Beguiling the Beauty

CHAPTER 17

Algernon House was magnificent: the marble galleries, the soaring ceilings painted by Italian masters, the library with its collection of fifty thousand volumes, including a Gutenberg Bible and manuscripts by da Vinci.

But what Venetia fell in love with was its vast, beautiful grounds. There was a formal geometric garden anchored by an enormous fountain depicting Apollo and the Nine Muses, a sculpture garden enclosed by ivy-draped walls, and a rose garden that was just beginning to bloom, its air dense with perfume.

The house, with its venerable, weathered sandstone exterior, sat at the edge of a large rolling meadow, just as the land rose into a wooded hill. A shining ribbon of a stream meandered across the meadow, its banks dotted with willows and poplars. A herd of red deer often gathered at the stream; flocks of wild ducks came and went; and occasionally, several Holstein cows would wander into the scene to graze contentedly.

Venetia was well accustomed to the demands of running a household, but she’d never managed an establishment of such scale. Her entire first week, as much as she yearned to explore the grounds for hours upon end, she devoted herself to more pressing tasks instead, learning the house’s rhythms and traditions, meeting with all the upper servants, and wrapping her hands gently but firmly around the reins of her new home.

She also wrote her family daily, describing her waking hours in great detail, so that they would not worry. Or rather, so that they could worry while knowing exactly what was going on in her new life.

In her letters she made very little mention of her new husband: There was not much to say. He spent much of his day in his study. She spent much of her day in her sitting room. The two were in very different parts of the house, and she rarely saw him except at dinner. The dining table was thirty feet long. They each sat at one end. Even without the towering epergnes running down the center of the table, she might need her opera glass to see him properly.

But sometimes, at night, she heard him come into his bedroom.

On their wedding night, after her maid had retired, she’d left her bed and opened the adjoining door a very discreet yet unmistakable crack. She wanted to sleep with him again. After all those hours alone in a private coach, with him close enough to touch and yet so far away, the memories of their nights and days on the Rhodesia warmed her everywhere most inappropriately. Dear God how she longed for him to make love to her again, as a humanitarian mission, if nothing else.

And then she’d waited. He’d come into the room and there had been the usual sounds of a man preparing for bed: splashes of water, plops of garments of various description landing haphazardly, the metallic click of a pocket watch set down on the nightstand.

Suddenly, silence. He’d spied the door, standing ajar in invitation. She licked her lips, wanting him to give in to his weakness, to be overcome by the temptation of her body.

Footsteps, slow and quiet. He came closer and closer to the door, so close that she could almost hear him breathing. More silence, rife with possibilities. Her heart slammed with anticipation of pleasure. Perhaps he might even speak to her afterward.

Perhaps—

The door shut with a calm, deliberate click.

She belatedly realized that without ever intending to, she’d offended him: He’d considered her invitation a nefarious attempt to consolidate her power over him. And if he’d been at all tempted, he’d now be that much more determined to stay away from her.

Still, she listened at night, not exactly with hope, but in suspense nevertheless.

But he stubbornly kept away.

Christian might threaten her with a divorce, but in the meanwhile, he could not stop this marriage from taking over his life.

Confidently she’d stepped into the management of the household. It had taken his stepmother years to win over the servants, but his wife had them eating out of her hands from the very beginning. Part of it could be attributed to her beauty. His staff took absurd pride in her comeliness: This was how a duchess ought to look, and all the other dukes could go cry into their first-growth tea.

But she also courted them adroitly. Both his majordomo and his gardeners had long desired to bring a living vine into the dining room, to rise out of the center of the table and offer his guests the amusement of plucking fresh grapes between courses. Christian had consistently denied them the wish, citing its frivolity. She gave them the blessing to go ahead.

From her own purse, she allocated funds to Mrs. Collins to make improvements to the servants’ hall. Once she learned that Richards was a connoisseur of wine, she initiated the transfer the late Mr. Easterbrook’s sizable collection of vintage claret and champagne into his keeping. To Monsieur Dufresne, the chef, she promised to import a trained pig, so that he could at last hunt for truffles on the estate among the roots of its abundant oaks.

And to the lower servants, she presented new uniforms, along with gold buttons for the men and pearl hairpins for the women, which they could keep or sell as they wished. Outright bribery, in his opinion, but it certainly made her very popular. His spiffily dressed staff, buttons shining, hairpins gleaming, went about their daily tasks with a spring in the steps.

Christian took refuge in the east wing, away from all the energetic changes. The public rooms of the house were in the central block, the family rooms in the west wing. The east wing, long a lonely and somewhat deserted portion of the house, he’d turned into workrooms, an archive that doubled as a secluded study, and a private museum for his collection of fossils and specimen.

Here he dealt with the correspondence from his solicitors and agents, sorted his notes from his American expedition, and wrote his stepmother every other day to reassure her that he was settling very nicely into married life, that soon he’d have truffle with every omelet and harvest his own grapes between soup and roast.

While he was able to avoid his wife with some success during the day, there was no escaping dinner or the polite predinner chitchat she was determined to foist upon him. He didn’t know how she managed it, but every night she stunned him anew with her loveliness. And he could swear each day dinner was served a quarter hour later, so that he must withstand the assault of her beauty that much longer.

The worst, of course, was at night. She left the connecting door ajar at maddeningly unpredictable intervals, sometimes two nights in a row, sometimes not for another four days. When she issued her invitations on consecutive nights, he seethed at her brazenness. When she seemed to lose interest in him, he seethed at her indifference.

He was damned if she did and damned if she didn’t.

The dowager duchess’s advice never quite left Venetia’s ear. But how did one make a man listen when he didn’t want to? And when she couldn’t even get him alone for more than a few minutes every day?

The third time he left his room in the middle of the night, she decided to follow him, keeping a certain distance behind. The house was hushed and still, the coppery flame of his hand candle casting vast shadows. Saints and philosophers, painted upon the ceilings of halls and passages, scowled down at her, as if they, too, did not approve of the underhanded manner with which she’d attached herself to the family.

He went into the east wing. She hadn’t yet penetrated the east wing, knowing he would be displeased by her incursion. But sometimes one must encroach. Indeed, sometimes one must surround the beloved.

But whether out of cowardice or curiosity too long denied, she did not pursue him directly into his study, but instead pushed open the doors of his private museum and found the lamps.

She sighed. She’d overpraised the grounds: This was the most beautiful part of the house.

The museum was fifty feet long and thirty feet wide, with display cases going all around the walls. From the ceiling hung a skeleton of a Haast’s eagle in midflight. The central exhibit was one of fossilized tusks, an enormous pair belonging to a mastodon, a much smaller pair probably from a dwarf Stegodon, and a straight tusk almost twice as long as she was tall that had once been the pride and joy of a gentleman narwhal.

“What are you doing here?”

She glanced over her shoulder. Christian stood in the doorway. She’d only belted a dressing robe over her nightgown; he was dressed more formally in a shirt and a pair of trousers. But the shirt was open at the collar. She had the strongest urge to lick the base of his throat.

He frowned. “I asked you a question.”

“It’s fairly evident that I am ogling—your fossils. What are you doing here?”

“I saw a light on and came to investigate. But I see it’s only you.”

He moved as if to leave.

She turned around and took a deep breath. “Wait. I want to know what exactly Mr. Townsend said to you.”

His gaze swept over her, not a covetous look, but a hard, inscrutable one. “He said, ‘You may yet have your wish, Your Grace. But think twice. Or you may end up like me.’”

You may yet have your wish. “Did he recognize you? He said something to me once about a Harrow player coveting me.”

His jaw worked. “Yes, he recognized me. Did he kill himself?”

After all these years, the question still made her stomach clench. “Yes, with an excess of chloral. He told me that he was going to a friend’s place in Scotland for shooting, but he went to London instead. Three days later, when the agent who’d let us the town house for the Season went to inspect it, he discovered Mr. Townsend in the master’s room, perfectly dressed and quite dead.”

“How did you know it was chloral?”

“The agent found a vial next to his hand. He kept it hidden from the police—he didn’t want anyone to know that a suicide took place in the house—but later he gave it to me.”

“There was no inquest?”

“Fitz was just able to prevent one. He had the police accept that Mr. Townsend died of a brain hemorrhage, and that in the confusion before his death, he wandered back into a house he knew and lay down to rest.”

Christian’s face was impassive. She wondered whether his mind went back to their conversations on the Rhodesia concerning her infelicitous marriage to Tony. “How did you find out?”

“With a visit from Scotland Yard to our house in Kent. And while the police inspector was speaking to me, the new owners of our house came to claim it—it was the first time I’d learned that the house had been sold.”

She’d been stupefied by the shock of sudden eviction, the threat of an inquest, and, above all, the sheer vindictiveness of Tony’s action. Helena even believed that he’d deliberately committed suicide in the manner he had to provoke police interest, to make the ordeal as ugly as possible for Venetia.

“Why did he hate you so?”

She could detect no compassion in Christian’s voice—but no disdain either. “Because he believed that I’d turned him from somebody into a nobody. He’d married me to have a pretty accessory to garner himself more attention, but the pretty accessory stole all the limelight he craved and left him nothing.

“I know it makes no sense at all. I can scarcely credit it myself, a grown man resenting his wife for such a reason. But the notice I attracted maddened him—he wanted everyone’s gaze squarely on himself. To that end, he resolved be become an astoundingly successful investor, so that his friends and acquaintances would stop paying mind to the wife and look to him with envy and admiration. And while he was waiting for that to happen, he’d obtain adoration from other women.”

“Such as the maid he impregnated?”

“Poor Meg Munn. But maids were an unsatisfactory lot. He wanted his adulation to come from proper ladies, proper ladies who required such things as jewels before they’d admit a man to be impressive.”

A hint of a volatile emotion traversed his features, but a moment later his face was again unreadable.

“When his investments turned sour one by one, he kept me in the dark. I didn’t know he’d become mired in debts. I only knew the amount I was allocated to run the household kept decreasing—and I thought that was because he was mean-spirited.”

Not a pretty confession, only a truthful one. “He must have believed that he’d strike gold on one of his investments. They all failed. It would have been terrifying for anyone, but for him … the implication that he had not been favored by God, that he could fall from grace just like any other ordinary bloke, and that he could do to nothing to stop this plunge into poverty and obscurity—he must have been in hell already.”

She’d never given a full recital of the facts. Perhaps she should have years ago. Then she’d have realized much sooner that the person Tony had condemned from the beginning was himself.

And only himself.

She sighed, whether from sorrow or relief Christian couldn’t quite tell. What he did know was that he wished Townsend were still alive so he could bash in the man’s face and break a few of his ribs besides.

She twirled the end of her robe’s sash between her fingers, waiting for him to say something—or perhaps simply waiting for him to leave so she could go back to her fossils. As his gaze remained upon her, she cinched the sash rather self-consciously.

The shape of her body hadn’t changed. The tightened sash attested to a waist just as slender as it had been on the Rhodesia. He would not have guessed that she carried a new life within.

He hadn’t been in the nursery in a while. There might still be some of his toys and books in there. And, of course, the whole of the estate was one vast playground for a child. “When will the baby be born?”

Her eyes turned wary. “Beginning of next year.”

He nodded.

“I wouldn’t be in such a hurry to speak to your lawyers if I were you.”

He hadn’t been thinking of speaking to his lawyers at all. “No?”

“Even they would think you a monster were you to orchestrate a divorce right after my confinement.”

“How long do you recommend I wait, then?”

“A long time. I know what happens when a divorce is granted: The woman never gets anything. And I will not be parted from my child.”

“So you will contest the divorce?”

“To my last penny. And then I’ll borrow from Fitz and Millie.”

“So we’ll be married ’til the end of time?”

“The sooner you accept it, the sooner we are all better off.” His ancestors would have appreciated her hauteur: a fit wife for a de Montfort. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I must have enough rest.”

He gazed at her retreating back. Foolish woman, did she not realize that he’d already accepted it from the moment he’d said “I do”?