The Duchess War Read online

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Before the sun found the horizon, Minnie woke to feel her husband’s lips against her neck, his arms around her. She’d slept the sleep of sated exhaustion; vaguely, she was aware that she was still tired. But it didn’t matter. If she was tired, it was a good sort of tired, the kind that took delight in the feel of his body against hers, his hands running down her ribs with possessive intent. It felt more like a dream than a waking. She was warm and his touch was sweet.

  If last night had been a discovery, this morning was about exploration—about fitting her hands into the curve of his back, about running her hands down his chest and then up again, noting the sensitive spots. The heady, insistent eagerness of the wedding night had been replaced with a sense of quiet wonder.

  She was ready by the time he slid inside her. This morning, his thrusts were a gentle rocking, a full-body kiss, one that coaxed her orgasm from her in stages, rather than wresting it from her by force.

  When he’d finished, he leaned his forehead against hers. “Good morning.”

  The sky was beginning to turn pink. She couldn’t have had a full night’s sleep, but she didn’t want to drift back into dreams. She wanted to capture this moment and stretch it forever.

  “Good morning.”

  He hadn’t let go of her.

  “You know,” he said, “I’m absolutely ravenous. If I’m remembering right from my last trip, there’s a little bakery down the street that should have something out even now.”

  By the time they’d dressed, the light of morning had flooded the streets below. The hotel they were in—some fancy affair; on the previous night, the name had been the last thing on her mind—let out onto a wide avenue. A park, ringed by a metal fence, stood on one side. Stone buildings with cunning façades marched down the other. Robert led her down a side street past the park. His little bakery was, in fact, a café that overlooked the River Seine. Not just the Seine; their hotel was in the heart of the city, steps from the Île de la Cité.

  A few months ago, she would have never imagined coming to Paris with a husband. She wouldn’t have dreamed of a hotel that was scarcely a quarter mile from the Notre Dame cathedral. This was grander than even Lydia’s wildest imaginings—but no. Thinking of her friend gave Minnie a pain deep inside.

  Instead, she concentrated on everything old and beautiful, everything bright and new. The colored awnings; the elegant buildings; the small flock of pigeons that came to roost near them as they ate, cocking their heads in interest at the croissants that Robert obtained from the baker.

  The pastries were so good, warm and buttery and flaky, that Minnie almost didn’t want to share with the birds.

  But as they were throwing the remnants of their breakfast to the cooing pigeons—trying to make sure that the intrepid little brown birds on the side got a few crumbs as well—a small boy with a crutch limped up. A beaver cap was pulled over his head, not big enough to cover too-large ears.

  He should have been too young to have that calculating look in his eyes. But age had nothing to do with the necessity for cunning. He took a limping step toward them, leaning heavily on his crutch. The wobble in his stride was too exaggerated to be real. Some things, one didn’t need to translate.

  Minnie’s fingers closed over the bracelet at her wrist.

  His eyes flashed in calculation once more. If he’d been planning to pick their pockets while they tossed bread, he switched to another strategy just as swiftly.

  “A few centimes, Monsieur,” said the boy in passable English. He took off his cap and swept it toward Robert. “A few centimes for the cripple.”

  How he’d pegged them for English… Well, she supposed it wasn’t hard to figure out. They’d been talking to each other, after all.

  Minnie had rather expected Robert to brush the urchin off, but he stopped and pulled out a purse. Without saying a word, he reached in and took out a coin. She saw the glint of gold as he flipped it toward the boy.

  The boy’s fingers flashed; he grabbed the coin from the air in reflex. But his mouth dropped open when he looked at what he’d caught. His crutch fell from his grasp; unheeding, he stood staring.

  Robert let go of Minnie’s arm and took two steps forward. He bent down and picked up the crutch.

  “Next time,” he said in his English-accented French, “don’t drop your stick. Another man might not have understood this was an act and would be less forgiving.”

  “M’sieur.” The boy looked again at the coin in his hand before taking the crutch from Robert and scampering away without any sign of disability.

  “You knew he was faking the limp?” Minnie asked.

  Robert shrugged. “It seemed likely.”

  “And you gave him—what did you give him anyway?”

  “A twenty-franc coin. I doubt he’s ever seen one in his life.”

  Twenty francs. That was worth almost a pound. For a street urchin, that sort of bounty was worth months and months of begging.

  “Why, when you knew he was lying?”

  He gave her a little smile. “Frauds need a helping hand as much as anyone else. I know all about that.” He glanced toward the street where the boy had vanished. “Especially when it’s done like that.”

  “You know about telling lies for money?” Minnie felt a smile come over her. She stood, brushed the crumbs off her gown, and strode over to him.

  “Indeed. Some of my first memories are about lying for money.” He tucked her hand into the crook of his arm and they began to walk. On the left, a wrought iron rail separated their path from the Seine. The river drifted by. Minnie refused to believe its waters could be brown and dingy.

  “Really?” She huffed in disbelief. “What trinket did you want to buy?”

  “No trinkets.” He flashed her a smile and patted her arm. “It’s rather an amusing story. You see, my parents married under…odd circumstances. My father convinced my mother he loved her. She believed him; my father could be most convincing when he put his mind to it. But her father knew a bit more of the world, and he suspected that dukes didn’t fall into passionate, life-altering love with wool-merchants’ daughters who had enormous dowries. Not on a few weeks’ acquaintance, at any rate. So instead of handing over a vast sum of money to my father upon their marriage, he put it all in trust, to be paid out so long as my mother was happy.”

  Robert had retrieved an extra bag from the baker. He opened it now and passed her a bun—crisp and golden and warm—and took out one for himself. This he began to apportion into pieces, tossing them over the iron rail for the ducks.

  “This does not sound like the beginning to an amusing story,” Minnie said dubiously.

  “Well, the background information isn’t very funny, I suppose.” Robert frowned and broke off a piece of crust. “But the rest of it is, I promise. In any event, to summarize: my father hadn’t any real money of his own, and my mother controlled the rest. So when she came to visit—”

  “Your mother would visit? Was she not living with you?”

  “No, most of the time she was not. I don’t think I saw her for the first three years of my life.” He scratched his chin. “If she’d been living with my father, the trust would have paid out—those were the terms. My mother controlled the money by her presence. She didn’t want my father to get a penny, and so when he told her that she would have to live with him in order to see me, she told him to go to hell.”

  Minnie thought back over her conversations with his mother. She’d said all sorts of things, but not this. It explained a great deal, though. Far too much, in fact. This was not turning out to be anything like an amusing story. Minnie blinked at her husband, but he had a little smile on his face, as if this were all part of some joke. He tossed bread blithely in the air and grinned when the ducks squabbled for it.

  “So, in any event—”

  “Wait just one moment. Your father didn’t let your mother see you for the first three years of your life?”

  “Correct.
” He frowned and broke off another bit of crust from his bun. “He didn’t have any control over the money under the terms of the trust, but legally he did control me. So…” He shrugged again, as if this were perfectly normal. “One can’t blame him for trying.”

  One couldn’t? Minnie could.

  But Robert simply threw bread into the water and kept talking.

  “By the time I was four,” he continued, “they’d worked out an arrangement. My mother’s father gave a handful of factories to my father so he could keep his worst creditors at bay.” He glanced at Minnie. “Graydon Boots was one of those. In return, my mother was allowed to see me for a few days twice a year. I would desperately try to be good when she came—so good that this time, she wouldn’t leave. My father, naturally, supported me in these endeavors. When I was six years old, his brilliant plan was this: I would pretend that I couldn’t read, presumably because in my father’s straitened circumstances, he could not afford a tutor. He was sure that would break her down.”

  Minnie cleared her throat, which seemed strangely tight. “Did it?”

  “Almost. I played the most pitiful urchin ever. I pretended not to know my letters. I stared blankly at pages and shrugged. I started to recite my alphabet, but skipped letters L through P. I counted to one hundred for her and transposed the sixties with the seventies. I added five and six and came up with thirteen.” He grinned at her. “And my father was right—it almost worked. After a few days, she dashed off a letter to her father, ordering him to send another trunk with her things. She ordered a primer from a local shop. And every afternoon, she would take me in her parlor, and she’d sit me down and we would go through the alphabet. She was very severe about it—regimented, even. We were on a strict schedule.”

  “You did…” She couldn’t contemplate a duke’s son not knowing how to read at that age, but then, she couldn’t contemplate a duke growing up and never seeing his mother, either. “You did already know your letters, didn’t you?”

  He gave her a nonchalant shrug. “Naturally. There wasn’t much else for me to do besides read. After three days of pretending ignorance, I was already chafing at the bit, wondering when I could get back to finishing Robinson Crusoe. But it was working—she hadn’t left yet. When we got to M-is-for-Mouse, I changed it to M-is-for-Mama. She gave me this look—this stern look with her lips pressed together—and demanded to know why I’d said that. I told her it was because I didn’t want any mice about, but I liked having her there.”

  How he could smile, when Minnie’s heart was breaking, she didn’t know.

  But he shook his head in what looked like quiet amusement.

  “Apparently, that was slathering on the need for pity a little too thickly, because she shook her head and then said that today, we would not be learning the alphabet any longer; she had some very important, very private letters to write, and I was going to have to play quietly by myself. She handed me some paper and a pencil, and told me to amuse myself drawing.”

  “I can’t believe that didn’t melt her heart.”

  “Oh, no. By that time, my mother was a hardened soul. And she knew just how to appeal to me. Very important, very private letters—she repeated that twice. Naturally, I could not resist the urge to get a peek at them. She wrote them sitting next to me, while I pretended to sketch birds. Her very important, private letter said, over and over again, ‘Clermont should go bugger himself.’”

  He grinned at that memory—of his mother writing profanity about his father—while Minnie looked on aghast.

  “Of course I asked her, ‘What is a bugger?’ Thus was my childish attempt at fraud revealed. I had just proven that I could read. She didn’t say a word. She simply stood up and left the room. She and my father had the most frightful row after that. I believe that she actually threw things at him that time around. And I didn’t see her again for almost eighteen months.”

  Minnie didn’t know what to say. He stood there, smiling, as if he’d just related a funny little story—like the anecdote Minnie might have told about the time she got lost when she was seven and put her hand in another man’s pocket, thinking he was her father.

  “God,” he said, “I can’t believe what an unworthy little cad I was.”

  How could he smile about his father conscripting him at the age of six, using him as a weapon against his own mother? How could he laugh about his mother walking away from him? How could he pretend there was anything amusing about the fact that his father took a newborn babe away from its mother in order to get more money out of her?

  “You know, Robert,” she said, choking on the words, “there is really nothing funny about that story. Nothing.”

  Slowly, the smile on his face faded. “You didn’t think so? But…” He frowned and rubbed his chin. “Not the first part, I understand that. And…and I suppose it’s not precisely a story that ends happily. I hadn’t thought of that, but I’m so used to the ending that I think nothing of it. But the middle bits—surely those were funny. Weren’t they?”

  “When you changed the primer to M-is-for-Mama, did you mean it?”

  For one second, there wasn’t the slightest hint of amusement in his eyes. He looked so old, the tiny lines at the corner of his mouth gathering as his lips pinched together. And yet he also looked young—impossibly young, as if his six-year-old self were still looking out from behind his eyes, watching his mother walk away.

  “Maybe.” He looked away from her, and then looked back. That urbane amusement was back on his face now, but it looked lopsided on him—as if he were trying to wear a hat that didn’t quite fit.

  “That’s why it’s not funny.”

  “There are funny elements to it,” he protested. “Adding five and six and getting thirteen?”

  His hand had cinched itself more tightly about her elbow. He didn’t throw the next piece of bread to the ducks so much as hurl it so hard that one of them quacked in surprise and darted away before realizing that it was fleeing food. And perhaps that was when she realized how much it meant to him. It had to be a funny story to him. This little tale about telling lies at his father’s behest and wanting, so desperately, for his mother to stay—this was a story about the breaking of his child’s heart.

  This was the man who had understood that marriage to the expected noble’s daughter would end in regret and recrimination if it came out that he intended to abolish the peerage. He knew in his bones what it meant to have a wife walk away from him, and he’d rejected the possibility—rejected it, even though it would mean gossip and scandal, even though it would certainly mean that the highest sticklers in society would never accept his family.

  He didn’t look at her. “That bit about skipping portions of the alphabet? Surely that’s at least a little amusing?”

  This was a man who wanted his wife to love him, but who would not even allow himself to hope for it. And that was when Minnie realized that she had something he’d never had. She’d been loved. Her father had adored her up until the moment when his pending conviction had broken his spirit. She had happy memories, years of them, with him. After he’d disappeared, her great-aunts had swept in. She might not agree with everything they’d told her, but they’d loved her. They’d treated her as if she mattered. She took love for granted.

  Lucky her.

  He had to laugh at what had happened. If he didn’t laugh, he would cry. She couldn’t have understood it until just that moment—because at that moment, she knew that she had to laugh, too, or burst into tears on his behalf. He looked at her with such urgency that she could not bear to force the issue.

  “Yes,” she said quietly, entwining her fingers with his. “I do see that, now. It is funny.”

  Those first days in Paris seemed like jewels to Robert. As if he’d lived all his life behind clouds and the sun had come out in blinding force.

  They woke. They walked. They visited museums and places of interest; they found their way back to their rooms in the afternoon and made love. Boxes at the o
pera went unused in favor of more time in bed.

  “You said you thought of me on my knees,” she said one afternoon. “How on earth would that work?”

  So he’d explained. And then she’d insisted on trying it—and after a little instruction, trying had turned into his cock hard in her mouth, his hands on her shoulders. He’ gasped as she took his length until he spilled. After that, it had only seemed fair to return the favor. It had taken him a little longer to grasp the gist of it, but it was worth the effort.

  If you’re good in bed, I might fall in love with you.

  He was determined to become good, and he had years of fantasies to explore.

  Sometimes, the things they imagined proved anatomically impossible, and they ended up collapsed in a laughing heap on the floor. Sometimes—like the time he bent her over the desk—it was very, very good.

  On their fourth night in Paris, he put rubies around her neck—just rubies, after he’d taken everything else off—and had his way with her.

  Afterward, she fingered the gems around her neck. “Are these supposed to be a bribe?” she asked. “You should realize by now that you don’t have to offer me anything to get me in your bed.”

  “I would realize that,” he said cheerfully, “but luckily for you, lust makes me stupid. You get rubies.”

  She had only smiled.

  But she’d been right. They had been a bribe. Not for her favors; he didn’t like the idea of paying for sex as a married man any more than he had as a bachelor. But by this point, he wanted her to love him. He wanted it with a deep yearning that he couldn’t have explained. He almost told her himself that night, that he loved her. But they had nearly a week left. There was time for love to come. No need to rush at all.

  He fell asleep with his arm around her and woke the next morning in the same position. The rubies at her throat winked at him in the early light, a blood-red portent of things to come.

  He stared at them and shook his head to clear it of such a strange, unsettling thought.

  And that’s when someone pounded on the door.

  Minnie woke to a cold draft and the memory of a ruckus. She opened her eyes; their bedchamber was empty. She blinked and looked around. It was only then that she heard the murmur of voices in the main salon. She got up, found a robe, and made her way to the door between the rooms.

  There was a garçon standing there. He handed Robert, who was also encased in a dressing gown, a plain brown envelope. Robert slipped him a coin. “Wait outside in case there’s a need for an immediate reply.”

  He shut the door.

  “A telegram?” Minnie asked. “I hope it’s not bad news.” The rubies he’d put on her last night seemed heavy on her throat, out of place while she was garbed in nothing but an embroidered outer covering.

  Robert slid his index finger under the flap to break the seal. “I’m going to guess it’s from Carter, my business manager. It can wait until after—” He spoke carelessly, flipped open the envelope, and glanced at the paper inside.

  Minnie watched all the color wash from his face. He stared at the message, his lips moving softly. Finally he looked up.

  “It’s from Sebastian.”

  “Mr. Malheur? Your cousin, the scientist?”

  His breath hissed in, snake-like. “That very man.”

  “Robert, what is it?”

  He was still staring at the page. His face seemed hewn from marble—hard and white. “Tell Rogers to pack my things.” He spoke in cold, clipped tones. “He can have them on the next train.” He pulled a watch from his pocket, frowned at it, and then opened the door to the waiting garçon. “Send a reply: ‘I’ll be there immediately.’” He tossed another coin to the man, who disappeared.

  Robert still hadn’t met Minnie’s eyes, but he turned around. “I must be on the nine-thirty express. That gives me almost an hour. I haven’t time to—”

  “What’s wrong?”

  She had to follow after him into the dressing room, trotting to keep up with his long strides.

  The snarl on his lips softened momentarily as he looked down at her. “You stay,” he said more gently. “You’ve shopping to do, and there’s no need—”

  She put her hand on his chest. “No need but the fact that I gave you my vows just days ago. Through better or worse, Robert. Do you think you’ll be running off on me already, leaving me here to guess what has happened? If you’re leaving, I’m coming.”

  She had thought he might argue, but he simply shook his head and rang for his valet.

  “What is it?” she asked again.

  “It turns out they’ve charged a suspect with criminal sedition for distribution of my handbills,” Robert said. “Found—ha. Arrested. Indicted.”

  “What? They’ve charged you in your absence?”

  “No. Not me.” His lips curled even more. “The man they have is innocent, but that won’t stop them from pursuing the matter. Perhaps they think to embarrass me, without thinking that they’re destroying the life of a man who is, and always has been, my superior.”

  “Who? Who is it?”

  His face contorted, and his hands gripped hers. “Oliver Marshall,” he said. “My brother.”