Duchesses in Disguise

by Grace Burrowes

  Every little thing about Stratton was weakening Mary Alice’s resolve. She reflected on her friends’ suggestions that Jonas would only want her happiness. And how could loving a good, honorable man disgrace her husband’s memory? As one part of her ventured into the scary idea, another, stronger part held tight to Jonas’s memory. She wasn’t ready to give him up yet. She wished she could crawl again into the safe black crêpe of deep mourning where she didn’t have to make decisions.

  “Colonel Stratton! Colonel Stratton!” An alarmed liveried footman sprinted around the trees. “A letter has come by express.”

  Stratton’s expression turned grave. He rose to receive the letter. Mary Alice watched him read the address with a furrowed brow. Her heart sped. How easily she panicked since Jonas’s death. How readily she expected terrible news. Then a grin cracked Stratton’s serious countenance. “Ah, ’tis a letter from your children.”

  Mary Alice was ashamed at how greedily she tore the missive from his hands. She broke the wax with her fingernail. Her children’s handwriting, adorned with corrections from their nurse, filled the pages. Homesickness hit like a punch to her heart.

  “Do you miss your children?” Eleanor asked. Mary Alice could see she was curious about her family.

  “Very much. Why don’t you help me read their letters? Come.”

  Eleanor snuggled beside her, the closest the child had ever got to her. Mary Alice put an arm around the girl, savoring her scent and soft hair. Oh, she dearly wanted this child to be her own. But then, Mary Alice also desired to love and keep all the world’s abandoned and mistreated children. Jonas once remarked that she married him only so she could set up an orphanage in his ancestral home. Mary Alice had denied his claim but pointed out that it was a good idea and thanked him for suggesting it to her.

  “Ah, Caroline writes that her little brother is annoying her.” Mary Alice pointed to the letter. “He hid a huge, hairy spider in her bed. Oh dear!”

  “Brothers are impish creatures, Eleanor.” Stratton winked at his daughter.

  “Ah, but see,” Mary Alice continued, “Little Jonas is angry at his sister because she killed his pet spider, Ignatius, who had gotten loose and wandered, without Little Jonas’s help of course, into his sister’s bed. However, he seems to have emerged quickly from his arachnid mourning period because he writes that he has found hundreds of tadpole eggs at the park and brought them home in a bucket. Oh no!”

  Stratton sipped his red wine. “You may find that you have a frog or toad infestation when you return to London.”

  “Hmm, how would you feel if I took up permanent residence in my rooms here?” Mary Alice joked to Stratton. “I’ll be very quiet. You won’t notice me at all.”

  Poor Eleanor didn’t perceive the jest. “I would love if you lived with us.”

  Mary Alice felt horrible. She needed to explain that she had her own home and family who needed her, but that would just hurt Eleanor. She would feel further rejected.

  Mary Alice was spared the pain of letting Eleanor down when Stratton cried, “Good God!”

  Mary Alice glanced down. Unthinkingly, she had shifted the letters, bringing Anna’s picture of Bogland to the top. She had completed the map in Mary Alice’s absence. “This is Anna’s work.”

  He drew the picture from her lap. “She is quite the artist, or cartographer. This is incredible. The detail, the precision. How old is Anna?”

  “Five,” Mary Alice gushed, proud of her unique daughter.

  “Five!” He gave an incredulous bark of laughter. “She’s brilliant.”

  Mary Alice’s eyes wetted as she watched him study the picture with nothing but honest awe on his face. A man who sponsored England’s greatest artists, scientists, and scholars admired her daughter’s work!

  “It’s Bogland as she sees it.” Mary Alice pointed to the left side of the map, where a great dragon clutched a tiny island in the sea. “This is Dragon Island. In our version, Jonas has his own dragon kingdom in the middle of the monster ocean.” She moved her finger upward on the map to a hot air balloon floating above Bogland. “Caroline’s doll, Caro, lived in a hot air balloon until the bog lord shot her with a rock and she tumbled from the basket. Now she’s trapped with her friend Marcela Misslemay in the swampy, underworld dungeon.”

  “Helandria would love to play with Caro in a hot air balloon,” Eleanor said wistfully. “Helandria is so much more adventuresome than I am.”

  “Pray, why don’t you write Caroline a letter?” Mary Alice suggested. “She would adore a correspondence with a girl her own age. You see how her brother torments her by putting spiders in her bed. Tell her about Helandria.”

  “Will Caroline like me?”

  “Of course. She’s very kind, but she’s been quite sad since her papa died. She needs a good friend.”

  Eleanor’s lips trembled. Mary Alice could see the girl was nervous but also longing to have friends, like a normal child.

  “Please write to her for me,” Mary Alice continued to persuade the girl. “It will make her so happy. Tell her about Helandria and your papa’s lovely fountains.”

  “I will!” Eleanor cried. “I will! Shall I do it now?”

  Mary Alice smiled. “If it pleases you.”

  “Yes! Don’t… don’t send your letter until I’m done. Please.”

  “Of course not.”

  Eleanor edged away and then broke into a run.

  “How do you do it?” Stratton asked.

  Mary Alice tilted her head. “What do you mean?”

  “In a matter of days, you’ve done more for Eleanor than my staff and I have done in months.”

  Mary Alice leaned closer to him. “Here’s my magical secret. Deep, deep inside, I’m still a little girl. I’ve never truly grown up.” She laughed and gazed upward, enjoying the sun and breeze on her cheeks.

  He shook his head. “You’re a wonder. But I want to return to the topic of Anna.” He picked up Anna’s map again. “I’m in great awe of her talent.”

  “She is a special girl. She’s difficult to know, her mind is so different from mine. She can be very frustrating without meaning to be. My father always said that I was the most impatient girl in the world. But Anna taught me patience.”

  He studied her face. “May I ask what happened that day in the park when Anna ran into the water?”

  Mary Alice shrugged. “Anna can’t tolerate loud noises and people. It’s all too much for her.”

  “I have a lot in common with Anna.” He took another sip of wine. “The day I carried you from the carriage accident, you mentioned not putting Anna in an asylum.”

  “I did?”

  “Yes, you said that you didn’t want Anna to be put away.”

  Mary Alice didn’t remember what had happened in those hours directly after the accident. What had she said? She felt too vulnerable to gaze at him as she spoke of those dark times when Anna was a toddling child. Instead, she focused on twirling a piece of grass around her fingers. “The family physician said that he had seen Anna’s kind before. He said she would be an unresponsive simpleton her entire life, that there was no hope, and it would be best to put her in an asylum. But I… I couldn’t imagine my child alone and at the mercy of strangers who didn’t love her.”

  Stratton edged closer, resting a tentative hand on her arm. She didn’t withdraw from him, letting his strength reassure her. She felt very alone at times even though an army of family, friends, and servants surrounded her. Every day she had to muster the strength to put on a strong front, to be both the mother and the father. She was so tired inside.

  “But… I knew there was something within her,” she continued. “An intelligence. I saw it in her eyes. I became highly upset with the physician. You don’t want to know what I said. I have a fierce temper when someone hurts one of my children. Genghis Khan only wished he could be as barbaric.”

  “As you should,” he approved.

  “I had expected Jonas to try and calm me. He was al
ways composed. We were quite the opposite in temperaments. But I had never seen him so upset. He growled at the physician to get out, that our family no longer required his services.” She gazed at the marble woman with the watery veil but didn’t see her. Jonas filled her mind. At least what she remembered of him. Every day, more of him slipped away, no matter how hard she tried to keep him. The tide of time was merciless, eroding the shore of memories. “I had always been in love with my husband—madly in love. But I fell even more in love with him that day. Again, and again, he was my hero.”

  “The late duke was a good man.”

  “He was,” she choked. She had to stop speaking of Jonas, or the tears would come again. So, she changed the subject to Stratton. “What changed you? You are not the man I was spoony for all those years ago.”

  “The war.” He didn’t look at her, leaving her to study his profile. “The day I gazed out onto a single field strewn with thousands of dead men. Thousands. Until then, I had believed all the words about honor and breeding. But at that moment, I realized they were just words. Shadows, really. They weren’t real. Nothing I had believed was real. I couldn’t feel the victory over Napoleon. Everything became empty in my mind. It’s hard to explain. It’s as if all meaning broke apart, and I had nothing. Just gray oblivion. For months, I literally felt nothing.” He drew up his sleeve, revealing two thin scars running parallel across his arm. “I wish I could say this was a war injury, but it’s where I cut my arm with a penknife and watched the blood drip just to reassure myself that I was still capable of feeling.”

  “Oh, Stratton.” She let her finger trail gently along his scars. “I’m sorry. I remember the numbness after Jonas died. Grief came in waves. Sometimes I felt everything. Sometimes nothing. Just numb.”

  His hand traveled up her arm to her face, brushing back the curls that blew across her cheek. She couldn’t deny that she drank in the sensation of him and didn’t resist when he drew her against his chest. He was both power and vulnerability. Hardness tempered with tenderness.

  “When I returned to England,” he continued quietly, “my sister and our old friends immediately tried to put me back in my old role, but I couldn’t even go through the motions of my previous life. Their lives are stupid games. They care about the most preposterous, trivial matters in their tiny worlds. But they made me feel again, so I must give them credit. I felt hate. I hated who I once was. I hated how I had treated people, how I’d thought myself some god and everyone else existed for my pleasure. I was like a poison in this world. I went from feeling nothing to living in rage. The smallest thing could explode inside me. And I couldn’t get away from the anger, from myself.”

  “Did finding Eleanor ease this anger?”

  “It was gone before then.”

  “Time healed it?”

  “No.” He gently drew her chin up. “I saw you again.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes.” His voice was a low whisper. His eyes searched her face. She didn’t know what he found there, but a small, wistful smile curled his lips. “I saw you again after all those years. You may not recall me lurking in the corners of the Royal Academy, hoping you didn’t notice me. But I saw you. You were so beautiful that day, a contrast to the gray cold outside. I can’t explain this, but pure love and true kindness seem to radiate from you. You are like a merciful Madonna portrait come to life. And that’s probably why I… I had loved you all along.”

  “Nathaniel.” The tears were back. She couldn’t stop them. “Why do you want to break my heart again? Why must you make this so hard for me?”

  His mouth waited mere inches from hers. She just had to lean in the smallest bit, letting gravity do its work, and their lips met. Touching, but not moving. Although he remained still, she could feel his body straining for her, enveloped in the same raw yearning that throbbed in her. He was letting her choose what happened next. A small voice in her mind screamed for her to run away as she opened her mouth, letting their tongues tentatively touch. He moaned, a sound of ecstasy and frustration that cut through her weak restraint. Her hands rose to his head, tipping off his hat and knotting in his hair as she deepened their kiss.

  He didn’t kiss like her husband had. It didn’t shock or cause her any guilt. She felt strangely like a virgin again, exploring unknown terrain. He cradled her as he lowered her, his lips never leaving hers. His hand slowly, slowly slid down her throat and finally found her breast. He cupped it, moving his finger over the fabric covering her nipple. Her body, untouched for two years, was ravenous, charging ahead of her rational mind. He moved his thumb faster as she whimpered into his mouth.

  His hardness thrust against her thigh. She instinctually reached for his hardened sex, enticing him with her hand. He ripped his mouth free and whispered her name. She undid a button on his pantaloons, reached inside, and wrapped her hand around his hot erection. His face crumpled with the acute pleasure. It didn’t take her long to discover what he enjoyed. His happiness became her happiness.

  Then he gently removed her hand, and his mouth claimed hers again. She felt his fingers trace up her legs to her wet, swollen sex. He stopped and waited. In his silence, he was asking her another question—one she knew she should deny, but couldn’t. All that consumed her thoughts was his cock sinking deep into her, satisfying the need that kept her up at night, writhing and frustrated. She instinctively opened her legs a little wider, encouraging his touch.

  His lips moved from her mouth, across her cheek to her ear. “I love you,” he whispered. “Give me a chance to make up for the pain I’ve caused you. To show how grateful I am that you have come into my life.” She couldn’t answer, because his finger flicked across her mound, sending shudders over her. He didn’t to try to slow the pleasure, but stoked it higher. Her pent-up climax was coming too fast, too powerful.

  In a graceful motion, he slid atop her, his thighs sinking between hers. His cock pressed against her vagina. This was wrong. Quite wrong. She should stop, but instead, she arched her back as she whispered his name in welcome.

  She heard a high, girlish, surprised gasp, and her eyes flew open. Stratton leaped back, pulling her with him, shielding her with his body as he tugged down her skirt.

  Mary Alice gazed beyond his arm. Eleanor stood, her mouth hanging open, a piece of stationery in her hand. “I… I forgot Helandria.”

  Mary Alice sat up and tried to put on a semblance of normality as shame washed over her. Stratton discreetly buttoned his pantaloons.

  Oh God, what have I done?

  “Helandria was here… waiting for you,” Mary Alice said with a nervous little laugh.

  Eleanor began to sway on her feet, her lips moving as if she wanted to say something but was afraid.

  “Dearest, Mrs. Mary Alice and I were… You see, I care for her very much… and…” Stratton faltered. He gazed at Mary Alice, desperate.

  “And I care for him,” she continued, but like Stratton, she found there was no fitting explanation for a child’s tender ears.

  “Are you going to m-marry Papa?” Eleanor stammered. “Will I have a f-f-family?”

  The radiant hope in Eleanor’s face pierced Mary Alice’s heart. She couldn’t refuse the girl, who had known so much pain and loneliness. She didn’t have to look at Stratton to feel his despair. His traumatized daughter, who had just recently dared to peek out from under her shell of fear, who struggled to trust, was about to have her heart crushed again. She couldn’t hurt that dear, courageous child. Mary Alice would rather maim herself.

  “Yes,” Mary Alice whispered. “Yes.”

  * * *

  An hour later, Stratton walked Eleanor back to her chamber. He had offered his hand, and she’d slowly slid her small, delicate one against his palm. His heart ached for his emotionally frail daughter. Away from Mary Alice, Eleanor’s face returned to its nervous visage. He wished he could reassure her of a family and Mary Alice’s tender love. He wanted to believe that Mary Alice really desired to marry him, that this brilliant,
sun-filled day would be the happiest one in his life. But the stiff, polite smile Mary Alice had worn for the remainder of their picnic confirmed his sad suspicions—she had consented to marry him only for Eleanor’s sake. Oddly, her little deceit to please his daughter only caused him to love her more, even as he knew he had to set her free.

  At the door, Eleanor stopped and tightened her clasp on Helandria. The doll’s empty, glass eyes stared blankly at Stratton. “Is Mary Alice really going to marry you? Will she really be my mother?”

  He hadn’t the strength for the dreaded discussion yet. Nor could he lie. He knelt and drew her close, something she hadn’t allowed him to do before Mary Alice had arrived.

  “You’re going to be very happy,” he whispered. “I promise.” But he didn’t know how. He had been a natural rogue and competent soldier, but fatherhood confounded him. It required more strength, wisdom, and resilience than he possessed.

  He left Eleanor in her chamber. As he was closing the door, he heard her talking to her dolls. “We’re going to have a new family. We must be nice so they’ll like us.”

  He wished he had the magical powers to make the world perfect for his daughter. He wished he could keep Mary Alice by his side, merging their struggling families together.

  He wished many things but knew wishes were flimsy, heartbreaking things.

  The door to Mary Alice’s chamber was closed. He told himself to give her privacy, but he couldn’t bear the torture of unknowing. He tapped the door and whispered her name. He heard footsteps approaching on the other side of the wood, and then the door swung open. Her skin was ashen, her eyes, though now dry, were glassy and red-rimmed from crying.

  When he stepped inside, she reached for him, pressing her head into his chest. “I don’t know what to do. I shouldn’t have said yes.”

  He’d known this would be her answer. Yet he hadn’t realized how much he had clung to the smallest hope until it shattered. His throat burned as his hand caressed her back, drawing her closer. “Hush,” he whispered. “Don’t trouble yourself.”