“Christ, Poppy, but she had the oddest reaction. She was horrified of course. But really she was just so, so … sodding hurt that I had never told her. She said her entire life she thought she had put me off marriage by burdening me.” He screwed up his face in frustration. “God, am I so fucking awful as that?”
She plucked at her fingers to keep from doing what she wanted to do, which was draw him into her arms. “You are very far from awful.”
“I didn’t tell her because—Christ, you know how hideous it is.”
“You wanted to shield her from it.”
“Yes. But it seems I’ve done damage just the same—she scarcely knows how much I love her.”
Poppy breathed in. She had never heard him say that word before, in reference to the living.
“Have you ever … told her?”
He blew out a long breath. “I did tonight.”
She smiled. “Good.”
“You know, I’m glad you left those portraits out. I would never have told her. But I’m glad I did it. I’m glad she knows.”
“Secrets are a burden,” Poppy agreed. She searched his face. “They weigh us down.”
He reached up and touched her hair.
“You are a wise woman, Cavendish. Nearly as wise as you are beautiful.”
He beckoned her down beside him. “Lie here with me?”
She hesitated.
She really shouldn’t. For the past few months his attendance in her room had been brief and dutiful. They had remained dressed, aside from the necessary garments, and the entire process had taken no longer than five minutes.
But even that dispassionate attendance had ignited a most unwelcome response in her. She tried not to show it, but he must have known, for as he swived her, he reached down and used his clever fingers to ensure she reached a height, and never spilled until he’d heard her halfhearted little cry. This element of their coupling—the fact that she could not, despite herself, keep pleasure out of it—and that he knew her well enough to handle even this politely, made one thing very clear to her: she was not immune to him, no matter how hard she tried to be.
She never would be.
If she curled up beside him here, just because he was upset and wanted companionship, something far more vulnerable would be at risk than just her body.
She should say no and send him out the door.
Or she should say yes, and ask him for what she really wanted.
All of him.
She had thought, as a younger woman, that she was her best self alone. That she was meant to inhale solitude and turn it into energy, like a plant.
She had confused solitude with happiness.
She was not a plant.
She missed her husband. If she was not mistaken, he missed her too.
But between them there was the question of the truth. The one she’d hidden, and the one she suspected he had.
She searched for a way to transform this painful mess into a question and found only a quiet, beating panic at how he might answer it. It was so much safer to say nothing at all.
So she sank down beside him, a glutton for damnation until the bitter end. She left only an inch between them, their heads staring up at the ceiling as though they were watching stars instead of plaster.
He took her hand in his.
“I never asked you,” he said, his voice carefully neutral. “How is work at Hammersmith progressing?”
Another freighted question. One easier to ask, no doubt, with both their eyes pinned upon the ceiling.
It was as good an opening as any, for the villa brought up that delicate subject of how they would go on. The house would be fit for habitation by the end of the week and she would move there, to oversee the progress of her nursery. The question was whether he would come with her.
Until this morning, she had been gathering her resolve to insist that they live separately, for good. So far, their efforts to conceive had not produced the desired effect. In a week’s time she would know for sure whether the process must continue, but even if it must, he could visit once or twice a week until she was with child.
She could not live in this ragged, uncertain state indefinitely. It was a torture. Particularly when he was lying next to her, a condition that made her heart want to say and do all kinds of things that she shouldn’t.
She braced herself, once again screwing up the courage to say the words.
“Poppy?” he whispered, quite helplessly. Just as he had said her name before he kissed her this morning in the stairwell.
She did a very foolish thing.
She said nothing.
Instead she leaned down and put her lips to his.
She did not want to kiss him, but she could not see how she could help it, when he was an inch away from her, whispering her name like some kind of incantation.
He ran his hands in her hair and pulled her down on top of him.
They were lost in it. She scarcely knew his limb from hers, his breath from hers. Their clothes fell to the ground. He was inside of her, her hands were on every plane of him, his teeth were scraping against her upturned wrist as he came and she went with him.
And then they were a tangle, panting.
She rested her head on his warm shoulder. Her lip brushed against the grooves there. And once again she knew—knew—they could no longer be both things at once.
Lovers or associates. Not both.
She would have to make him choose.
She put her finger to his largest, thickest scar.
“Archer?”
“Mmm?”
“Why would Tom Raridan have heard ill of you at a bawdy house?”
The foggy look disappeared from his face.
“Pardon?”
“Before you arrived this morning, Tom said something about you and bawds.”
Her handsome, sated, naked husband, still dewy from the act of making love to her, transformed in an instant into the contours of the Duke of Westmead.
He rose up, away from her. “What exactly did he say?”
“I didn’t fully understand it—something about cullies and whips. But his point was that you are spoken of in disreputable parts of town. And then when Constance mentioned that club, you seemed uncommonly upset. Almost as if … you knew about the place.” She drew a breath and rose up beside him and asked him the question that had been forming in her mind all evening.
“Do you?”
The look that crossed his face was all the answer that she needed. Even if this was not the exact truth, it was not so far away from it. It didn’t matter, the nature of the details. What mattered was the decision she was asking him to make.
He was not required to answer her. They did, after all, have an agreement. But if he wanted this—her, him, this tangle, his custody of her whispered breathless name—the agreement had to change.
“Do you?” she repeated.
Tell her. The thought flashed through him like an order from the heavens. If you want her, you have to tell her.
But how could he?
The last time she had seen a glimmer of the truth, it had nearly destroyed them. A taste of who he really was had been enough to sunder their relationship for months. How would she react if she knew the truth? What would he have left?
“You would believe Tom Raridan?” he asked.
The liquid expression in her eyes went cool.
“I merely asked you what he meant.”
“No, you asked me if there’s truth in it.”
“And you,” she volleyed back, “have not answered.”
She put her hand back to his shoulders.
“Archer. Where did you get these marks?”
He shrugged her away, feeling ill.
“You can trust me.” She rose and stood beside the bed, naked, her arms at her side. “You really can.”
He really couldn’t. She said that, but he had seen the way she looked at him that morning after the coupling in the study.
It was
the way his mother had looked upon his father.
He could not bear to be looked upon that way.
Especially by her.
He made himself take a breath, relax his posture. “Tom Raridan is a drunken lout, and one to whom you have a long history of giving far too much credit. He wanted to provoke you and it’s worked. You’ve let him.”
“You,” she said, “are plainly lying.”
He didn’t answer her. He could only look at her willowy, candlelit form and wish that it weren’t true.
“Very well,” Poppy said, bending down to find her shift. She paused and looked her husband directly in the eye. “You are well within your rights. But please understand this: when I agreed to marry you, all that you asked for was business. The deal you offered was fair. This—whatever this is—is not. I can only surrender so much of myself to a person who does not give as much as he wishes to take.”
She waited for him to tell her she was not wrong. To express some understanding that she was admitting, in her way, what she felt about him.
To offer some admission that he felt the same.
To trust her, as she had trusted him.
He averted his eyes.
She watched him settle into his decision.
She felt that spark that had made her brave enough to speak the truth grow dull and flicker out.
“I think,” she said, “it is time for you to return to your own room. And I think, at the end of this week, when construction on my house is finished, I will move to Hammersmith. Alone.”
Chapter 27
Poppy opened her eyes to the sound of footsteps in the hall. Someone was moving through the house. Running.
Her room was still dark. Not yet dawn. The house should be silent and asleep.
“Archer?” she called out. Perhaps he had lingered late in the study and was only now going to bed. She herself had had trouble sleeping, her stomach in a bitter, queasy knot long after he’d left her room.
She peered out into the hall. “Archer?” His room was empty. Through his open door she saw his bedsheets were tossed aside, his nightshirt on the floor—a state of disorder at odds with his usual mania for neatness.
Gibbs rushed by, carrying a stack of linens. Enough to prepare for the onslaught of a flood. She dropped the poker to her side, relieved.
“What's happened?” she asked him. “Where is the duke?”
“There's been a fire on Threadneedle Street, Your Grace. He's gone to the counting-house. We’ve been ordered to prepare for any bodies that need tending, in case of burns.”
Fire.
It was the menace of the city, making kindling of the ancient wooden buildings that jagged and jumbled along the close-packed streets. The threat of immolation was never absent from London’s smoky air, a taste you breathed in with the coal smoke. Men like her husband paid exorbitant fees to fire brigades, investing in their powers with the desperate faith with which their forebears had bought indulgences to protect them from the flames of hell.
To live in London was to live in constant fear of fire. But Archer feared it more than most.
He was so careful. He kept ladders in the counting-house, ordered barrels of water stored on each landing of the service stairs, paid guards to watch his buildings overnight. At home, he insisted their rooms be on the parlor floor, despite the fashion to sleep upstairs.
“Have my carriage brought round,” she called out to a footman.
She did not bother to dress. She put on her boots and stockings and donned her cloak over her nightdress and went running out the door.
Keep him safe, she whispered to herself as they clattered over the dark roads. Don’t let him do something foolish—trying to save lives, or things, or—and then she remembered.
She’d forgotten to take her papers home with her. Her ledgers, files, correspondence, all her annotated plans—she’d overlooked them in the tumult, shaken from the scene with Tom. They would burn.
Years of careful research and months of breakneck work. The future for which she’d traded in her past.
All locked in the bloody cabinets behind her bloody desk.
Prayers could be changed midutterance.
Let me get there in time, she whispered. Oh God, please don’t let them burn.
Archer stood on the street and watched the blaze and awaited the inevitable.
The fire had begun at a bakery downwind and slowly chewed its way westward, leaping from one rooftop to the next. The brigade's efforts to smolder it were valiant, but on it crept, engulfing buildings one by one until there was no doubt that the counting-house would burn. Now the flames were licking at the building two doors down. Within half an hour his life's work would be destroyed. His vault of files—the decade of carefully sorted information he’d treasured like a temple of priceless relics—would burn. Reduced to less than the paper they were printed on.
And yet he felt oddly calm.
He had been gutted by fire once in his life. He knew what could be lost. This one would take only objects with it. The building was empty. He had searched it himself. Counted every last man.
A carriage pulled up at the corner and a cloaked woman leapt out of it and elbowed her way through the crowd of onlookers toward the looming conflagration. She paused at the door of his building to glance at the approaching flames licking across the rooftops, and then dashed past the assembled watermen and inside the open doors of the counting-house. She was so fast she was inside before it dawned on him that the carriage bore his own crest and the woman bore the proportions of his wife.
What in the name of God was she thinking?
He sprinted after her, shouting her name. Closer to the blaze, the air was a wall of choking heat. He paused and ripped off his neckcloth, doused it in a tub of water. With this mask slung across his nose and mouth, he dashed inside.
The lobby was empty—she must have gone upstairs, toward the offices at the top. He thundered up the steps as fast as any man had ever climbed, taking them three by three. The higher floors were hotter, darker, occluded by smoke billowing in from the windows. He hacked into the cloth and wet his face and eyes against the burn of smoke.
He found her on the top floor, crouched over her desk. She’d unloaded the contents—her ledgers and reams of papers and ungainly draftsmen’s scrolls—and was shucking them into her skirts like a child collecting blueberries in a pinafore. He could see flames licking up at the windows, creeping quickly from the chimney of the neighboring rooftop. They had minutes, if that.
He dashed toward her, his heart fit to explode. She was doubled over with coughing and yet still collecting papers in her dress—stubborn enough to burn alive. Without a word he scooped her off the ground, papers and all.
“Stop it,” she rasped at him, knocking his arms away with her elbows as her hands scrambled to grab at the pages that fluttered from her cloak.
When he did not obey, she began to struggle to evade his grip. “My plans,” she croaked at him, wrenching away. “I must save them. Put me down!” Tears streamed down her face, making trails in the soot that had collected on her skin.
He was stronger. He lurched as she fought him off, carrying her, flailing arms and papers and all, toward the stairs. She struggled harder, fighting him at every step. “Stop,” she cried raggedly. “Let me go. There is time yet.”
“There isn’t,” he bit out, clamping her against him as she struggled.
“Please,” she cried, and lurched so violently he nearly lost his footing.
“You will die, Poppy,” he shouted at her, barreling on toward the staircase doors. His voice sounded like some kind of animal. “You will die.”
She stilled and allowed herself to be carried, limply, down the stairs, sobbing as though he had robbed her of her very soul.
Above them, he heard a crash. The first of the timber beams collapsed above them, filling the landing with burning ash. He took a mighty breath through his soaked cravat and lunged for the ground floor, careening into walls
and rails in the darkness, his lungs searing, his breath a rattle in his chest.
At last, he reached the service door that let out to the alley. He kicked it open and rammed through it, taking the brunt of the force on his knuckles and forearms and shoulder to protect Poppy from the blow. Dazed, he carried her through the snowstorm of ash that floated down from above, gasping for air.
He dropped her and sank to his knees, heaving with his efforts. Sweat dripped from his hair into his eyes. He tore the cloth from his mouth and heaved in cold night air in painful gasps that seared his ragged throat.
He couldn’t breathe. The roar and smoke and haze were inside of him, roasting him alive from inside out. He was back in Wiltshire, in the burning west wing, the baby’s cries, the desperation, the crumbling incinerated staircase between him and his son.
“How could you?” a broken voice screamed at him. Bernadette. No, Poppy. He looked down, dazed, and he was not in Wiltshire but in London, staring at a woman crumpled in a pile of sooty papers.
“I wasn’t finished,” she sobbed. “I had time enough. It wasn’t burning—all my work.”
Rage cauterized his grief.
“Are you insane?” he screamed at her, taking a handful of her papers and smearing them into the wet ash until he felt them turn to pulp against the gravel. “Do you know what would have happened to you?”
“I don’t care, I don’t care,” she sobbed. “It doesn’t matter. Don’t you understand?”
Behind them, the attic of the building collapsed in a great explosion.
“You could have died,” he said, and this time he realized it was he who was sobbing. He held himself over her on his forearms, great tremors rocking through him, her body motionless beneath him, her eyes glinting with the reflection of the fire.
A member of the brigade came and pulled him off her. Someone wrapped a blanket around him. He heard urgent voices whispering his name. But mostly he heard his wife rasping the same words, over and over and over, like a woman who’d gone mad.
“I won’t forgive you.”
Chapter 28
The Duke I Tempted Page 22
