A Secret Affair

Chapter 15

HANNAH’S GUESTS were to be with her for three full days. She had deliberately not overorganized the activities for those days. Everyone, after all, had come from London, where the Season was in full swing and entertainments abounded. Everyone, she felt, would enjoy simply relaxing for a few days in quiet rural surroundings.

Nevertheless, some activities had been arranged for the first day—a morning walk into the village for those who wanted to see the church and get some exercise, a leisurely afternoon picnic down at the lake, an evening of cards with a few neighbors and music provided by various members of their own group. They were fortunate that the weather remained fine and warm.

It had been a successful day, Hannah felt when it was over and the last neighbors had been waved on their way. Sir Bradley Bentley, her friend and frequent escort during her marriage—his grandfather had been the duke’s friend—had flirted all day with Marianne Astley, and Julianna Bentley had spent much of her time in company with Lawrence Astley. Just as Hannah had hoped. Not that she had tried to play matchmaker, but she had wanted to invite Sir Bradley after she and Barbara had had tea with him one morning on Bond Street, and he had a sister who had made her come-out last year but still had no steady beau. And her close friend was Marianne Astley, who had a brother in his middle twenties.

Her house party needed some young people, Hannah had decided. Young, unattached adults, that was. And so she had invited all four of them.

All her other guests seemed comfortable with one another, though some of them had been strangers to one another at the start. There were the Parks, the Newcombes, Mr. and Mrs. Finch, who had been the duke’s neighbors all their lives and all their parents’ lives before them, and the aforementioned young people. And Barbara, of course. And Constantine himself and his cousins and their spouses. And ten children and babies.

The third day was designated for the children’s party in the afternoon and would be fairly busy as a consequence, but the second day was left free for whatever the guests wished to do. During the morning Hannah strolled through the flower beds to the east and north of the house with Mrs. Finch, the Countess of Merton, and a rather pale-looking Lady Montford. When Hannah, rather alarmed, inquired into her health, she laughed rather ruefully.

“It is nothing to concern you, Your Grace,” she said. “It is not poor health that is causing me to feel a little bilious, but good health. I am to have another baby.”

“Oh,” Hannah said, and was assaulted by a great wave of envy.

“We intended to have another within two years of Hal,” Lady Montford said. “But the powers that be had other ideas. I am glad they have relented at last.”

“You must be my age or even younger,” Hannah said. “Yet you lament having to wait so long for your second child?”

And she had, she realized in some dismay, spoken aloud.

Mrs. Finch was bent over a rosebud, holding it cupped gently in both hands. Lady Merton and Lady Montford turned to look at Hannah, both with the same expression of … compassion?

“I am thirty,” Hannah added, and then felt even more foolish.

“I was twenty-eight when I married Stephen last year,” the countess said as Lady Montford linked an arm through Hannah’s—startling her considerably. “I was a widow too, Your Grace. And I was childless, with four dead babies to mourn. I will forever mourn them, but I have Jonathan now, and we hope to fill our nursery to overflowing before I am forty. There is always hope even in the darkest moments of despair when we can come dangerously close to losing it.”

Mrs. Finch straightened up.

“I was seventeen when I married,” she said, “and eighteen when I had Michael. Thomas came two years later, Valerie two years after that. I am only twenty-seven now. I love my children dearly, and my husband too, but sometimes I have wicked thoughts about having lost my youth too soon. Perhaps there is no easy road through life. We must each walk our own and make the best of it.”

“Wise words indeed,” Lady Montford said, patting Hannah’s arm.

They strolled onward, enjoying the sight and smell of the flowers, taking a whole hour over it though the gardens were not large.

And Hannah felt … Oh, how did she feel? Blessed? She had been drawn into a group of ladies to chat about the pains and joys of marriage and motherhood and the passing of time. It had been a very brief chat, but she had felt included. In all the years of her married life, she thought, she had been part of society, always in the very midst of large groups of admirers, mostly gentlemen. She could not remember another time, though, when she had strolled in a flower garden arm-in-arm with any woman but Barbara.

And two of these ladies had refused her initial invitation.

“Mmm,” Lady Merton said, breathing in deeply just before they went back inside the house, “this is perfect. I cannot imagine a better way to spend a few days between one grand ball and another.”

“Are you feeling any better?” Hannah asked Lady Montford.

“I am,” she said. “It struck me when we first came outside that perhaps it was foolish to walk among flowers and breathe in their scent. But the air has done me good. I will be perfectly fine for the rest of the day—until tomorrow morning. It is all in a good cause, though. And soon the morning nausea should be over.”

Lady Sheringford was coming downstairs as they stepped inside.

“I have been putting Alex down for a nap,” she explained. “He fell over and scraped his knee and was feeling mightily sorry for himself. The wound has been cleansed and kissed better, his tears have been dried and kissed away, and he is fast asleep. You have a little more color in your cheeks, Kate. Are you feeling better?”

“I am,” Lady Montford said. “Her grace has been showing us the flower beds, and I am quite restored.”

Lady Sheringford’s eyes moved to Hannah, who was thinking how lovely it must be to kiss scraped knees and tear-wet cheeks.

“You really ought to wear colors more often,” she said. “Not that you do not look quite stunning in white. But you look more … Hmm, what is the word?”

“Approachable?” Mrs. Finch suggested, not perhaps with the greatest of tact. “It is what I have been thinking since I saw you in that gorgeous yellow dress yesterday, Your Grace.”

“Well,” Lady Sheringford said. “You look more something. Something good, that is. That particular shade of sage green goes well with your blond hair.”

“We came inside for coffee,” Hannah said, smiling. “Will you join us?”

She was feeling happy, she realized. She had never had women friends, except Barbara, who was usually far away. She had never thought she wanted or needed any. Today she could live with the illusion that these ladies were her friends.

CLOUDS MOVED OVER late in the morning, and a sudden chill wind drove everyone indoors sooner than they might otherwise have come. A sharp shower kept them indoors after luncheon, but no one seemed unduly unhappy about it. The youngest children were taken to the nursery for a sleep, while most of the others went off to the gallery to play some game devised by Mr. Newcombe and the Earl of Sheringford.

A few of the adults sat in the drawing room conversing or in the library reading or writing letters. One or two had disappeared entirely, probably for a rest in their own rooms, Hannah guessed. The largest group was in the billiard room. That was where Hannah went in search of Constantine.

He was not playing. He was standing just inside the door, his arms folded across his chest, watching.

“It is a pity,” she said, “that I have only the one billiard table.”

“You must not fret about that, Your Grace,” Mr. Park said. “I am a far better billiard player when I watch someone else than when I play myself. I never miss a shot, in fact, and all are perfectly brilliant.”

There was general laughter.

“I have come here,” Lady Montford said, “so that I will know if the shots Jasper will claim to have made when I ask him later are actually only a figment of his imagination.”

“My love!” Lord Montford protested from some distance away—she had not tried to lower her voice. “Do I ever exaggerate? Do I ever boast?”

“This is the moment, Kate,” the Earl of Merton advised his sister as he chalked the end of his cue before bending over the table to concentrate upon his shot, “when silence is golden.”

“Well, that was nothing to boast about, Stephen,” Lord Montford said a moment later as the earl missed his shot. “If I cannot do better than that, I will deserve everything derogatory Katherine will have to say about me.”

Hannah touched a hand lightly to Constantine’s sleeve.

“Would you care to come out for a ride?” she asked softly.

“Now? Is it not raining?” He raised his eyebrows, but he looked toward the window to see that indeed it was not and then followed her from the room.

“I always keep riding horses in the stables,” she said when he had closed the door behind them. “I suppose I should ask if anyone else would like to come too, but everyone seems contented doing what they are doing, and I would like to show you something.”

“Just me?” His eyes smiled at her.

“I will ask Barbara to take charge of the tea tray later on,” she said without answering him.

“Just me.” He answered his own question and dipped his head closer to hers. “Lucky me.”

“I will go and change,” she said. “I will see you at the stables in fifteen minutes.”

And she turned to hurry away.

She changed into one of her oldest, plainest riding habits—her favorite, actually. It had been quite a pale blue when it was new. Now it was even paler. She had Adèle twist her hair into a simple knot at the nape of her neck so that it would not push her hat right off her head. She pulled on her riding gloves and looked with some satisfaction into her dressing room mirror. She wore not a single jewel.

It was important that she look like an ordinary person this afternoon, that she not look like the Duchess of Dunbarton, before whom everyone felt it necessary to bow and scrape. She was beginning to long to be ordinary again, but with all the advantages of confidence and discipline and self-acceptance she had learned from the duke. Or, more accurately, from the duke’s love.

She hoped Constantine would appreciate what she had to show him, that he would not be bored or uncomfortable. That he would not misunderstand and think she was nothing but a bleeding heart or, worse, nothing but a maker of grand gestures.

She did not believe he would think either thing. She thought that he of all people would understand. But she was horribly nervous. Her stomach fluttered uncomfortably as she strode across the terrace and along the graveled path to the stables, and she wished she had not eaten so much at luncheon.

For this, she admitted to herself, was why she had wanted him to come here, why she had devised the house party so that it would be unexceptionable to invite him.

This was important to her. His reaction was important.

He was in the stables ahead of her, saddling the horse she usually rode herself, while a groom was fitting her side saddle on another. But Jet was the only horse really large enough for him, she conceded. He had changed into buff riding breeches and a black coat with black riding boots and tall hat.

He looked just at he had looked in Hyde Park the first time she saw him this spring. But different too. He was Constantine now. Her lover. Though, alas, they had not been intimate for a week. And would not be for several more days until they returned to London since she would not show disrespect for her house guests by indulging in a continuation of her affair on her own property. It seemed an interminable amount of time to have to wait. However, her courses had been kind enough to put in an appearance on the very day she left London. They were already behind her for another month.

“Duchess?”

He turned and looked her over from head to toe, and she saw open admiration in his eyes and pursed lips. Strange that, when she was really looking almost dowdy. She returned look for look, even to the pursed lips, and he grinned at her.

“Minx,” he said.

A few minutes later they rode out of the stable yard and set out behind the house and across country rather than keeping to the driveway and the road beyond it, as they would have had to do if they had traveled by carriage. It was not going to rain anymore—at least for a while. The clouds had broken up, and blue sky was taking over.

“Where are we going?” he asked. “Anywhere specific?”

“To Land’s End,” she said. “Oh, we are not going to be galloping all across southern England and down through Devon and Cornwall, you will be relieved to know. Land’s End is the name someone suggested for the dilapidated heap of an old house I bought a few years ago and converted into a very decent home with gardens quite formal enough to satisfy the most exacting of proponents of art over nature. The first suggestion was Life’s End, but no one would vote for it, and I insisted that all the first tenants of the house must agree upon a name. They liked Land’s End, though, when the tenant who suggested it explained that beyond the land was the eternal peace of the eternal deep, though I have not always seen the sea quite that way myself—I never did learn to swim. I did not have a vote, however, and so Land’s End it is.”

“Is this an elderly persons’ home?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said.

They rode in silence for a short while.

“This is the cause for which you sold your jewels?” he asked.

“It is,” she said.

“You love elderly people?” he asked.

She smiled. “I do. I loved one elderly gentleman very dearly. He had everything he needed for his physical comfort at the end of his long days. Thousands do not.”

“You are a fraud, Duchess,” he said.

“Of course I am not,” she said briskly. “What were all those jewels to me except a reminder that I was loved dearly for ten years? I have enough left to remind me more than sufficiently. Not that I need any reminder at all except my memories.”

They were coming to open country, she could see, a stretch of flat land that she always looked forward to whenever she rode to Land’s End.

His head was turned toward her. She did not return his look. She was not a bleeding heart. She loved those people. She had come here every few days over the past year, before she went to London after Easter, and so had eased her grief. She had come here five days ago after returning. She had come because she wanted to come, because she needed to come, not because she expected applause or adulation. Good heavens, the very idea!

“This particular stretch of the way is tedious if walked across,” she said, “and exhilarating when taken at a gallop. Do you see that tall pine tree in the distance?”

She pointed with her whip.

“The one with the crooked top?” he said.

“I’ll race you to it,” she said and was off before the words were all out of her mouth.

If she had been on Jet’s back, she would have had a fighting chance, even hampered as she was by her side saddle. But of course she was on Clover, who liked a respectable gallop but did not have a competitive bone in her body. They lost the race quite ignominiously.

Constantine was grinning at her when she came up to him.

“That will make you think twice before challenging me to another race, Duchess,” he said. “We did not even agree upon a prize before you tried to gain an unfair advantage with the element of surprise. That means, I believe, by international law, that I am able to choose my own prize.”

“Is there such a thing as international law?” she asked, laughing at him. “What would you choose if indeed the law were on your side?”

“Hold still,” he said, “while I think about it.”

And he rode up alongside her until his knee dug into the side of her thigh, leaned across the gap between them, and kissed her on the lips. Jet snorted and sidled away.

It was perhaps the briefest and least satisfactory of all their kisses. But it was the one that informed Hannah very clearly indeed of what she had known for some time now, though she had avoided admitting it.

She was in love.

Which was very careless and incautious of her. And might well cause some pain at the end of the Season if she had not succeeded in falling out of love by then.

But she could not feel as sorry as she knew she ought. She felt as if eleven years of her life had somehow rolled away and left her young again and happy again—and in love again. Not in love with love this time, though, but with a real man, whom she liked and could actually love if she let herself. Totally committed, all the way through to the soul love, that was.

She would not be that foolish.

But, oh, to have a lover, and to be in love for the whole of a springtime—it made her want to leap from Clover’s back and dance in the meadow beneath the pine tree, her face and her arms lifted to the sun.

How wonderful it was to be young.

“You may smile,” he said. “That was the sorriest prize ever awarded the victor of a horse race, Duchess. Before this day is over, I am going to demand a far more satisfactory kiss than that.”

She gave him her best haughty duchess look.

“You have to catch me first, Mr. Huxtable,” she said. “But look. You can just see Land’s End from here.”

She pointed ahead and they moved off together, side by side, at a walk this time. It was visible through a gap in the trees, a solid, quite unremarkable manor that was in many ways as dear to her as Copeland.

“How did you finance Ainsley?” she asked him.

“I am not poverty stricken,” he said with a shrug. “I was left well provided for.”

“But not well enough, I would be willing to wager,” she said. “I know something of what it costs to finance such a project. Did your brother help? You said the whole thing was his idea.”

She thought he would not answer. He looked dark and brooding again for some time. And then he laughed softly.

“The truly funny thing is,” he said, “that we did it exactly as you did, Duchess. Except that you did it with Dunbarton’s knowledge and blessing, however grudgingly given. We did not consult Jon’s guardian, who would most certainly not have given his blessing. That was our uncle before he died, and then Elliott, who had a far sterner sense of duty and a far more eagle eye.”

“You say we,” she said. “But was it Jonathan’s idea or yours to sell his valuables?”

He turned his head to look steadily at her.

“The Huxtable jewels were not mine to sell, Duchess, or even to suggest selling,” he said. “They were Jon’s, and though I was not his official guardian, I felt a great responsibility toward him. He was not by any means stupid, but sometimes he saw things differently from the way other people did. Once he discovered the truth about our fa—Ah, dash it all! But I suppose you had guessed. Once he discovered the truth about someone he had loved during life and mourned after death, he lost all his joy and all his interest in food and sleep for days on end. I had never seen him like it before. And he would not speak to me about his pain. He would only swear me over and over again to secrecy. No one must know about our father. And yet the suffering he had caused must not be ignored either. And Jon was very aware that he was now Earl of Merton, that putting everything to rights was his duty. I could not persuade him otherwise, though I had felt the same way for years, quite impotently, I might add.”

“I wish I had known him,” Hannah said softly. “Jonathan, I mean.”

“And then one morning,” Constantine said, “he came bounding into my bedchamber and shook me awake—literally. He was bursting with excitement, bubbling over with it, giggling with it. He had concocted his grand idea. And nothing would satisfy him until he had found a way of making his dream a reality. I was the one chosen to do it all for him. There was no point in arguing with Jon when he made up his mind about something important to him, Duchess—and this was more important to him than anything else in his life. He was as stubborn as a—”

“Mule?” she said. “Could he have been like his elder brother by any chance?”

“Ten times worse,” he said. “The only way I could have stopped him was to run off and tell tales to my uncle behind his back. But I wanted what Jon wanted too, you see, and I was too weak to do what was undoubtedly the right thing. For years I had been sickened by what Jon had just discovered. I knew about it all my life, it seems. I watched my mother dwindle with unhappiness and the repeated loss of children, and my father debauch everything in skirts. He was not a pleasant man, Duchess. And he hated Jon, whom he called an imbecile, sometimes to his face. I beg your pardon. One ought not to say anything aloud against one’s parents. Anyway, none of the jewels I sold for Jon was part of the entailed property. But several of them had been in the family for a few generations, and all were costly and fully documented. A good case could have been made to say that Jon had no right to dispose of those pieces without the express permission of his legal guardian. And even if he had lived to his majority I daresay the powers that be would have declared him incompetent to make his own decisions unaided.”

“He was stealing from himself, then?” she said.

“He knew what he was doing,” he said. “Jon was no fool. Sometimes I believe he was the only truly wise one among us. What is more important? Those ancient jewels locked up in a safe at Warren Hall, or those people at Ainsley?”

She laughed. “You would never be able to guess my answer, would you?”

They were getting close to Land’s End. There was just a meadow to cross and then the wide lawn to one side of the house.

“You have told no one all this?” she asked. “No one but me?”

“No,” he said. “Not even the king.”

“And so everyone thinks you are a villain,” she said, “who stole from his helpless brother in order to purchase a home for himself in Gloucestershire, where he lives in the lap of luxury.”

He shrugged.

“I believe,” he said, “Elliott must have been as closemouthed as I have, except perhaps with Vanessa. If he had not, I do not suppose Stephen or his sisters would still be on speaking terms with me, would they?”

“Or trying to protect you from me,” she agreed.

He looked at her and smiled before stooping to open the gate leading from the meadow into the park. They walked their horses through, and he shut the gate behind them.

“Perhaps,” she said, “you ought to tell the Earl of Merton what you have told me. He seems to me to be a gentle, honorable soul.”

He raised one mocking eyebrow and shot her a glance.

“You believe he would forgive me?” he asked.

“I believe,” he said, “he might assure you that forgiveness is not necessary. It is Jonathan he needs to forgive rather than you, anyway, is it not?”

He nudged his horse to a slightly faster pace and moved ahead of her until she made the effort to catch up.

“That is what you fear most?” she asked. “That no one will be able to forgive your brother? Perhaps you need to give them more credit.”

He turned to look fully at her again, and his features looked very taut, his eyes very black.

“Have you told anyone about this?” he asked her, nodding toward the house. “Anyone except me?”

“No,” she said.

“Why not?” he asked. “Why did you not invite all your guests to come here this afternoon?”

“I have a reputation to protect, Constantine,” she said.

“Precisely,” he told her. “I do too. Devil and duchess. We deserve each other.”

In the eyes of the world? Or … in truth?

She did not ask the questions.

“If we were not so close to the house,” he said, “I might begin on all the reasons you ought to go back home, Duchess. To Markle, that is.”

She leaned forward to pat Clover’s neck as they stopped outside the stables and a groom hurried out to assist them.

“Point taken,” she said.