“Your Grace,” her secretary said. “Mr. Van Dijk has arrived. He is having coffee in the lobby.”
“I will join him presently. Please file the letters I left on the tray, and keep note of the size of the orders.”
She smoothed her skirts and gathered her proposal for the European leg of her subscription network. Mr. Van Dijk, with a thriving botanical garden situated just outside Amsterdam, was the ideal person to serve as her partner on the Continent. Downstairs, she found that he was taller and younger than she’d expected. He rose to greet her with a smile.
“Your Grace. What an honor.”
“The honor is mine, Mr. Van Dijk. I have always been so grateful for your correspondence. Not every botanist is willing to tutor an untrained girl. By post, no less.”
“Well, it is rare to find an untrained girl as knowledgeable about plants as the young Miss Cavendish,” he said in careful English. “It was clear from your first letter that you had a particular gift.”
“You flatter me. Tell me, how was your journey?”
They passed a quarter hour exchanging pleasantries before she could no longer stand the suspense and pushed her proposal across the table. Mr. Van Dijk’s eyes lit with interest as she explained the details.
“I will provide the capital to build a warehouse near the ports,” she explained. “Your nursery would supply the list of plants you see on page four in the quantities indicated, which I expect will grow as the subscription pool expands.”
His blue eyes locked on hers. He was a handsome man—golden in complexion from his work out of doors—and his eyes held frank admiration for her. It was like a cool rain on a hot day, after her months of staring at the blank chill in Archer’s eyes.
“I will have my solicitors review the terms, Your Grace, as a formality. But what you propose is most acceptable. I regret only that I cannot claim I thought of it myself.”
Poppy bade the man farewell and walked him toward the doors, warm with pleasure.
“Handsome devil,” a thick voice said from behind her as she returned inside the inner sanctum of the lobby. “Can’t imagine Westmead would like the way you flirted with him.”
She whirled around.
Tom Raridan was sprawled in a deep-set leather armchair, lounging king-like before a silver coffee service left by other guests. Dressed in the nondescript clothes of a Cit, he did not immediately look out of place among the well-heeled gentlemen conducting business in the hushed mahogany room. But up close, she could see that his pale skin bore blossoms of angry pink around his cheeks and nose, and his broad form had given way to bloat. Spirits. Taking him just as they had taken his father.
“You are unannounced, Mr. Raridan. If you wish to call on me properly to apologize for your behavior, I suggest you write my secretary and request an appointment.”
“Think I’ll stay. S’quite comfortable.” He gestured so expansively at the sumptuous room his hand knocked over a silver candlestick, which she lurched to catch discreetly before it clattered to the floor.
“What is it that you want?”
“Came to visit my girl. Have a look around. Keep an eye on ol’ Westy.”
The smell of ferment wafted toward her on his breath. He’d already been drinking, though it wasn’t yet noon. A faint tremor danced down the back of her neck. Fear.
“You should go,” she said firmly. “Excuse me.”
He jumped up so quickly his knees knocked into the coffee service, causing it to rattle. A group of gentlemen looked up, annoyed at the disturbance. She flashed them a smile of apology and moved toward the door to the counting-house stairs, but Tom was quicker, inserting himself between her and escape. She was trapped in plain sight, and he knew it. If she shouted for help, she would make a scene that would be the talk of the City for weeks.
“You need to leave,” she hissed.
“Fine establishment, this counting-house. Had a look around. He’s even got you a desk like a gentleman. Bet you like it better here than that ugly house in Hoxton.” He was so close she felt flecks of spittle landing on her ear. “Had to spread your legs awfully wide for that shabby setup.”
She scanned the room for a means of discreet escape. Archer was walking through the door, just back from his meeting. Thank heavens. She waved.
Her husband started at the sight of Tom and strode toward them.
“You speak of the devil, you raise him from hell,” Tom sneered into her ear. “Filthy mouthful they have to say about the likes of him in the bawdy parts of town. He should be careful, lest the wrong ears catch wind of what they say about him.”
“How dare you,” she hissed.
“If I'd known you were after a cully, I’d have been happy to oblige. My arse wouldn’t mind a taste of the leathers from the likes of you.” He touched her where her buttocks met her spine, above her dress.
She reared back, her entire body alight with disgust, and landed in the reassuring embrace of her husband. He placed a steadying hand on her back. She leaned into his touch, like it could clean her of Tom’s. She’d never felt so grateful for his air of authority. His sheer bloody size.
“Mr. Raridan,” Archer said with a deadly calm, his fingers laced through hers.
And then he reared back his fist.
A thwack broke out before she could so much as blink away her disgust. The entire room froze, thirty pairs of eyes fixed on the sight of Tom reeling back into a table stacked with porcelain. China toppled and shattered. Tom stood dumb in a pile of broken glass and sodden tea leaves, reeling, but uninjured.
“That, Raridan,” Archer said in a voice loud enough for every man in the room to hear, “is a very small taste of what you can look forward to if you come near my wife again.
“Go upstairs,” he said quietly, ushering her a few paces to the service door.
And then he lunged back into the room.
Chapter 25
Ignoring the stares from the gentlemen around him, Archer jerked his jaw at a pair of burly footmen who’d come running at the noise.
“Sort him out.” They knew what he meant.
“You best watch your pretty back, Your Grace,” Raridan called as they picked him up and dragged him toward the doors. “I know what you’re about, I do. And when I have proof, oh, I’ll make sure your duchess sees it.”
Archer willed himself not to turn and shove his fist into the man’s jaw a second time.
He could feel the eyes of the entire room on him, no doubt aghast that the bloodless duke had just engaged in such a public, ugly scene. Speculating on the meaning of Raridan’s threat.
For once, he didn’t mind.
Let them wonder.
He needed to be with his wife.
She was waiting for him on the landing just through the double doors, her back pressed against the wall, her chest heaving.
“Oh, sweetheart,” he murmured at the shaken sight of her. “Are you all right?”
She hugged herself and shook her head. Without thinking, he took her in his arms. She wound her arms around his waist and rested her head on his shoulder. Heaven, to have her back like this, even if only for a moment.
“Oh, Archer,” she said, trembling.
He ran his hand along the back of her head, letting his fingers tug into her curls. “It’s all right. He’s gone. You’re safe.”
“I’m so glad you returned when you did.”
“Me too,” he breathed into her hair.
“I’m sorry for that.”
He took her head in his two hands. “Do not apologize. My only regret is you didn’t thrash him yourself.”
“I didn’t want to embarrass you with a scene.”
What an utterly disquieting sentiment. “Poppy. You are so much more important to me than any scene. Make all the scenes you like.”
She looked like she wanted to argue, but instead she brushed her fingers inside his coat to find the fob just above his hip where he kept his pocket watch. He froze, stunned at the familiarity of her
gesture, at the light brush of her fingers against his clothing, warm and nimble as she tugged the gold chain to extricate the timepiece. If she noticed that he had stopped breathing, she did not let on, only winced at the hour.
“I’m late. I’m due at Hammersmith.”
Just as delicately, she returned his timepiece to the fob. He had never before imagined such a gesture and now he knew he would recall it all his life.
She reached up and ran her finger along his jaw. “Thank you. Perhaps a judicious rescuing is not so bad from time to time. I see why maidens like it.”
Oh God, her touch. How he had longed for it. For weeks his every confounded limb had been united in the purpose of finding ways to brush against her—a hand against her shoulder as they stepped onto the street, his fingers glancing upon hers as he passed her a sheaf of papers. And now, she was touching him. Willingly. Smiling up at him. Jesting with him.
And leaving.
He lowered his head and kissed her. He was not delicate or gentlemanly. He was not polite. He kissed her with all the longing that had built in him for months, months during which she was so rarely more than a few paces away—in his house, his carriage—yet remote.
When he finally tore himself away, her eyes were closed and her mouth was swollen.
“Oh, Poppy,” he murmured. He braced himself against the wall on his forearms and placed a kiss on her forehead, limp and defeated. It was not rational, what he felt for her. It lived in his blood and his flesh, animating him against his own will, a feeling he hadn’t known since he was a boy falling in love during stolen moments in the forest. A feeling he once thought he would give anything to avoid experiencing again.
He had fallen in love with her.
“I’ll be home by eight,” she said. She put a hand to his shoulder, a gentle cue to release her.
He stepped back. She turned. He watched her walk away.
What was he going to do?
When Poppy returned home that night, she was startled to hear the unfamiliar sound of laughter.
She followed it to the parlor, where her husband, looking unusually relaxed in a half-unbuttoned waistcoat and his shirtsleeves, was sprawled on a sofa next to his sister, a carafe of wine on the table between them.
She smiled at the image of the two of them, happy to observe them for a moment before disturbing their twosome.
“Will you at last tell me how you are finding married life?” Constance asked. “I find that the question has been most studiously ignored in all my letters.”
Poppy stood quietly, straining to hear his answer.
A flash of desolation crossed his face, then disappeared just as quickly. “It’s agreeable enough,” she heard him say.
She sank back against the wall. She knew that look. It was the one that startled her when she looked up from her dressing table and caught an accidental glance at her own unschooled reflection in the looking glass.
A piercing, unbearable loneliness.
To see the same hurt writ across his features strengthened the regret she had felt this morning, standing in the stairwell in the sunlight, hearing his breath catch as she reached for his watch fob.
Maybe contracts could be renegotiated.
Maybe it was not too late.
A great, troubled sigh escaped from Constance. “Agreeable,” she echoed skeptically. “I suppose you would say the same whether it was shockingly good or hell on earth, so I wonder why I persist in asking.”
Poppy quickly entered the room before she overhead anything further.
“Duchess!” her sister-in-law sang, rushing up and nearly galloping her down with the force of her embrace.
Constance pulled back and squinted at her. “Darling, what in the name of Beelzebub is that atrocity you are wearing?”
She was wearing one of the new plain, sturdy gowns she had ordered to replace the fussy Valeria Parcs.
“My wife costumes herself as a working woman ought,” Archer interjected. “We can’t all live your life of leisure. Now come into the dining room and regale us with your tales of idle frippery and intellectual rot.”
Poppy gave him a moment of silent thanks for sparing her an interrogation over gowns. It would not escape Constance that she had firmly shed the trappings of aristocratic womanhood, and to discuss why would only inch them toward a topic of conversation that was better left unspoken.
“So tell us of your time in Paris,” Poppy said, as they arranged themselves around the dining table. Constance and Hilary enjoyed a rather more urbane circle abroad than was considered appropriate for ladies of their set in London.
“Oh, it was fabulous. The on-dit was delicious,” Constance said. “One could not walk from the Tuileries to the modiste without hearing of the most remarkable tales.”
“I trust they stayed safely tucked within your diary and were not ferried back to your friends at the Peculiar,” Archer said. “I should hate to have to lock you in my cellar for the winter.”
Constance rolled her eyes. “How many times must I tell you I was virtuous! I have conducted myself so spotlessly and above reproach these last months that I fear I may no longer be fit for company. Nevertheless, there are a few choice morsels I simply must tell you.”
For the next hour Constance hardly ate, skipping from one masterfully recounted anecdote to the next. It was no small wonder to Poppy the girl was always covered in ink. Her eye for observation was quite remarkable. In fact, it made Poppy rather ill at ease. For surely, she and Archer would not escape the subtleties of his sister’s notice.
“I suppose Paris will always outrival London when it comes to excitement,” Archer said. “We are a steady, proper lot, the English.”
Constance snorted at this pronouncement.
“Not all of us match you for dullness, my tedious brother. In fact, one of the most delectable tales I heard abroad concerned a bit of intrigue in our very own fair London.”
She lowered her voice. “I’m told there is an establishment somewhere in Mary-le-Bone that is all the rage. It is so discreet it doesn’t have a name, and the location is known only to initiates. But it is said that an elite few go there religiously.” She surveyed the table to make sure she had their full attention. “To be whipped.”
Archer slammed his glass down with such force that claret sprayed across the white lace tablecloth.
Constance yelped. “Have a care! That is our mother’s one-hundred-year-old Point de Neige.”
“Constance,” he barked, scraping back his chair. “A private word. Upstairs. Immediately.”
It took only until they had passed the threshold of the door for the two of them to begin shouting at each other.
Poppy could hear the strains of it through the floorboards. She remained downstairs, leaving them to their disagreement. She felt rather bad for Constance. Archer’s sudden fury seemed out of proportion to his sister’s lapse in discretion. While the rumor was indelicate for mixed company, it was no great crime to tell an off-color tale among the privacy of family. It certainly did not warrant a fit of rage so voluble it thundered through a sturdy house.
Unless, of course, he was familiar with such a place.
Poppy sat there, at the deserted table, and scraped the tines of her fork through her blancmange as she thought about the marks along his back and the words that Tom had said about his reputation.
No. It was not possible.
Tom had surely said that to insult her. To think of Archer, so exacting and correct—Archer who wore his power like a cloak whether he stalked the halls of his counting-house or the Palace of Westminster—to think of him visiting such a place was unimaginable. And then there was the scornful way he spoke about the behavior of his father. She had never met a man less prone to indulging vices than her husband.
When the voices through the floorboards at last grew hushed, Poppy went upstairs. Assuming their silence was not an indication that her husband and his sister had killed each other, she would bid them good night and retire.
<
br /> The door to the study was half-open. She knocked on it, then poked her head inside. Constance was crouched on the sofa with her entire torso hunched over her knees, her head nearly in her lap. She whispered something to Archer and her head moved blindly back and forth with the force of whatever she was saying, a pantomime of disbelief. Archer leaned over her and whispered back intently, his hand on her shoulder, his expression pained. His sister reared back, shaking her head violently at whatever he had said, and her hands fluttered up from her lap.
In them were two miniature portraits.
Poppy backed out of the room and shut the door.
Chapter 26
It was several hours later by the time Poppy heard Constance leave.
As soon as she did, there was a knock at her own bedchamber door.
“May I come in?” Archer asked, from the hall.
She rose and peeked out at him. He stood there in his shirtsleeves, his eyes red.
She moved aside, making way for him. “Of course.”
He sat down at the edge of her bed. Two faint lines between his eyes stood out, making him appear years older. She wanted to reach out to him, but she held herself stiff, waiting for him to speak.
“Constance found the portraits. Of my … of Benjamin. And Bernadette. That’s why we did not return.” He glanced up at her. “I’m sorry. It was rude of us to leave you.”
“I … gathered as much. The door was open. I didn’t wish to disturb you.”
“Ah.” He leaned back on her bed until his head was flat with the mattress. He closed his eyes.
She could not but feel that his distress was partly of her own making. “Archer, I’m so sorry for leaving them out. I never thought to put you in that position—I simply wanted to put them in a place where you might see them, and remember—”
“I know,” he said, opening his eyes and meeting hers. “I know that.”
Helplessly, she sank down on the bed beside him, careful to keep herself at a distance from his person.
The Duke I Tempted Page 21
