A Secret Affair

by Mary Balogh

  “I do not care—” Hannah began, and stopped. “I am not in love, Babs. How ridiculous. Just because you are, you think I must be too?”

  “You said just now,” Barbara said, “that you were always rumored to have lovers even when it was not true. Was it ever true, Hannah? I never have believed it of you. The Hannah I used to know could never dishonor her marriage vows even if the circumstances of her marriage were … unusual.”

  Hannah sighed. “No, of course there was never any truth in the rumors,” she said.

  “Then Mr. Huxtable is your first lover,” Barbara said. It was a statement, not a question. “I do not believe the Hannah I once knew or the Hannah I know now can be simply blasé about that fact. And I saw you together at the Tower and at Gunter’s. You are fond of him.”

  “Well, of course I am fond of him,” Hannah said crossly—goodness, when had she last allowed herself to be cross? “I could not dislike or despise or even be entirely indifferent to any man who was my lover, could I?”

  But why not be indifferent, at least? It was what she had expected to be, was it not?

  “I know very little of gentlemen of the ton and really nothing whatsoever of Mr. Huxtable,” Barbara said, “except that I liked him far more than I expected to do when he took us to the Tower. I thought he seemed fond of you too, Hannah. But I do not know. And I am afraid for you. I am afraid you will end up hurt. Heartbroken.”

  “I am never hurt, Babs,” Hannah said. “And never, ever heartbroken.”

  “I would hate to see you either,” Barbara said. “But I would hate even more to believe that neither was possible. It would mean that you had not got the point at all of why the Duke of Dunbarton married you and loved you.”

  Hannah fixed her eyes upon her friend. She felt suddenly cold. And afraid to move so much as a muscle.

  “The point?” The words came out in a whisper.

  “So that you could be made whole again,” Barbara said. “And ready for love—real love—when it came along. The duke did not see just your beauty, Hannah. He called you an angel, did he not? He saw all your essential sweetness and your shattered joy on that day when you discovered the truth about Dawn and Colin. Even now you have not seen how very special you are, have you? The duke saw it.”

  Barbara went suddenly out of focus, and Hannah realized that her eyes were swimming in tears. She got abruptly to her feet, almost tipping her chair in her haste to push it back.

  “I am going out,” she said. “I am going to call upon the Countess of Sheringford. I would rather go alone. Will you mind?”

  “I did not have time yesterday to write more than a few lines to either Mama and Papa or Simon,” Barbara said. “I need to write longer letters this morning. I am starting to feel selfish and neglectful.”

  Hannah hurried from the room.

  To call upon the Countess of Sheringford? Whatever for?

  TOBIAS—TOBY—PENNETHORNE, Sheringford’s eight-year-old son and Margaret’s too by adoption, had developed an insatiable interest in the geography of the world, and Constantine had spied the perfect gift for him in a shop window on Oxford Street, though his birthday was nowhere on the horizon. No matter. He bought the large globe anyway.

  And because he could not show favoritism to one child when there were three, he bought a gaudily painted spinning top for three-year-old Sarah and an impressively loud wooden rattle for one-year-old Alexander.

  He bore his offerings off to the home of the Marquess of Claverbrook on Grosvenor Square, where Margaret and Sheringford lived when they were in town—Sherry was the marquess’s grandson and heir. And he spent a pleasant hour in the nursery with Margaret and the children, Sherry being from home. He began to have doubts about the rattle, though, when Sarah appropriated it and decided that shattering everyone else’s eardrums as well as her own was to be the game of the morning. The baby meanwhile was fascinated by the top, though he spoiled the lovely spinning and humming each time someone set it in motion by grabbing the toy before it stopped. He howled in cross protest every time.

  Toby found every continent and country and river and ocean and town in the known world, not to mention poles and elevations and lines of latitude and longitude, and insisted that his mother and Uncle Con come and see each new discovery. The globe began to look like an instrument of torture.

  It all made the tea parties in the conservatory at Ainsley seem very tranquil events indeed, Constantine thought cheerfully. And it struck him as an unexpected revelation under the circumstances that he liked children.

  But had he not played endless games of hide-and-seek with Jon, that eternal child?

  A knock on the nursery door, which they miraculously heard, preceded the appearance of a footman with the announcement that her grace, the Duchess of Dunbarton, had come to call on Lady Sheringford, and that his lordship had had her shown into the drawing room.

  The duchess? Here?

  “Oh, goodness,” Margaret said, “Grandpapa never admits visitors. Oh, this is very vexing.”

  “Vexing?” Constantine raised his eyebrows, and she flushed and did not quite meet his eyes.

  “She invited us to spend four days at her home in Kent,” Margaret said, “and we sent back a refusal—with regrets.”

  “Because—?” Constantine asked as there was a crescendo from the rattle, accompanied by a beatific look on Sarah’s face, a wail of protest from Alex as the top stopped its spinning yet again, and an excited invitation from Toby to come and see Madagascar.

  “We do not wish to leave the children for so long,” Margaret said, setting the top to spinning again while Sarah went to see Madagascar, the rattle poised at her side.

  And the duchess had responded to the refusal by coming here in person? She really did not take well to rejection, did she? And she did not often have to suffer it. Would she win Margaret over after all? Was that why she had come?

  Sarah was spinning the globe under Toby’s watchful eye, and the baby had spied some other potential toy and was waddling about the furniture toward it, his bad temper—and the top—forgotten.

  “Constantine.” Margaret met his eyes at last. “We cannot live your life for you—I would not even wish to try. But we can refuse to condone your association with a woman who is an utterly heartless … predator.”

  He clasped his hands behind his back.

  “Those are harsh words,” he said.

  “Yes,” she admitted, “they are.”

  “I can remember a time,” he said, “when words of equal harshness were being bandied about over Sherry. But that did not stop you from taking up with him and betrothing yourself to him and ultimately marrying him.”

  “That was different,” she said. “He was not guilty of any of the charges that had been made against him.”

  “Perhaps,” he said, “the Duchess of Dunbarton is not either—guilty of the charges against her, I mean.”

  “Oh, come, now,” she said.

  He was in danger of losing his temper, he realized. He looked away from her. The baby had hold of one of Toby’s books and was about to make a meal of it. Constantine hurried across the room, rescued the book, and prevented the imminent protest by swinging the child up onto one of his shoulders.

  “You must be besotted if you believe that,” Margaret said. “And we are all quite right to be concerned for you.”

  “We,” he said. “Were any of the others invited to Copeland too?”

  “Not Nessie and Elliott,” she said. “But the others, yes.”

  “And tell me,” he said, “have they all refused their invitations too?”

  She had the grace to look away from him again.

  “Yes,” she said.

  Alex was pulling Constantine’s hair and shrieking with glee.

  “Now let me see,” he said, disentangling his hair from the baby’s fist and setting him down beside a box of wooden bricks. “Monty was England’s most notorious hellion. I could vouch for that—I knew him. Katherine married him. Sherr
y we have already talked about. You married him. Cassandra was believed to have murdered her first husband—with an axe, even though it was a bullet that was found in Paget, not an axe wound. Stephen married her. And yet you all believe everything you have heard of the Duchess of Dunbarton without any objective proof at all?”

  “How do you know we have no proof?” she asked.

  “Because there is none,” he said. “She loved Dunbarton, even if not in a romantic way. She was true to her marriage vows until the day of his death, and she was true to her widowhood throughout the year of her mourning. I know, Margaret. I have had proof.”

  Anger was making him speak quite rashly.

  She was biting her upper lip.

  “Oh, Constantine,” she said, “you do care for her. It is what we have most feared. But—are you sure you have not just come under her spell?”

  He did not answer her—or look away from her.

  “Proof.”

  She closed her eyes and then opened them and looked herself again—in charge, as she always had been, the eldest sister who had brought up her siblings almost singlehanded and done a really rather splendid job of it too before going in search of some happiness for herself.

  “I had better go down and see her,” she said. “Oh, goodness, Grandpapa will have eaten her whole by now. She is just the sort of frivolous person to set his teeth on edge. And is that too an illusion? Her frivolity?”

  “I had better let you make some discoveries for yourself,” he said.

  She was pulling on the bell rope, and the children’s nurse came almost immediately. Toby demanded that she come to see India, Sarah raised the rattle toward her and shook it with a flourish, and Alex banged one wooden brick against another and chuckled.

  Constantine left the nursery with Margaret. He half thought of taking his leave altogether, but he could not resist getting a glimpse of Hannah up against one of the gruffest and grimmest old aristocrats in all England. And a near-recluse at that.

  He rather hoped she had not been eaten alive. But his wager was on her.

  WHY EXACTLY WAS SHE HERE? Hannah asked herself as she was admitted to Claverbrook House by a footman, and an elderly butler almost elbowed the poor man in the stomach in his haste to move him out of the way when he heard her name. He bowed to her and actually creaked. Foolish man to wear stays at his age, which must be anywhere from seventy to a hundred.

  Why was she here? To grovel? To demand an explanation? To try to persuade Lady Sheringford to change her mind?

  She did not have long to wait. The footman who had narrowly avoided getting elbowed was sent upstairs to see if Lady Sheringford was at home, and he performed his task with nimble speed. He reappeared within moments of disappearing and murmured to the butler that her grace was to be shown up to the drawing room.

  Hannah followed the butler up at a speed that was approximately half that of a tortoise by her estimate.

  She was glad she had worn the full armor of a white muslin dress with a white spencer and a white bonnet. She was even wearing some of her real diamonds in her ears and on her fingers. It was all something to hide behind. Though if she wished to impress the countess, perhaps she should have dressed more simply, even more colorfully.

  It was too late now for such thoughts.

  The drawing room had just one occupant, she saw when she was admitted to the room after the butler had announced her in solemn, ringing tones as though he were addressing thousands. And that occupant was not the Countess of Sheringford.

  “Yes, yes, Forbes,” the old gentleman seated in a wing chair close to the fire said impatiently, “I know who she is. Bindle told me. Where is she?”

  Hannah had been gathering as much of her famed dignity about her as she could in preparation for confronting the countess. But she abandoned it at the sound of the voice and hurried across the room to take up her stand before the Marquess of Claverbrook’s chair. She extended both gloved hands to him and smiled warmly.

  “Here I am,” she said. “And there you are. It must be years.”

  He had been one of the duke’s friends. Hannah had met him a few times before he shut himself up inside this house after the great scandal involving his grandson and became a virtual recluse, neither going out nor receiving visitors. He had been a gruff, frequently impatient man, but never with her. There had always been a twinkle in his eye when he had looked at her and spoken with her. She had always believed he liked her. And she had liked him.

  He took his hands off the silver head of his cane and took hers. His fingers were bent and gnarled, she could see. She curled her own warmly about them but was careful not to squeeze them. She was careful not to touch him with any of her rings.

  “Hannah,” he said. “There you are indeed. Looking even more lovely than you looked as a girl when old Dunbarton snatched you up from some godforsaken place in the country and married you. The old devil. No other woman would suit him all his life, and then you came along when he was close to doddering.”

  “Some things,” she said, “are meant to be.”

  “Hmmph,” he said, shaking her hands slightly up and down in his own. “And I suppose you married him for his money. Of which he had more than his fair share.”

  “And because he was a duke and was able to make me a duchess,” she said. “You must not forget that.”

  “I daresay I would not have stood a chance with you, then,” he said, “even if I had seen you first. I was only a marquess.”

  “And probably not as rich as the duke was,” she said.

  She smiled at him. His white hair was sparse. His white eyebrows were not. He had a deep vertical temper line between his brows, eyes that tended to glare, and a beak of a nose. He looked like a thoroughly bad-tempered old man.

  “I loved him,” she said. “And I still grieve for him. If I had ever had a grandfather that I remembered, I would have wanted him to be just like my duke. But since I did not, and since I did have the good fortune to meet the duke, I married him.”

  “Hmmph,” he said again. “And you led him a merry dance, I daresay, Hannah?”

  “Oh, very merry indeed,” she agreed, “though he would not dance after his seventy-eighth birthday, which was very poor-spirited of him. We found something to laugh at every day, though. Laughter is better than medicine, you know.”

  “Hmmph,” he said. “But he died in the end anyway.”

  “I have heard,” she said, “that your medicine came in the form of your granddaughter-in-law. I have heard that she takes no nonsense from you and that she is your favorite adult in the world. And I have heard that you dote upon your great-grandchildren, who actually live here with you during the Season. What sort of a recluse is that? A rather fraudulent one, I would say.”

  “You used to be a timid thing when Dunbarton first married you, Hannah,” he said. “When did you become so saucy?”

  “After I married him,” she said. “He taught me that people like you are really just pussycats pretending to be lions.”

  He barked with laughter, and Hannah’s eyes twinkled down at him.

  “Dunbarton was a devil of a fellow when he was a young man,” he said. “Did he ever tell you? There was no pussycat there, Hannah. Walsh—he is long gone now—slapped a glove in his face right in the middle of the reading room at White’s one morning and challenged him to a duel for cuckolding him with his wife. They met on some barren heath—I can’t remember exactly where. That is what age does to the mind. But I was there. Walsh’s hand was shaking like a leaf in a hurricane, and his shot missed by a mile. Dunbarton lined him up along the barrel of his pistol, taking his time, his hand as steady as a rock, and then at the last possible moment he bent his arm at the elbow and shot into the air. We would all have been vastly disappointed if it had not been so neatly done. Poor Walsh had to retreat to the country for a year or three with his tail between his legs. He would have been happier, I daresay, if Dunbarton had blown a hole in his shoulder or winged the tip of his ear—an
d he could have done it too, by Jove. He was a deadly shot.”

  “He was too kindhearted to shoot the man,” Hannah said.

  “Kindhearted?” The marquess had roused himself into some sort of passion. “He did the most cruel thing any man could have done, Hannah. He showed his contempt for Walsh. Humiliated him. Even suggested that the surgeon lay him out on the grass and administer smelling salts. It was splendidly done. And everyone knew that it was Jackman who was making free with Lady Walsh’s favors, not Dunbarton. Even Walsh must have known it, but Jackman was a little, weedy fellow, and Walsh would have been the laughingstock if he had slapped a glove in his face. So he waited until Dunbarton danced with his wife one evening and made his move at White’s next morning. The man must have had a death wish. Or a rock for a brain. Probably the latter.”

  Hannah continued to smile at him.

  “Ah, those were the days,” he said with a sigh. “A man’s man was Dunbarton, Hannah. The very devil. All the girls wanted him—and not just because he was a duke and indecently rich, let me tell you. But he would have none of them. You ought to have known him then.”

  “I daresay,” she said, “even my father and mother did not know each other then.”

  He barked with laughter again.

  “You got him in the end, though,” he said. “You tamed him, Hannah. He was besotted with you.”

  “Yes,” Hannah agreed, “he was. But does one forget manners as well as the location of old duels after one passes the age of eighty? Am I not to be offered a seat and a cup of tea?”

  He half shook her hands again.

  “You may have any seat you like,” he said. “But first you must haul on the bell rope if you want tea. If you were to wait until I got to my feet to pull it, you would probably be ready for your luncheon too.”

  “I have already given the order for a tray to be brought in, Grandpapa,” a voice said from the doorway, and Lady Sheringford came into the room.