladies in her circle, both inside and out.

  After a few minutes, he shifted and reached for her gloved hand. “I asked Mrs. Melton to have Cook pack some of those cherry preserves you enjoy.”

  “Thank you. How thoughtful of you.”

  She pulled her hand away to fuss at the folds of her dress. He wondered if she would ever wear the silver dress again. Of course she wouldn’t. He would order her another one, differently styled. He would make a gift of it to her on their anniversary or some such thing. She really looked stunning in the color, especially with her light blue eyes.

  Blast, she was quiet. What was she thinking about? He drew her into a desultory conversation about the weather, about books she’d recently read. When she stopped reading, then he would worry. She haunted his library more than ever, her nose always buried in some book. He talked to her about the St. Alphage ruins, about the old Roman roads and the history of London. She nodded and made interested noises but he realized after some time that she probably knew everything he told her, had probably already read it in the same books he’d read.

  By the time they arrived, his good mood had eroded into something a bit more cross. He stuffed down his irritation and gave Harmony a tour of the dry winter park, the stone ruins and reputed Roman burial ground. Meanwhile, modern town life went on around them. There was no grand, great blue sky to gawk at, no expanse of vast moors, but there were old trees and some greenery and wildflowers. They came to one giant stone on their stroll and Court expected her to scramble atop it. When she stood beside it instead, laying her hand upon it, he felt disappointment. Why?

  “This is a grand old rock,” she said. “I like it.”

  “I wish I could put it away in my pocket for you then.” She gave him a crooked smile. He wished he could keep that in his pocket. “Alas, I cannot,” he said, indicating her rock. “Perhaps a smaller keepsake. A pebble? A winter rose like the one in our garden?”

  She blinked and looked down at the ground, then back at him. “I need no keepsake, but thank you for bringing me here. It is a fascinating diversion.”

  They spread a blanket and had tea in a circle of shrubs, protected from the bite of the breeze. She perched primly in her dress and ate very little of the fresh bread and ham, though a bit more of the cherry preserves spread on thin biscuits. The conversation was polite but markedly strained. Or rather, he strained not to reach out to touch her, to seduce her back into his good graces. He wished he could lay her back on the thick blanket, roll her up in a bundle and make love to her beneath the afternoon sun.

  Instead they packed the food away, took one last look around the historical site and walked a bit farther down the road, viewing more recent landmarks and some ramshackle houses in need of repair. They were not the only things in need of repair.

  “Harmony,” he said as they walked. “We must speak of matters between us.”

  She took another step and turned to face him. Her expression was calm, inscrutable. “What matters?”

  What matters indeed. She would not make this easy. Her eyes were not Harmony’s eyes, bright and inquisitive. They were closed off and emotionless.

  “I fear we are not as comfortable with one another as we once were,” he said.

  She looked away from him, considering. “Do you think so? I have felt more comfortable these last few days. I feel as though things have…calmed down.”

  “Perhaps they have.” What the deuce did she mean by that, “calmed down?” It would be too embarrassing to ask. He felt temper flare, helplessness. He reached to touch her cheek and the velvet curve of her jaw. “I miss you, my love.”

  She made a dainty feminine gesture that seemed false in the extreme. “How can you miss me when I am right here?”

  Her falseness stoked his temper to ire. “Do not play the chirping ninny with me, for we both know you are no such thing.” He softened his tone as her gaze dropped to his feet. “Harmony. My love. My wife. I will not ask for your forgiveness. If you are waiting for me to prostrate myself at your feet and say I was wrong for giving you a well-deserved punishment, you shall be waiting a long while.”

  “I want no apology. I demand nothing from you.” Her tone was not rude, but exceedingly cool. “I expect nothing, and accept whatever I am given. If you are not happy with some aspect of my behavior, then tell me what you wish me to do.”

  Smile at me. Love me. Forgive me, damn it.

  “I hope you will not object if I come to you tonight,” he said instead in his most autocratic voice. “I have given you time apart. That time is at an end.”

  “As you wish. You might have come before,” she added in the same cool manner, as if he were the one being difficult.

  He studied her, noting the color in her cheeks. “I warn you, I will not allow you to lie beneath me and be distant.”

  “I can hardly imagine that being possible.”

  “Can’t you?”

  Were they to spar like children? He took her in his arms, in a forceful grip that shook the ennui, at least momentarily, from the depths of her gaze. “You promised once to stand my friend,” he said. “At the inn at Newcastle.”

  Her lips tightened into a grim line. “It was not a promise, just naive talk from a silly girl. And that was before…before you ever…hurt me.”

  “It was directly after a spanking as I remember, and I was not gentle that first time.” She looked down at his chest, her jaw working against tears. It was as if she would withhold all emotion from him, the very emotion he treasured, the emotion he couldn’t express himself. “Cry, damn you,” he said. “I ordered dozens of handkerchiefs when we wed, expecting to need them.”

  He’d teased, made a joke, but she hadn’t even reacted. Her face was a blank mask.

  “Where are you?” he asked in despair. Perhaps he shook her; perhaps she only trembled. “Where have you gone?”

  “Nowhere!”

  “Where is my Harmony? The woman I walked with beside the Roman wall?”

  She swallowed hard, going tense but not pulling away from him. “I am right here. I am trying to change for you. If you do not recognize me, perhaps that is why.”

  “This cold demeanor is not the change I wanted.”

  Tears shimmered in her eyes. He pulled her into an embrace, prepared to produce his handkerchief after all, but she mastered herself before the glittering tears fell. He could feel the tension in her body as he held her. “Look at me,” he said.

  When she turned her eyes to his he saw his Harmony there, emotional and conflicted, fighting to get out. What did he want? The wildly unpredictable woman, or the hollow shell of her that made the polished and suitable wife? He took her face in his hands, the beloved face that hid so much anxiety and pain, and touched his lips to hers beside the weed-cluttered road.

  “I want you to be happy,” he said when he pulled away. “My punishments, my efforts to improve you, it is all in an effort to make both of us happy. To bring balance and structure to our lives.”

  “I find balance and structure very calming,” she replied in a dead-sounding voice.

  Court wanted to throttle her, but he kissed her again instead. At least in her kisses he had some sense that she still cared for him. Her fingers brushed up into his hair, her palm hot on the back of his neck.

  “You torment me, Harmony,” he breathed against her lips. “You ought to be spanked for it.”

  She didn’t deny his words. She didn’t deny any of it.

  “Come to me tonight,” she said when they broke apart. “Perhaps you will find I am not so changed.”

  *** *** ***

  Harmony sat at the escritoire in the dowager’s room. Court’s mother lay i
n her bed as if in state, her expression suggesting great forbearance with Harmony’s faults. Well, that never changed. Harmony had learned, in assisting with the old woman’s correspondence, that her given name was Ermengarde—not that she would ever dare call the woman anything but ma’am or Your Grace.

  “Read it back to me, if you please.”

  Harmony focused on the letter before her. “My physician says my wrist will be whole in five more weeks at the latest. We will not come to Hertfordshire, though the weather continues dry and mild.”

  “Did you spell ‘physician’ correctly?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “It is barbaric, the way you write with your left hand.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Then why do you not improve? It is not enough to merely repeat that you are sorry all the time.”

  You are always sorry. It won’t be enough anymore.

  The dowager’s words recalled painful memories, thoughts of punishment and remorse, and the tension in her marriage. During today’s jaunt to the St. Alphage ruins, Court had tried to re-connect to her, but to be her was to be a bad, inappropriate person. To be the calm lady he wanted—like Lady Wembley—she must be something outside herself. If she wasn’t… Oh, she couldn’t bear to be taken to that awful study again.

  Of course, he did not seem to understand this. He thought she could magically remain herself and still be refined and well-mannered. He was making impossible demands, expecting her to fulfill them. Did he believe he could kiss her and give her a little shake and bring everything wrong in their relationship back to rights?

  But she liked the kisses. Frustrated as she was, she still desired her husband. He could capture her so easily with his touch and intent gaze. She had tried to steel herself against him. She’d tried to hide herself away to give both of them peace, but now the cursed man didn’t want that. He was as impossible to please as his mother.

  Harmony scanned the other letters on the dowager’s desk. Her gaze caught on one of the envelopes, on spidery handwriting she knew well. She would recognize her papa’s peculiar left-handed writing anywhere, not least because it was similar to hers and because she received her own letters of him on a regular basis, calm, fatherly letters that made her heart ache for their modest but comfortable home. She was about to reach for it when the dowager’s sharp voice stopped her.

  “Do not poke among my things. What else does the letter say?”

  Harmony swallowed back a retort about the fact that the dowager should very well know what it said since she had moments before dictated it. “The duke and duchess are well, although she is mopish as always.” Harmony stopped, biting her lip.

  “Go on.”

  “I do wonder if she is breeding,” Harmony said. She felt herself go red as the dowager watched her expectantly.

  “Well? Are you?”

  She stole a look at the dowager from beneath her lids, hoping her agitation didn’t show, but the woman regarded her with far too much acuity. She shook her head. “No, ma’am. Not yet.”

  “Does he still visit you?”

  She would not, absolutely not answer that question.

  “Answer my question, girl,” said the dowager in a sharp voice. “What is going on between the two of you? You’re like a flower without petals these days, and it doesn’t suit you. You can’t keep him from your bed. No wife does.”

  Harmony felt tragically, traumatically humiliated. “He wouldn’t come,” she said to the floor. She didn’t say that he was supposed to come tonight, that she was beside herself to think about it.

  “Stop chewing your lip,” said the dowager. “Surely you understand your duties. You must make an heir. Several, it is to be hoped.”

  “I will try.”

  “Does he hurt you?”

  The old woman’s abrupt question resounded in the quiet room. Harmony picked at the edge of the letter.

  “I don’t know what type of hurt you mean, ma’am.”

  She rapped on her tea tray. “Answer the question.”

  “He doesn’t break my wrist,” Harmony said. “Nor any of my bones, so he is not as bad a person as me. He is still angry with me for what I did to you. For embarrassing him. He tolerates my company but I don’t believe...” I don’t believe he loves me. She swallowed back the words, expecting another sharp reprimand, but when the dowager spoke her voice was sad.

  “It is an awful thing to only be tolerated, is it not?”

  There was quiet, tragic pain in the old woman’s words. Harmony stared down at her blurring fingers. “Please, ma’am, I had better go.”

  “No. Cry if you must, but we will talk together about your disaster of a marriage. You think I do not understand you, but I tell you I cried many tears in my day. I remember what you are feeling, how heavy it sets in your heart to be disapproved of. To be despised. My husband—”

  The dowager’s voice cut off and for a moment Harmony feared she would begin to cry too. She didn’t know what she would do if that came to pass, but the old woman marshaled her control and lifted her chin. “In truth, my husband despised me. He told me so daily. He showed me hourly with his cutting glances and sneers. You believe that Courtland is cruel to you, but you don’t know what cruelty is.”

  Harmony shook her head, staring at the dowager’s trembling mouth. “No. I don’t— I don’t think he’s cruel,” Harmony said. “Only...”

  “Only what? Rigid, unfeeling, inflexible? He was raised to be that way.” The lady pushed out her lower lip. “Thank God I had a son. Otherwise I believe my husband would have divorced me. Or saved the trouble and arranged me a quick and tidy death.”

  Harmony gasped. “Oh, no. Surely it wasn’t as bad as all that.”

  “It was.” Her words burst out in a croak of agony that propelled Harmony to her feet. She stood beside the dowager’s bed and touched her hand.

  “I am so sorry, ma’am.”

  The woman swallowed hard. Harmony almost wished she’d release her tears. “So you see,” the dowager choked out, “you are not the first one to suffer in marriage.”

  “No, of course not.”

  For a brief moment the dowager took her hand and squeezed it. Coming from her, it felt as intimate and shocking as a hug. Just as quickly, she released her hand and jutted out her chin again.

  “You do not realize your good fortune, Harmony. My son does not hate you. You are better off than half the women of the ton.”

  Harmony studied the dowager, feeling as old and tired as the wrinkled woman before her. “Yes, I know he does not hate me. But he married me because he had to. Because you raised him to believe in duty.”

  “Foolish girl. Duty is all we have, though you scoff at it.”

  Harmony shook her head. “Duty is not all we have, ma’am. People can love. I love your son even though it hurts me. Even though I’m very afraid he will come to—to—” She stopped and traced a rose on the dowager’s bed quilt. “That he will come to despise me in the way your husband did. I’m so afraid of that.” She wiped away a tear and stared into the dowager’s steely gaze. “I’m sure you think I’m an utter ninny. I know you have set your heart against me, with good cause.”

  “I have not set my heart against you. But I am a practical woman and you are not. I think you have to let go of this ‘love’ foolishness. It is not the way of our world.”

  Harmony touched the dowager’s hand again, and took a very great risk in stating the obvious. “You loved your husband though, didn’t you?”

  The old woman took in a sharp breath, as if Harmony had slapped her. A gate came crashing down between them, and any bond Harmony had come to feel with her in the last few moments evaporated in the hardness of her glare. “You may take your leave.”

  Harmony stepped back at the ice in her voice. She had heard Court use the exact same tone when he was furiously angry. “I’m sorry. Please—”

  “Get out. Leave me,” she said. “Mrs. Lyndon is a less provoking companion. I will have her co
me and help with my other letters after my nap.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I shall let you know if I require your company tomorrow. I doubt I will.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Harmony curtsied and backed away from her, repelled by the severity in her gaze. Not severity. Misery. The fearful woman was plagued with a broken heart. How sad, for all that heartbreak to be trapped beneath her cold and cutting manners. How sad that she was a widow now, with no hope of reconciliation with her husband, no hope of ever being loved as she ought to have been.

  As Harmony left, she caught a last glimpse of her papa’s letter on the desk. Why on earth was the dowager corresponding with her papa? Why would he write to the dowager, and why wouldn’t he have told Harmony he was?

  But the least likely people corresponded over the most benign things. She herself had begun an avid correspondence with Mr. Michael Thomas Burgermeister, an author and scholar of ancient history. He too had visited the old Roman wall at Newcastle, and numerous other grand sites in England, Scotland, and Wales. His letters painted vivid pictures of the various locales, and detailed a level of historical knowledge that astonished her. She enjoyed his letters immensely, enjoyed everything about them except that she had to keep them a secret from her husband.

  She wasn’t sure she had to, but somehow, from the start, she did. Now that they’d exchanged so very many letters she came to realize it was perhaps improper. Not that the man wrote anything impolite. He was a gentleman of advanced years, and starchy as anything. He was working on a new book, a companion to his last work The Culture of Ancient Greece During the Bronze Age, and he had asked her, as the Duchess of Courtland, to be a patron of his studies. Or rather, to help finance a research expedition to several ancient Greek sites. At some point she would have to ask Court about it, for the sum of money Mr. Burgermeister asked for, while reasonable, was not one she could disburse without someone noticing.