I could not pull my eyes away from him.
“I, who have always prided myself on doing what is right—honor comes before all, you’re right, Gwen—just took what I wanted, even though I knew it to be wrong. And now, it seems, we will all pay for it.”
“And what is wrong with being a person, Harry?” I asked. Tears were running down my face. “With allowing yourself your humanity?”
“Oh, I’m human,” he said. “Damnably human. Just as willing as the next fellow to throw away my beliefs to get what I want, it seems. And tonight, well”—he shrugged his sleeves into his jacket—“I chose to stay here and dally with you. And now, I have to go figure out how to pay the price.”
“But why?” I asked, as I hugged my knees to my chest. “Why did you do it, Cambourne?”
He ran a hand through his hair. “Do you save your correspondence, Gwen?”
“Yes,” I told him, not sure why he wanted to know. “It is still in my chamber at my parents’ house.”
“Perhaps,” he said, lightly, “you might try rereading some of your letters with the eyes of the woman you are becoming. And I am afraid that now I must ask you to excuse me, as it seems I’ve business to attend to belowstairs.”
25
In which I search for Cambourne’s letters and make a most harrowing discovery
Immediately the next morning, I hared over to my par ents’ house. I emerged from the carriage, if not at a run, at a distinctly unseemly pace, and continued thus up the front steps. I was through the door and headed up to my old bedchamber before Ladimer had managed so much as a greeting.
“Good morning, Ladimer,” I had called over my shoulder. “Don’t bother about me, I’m only here to retrieve something from my old bedchamber. I’ll be done in a trice.”
I burst through the door, hardly able to contain myself, and then, as inelegantly as a team of horses with Milburn at the reins, I skidded to a halt. It was gone. All of it. My bed, my clothespress, my reclining sofa, my chairs, my desk. The soft peach silk on the walls had been replaced by stark white paint. Even the draperies were gone.
I looked around more carefully. Now that I was paying attention, there was a faint smell in the air, of … linseed oil? The rug was splotched with paint, and a pile of palettes and brushes stood on a rough wooden table. Standing against the far wall was a group of canvases. I walked over and looked at the first one. Not altogether horrible. It was a bowl of fruit and I was fairly certain I could identify cherries, either a peach or an apple, and that the fuzzy purple mass was intended to be a bunch of grapes. The signature in the corner was “A.E.” My mother. I pulled that one away from the wall and tipped my head to look at the next. Primroses, I thought, growing in a garden, but she must have got some of the green of the grass mixed into her yellow, because the flowers were sort of a sickly color. The third was a huge naked woman in a purple turban—that is, the naked woman was huge, the canvas was the same size as all the rest.
I gasped in horror, and the canvases slipped out of my hand and banged back against the wall. It was Violetta! Naked! Reclining on purple cushions and eating grapes, no less. I covered my eyes, even though it was no longer visible. Naked! Not even Reubens’s famed paintings were fully naked. I had seen Violetta unclothed! Argh! I was bound to have nightmares for years.
I backed out of the room, and, naturally, smack into my mother. She immediately launched into a diatribe. “Ladimer tells me that you barged past him with excessive speed, Gwendolyn, without so much as giving him time to announce you properly.”
“My—my chamber!” I managed to stutter, my tongue still tied by the horror of what I had so recently seen.
“I have converted it,” she said, airily, as she stepped past me and into the room. “To a studio. Ernesto—my art tutor—is convinced that I have talent. Talent like this, he says, must be carefully nurtured. Cared for. Fed. Sustained. Strengthened. Fostered. Cultivated. Call it what you will, I have quite come to dote on it. The talent, that is. Having perfected my natural objets—note, if you will, the astoundingly lifelike aspect to my pear—”
“I thought that was a peach,” I could not resist saying. “Or possibly an apple.”
“That,” she said, “is because you do not have the eye. I have now moved on to the greatest challenge an artist can face: the human form. It is not generally done, of course, for the female to paint the unclothed human form. But I, as you know, have always prided myself on being an exceptional female! And Ernesto agrees—”
“What happened to my things, my furniture?” I asked, cutting her words off.
“Why?” she said, turning a gimlet eye on me.
“I am looking for something. Some papers that I kept in the escritoire.”
She directed a keen glance at me. “Papers. Is that what you called that pile of junk cluttering up the drawers?”
“Where are they?” I persisted.
She shrugged. “I suppose they were thrown away. You know I cannot abide clutter.”
“That clutter,” I said, beginning to feel truly stricken, “was composed of my letters, all my documents. Everything that could someday prove I existed.”
“Not your marriage lines,” she said with asperity as she stepped into the corridor and turned away. “Some of it may be in the attics,” she called over her shoulder. “Some was likely sent home to the country, and the gardener burned the rest. Now, I am off to don my smock. And by the way, I am having a dinner. To celebrate the return of your brother-in-law, Cambourne, and to give him a chance to fete you, the new addition to his family. He has already accepted and I fully expect you and Milburn to as well. Friday evening at seven of the clock. No excuses shall be entertained!”
I closed my eyes for a moment, wishing for a serenity I did not possess. Oh God, she must mean that Milburn had accepted as Cambourne. What on earth was that idiot thinking? I also seemed to have a vision of the reclining, unclothed, Violetta permanently imprinted on the inside of my lids. So much for serenity. I shuddered and snapped them open. “Did you forget what I said about inviting Milburn to my bed should you try to interfere?” I asked.
She stepped back into the room, and put her face very close to mine. “You may have changed, daughter,” she said, pronouncing each word very distinctly, “but not so much that I can’t still make your life a misery. If you want to tempt me to do so by inviting that miserable little fribble to your bed, you may certainly do so, but do bear in mind all the while that I want you to be a duchess and a duchess you will be.” And then she tucked a paintbrush behind her ear and made her departure.
I set off for the attics, resolving to tackle the issues of my mother’s dinner and Milburn’s idiocy later. After an hour of poking about in the vast piles that seemed to fill the attic to overflowing, I had come up empty-handed. For a woman who professed to loathe clutter, my mother certainly seemed to have amassed a good deal of it.
Finally, as I was about to give up the search, I saw just a corner of the light blue silk ribbon that had been around some of my letters from my school friends. I dove deeper into the pile, and scrabbled about, in the hope that something else of mine would have been unceremoniously dumped there. And there, finally, under my grammar composition book from the year I was seven were the letters. I grabbed the pile and headed for the stairs, running down the four flights at a trot, and out the door to the carriage.
It was an act of will, to sit in the carriage, watching the streets and houses pass by, and not so much as peek at a letter, but I forced myself to wait until I was alone in my bedchamber. I sank down in a chair and untied the ribbon with trembling hands. I could hardly even bring myself to read them in their entirety. Instead, little pieces seemed to jump out at me, from different letters, different seasons, different years.
… Perhaps it is this war, and Bertie being gone, but I find myself savoring the lengthening days here in a way I had not thought to. The light, the air, all seem somehow different here …
… I read a book in
your garden today, The Dark Castle, or, Count Armando’s Revenge. Your name was scrawled in the flyleaf, and I felt your presence as I read. Goodness, you do read the most awful trash! I took it home with me to finish at my leisure, surely no rational person could sleep at night without having learned whether Count Armando was truly a werewolf …
… Have you already torn the paper off the attached package, Gwen? Or are you being restrained and reading this first? In that unlikely event, I will tell you what it contains: The south meadow at Hildcote is so entirely covered in bluebells this year it looks to be carpeted in blue. I have never seen it this way before and do not know whether it is the meadow or my vision that is different. It occurred to me, though, that as you are not to be here this spring, you will not see it. To that end, I engaged Mr. Thomas Wilkins to capture it on canvas for you. I think it a most credible effort …
I let the letters fall into my lap. Tears were running down my face, and I let them. How had I ever thought that these were only amiable letters from a childhood friend? There was nothing untoward in any of them. But suddenly shimmering clearly before my eyes was the fact that they spoke of love in ways that impassioned avowals never would. As I sat, staring ahead, the letters on my lap, it seemed inconceivable to me that I had been so blind. What Bertie had said was true: Cambourne did love me.
It is true that they were not filled with pretty, facile words, or avowals of undying passion. These were filled, instead, with him, with reminders of how deep our roots together went. With the man who, underneath a veneer of aloof sophistication, noticed the light and the bluebells. Who took home a book to finish because it was mine (and, believe me, having read that book, there was no reason having to do with literary merit).
And had chosen to share himself with me, to love me enough to trust me with his thoughts. And although I well understood that Cambourne had shared his body with any number of women over the years, I knew that this was a part of himself he had not.
Also, shimmering clearly before my eyes was the knowledge that I loved him, too. With all his faults, his arrogance, his secretiveness, and possibly even his mistress, I loved him, and likely had since the moment he had taken my hand in front of the altar.
Less pleasing, however, was my sudden understanding that he did love his birthright and his land, that it was too deeply a part of him for him to ever give up. And surely the people who depended on the estates that went with the titles deserved a better lord than Milburn? I stared at the little gilt framed picture of the bluebells that had hung on my bedchamber wall—wherever that bedchamber might be—since I had received it.
I admit, that for a few moments I indulged in some rather bleakly romantic fantasies of disappearing from London, never to be heard from again. Cambourne would be heartbroken, naturally, but eventually would return to his birthright, marry sensibly, and abide by his duty (pining for me, of course), while I, a study in selflessness, lived quietly in a small town—perhaps a simple cottage by the sea? A garret?—doing good works and devoting myself to spinsterish pursuits. It occurred to me, though, that I did not precisely know what a garret was, or even whether I would find it comfortable, which, it seemed to me, was taking selflessness entirely too far.
No, I would simply have to find a way for Cambourne to have his land, salvage his belief in his own honor, accept his frailties, and have me, too.
A small undertaking.
Particularly as I never would have imagined that someone living under the same roof could disappear so thoroughly as Cambourne did for the few days that followed. Discreet inquiries amongst the staff confirmed that he was still residing on the premises, although one would never have guessed it. I did hear him come in, the night after I had read the letters, and lay in agonies of hope that he would stop at my door. Alas, his light tread continued past without pause. By the time I arose the next morning, he was gone, and had been since before daybreak, my informant (well, all right, it was Mrs. Harbison, if you insist upon knowing) told me.
The next night, I heard him come in and make his way down the corridor. His tread was stealthier than usual, and I wondered whether he had guessed I was lying awake, waiting. I had planned to let him pass by, unaccosted, but my body sprang out of bed, without much cooperation from my mind. I grabbed the infamous cabbage wrapper and swung the door open. He was leaning against the wall opposite, staring at my door. His hair gleamed in the light of the sconces that had been left burning, and he looked … hungry. At my appearance, he smiled. “Hello, Gwen.”
“Cambourne,” I said. “What are you doing?”
“Leaning against the wall,” he told me.
“Yes,” I said. “I can see that. But why?”
“Because,” he said, enunciating very precisely, “I am foxed thanks to your curst brother James and his liberal hand with the bottle. And, too,” he added, “because I wanted to be.”
I looked at him more closely. I would never have guessed it, but now that I knew, I could see that his color was high and that there was a hectic glitter in his eyes. “Oh,” I said. “I see.” And then, after a moment, I said, “Would you like to come in?”
He shook his head. “Actually,” he said. “I think that would be inadvisable.”
His hand, I noticed, was bandaged. “What happened?”
He shrugged. “I punched a windowpane at White’s.”
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“Yes,” he replied. “Only foxed, like a coward, and still hating myself, despite it.”
Don’t hate yourself because of me. I can’t bear it, I wanted to say. “Oh, dear. Can I do anything?” is what I did say. I hoped that he would ask me to kiss his wounds, soothe his brow, or whatever it was that a gentleman needed at such a time.
But he only said, “Yes. Don’t fuss.”
“Very well, I won’t. But may I ask you a question?”
He smiled crookedly. “Can I stop you?”
I shook my head. “I’ve been wondering this entire time, Cambourne. The whole of London and half the countryside knew I was promised to Milburn. When you decided to marry me, how,” I asked, “did you plan to explain to the world at large that you had taken Milburn’s place?”
He stopped smiling. “I don’t know,” he said.
I stared at him. “You don’t know? Do you mean you had no plan? No way to save yourself from the scandal of having switched places at the altar and then hared around London having pretended to be your brother?”
“My plan, Gwen?” he said. “My only plan was this.”
And then he moved toward me quickly, the drink having apparently not dulled his grace in any way. He pulled me tight against him. “This,” he repeated as he touched his lips to mine. Falling into me, deepening the kiss, making me feel his hunger. His heartbeat pounded against mine. I opened my lips beneath his and he kissed me like he would never stop. Unlike our previous kisses, there was no teasing, no element of seduction to this, only need. It felt as though he were trying to memorize me. And I let him. Tried to memorize him back as I felt the dizziness overwhelm me, and the thundering of his heart against mine. I was completely lost in the moment, in the harsh rhythms of his breathing, and the need I could feel in his kiss. I would have liked to stay like that forever.
Eventually, though, he lifted his head, and I was startled to see tears in his eyes. “That was it,” he said, brokenly, “and it failed. Because I wanted something so much that I let it overwhelm me. And all over a secret, Gwen. But a secret that’s not mine to tell.”
“Good night,” I heard him say as he resumed his passage to his chamber.
My eyes were swollen almost shut the next morning from having spent more or less the entire night in tears. Cambourne’s misery seemed to have crept inside me. But Cecy withheld comment until I had poured out the whole story.
“Lud. I’d be blubbing, too, if it had been me who had seen Violetta naked,” she said.
“But he loves me,” I sobbed. “Enough to have just married me with no pla
n, nothing. And I love him, too.”
“Stop being such a widgeon,” she said briskly. “We must decide what is to be done. Where is Myrtia?”
“She took Therèse with her to the Foundling Hospital.” Cecy raised a brow. “Do I understand that Therèse is taking up charity work?”
I sniffled into my handkerchief. “I suspect it was more the promise of bonnet shopping and a treat at Gunter’s following that induced her to go.”
“Well, that unfortunately leaves us without Myrtia, but fortunately without Therèse, who is lovely, but can be a distraction.”
“But Cecy,” I protested, “should we not be concerned with your problems for a change?”
She smiled tightly. “My problems, for the moment at least, can only be unraveled with the cooperation of those causing them. Yours somehow seem infinitely more likely to be solved with a little plotting and planning.”
“Cec,” I said. “Where is your mother?” I had not seen Lady Wainwright for quite some time.
“Oh,” she said, airily. “She has taken herself off—temporarily only, unfortunately—with the new footman. Thomas’s replacement.”
“Cec—” I began.
She interrupted. “Gwen. Let us get you sorted. Then, I promise, we can turn our entire attention to dissecting every aspect of my life. Now, what do you want?”
“Cambourne. And I know what I don’t want,” I said. “To be married to Milburn. I never understood until now how important it is to be married to someone you truly want. Oh, Cec,” I said, the tears suddenly beginning again. “What am I going to do? Cambourne was utterly miserable, he seemed … defeated, almost. I’ve never even imagined him that way.”
“I know you will think this suggestion revoltingly unworthy of me,” she said, “but there is always honesty. Have you thought of that? Simply going to him and confessing that you are in love with him and trying together to find a way out of this mess?”
I shook my head.
The Accidental Duchess Page 27
