And would knowing make her any less upset?
Inevitably: no.
He did not wish to imagine what his country nurserywoman, with her scent of grass and dewy skin and twenty-five years of self-discipline and moral rectitude, would make of a man who sometimes longed to tremble on his knees. What was solace to him was to the greater world perversion. A laughable depravity that would make him seem to outside eyes as dissipated as his father. Men had been destroyed by far less.
Besides, he did not wish for terrified acquiescence from his wife, nor some wan, disgusted tolerance.
He wanted the bloody privacy he’d paid for.
So he did not return to her bedchamber. Instead he slipped across the hall to his own room and found the leather cord and iron key he’d discarded the morning of his wedding and returned them to their place around his neck.
He gathered his few remaining effects from the bureau and packed them in a trunk bound for his house in London. He went to his study to gather the books and papers that he’d left there. He paused only when he looked down at the drawer of the desk where he’d stored the threadbare bag.
He debated.
But it felt wrong to leave them here now that he had found them.
He gathered the portraits along with his books and papers and packed them in the trunk and rang for a footman to load it in the carriage.
When Poppy joined him in the grand salon to depart for their trip, he was relieved to see his resolve to keep her at a distance was not necessary. She regarded him the way she might a leech that had attached itself to her ankle.
They departed, and an hour passed in silence. She sat erect and wrote notes in her ledger, behaving as though she shared a mail coach with a stranger. At her purposeful remove, she was more beautiful than ever, self-possessed in a traveling dress of fine navy silk that made her skin look like milky tea and her pale eyes glow like seawater. He feigned the act of reading and attempted not to let her catch him gazing at her. The trip from Grove Vale to London, undertaken at a respectable pace with luggage and servants in tow, would take two days. It was going to be torture, staring across the carriage at her beauty all day in that correct, immaculate dress.
“Would you care for a game of chess?” he asked her finally, when he could no longer stand the tension. She lifted her eyes slowly from her papers to give him an acutely uninterested look.
“Chess?” Never had so harmless a word been uttered with so much disdain.
“We have hours yet before we reach the inn. I thought we might amuse each other.”
“I’m terrible at chess.”
He grinned at her. “I don’t believe that for a moment. I do believe that that is precisely what someone as clever as you would say when they are brilliant at chess but do not wish to reveal their advantage to their opponent.”
“No,” she said flatly. “I am, literally, terrible at chess.”
He bit his cheek for forbearance. “Indulge me anyway?”
Her mouth, gratifyingly, bent in the slightest hint of a smile. He would take it, that smile, even if it was a begrudging and annoyed one.
“Very well, Your Grace. I am at your service.”
He dug out the board and pieces and assembled them between them on the traveling table.
He proceeded to lose several games in rapid succession. This, despite the fact that he was masterful at chess.
“Checkmate,” she said in a puzzled tone, for the third time that day.
He looked down. He hadn’t even noticed her pawn approaching his king. He’d noticed little beyond the delicacy of her features and the swell of her figure beneath that navy dress and the wrinkle of displeasure knit between her brows—evidence that she still had not forgiven him. He could not recall ever wanting more fervently to be forgiven. Particularly for a crime of which he did not believe himself to be guilty.
“For a putatively clever man, Your Grace,” she said, “you have markedly little skill at games of strategy. I was not lying when I said that I was terrible. But you, I’m sad to say, are worse.”
She plucked his king off the board and held it up in a cold salute of victory.
He couldn’t stand it, her wintry poise. He wanted to restore the easy harmony they’d shared until this morning. He leaned forward and detached her fingers from the ebony figure one by one. She breathed in, startled.
“Poppy,” he said quietly. “Forgive me.”
She looked at him inscrutably.
“For this morning,” he clarified. It was as far as he could make himself go, but he infused the words with everything he couldn’t bring himself to say.
She stuck out her chin and drew her shoulders back.
“Forgive you? Nonsense. Nothing is amiss. I’ve beaten you at chess three times.”
By the time they reached the Old Crown Inn, it was nearing eight o’clock. Though there was not a chill in the air, the dining room was lit with a welcoming fire, and the public rooms had a convivial buzz that was rather a relief to Archer after the strained atmosphere of the carriage.
The inn, in the little market town of Faringdon, was not particularly luxurious, but it was clean and well maintained, with a reputation for its food.
“Ah, Your Grace,” the innkeeper said when they walked in. “My felicitations on the happy news. Your house sent word that you and your duchess were to be expected. We have reserved our finest room for you, and my wife, Mrs. Wiscomb, has prepared a feast. Pheasant, jellied eel, a joint, hare pie. You will not go hungry here.”
He was exhausted, and not at all hungry, but he thanked the man for his kindness. Poppy, however, seemed plagued at the notion of enduring a long meal.
“I’m so very sorry,” she told the man. “I hate to disappoint your wife after she has gone to so much trouble. But I believe I will retire early. I am not accustomed to long hours of travel and I’m afraid it has not agreed with me.”
The man’s face fell so low that Archer felt inclined to embrace him—he, was, after all, a fellow new initiate in the pool of men who knew what it was like to feel the chill of the Duchess of Westmead’s indifference.
“Well, I, for one, could eat the whole spread and still have room for cake,” he assured Mr. Wiscomb.
In Poppy’s absence he invited their personal servants to join him for the meal, treating them to the inn’s best wine and ale and accepting their toasts to his nuptials. But he ate lightly and left them quickly to their private revelry. He wanted, despite himself, to return to his wife’s side.
In their room, Poppy had already readied herself for bed. She was under the covers with a book.
“I brought you a tray,” he said, gesturing down at a slice of pie and a mug of ale he’d charmed from the innkeeper’s wife. “Are you hungry?”
“No,” she said, not looking up from her tome on botanical remedies.
“You are not feeling well?”
“Only tired.” Her voice was a study of politeness.
Her careful distance was beginning to aggravate him. How long was she going to punish him for doing what she’d known all along he would do?
He undressed and refreshed himself—leaving on his shirt—and made order of their things for the next morning, dragging it out to prolong the time before he would need to do the awkward thing of getting into bed with her.
When he ran out of clothes to fold and hairpins to assemble, he cautiously approached the far side of the bed.
Poppy didn’t look at him as he climbed in.
He lay there, staring at the ceiling, listening to her turn a page in her book.
Finally he rolled up on one elbow and looked at her.
“Cavendish?”
“Yes?”
“Come here?”
He held out an arm to her. Since words of apology had gotten him nowhere, he thought perhaps simple human warmth might help restore their rapport.
She eyed him, then obediently edged a few inches closer until her shoulder was just below his own. He pulled her fi
rmly against him.
She held herself rigid.
At least she was touching him. He could work with touching. He leaned down and placed a kiss on her head. Then her right cheek. Then the left one. By the time he ventured to her mouth, his motives had become less purely congenial.
“Let me make love to you again,” he said huskily, running his hand down to her breast. He smoothed his way lower, over her shift, until his fingers touched the lowest perimeter of her stomach.
“Very well,” she said. She reached down and lifted the hem to give him crude access to the lower half of her body.
Like she expected him to pop himself in and swive her while she lay there reading about botany.
It was childish, and plainly rude. He groaned, out loud, and not with desire.
“I shall infer by this display that you would prefer to decline.” He flipped her gown back down to her knees.
She looked at him evenly. “If I recall, our arrangement was meant to be procreative in nature. I see no reason why I should need to feign undue interest in the act of conception.”
“Feign undue interest?” It annoyed him that she would pretend the hours they had spent the day before were somehow not real. They had been real enough to him. They had been some of the better hours of his past decade.
It had aroused him unmercifully, how her eyes grew glazed and hot at a simple kiss behind the ear. How wet she was when he put his hand between her legs. How quickly he could make her come, and how often he could repeat it, eliciting furtive little quakes or splintering orgasms that had gripped her so fully she had left marks on his skin with her nails.
To diminish all that—it hit him exactly where she’d meant for it to: in the gut.
Because perhaps she was right.
Perhaps he was trying to have it both ways. And perhaps that was unfair of him.
“I had hoped that to the extent we must be intimate, we might enjoy it,” he began to say, trying to make sense of his own thoughts, but she cut him off with a raised hand.
“Our arrangement is of your own design, is it not? Either take what I have offered or leave me in peace.”
He rolled over and blew out his candle.
But it was many, many hours before he slept.
Poppy lay awake in the unfamiliar bed. She did not like the inn, with its public smells and raucous noises. She missed the loam of the greenhouse. She missed the crisp, mossy air of Grove Vale. She missed the comfort of Archer’s arms.
There was a piercing kind of emptiness in being cold to someone who was trying to be kind to you. She had thought it would be satisfying to trouble him, but it made her feel more bereft.
He was only inches away from her. All she had to do was roll over, and he would take her in his arms. But in the darkness, what would stop her from indulging her desire for his touch, and, worse, his affection? She stared up at the beams in the ceiling and felt a sickening certainty that if she let down her defenses even one more time, he would see what was happening to her.
How she felt about him.
And what would she have left then?
She tossed and turned and barely slept.
In the morning he was already awake and gone when she opened her eyes.
She smelled rashers, grease, and yeasty buns wafting from the dining room. She was ravenous. She could not recall going so long without food in all her life.
Archer sat alone in the breakfast room, reading a gazette as he sipped a mug of tea. Beside him were a plate of toast and a tureen of creamy butter. She descended on it, barely pausing to greet him in her haste to fill her stomach.
He stared up at her over his paper with a faint look of amusement.
“Hungry, Cavendish?”
She could only moan in response, as her mouth was busy chewing.
A well-built, aproned woman came to the table and offered her tea.
“Yes, please, with cream and lots of sugar. And have you any eggs? And perhaps some bacon?”
The woman gave her a kindly smile. “I see Her Grace has recovered her appetite,” she said to Archer. She was too polite to leer, but her implication could not have been clearer had she added the words in bed.
Archer bestowed a sly, sideward smile on the woman. “I must confess, she does appear rather ravenous.”
The lady gave a hearty laugh. Poppy ground her heel into Archer’s toe beneath the table for his outright insolence. He merely sipped his tea.
“Well, Duchess, I shall bring you eggs and bacon both,” Mrs. Wiscomb said.
“And I,” Archer said, putting down his paper, “will leave you to it. I must settle with the innkeeper before we leave.”
He walked across the room to the innkeeper’s counter, sidling against the bar while he waited for the man to serve a small queue of customers ahead of him.
A well-dressed pair of gentlemen were chatting to Mr. Wiscomb. By the nature and volume of their laughter, Poppy could only gather the subject was ribald. Behind them, a woman with a baby in her arms and a little girl beside her made a pained expression at their talk. It seemed the men’s laughter had roused the infant, for he suddenly began to wail. The baby’s shrieks startled the older child, who, in her distress, dropped the bun she had been eating on the floor. When her mother told her not to pick it up, she began to wail as well. The woman crouched down, trying to soothe the angry baby and the offended child all at once, while the gentlemen in front of her turned and glared at the racket her family made.
Archer, taking all this in, bent to his knees and said something to the mother. The woman nodded and he addressed the little girl. She stared at him warily, still crying, and he bent down and collected her discarded treat and then picked her up and set her on a stool. He plucked another pastry from behind the counter and set it on a plate for her, doing all this with the workmanlike alacrity he might have shown had he owned the inn himself. He then set about wiping away the girl’s tears with his handkerchief as he said something that she found amusing. By the time her bun was devoured, the two of them were laughing like old chums, to the astonishment of the harried mother. Having made a bosom friend, and waited out his place in line, he bowed to the child, winked at the mother, tossed a few coins to Mr. Wiscomb, and then exited the inn to confer with the coachmen outside.
Poppy observed all this while munching on bacon and working her way through two deliciously sweet and milky cups of tea.
“Anything else, Your Grace?” Mrs. Wiscomb asked.
“No, thank you,” she said. “But it was delicious.”
She walked back up the stairs to her room to prepare herself for the remaining leg of the trip. At her request, her maid had left a small satchel of her personal effects and a mug of boiled water on the dressing table.
She poked around inside the bag and found the small glass jar prepared by Mrs. Todd. Pennyroyal tea. According to her book on healing, she would need to take a small dose daily to produce the desired effect.
She hesitated, tapping her fingernails against the glass.
I suppose you will simply have to trust me.
No. It wasn’t right.
He had done only what he said he would do: treat her with kindness, make their marriage friendly. It was petty to hold her own desire for some stronger form of attachment against him, given she had explicitly agreed to its absence.
He was not the problem. He had not gone against his word.
She had.
She shoved the bottle in her pocket unopened, closed the satchel, and returned it to her trunk.
Outside, the two carriages and accompanying luggage coach had been readied for their departure. Archer leaned against the door of their private vehicle, looking tall and handsome in the morning light. The scene she had made the night before must have left him less disturbed than it had her, for he looked like the living male embodiment of a refreshing ocean breeze.
“Ready to depart?” he asked her.
“Just one moment.” She popped around to the coach and locate
d a trunk secured just inside the doors. She slipped the bottle from her pocket and threw it in with her books and seeds and other items from her workshop desk.
She smiled at her husband.
“I’m ready.”
Chapter 21
Poppy grew ill at ease as the carriage wound its way down the narrow streets of London.
Something was different about Archer.
All day he had been buoyant and unruffled, like the previous day had never happened. He had beaten her savagely at chess. When she protested, he taught her five-card loo and beat her savagely at that. With every mile they drew closer to the city, he became more polished, more blandly debonair. It was as though London were a shield he wore, and he was putting it back on.
Now the city rose up around them in an ominous miasma, as gray as Wiltshire was green. The streets were clogged with hackney coaches, carts, sedan chairs, and pedestrians darting through the muck and the rush of traffic. As they wound their way past Cheapside and through the throng of the Exchange, she could feel London on her tongue and in her nostrils, a gritty, sooty air that smelled of coal and dung and damp. She coughed, and shut the window of the carriage.
Archer raised an eyebrow. “Had enough so soon?”
“I knew the air was bad here, but no one mentioned you could chew it.”
“One doesn’t come to London for fresh air, Cavendish. Look, we’re here.”
The carriage drew to a stop in front of a row of terraced houses that lined a small square northeast of the Exchange. Archer led her inside the tallest of them, a four-story town house with a basement kitchen and an artless garden to the rear. Though the house was modern in its comforts, the rooms were dark and the furnishings were spartan. It was as unlike Westhaven as any home she’d ever seen.
The Duke I Tempted Page 17
