A Secret Affair

Chapter 12

SINCE IT WAS RAINING the next day, Constantine spent most of the morning writing to Harvey Wexford, his manager at Ainsley. There were a few questions he needed to answer and a few minor details he needed to comment upon. More important—and something he did every week—there were all sorts of private little messages to send to various residents at Ainsley. He might leave their management and training and well-being in Wexford’s capable and compassionate hands with every confidence that things would run perfectly smoothly, but he did not forget his people when he was away from them, and he was determined that they know it.

There were fifth birthday greetings to send to Megan, young daughter of Phoebe Penn, for example—and the book he went out to buy her before luncheon since the child, together with her mother, was learning to read. And there were congratulations to Winford Jones, the young ex-thief, who was deemed skilled enough as a blacksmith to take a position with someone looking for an assistant in a Dorsetshire smithy. And further congratulations to Jones and Bridget Hinds, who were going to marry before they left—taking young Bernard, Bridget’s son, with them. And another book for Bernard since at the age of seven he could already read. And commiserations to Robbie Atkinson, who had fallen from the hay loft and broken his ankle. And get-well wishes to the cook, who had taken the unprecedented step of remaining in her bed for two whole days with a severe head cold, though she had ruled her kitchen with an iron thumb from that bed.

Constantine spent the afternoon at the races with some of his male acquaintances since the weather had cleared up somewhat, and the evening at a soiree given by Lady Carling, Margaret’s mother-in-law, on Curzon Street. That was another of those occasions on which he was forced to spend time at the same function as Vanessa and Elliott, but since Lady Carling had opened up more than one room for her guests, they were able to occupy different rooms from one another most of the time and effectively ignore one another’s existence.

Constantine thought of Hannah’s suggestion last night that he talk to Elliott at last—so that he might be less unhappy. He drew some amusement from imagining how Elliott would react if he were to seek him out and suggest that they sit down and talk out their differences right here and now.

There was nothing to talk about. Elliott believed the very worst of him, and Constantine did not care.

Ass and mule.

Two sides of the same coin.

It really was as simple as that.

Hannah was not at the soiree.

Constantine left early, considered going to White’s for a while, and went home to bed instead. Having a mistress could do that to a man—it could make him choose sleep over his friends at night when the opportunity presented itself.

He called at Dunbarton House the following morning. He half expected that the ladies would be either still in bed or else out shopping. But they were at home. The duchess’s butler, who had gone to see if indeed they were, showed him into the library, which was an unexpected setting in which to find the duchess, though she had a book open on her lap, he noticed, while her friend was seated at the desk, probably writing a letter to her vicar.

The duchess closed her book, set it aside, and got to her feet.

“Constantine,” she said, coming toward him, one hand extended.

“Duchess.” He bowed over her hand, and for once she allowed him to raise the back of it to his lips. “Miss Leavensworth.”

That lady set down her pen and turned toward him, her cheeks unnaturally pink.

“Mr. Huxtable,” she said gravely.

“Miss Leavensworth,” he said, “I wish you to know that I asked you to dance with me at the Kitteridge ball because I wished to dance with you. My ill-mannered probing for information about the duchess’s roots was an afterthought and an ignominious one. I do beg your pardon for upsetting you.”

“Thank you, Mr. Huxtable,” she said. “It was a pleasure to dance with you.”

“And I have not forgotten,” he said, “that you hope to see the Tower of London before you return home to Markle, and that the duchess has not been there for ages. The weather is much improved today. Indeed, I do believe the sun is about to force its way through the clouds. Would you care to come there with me this afternoon? And perhaps to Gunter’s afterward for ices?”

“Ices?” Miss Leavensworth’s eyes widened. “Oh, I have never had one, but I have heard that they are simply heavenly.”

“Then definitely to Gunter’s afterward,” he said. He looked at Hannah.

She would say, of course, that they had another engagement this afternoon.

“We will be ready at half past twelve,” she said instead.

By which she probably meant a quarter to one.

“I will not keep you any longer, then,” he said, “from your reading and your letter writing.”

And he inclined his head to both and took his leave without further ado.

She had been wearing a plain dress of pale blue cotton, one shade lighter than her eyes, he remembered as he strode out of the square. No jewelry. And her hair had been caught back in a simple knot at the nape of her neck.

Plain and unadorned.

She had looked achingly lovely.

The duchess, that was.

She looked more her usual self when he arrived outside her door again promptly at half past twelve. He had his carriage with him this time as it would accommodate the three of them in more comfort than his curricle would have done, and it really was quite a distance to the Tower.

Both ladies were ready. Perhaps as a matter of sheer principle the duchess would have kept him waiting if the outing had involved her alone, but it did not, and Miss Leavensworth’s face was alive with eager anticipation. And the Duchess of Dunbarton, Constantine thought, loved her friend.

There was much to see at the Tower. Neither lady wished to see the old dungeons or the torture chambers, though, or the place and instruments of execution. The duchess, in fact, shuddered with what looked like very genuine horror when a yeoman of the guard suggested that they might enjoy the displays.

They went to view the menagerie instead and spent a considerable amount of time there gazing at the unfamiliar wild animals, especially the lions.

“How splendid they are,” Miss Leavensworth said. “I can see why they are known as the kings of the jungle. Can’t you, Hannah?”

But the duchess was not so easily pleased.

“But where is the jungle?” she asked. “Poor things. How can they be kings in a cage? It would be better to be a humble rabbit or tortoise or mole and be free.”

“But I daresay they are well fed,” Miss Leavensworth said. “And they are sheltered from the worst of the elements here. And they are much admired.”

“And of course,” the duchess said, “the admiration of others makes up for a multitude of sins.”

“I am glad I have seen them,” Miss Leavensworth said firmly, refusing to be deterred by the misgivings of her friend. “I have only been able to read about them in books until now and see drawings of them. And books never take account of smell, do they? Whew!”

“Shall we go and see the Crown Jewels?” Constantine suggested.

Miss Leavensworth was enthralled by them. And as coincidence would have it, her fiancé’s relatives, with their children, came there to look at them less than five minutes after they had arrived there. There were exclamations of surprise and delight and some hugs, and she had to introduce Mr. and Mrs. Newcombe and Pamela and Peter Newcombe to Constantine—the duchess had met them a few mornings ago when they had fetched Miss Leavensworth for the visit to Kew.

“I need fresh air,” the duchess announced after a few more minutes. “Constantine is going to take me up to the battlements of the White Tower, Babs, and now is the perfect time for us to go since you are terrified of heights. We will come back here in a short while.”

“We will remain with Barbara for as long as you need to see the view, Your Grace,” Mrs. Newcombe assured her. “Do take your time. All we have left to see is the dungeons, at the children’s insistence, and there is no hurry.”

The duchess took Constantine’s arm, and they climbed to the top of the White Tower together—the highest point apart from the four turrets at its corners.

“Tonight?” he asked as they went.

“Yes,” she said. “I will need it. I am to attend a dinner and reception at St. James’s Palace this evening and it is certain to be a dead bore. But when one receives a royal summons, you know, one does not reply that it does not suit one’s purposes to attend, even if one is the Duchess of Dunbarton. Barbara is to dine with the Parks. You may send your carriage at eleven.”

They stepped out onto the battlements of the Tower to find that all the clouds had moved off, leaving blue sky and sunshine in their place.

The duchess opened her parasol and raised it above her head. She was wearing a bonnet today, tied securely beneath her chin. It was just as well. There was a significant breeze up here.

They walked all around the battlements, admiring the various views over the city and the countryside beyond before coming to a stop when they were facing the River Thames.

She tipped back her parasol and lifted her face to the sky. One of the ravens for which the Tower was famous was flapping about up there.

“Do you ever think,” she asked, “that it would be wonderful to fly, Constantine? To be all alone with the vastness and the wind and the sky?”

“The dimension man has not conquered?” he said. “It would be interesting to see the world from a bird’s perspective. There are, of course, hot air balloons.”

“But one would still be constrained,” she said. “I want wings. But never mind. This is quite high enough for now. Is it not lovely up here?”

He turned his head to smile at her. One did not often hear such unguarded enthusiasm on the duchess’s lips—or see her face so bright with animation. She had leaned her arms on the parapet and was gazing out toward the river. Her parasol was propped against the wall.

“Or perhaps I should sail away to some distant, exotic land,” she said. “Egypt, India, China. Have you ever longed to go?”

“To escape from myself?” he said.

“Oh, not from yourself,” she said. “With yourself. You can never leave yourself behind, wherever you go. It was one of the first things the duke taught me after we were married. I could never escape the girl I had been, he told me. I could only make her into a woman in whose body and mind I felt happy to be.”

And yet she acted as though she had escaped that girlhood. She would not even go back to the home and people she had left behind when she married Dunbarton.

“I briefly thought of going to sea as a young man,” he said. “But I would have been gone for months, even years, at a time. I could not be away from Jon so long.”

“The brother you hated?” she said.

“I did not—” he began.

“No,” she said. “I know you did not. You loved him more than you have loved anyone else in your life. And you hated him because you could not keep him alive.”

He leaned his arms on the parapet beside her. Some shallow woman she was turning out to be. What had made her so perceptive?

“Even now,” he said, “I often feel as though I had abandoned him. I will go a whole day—sometimes more—without thinking about him. I go to Warren Hall occasionally just to visit him. He is buried beside the small chapel in the park. It is a peaceful place. I am glad about that. I go to talk to him.”

“And to listen to him?” she said.

“That would be absurd,” he told her.

“No more absurd than to talk to him,” she pointed out. “I think he is alive in your heart, Constantine, even when you are not consciously thinking about him. I think he will always be there. And he is a good part of you.”

He leaned farther out to see down, and then looked toward the river again.

“This is foolishness,” he said. “I never talk about Jon. Why do I do it with you?”

“Did he know,” she asked, “about Ainsley?”

What was it about her? He never talked about Ainsley either. He heaved a deep sigh.

“Yes,” he said. “It was his idea—not the gambling, of course, but the purchase of a safe home for women and children who were not wanted anywhere else, a place where they could work and train for something more permanent in the future. He was so excited by the idea that sometimes he could not get to sleep at night. He wanted to see it all for himself. But he died before there was anything tangible to see.”

Her hand, he realized, had moved to cover his on the parapet—and she had removed her glove.

“Was it a hard death?” she asked.

“He fell asleep and did not wake up,” he said. “It was the night of his sixteenth birthday. We had played hide-and-seek for a few hours during the evening, and he had laughed so hard that I daresay he weakened his heart. He told me when I went to blow out his candle for the night that he loved me more than anyone else in the whole world. He told me he would love me forever and ever, amen—a little joke that always afforded him considerable amusement. Forever turned out to be a few hours long.”

“No,” she said. “Forever turned out to be eternal. He loved you forever, as the duke loved me. Love does not die when the person dies. Despite all the pain for the survivor.”

How the devil had all this come about, Constantine wondered. But thank the Lord they were in a public place, even though they appeared to have the battlements all to themselves at the moment. If they had been somewhere private he might have grabbed her and bawled on her shoulder. Which was a mildly alarming thought. Not to mention embarrassing.

He turned his head to look at her. She was gazing back, wide-eyed, unsmiling, minus any of her usual masks.

And he realized that he liked her.

It was not an earth-shattering revelation—or ought not to have been. And yet it was.

He had expected, perhaps, to have all sorts of feelings about the Duchess of Dunbarton when she became his mistress. Simple liking was not one of them.

He covered her hand with his own.

“I daresay,” he said, “Miss Leavensworth and her fiancé’s relatives have exhausted every conversational topic known to man or woman. And I daresay the young people are ready to climb the walls surrounding the crown jewels. We had better go and rescue them—and bear her off for her first ice at Gunter’s.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “How ghastly it would be to arrive there to find it closed for the day. Babs would be inconsolable. She would not admit it, of course. She would assure us both quite cheerfully that she did not mind at all, that the afternoon had been a delight even without her very first ice. She is such a saint.”

He offered his arm as she pulled her glove back on, settled a large diamond ring—or not diamond—on her forefinger, and grasped her parasol.

IT WAS ALMOST MIDNIGHT when Hannah arrived at Constantine’s house. She had not meant to be late—the time for games with him was over, she had decided. But one could not rush away early from St. James’s Palace with the excuse that one had promised to be with one’s lover soon after eleven. Not especially when one had had a private conversation with the king himself for all of ten minutes just as the hands of the clock were crawling upward to that hour.

Constantine had not locked the door. He did open it himself, though, when his carriage pulled up outside. There was no sign of any servants. He must have dismissed them for the night. Hannah did not offer any explanation for her lateness—she would not go that far. She merely wound her arms about his neck and kissed him, and he bore her off to bed without further ado.

A little less than an hour later they were in his sitting room again, he wearing shirt and pantaloons, she in his dressing gown. A tray of tea with plates of bread and butter and cheese stood on the low table between them.

She could grow accustomed to this, she thought—this cozy companionship after the exertion and pleasure of making love.

She could grow accustomed to him.

This time next year he would have a different lover, and perhaps she would too, though she was not sure she would wish to repeat the experiment. The thought popped unbidden into her head. There would be a different woman sitting here, perhaps wrapped in this very garment. And he would be there, looking at her with slightly sleepy eyes and relaxed posture and tousled hair.

She frowned—and then smiled.

“The king has not forgotten about Ainsley Park,” she said, “or about you.”

“Good Lord,” he said with a grimace. “You did not remind him, did you?”

“He was complaining about St. James’s Palace, which he heartily dislikes,” she said, “and wondering if Buckingham House might be made into a more imposing royal residence. I suggested the Tower of London and mentioned the fact that I had been there today with my dearest friend and with you as an escort.”

“Prinny as lord of the Tower,” he said. “The mind boggles, does it not? He would probably have Traitor’s Gate opened for business again, and parade all his enemies inside to the dungeons.”

“England would be an empty country,” she said. “There would be no one left to run the government, except the king himself. The halls of Parliament would be left to the bats and the ghosts. And the Tower would be bursting at the seams.”

They both chuckled at the thought, and Hannah, finished with her buttered bread and cheese and her tea, dug her hands under the cuffs of the opposite sleeves and grasped her arms tightly. None of her dreams and plans over the winter had included them laughing together at treasonous absurdities.

He looked purely handsome when he laughed—especially when he was also sleepy.

“And how did the conversation get from the Tower to Ainsley?” he asked.

“He frowned in thought when I mentioned your name,” she said, “and then seemed to remember who you were. A dashed shame, he said, that you could not have been Earl of Merton, though he was inordinately fond of the current earl. And there was something about you he ought to remember. He dug very deep into his memory, Constantine, and then popped up with the name of Ainsley Park without any prompting at all. He looked just as pleased with himself as if he had pulled a plum out of the Christmas pudding. A wonderful man, he declared—you, that is, Constantine—and he fully intends to offer you some assistance in your charitable endeavors and to honor you personally in some suitable way.”

He shook his head.

“Was he inebriated?” he asked.

“Not to the point of making an idiot of himself,” she said. “But he did drink an alarming amount even when I was looking. I daresay he drank just as much if not more when I was not looking.”

“One must hope, then,” he said, “that he will forget—again.”

“He saw a plump and frumpish matron as he finished speaking,” she said, “and his eyes lit up and he went in pursuit of her. I was totally forgotten and abandoned. I might not have existed. It was very lowering, Constantine.”

“The king’s tastes in women were always eccentric,” he said, “to put a kind spin on them. Peculiar, to be a little less kind. Bizarre, to be truthful. Did everyone else ignore your existence?”

“Of course not,” she said. “I am the Duchess of Dunbarton.”

“That is the spirit, Duchess,” he said, and his very dark eyes smiled at her.

It was very disconcerting and very knee-weakening. None of the rest of his face smiled. Yet she did not feel mocked. She felt—teased. Liked. Did he like her?

And did she like him? Like, as opposed to lust after?

“If you had made off with the crown jewels this afternoon and presented them all to Babs,” she said, “instead of merely buying her an ice at Gunter’s, she would not have been half as delighted.”

“She was pleased, was she not?” he said. “Have you met her vicar? Is he worthy of her?”

“Among other lesser virtues,” she said, “he possesses a special smile, which he saves just for her. And it pierces straight through to her heart.”

They gazed at each other across the low table.

“Do you believe in love?” she asked him. “That kind of love, I mean.”

“Yes,” he said. “I would have said no once upon a time. It is easy to be cynical—life gives one much evidence to suggest that there is nothing else to be and remain honest. But I have four cousins—second cousins—who grew up in the country in genteel poverty and burst upon the social scene with the death of Jon. Country bumpkins, no less, whom I expected to be wild and extravagant and vulgar. I hated them even before I set eyes upon them, especially the new Merton. They turned out to be none of those things, and one by one they all made matches that should have been disastrous. And yet all the evidence points to the conclusion that my cousins have converted their marriages into love matches. All of them. It is unmistakable and extraordinary.”

“Even the cousin who married the Duke of Moreland?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said, “even Vanessa. And yes, I believe in love.”

“But not for yourself?” she asked.

He shrugged.

“Does one have to work at finding and building it?” he asked her. “The experiences of my cousins would seem to suggest that one does. I am not sure I am prepared to put in the effort. How would one know it would not all be in vain? If love arrives in my arms full blown one day, I will be quite happy. But I will not be unhappy if it does not. I am contented with my life as it is.”

And yet it seemed to Hannah that he looked melancholy as he said it. He had, she thought a little wistfully, an enormous amount of love to give to the right woman. A love that would move mountains or universes.

“And you, Duchess,” he said. “You loved when you were a girl and were badly hurt. You loved Dunbarton, but not, I think, in any romantic way. Do you believe in the sort of love Miss Leavensworth has found?”

“When I was nineteen,” she said, “I was in love with being in love, I think. And I was given no chance to discover how deep—or not deep—that love would have gone. All things happen for a purpose—or so the duke taught me, and I believe him. Perhaps discovering Colin and Dawn together was the best thing that ever happened to me.”

Strange, that. She had never consciously thought it before. What if she had not discovered the truth until too late? What would her life be like now? And what if Colin had never loved Dawn? Would she still love him now? Would she be content with her life with him? There was no way of knowing. But she no longer felt the pain of losing him, she realized. She probably had not for a long time. Only the pain of betrayal and rejection. That had lingered.

“Even without the example of Barbara, though,” she said, “I would know that real love exists. I mean that real, once-in-a-lifetime, soul-deep love that happens to a few people but never to most. The duke knew it and told me about it.”

“Dunbarton flaunted a former love before you?” he asked. “If it was former.”

“He was a year into his mourning when I met and married him,” she said. “The worst should have been over and perhaps was. But he never stopped grieving. Never for a moment. It was a love that had endured for more than fifty years, and it was a love that defined his entire life. It enabled him to love me.”

He folded his arms and gazed steadily at her for a while.

“And yet,” he said, “he never married her. And he kept her such a secret that no whisper of her existence ever seems to have reached the ears of the ton.”

“He was the duke’s secretary,” she said, “and remained so all his adult life. And so they were able to be together and live together without anyone remarking upon the fact. They must have been very discreet, though. Even the servants seemed not to know the truth, or else they were so loyal to the duke that they never spoke of what they knew beyond his household. They were loyal. They still are.”

“Dunbarton told you of such things?” he asked her.

“Before we married,” she said, “when he was making clear to me that he had no ulterior motive in marrying me but to take me away and teach me to be a duchess and a proud, independent beauty in the short time remaining to him. He had not been able to take his eyes off me during the wedding, he told me, not because he felt lasciviously toward me but because I looked so like an angel that I surely could not possibly be human. But angels ought not to have their hearts broken by plodding yokels—his words. I was shocked to the roots of my being by his story. I did not even know such a thing existed as what he described. But I believed in his kindness. Perhaps I was foolish—undoubtedly I was. But sometimes it is a good thing to be foolish. He talked freely about the love of his life during our years together. I think it soothed him to be able to do so at last, after so many years of secrecy and silence. And he promised me that one day I would find such a love for myself—though not with someone of my own sex.”

“And you believed him?” he asked.

“I believed in the possibility of it,” she said, “even if not the probability. All is artifice in my world, Constantine. Even me. Especially me. He taught me to be a duchess, to be an impregnable fortress, to be the guardian of my own heart. But he admitted that he could not teach me how or when to allow the fortress to be breached or my heart to be unlocked. It would simply happen, he said. He promised it would, in fact. But how is love to find me, even assuming it is looking?”

She smiled. What a very strange conversation to be having with her lover. She got to her feet and walked around the table.

“But in the meantime,” she said, “I am not waiting around for something that may never happen to me. Taking you as a lover is something I wanted to happen—no, something I decided would happen as soon as my year of mourning was at an end. And for this spring what you have to offer is quite sufficient.”

“You decided even before you returned to London,” he asked her, raising his eyebrows, “that I was to be the one?”

“I did,” she said. “Are you not flattered?”

She undid the sash of his dressing gown, opened it back, and climbed onto the large leather chair with him, straddling him as she did so and bending her head to kiss his lips.

“And so Dunbarton taught you, did he,” he asked, pushing the dressing gown off her shoulders and down her arms, and tossing it to the floor, “always to get what you want?”

“Yes,” she said. “And I have got you.”

She looked directly into his eyes and smiled dazzlingly.

“A puppet on a string,” he said.

“No.” She shook her head. “You had to want it too. And you do. Tell me you do.”

“I cannot just show you?” he asked, and there was a smile lurking in his eyes again.

“Tell me,” she said.

“Vulnerable, Duchess?” He almost whispered against her mouth, causing her to shiver. “I want it. Badly. I want you. Badly.”

And he undid the buttons at his waist, opened back the flap of his pantaloons, grasped her by the hips to lift her above him, and brought her down hard onto him.

Hannah had always found their encounters on his bed almost unbearably pleasurable. This time the almost was missing. She knelt on the chair, her legs on either side of his body, and she rode him as vigorously and heedlessly as he rode her, feeling him hard and deep inside her, hearing the wetness of their coupling, seeing his harsh, dark-complexioned face, as his head rested against the back of the chair, his eyes closed, his hair disheveled.

And when the pain had reached almost to its limit and he should have held her firm and put a stop to it with his own release, it did not end but hurtled onward until it became all the way unbearable—and then fell away suddenly and instantly into such total glory that there were no words even if she had been searching for them.

Only a wordless cry.

And a shivering, shuddering descent against his body and a shoulder to cradle the side of her head and an irresistible urge to sleep.

He held her close until she had almost completed the descent, and then he disengaged from her and lifted her in his arms, somehow managed to wrap his dressing gown about her like a blanket, and carried her through to his bedchamber.

He kissed her before setting her down.

“Tell me it was as good for you as I think it was,” he said.

“You need compliments?” she asked him sleepily. “It was good. Oh, Constantine, it was good.”

He chuckled.

She curled up on the bed and was already well on her way back to sleep before he joined her there and covered them both with the blankets.

Jewels, she thought just before she fell over the barrier into sleep.

The crown jewels she had joked about his stealing for Barbara.

Her own jewels, sold for funds with which to finance the dearest wish of her heart.

His half-stolen jewel converted to cash with which he had gambled and won Ainsley Park.

Whose jewel had it been? Jonathan’s?

To have been sold for what? For the home for unmarried mothers and their children that had been Jonathan’s idea?

Had Jonathan and Constantine between them been up to the same thing as she had? Not just with the one jewel, but perhaps with more?

Was there that degree of similarity between her and Constantine?

All things happen for a purpose, the duke had told her, and she had come to believe for herself.

There are no coincidences, he had also said more than once. She had never quite believed that.

Love would find her one day when she was not looking, he had told her.

She did not expect it. She was afraid to expect it.

But her mind could not cope with so many apparent non sequiturs tumbling about in it.

She slept just as Constantine’s arms came about her and drew her close.