A Secret Affair

by Mary Balogh

  Was it not, then?

  She had no one with whom to compare him as a lover. But surely there could be no one else who could so thoroughly satisfy her—a thought that did not bode well for the coming years. She had started with the best, and what did that leave her?

  And was not the physical enough?

  This craving to know him—ought she to have paid it more attention before it was too late?

  Too late for what?

  “Ainsley Park,” he said abruptly, setting down his empty cup in its saucer beside him. “It is the name of my property in Gloucestershire. The house and park are not quite on the scale of Warren Hall, but they are impressive enough. Even the dower house is quite sizable. And the home farm is large. I have enlarged it further by not leasing out two of the tenant farms when they went vacant. It is all very prosperous—a hive of industry.”

  “Was it your father’s?” she asked.

  “No.” He shook his head. “All my father’s properties were entailed. They are Merton’s.”

  “How could you afford to purchase it?” she asked.

  He smiled slowly.

  “It is the question all my closest acquaintance have wanted answered since it became mine,” he said. “Especially Moreland, who knows—or thinks he does.”

  “So?” she asked, setting her own cup down and sliding her hands into the opposite sleeves of the dressing gown she was wearing.

  “I did not purchase it,” he said. “I won it.”

  “Won?”

  “I gambled as much as most idle young men do when I first left home,” he said. “I always ended up losing everything except the shirt on my back, though I was always wise enough to wager only what I had, which was not a great deal. I had a monthly allowance, but my father kept me on a tight enough rein. But this was after his death, when Jon was earl, and this time I deliberately sought out a game where I knew the stakes were high and no prisoners were taken, so to speak. And I wagered with money that was not strictly mine but was what I had received for the sale of a certain jewel—we have both been up to that game, Duchess. The money was not mine to lose, and I do not believe I have ever felt a terror to match what I felt when I sat down to play and made a bet of the type of magnitude my fellow players expected.”

  Hannah closed her eyes.

  “Within ten minutes,” he said, “I had won Ainsley Park. It was not the principal seat of the man who lost it, and he did not seem unduly disturbed at losing it with one turn of the card. He and his fellows did seem annoyed, however, when I took my winnings and left. They threatened never to allow me into their hallowed midst again. I do not know if they would have carried through on the threat. I believe they probably would have. I have never gambled since—except in a very small way at balls and private parties, I suppose.”

  “And the money from the sale of the jewel?” she said.

  “That went where it was intended to go,” he told her.

  “And no one knows how you acquired Ainsley Park?” she asked.

  “Let them guess,” he said.

  “And what is the usual guess?” she asked.

  “That I bought it with ill-gotten gains, I suppose,” he said with a shrug. “They are not far wrong.”

  “You live there alone?” she asked. How sad that he should have cut himself off in such a way from his relatives and friends.

  He laughed softly.

  “Not quite,” he said. “In fact, the house—the mansion—is so crowded with people that there is no room left for me. I live in the dower house. And even that haven of peace is being slowly but very surely invaded.”

  Hannah moved her legs until her feet were flat on the chair. She hugged her updrawn knees and rested her chin on them.

  “You are going to have to tell me now, Constantine,” she said, “or I will not sleep for a week wondering. And you do owe me. Who are all these people?”

  “I started with women,” he said. “Women whose character and reputation were in tatters because their employers or social superiors had assumed their God-given rights extended to the very persons of the females they fancied. Women and their bastard children. They were given a home at Ainsley and honest work to do in the house and on the farm. And training as seamstresses or milliners or cooks or whatever else took their interest, if I could find someone willing to teach them in exchange for a home and food and a modest salary. And eventually they were found work with people who were willing to take them, reputation and bastard children and all.”

  “Why?” she asked. “Why them in particular?”

  He looked darkly brooding.

  “Let us just say,” he said, “that I knew some of those women and the man who took everything from them except life itself. I knew what they lost—employment, family, the respect of all who knew them. I knew what they suffered—ostracism. And I knew that the meager handouts of money I occasionally made to them solved nothing substantial. I knew that I dared not befriend them openly or assumptions would have been made and matters would have been worse for them. If that were possible. I knew the man who caused it all and felt not a qualm of guilt as one by one they were cast from his employment and forgotten about while others took their place and as like as not suffered their fate.”

  Hannah hugged her legs more tightly.

  Oh, dear God. His father? She opened her mouth to ask, but the question was unaskable.

  “Elliott—the Duke of Moreland—would tell you that I was that man,” he said.

  “Did he actually accuse you?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “And you did not deny it?” she asked.

  “No.”

  Oh, dear, getting information from him was sometimes like trying to squeeze blood from a stone.

  “Why not?” she asked.

  He looked very directly at her. “He had been my friend,” he said. “He was my cousin, almost my brother. Our mothers were sisters. He ought not to have needed to ask. I would never have asked it of him. I would have known the answer to be no. We had been pretty wild together when we were younger, but we never ever took any woman against her will.”

  “But you did not deny it when he did ask,” she said.

  “He did not ask,” he said. “He told me. He had found out somehow about those wronged women and their children. And so he confronted me. Accusations are not always or even usually polite questions, Duchess.”

  “You foolish man,” she said. “And so this is what your quarrel is all about?”

  “Among other things,” he said.

  She chose not to ask.

  “And it all might have been cleared up,” she said, “with a simple denial, which your pride would not allow you to make.”

  “A denial ought not to have been necessary,” he said. “Moreland was, and is, a pompous ass.”

  “And you are a stubborn mule,” she said. “You described yourselves thus on another occasion, and I see that you were quite right.”

  He got to his feet, took the cozy off the teapot, and refilled both their cups. He sat down again, remembered that she took milk and sugar, and got up to add them to her cup. It was full to the brim again. Fuller than last time. He offered her a biscuit, but she shook her head.

  “You said you started with women at Ainsley,” she reminded him.

  “I saw a boy in a butcher shop here in London,” he said. “I stopped on the pavement outside and took a closer look because he reminded me remarkably of Jon. He had the same sort of facial features and physique, and I guessed that his parents too had been told when he was born that he would not live much beyond the age of twelve. I would have moved on, but even in the minute or so I stood there I could see two things—that he was eager to please and that he did not please at all. Even in that minute he was cuffed twice, once by a customer and once by the butcher for displeasing the customer. I went in and paid the butcher the price of an apprentice—he had taken the boy from an orphanage for next to nothing, I would imagine. I took the boy—Francis—down to Ains
ley when I went a few days later. I put him to work in the kitchen and farmyard and he became the adored pet of all the women living there, especially the cook. He died a little more than a year later at the age of thirteen or so—he did not know his exact age. I believe it was a happy year for him.”

  He stopped speaking in order to drink his tea. He directed his gaze into his cup as he did so. Hannah busied herself with her own cup in order to give him a few moments to collect himself. She knew she had not imagined the brightening of his eyes and the unsteadiness of his voice.

  He had grieved for that butcher’s boy. Francis. The boy who had reminded him of his brother.

  “It was meeting him that made me realize,” he said, “that if I wanted the Ainsley project to pay its own way and not be a constant drain on my finite resources, I was going to have to get the farm working at full capacity again. It had been sadly neglected for years. And in order to get it working and earning, I needed workers, many of them men to do the heavy work. And if I was going to hire men anyway, I might as well hire men who were unemployable elsewhere. You would be amazed, Duchess, to discover how many men fit that category—those with physical or mental disabilities, retired or discharged soldiers who have lost limbs or eyes or minds in war and are useless to anyone but themselves in peace, vagabonds, even thieves who steal only because they cannot find employment but do find that they need to eat. I could fill twenty Ainsleys any time I chose.”

  No, she would not be amazed.

  “Some men,” he said, “are capable of doing more than laboring in the fields, and want more. Some are given training as blacksmiths and carpenters and bricklayers, even bookkeepers and secretaries. And then they are found work elsewhere so that there is room at Ainsley for more. And some of the men and women marry and go off to a new life together.”

  “And you have told no one about this?” she said. “No one but me?”

  He shook his head and then grinned.

  “Yes, actually,” he said. “I told the king.”

  “The king?”

  “It was before he was king actually,” he said. “He was still the Prince of Wales. Prinny. We were sitting together in that bizarre palace of his in Brighton late one night after everyone else had gone to bed. How it all came about I cannot recall. But we were both deep in our cups and one thing led to another and I told him about Ainsley. I do believe—no, I know—that he hugged me almost hard enough and close enough to break bones and smother me against his enormous bulk. He almost drowned me in sentimental tears. He declared me to be saint and martyr—why martyr, he did not explain—and a host of other extravagantly complimentary things. And he promised to aid me and reward me and bring me to the attention of the whole kingdom and other shudderingly awful things. Fortunately, he forgot all about the whole thing and probably me too as soon as he was sober.”

  “I know him quite well,” she said. “The duke was his friend even though the prince—now the king—constantly exasperated him. One cannot help liking the man, ridiculous as he often makes himself. More than anything else in life, he wants to be loved. If the old king and queen had only loved him from the start, he might be a different person today. A far more secure one.”

  “And a thinner one?” he said. “He would have had less need for food?”

  She looked at him and smiled. And then laughed.

  He smiled too and waggled his eyebrows.

  It was a strange moment.

  She had spent eleven years acquiring wisdom and discipline, ten of those years at the hands of a man who had known all about those two attributes from a long life of experience. Wisdom and discipline. Always guarding one’s real, precious self in a cocoon of tranquillity within a thousand masks.

  Life itself had become a secret affair. No one knew of the life she lived behind the appearance. The appearance was everything to the people surrounding her. It was all they knew. The reality within was everything to her.

  But suddenly that cocoon was threatened. She had selected a man purely for the sensual delights he could offer, and she had … Oh, what was the word for what he had become to her instead? She had not fallen in love with him. But—

  Well, she was somehow deeply involved with him. As his lover, yes. But lovers could be cast off, forgotten, exchanged. They could be kept at a safe distance from the heart. They were for pleasure, for fun.

  He was more than her lover.

  She had told herself from the start that this year she would devote to pleasure instead of the search for love and permanent happiness. She had told herself that she would cast him off, forget him after this Season was over. And, of course, she would do it. Indeed, she would have no choice anyway. She knew very well that he took a different mistress each year.

  But—

  But her emotions had somehow got caught up in what was supposed to be a purely physical experience.

  The tranquil cocoon of her heart had been ruffled.

  The duke had been right. He had warned her that it would happen one day, that cocoons were meant only to guard the fragility of a new life until it was ready to burst forth into the glory of full life.

  She ought to have known better than to choose a man of mystery who intrigued her.

  For of course his character was layers and layers deep. Some of it was not so pleasant—his sly, intrusive questioning of Barbara at the Kitteridge ball, for example, or his ridiculous pride that had perpetuated an unnecessary quarrel with his cousin and closest friend for years. And some of it … Well, she could love the man whose compassion for those less fortunate than himself ran so deep that he had opened up his home, the heart of his privacy and peace, to them. And all for the simple satisfaction of doing the right thing. Far from looking for accolades, he had told no one about his home or what he was doing with it.

  Except the king when they were both drunk.

  And now her because he owed it to her.

  Oh, she was perilously close to doing something foolish that she would regret for the rest of her life. For Constantine Huxtable was not the right man for permanence. Suddenly she felt the emptiness of the duke’s absence as a great void. If only she could go home and tease him and be teased by him and put her hand in his elderly, arthritic one and be safe again. And ask for his advice. Or his interpretation of what was happening to her.

  Yet he had taught her self-reliance, and she had thought the lesson thoroughly learned. He would not want her to be dependent upon him indefinitely. She did not want it.

  They were gazing at each other, she and Constantine, she realized, the smile dying on both their lips.

  “We could probably hang for treason for saying such things,” she said.

  “Or have our heads chopped off,” he said. “Speaking of which—I told Miss Leavensworth that I would arrange to take the two of you to the Tower of London since she has not been there yet. Will you come?”

  “I have not been there in an age either,” she said. “Will you come to Copeland for a few days if I arrange a brief house party there?”

  “Asking, Duchess?” he said. “Not telling?”

  “Well,” she said, “you asked about the Tower, and I could hardly allow myself to be outdone in civility.”

  “You are not planning to invite Moreland and his wife too, are you?” he asked her.

  “No.” She shook her head. “But ought you not to speak with him sometime soon anyway?”

  “Kiss and make up?” he said. “I think not.”

  “And so you will go through life unhappy,” she said, “merely because of a little pride.”

  “Am I unhappy?” he asked.

  She opened her mouth to answer and then closed it again.

  “And are you,” he asked, “going to go back to Markle, Duchess, perhaps for Miss Leavensworth’s wedding, and speak with your father and sister and brother-in-law? Is pride going to keep you away?”

  “That is a different matter altogether,” she said.

  “Is it?”

  They stared—
or perhaps glared—at each other in a silence neither seemed willing to break. He was the one to do it eventually.

  “And so you will go through life unhappy,” he said softly, “merely because of a little pride.”

  Touché.

  But he had no idea—no idea what he was suggesting.

  “I want to go home to Dunbarton House,” she said. “It is late.”

  Or early.

  He got to his feet and closed the distance between them. He set his hands on the arms of her chair, leaned over her, and kissed her openmouthed.

  It was a horribly gentle, even tender kiss.

  Horrible because it was the middle of the night, she had made love with him and slept with him, she had sat here and talked with him, and she did not know where her defenses were. If she could have located them, she would have wrapped them about herself and been safe again.

  But again—safe from what?

  He lifted his head and gazed into her eyes. His own were shadowed and very dark.

  “You had better go and dress, then,” he said. “My coachman might be scandalized if he saw you dressed like that, even if you are covered from chin to toes.”

  “If I were to step out like this, Constantine,” she said, “he would see nothing but duchess. Believe me. People see what I choose to have them see.”

  “Is that something Dunbarton taught you?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said, “and he taught me well.”

  “I believe,” he said, “he did. Whenever I have seen you over the years, I have seen nothing but duchess. Very beautiful, very rich duchess. I am only just learning the error of my perceptions.”

  “Is that good?” she asked him. “Or bad?”

  He straightened up.

  “I have not decided,” he said. “I have seen you as a rose without the multiplicity of petals. But I have begun to realize my error. You have more layers than the most complex of roses. And the heart of the rose has yet to be revealed. I begin to believe that there is a heart. Indeed, I more than believe. Go and get dressed, Duchess. It is time to take you home.”

  And contrarily, given the fact that she had been the one to say it first, she felt bereft. As if he did not want her to stay. And shaken. He saw her as a rose, and slowly but surely he was finding his way past the petals to the heart. If she allowed it. How could she stop it?