The Duke's Suspicion. Susanna Craig
well.
Once bathed and dressed in a clean shift and clean stockings, she thrust her arms into the sleeves of an overlarge silk dressing gown and sat down before a mirror in an ornate frame. Her fingers traced the handle of a silver-backed brush.
No, she would not allow her opinion of the Duke of Raynham to be influenced in any way by these signs of his extraordinary wealth, for which she did not give a fig. Nor by the evidence of the authority he must wield, the very thought of which aroused her instinctual defiance. Since the moment they met, he’d been taking charge, giving orders, demanding deference.
Until a girl of perhaps twelve had dared to tease him, whereupon he had…smiled?
Prior to that moment, Erica had seen little sign that Tristan was ever anything other than a stick in the mud…with or without the mud. Lady Viviane, however, seemed to know another man entirely.
Had grief transformed him from whatever he had once been? She had watched it turn young people into old, stripping them of their vitality, just as a hard freeze sapped the life force from plants that had been green and blooming the day before. What had once been bright and full of promise became cold and brittle and black.
In the spring of the year, one made plans for the future. One did not think of death. This past spring, for instance, she had been planning her wedding to Henry Edgeworth. Then the frost had come, late and all the more cruel for being unexpected. Mostly to please her brother, Henry had joined the United Irishmen. Then he had been killed at the start of the rebellion, and she had grieved, both for his loss, and for her own.
Everything she had dared to imagine about her future had died with him. She was once more wholly dependent, trapped within the narrow cage society had constructed for unmarried young ladies.
Absently, her fingers tightened around the brush. Did she really imagine Tristan’s situation bore any resemblance to her own?
He had known loss, yes, and she did not doubt it pained him greatly. But that loss had also brought him unimaginable gain. Death had made him a duke. A title, an estate, power…and with them, freedom. Even grief stricken, who would turn down such a bequest?
She, meanwhile, was stuck. Stuck at Hawesdale Chase until the rain stopped. And after that… Stuck at home, most likely. Unless she accepted her sister’s offer to live with her and…do what? Become a maiden aunt to a passel of unruly lordlings?
The very thought sent the hairbrush skittering from her fingertips, across the marble top of the dressing table.
Henry had never minded her freckles. He had been willing to pluck and pot and press her botanical specimens. And once they were married, he had promised her, she’d have all the time in the world to fill the pages of her journal with notes and sketches and—
Her journal.
No. Not twice in two days.
Even she could not be that careless.
Well, yes…apparently she could.
She pushed to her feet, though she could not decide where to go. Tristan had put her journal in the saddlebag, probably with his own important papers. To the stable, then. Unless he’d brought it inside when they’d arrived? She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to remember the last she’d seen of the dark leather satchel. Had he been carrying it in his hand? Had he slung it easily over one broad shoulder?
Her mind’s eye grazed over the memory of his form, lingering here and there for a moment longer than was strictly necessary.
When she opened her eyes, the mental image popped like a soap bubble. He was a duke. How ridiculous to imagine he did his own fetching and carrying. Likely, a servant had taken his bag to his chambers in the—
Finding herself on the threshold of her room, she paused. Mrs. Dean had said the family apartments were in the east wing, had she not? Was that to the right or to the left? Outdoors, growth patterns of plants or the position of the sun might have helped to guide her. In the windowless, candlelit corridor, she was all but lost.
Lifting her chin, Erica looked both directions, chose one, and set off in search of her journal.
While walking with Mrs. Dean, she had not noticed the inordinate number of doors leading off the corridor. Provided she found the east wing, how would she determine which was the correct door? Would the door to the duke’s suite look particularly…ducal?
At the end of the corridor, past yet more stairs, stood a set of tall double doors, of the sort that a pair of liveried footman might have been expected to guard. But no one was guarding them, and so it did not immediately occur to her that if she opened them and went through, she would find herself anywhere other than in another corridor.
The room she entered was so large and stately she assumed she must have made a wrong turn and found herself in the state rooms of the west wing. The walls were covered in ivory silk with gold damask, the windows framed by crimson velvet drapery held back by thick, tasseled ropes of gold silk. On two sides, the room overlooked the slopes and hollows of the wooded valley. She understood why Mrs. Dean considered it the finer view, though for herself, she preferred the dramatic ruggedness of the hillside.
Though the day was damp and cool, no fire had been lit in the marble fireplace. It might have been insufficient to heat the room in any case, though the firebox was so large she could have stepped into it without ducking her head. On either side of the fireplace stood a suit of armor, and on the wall above hung a tapestry depicting the Knights of the Round Table. Below it, nearer the mantel, had been mounted an ancient-looking sword, meant to suggest Excalibur, she supposed. It could not have been the real one, could it?
Warily, she took two steps closer. Thick Turkish carpets muffled the sound. Around the room stood groupings of furniture: plushly upholstered chairs on spindly legs, sofas with curved backs, tables of gilt and mirrored glass. A drawing room? A…a sitting room? She hadn’t the vocabulary for this sort of architecture. But who would sit here?
A duke, you dolt.
Erica flinched, though the voice spoke only inside her head.
All right, then. She was in the right place. But her journal could be…anywhere.
She forced herself to take a deep breath, hold it for a moment, and exhale slowly. Once, twice, thrice. Within four walls, she often felt panicky. Restless in small spaces. Overwhelmed in large ones. She tried to focus on the open sky beyond the windows, but dark clouds and lashing rain only increased her anxiety. Somewhere, her sister must be watching that same foreboding sky and fretting over what had become of her.
Forcing her gaze away from the storm, she swept her eyes once more over the rest of the room. Impossible to imagine her battered leather journal being allowed to mar any one of its gleaming surfaces. Ah, but behind her stood an antique secretary desk, placed near the door so a visitor would have to take no more than a few steps into the room to state their business to the one seated at it. She ran one hand over its polished edges. Just the sort of place a duke might keep his important papers…
“At the risk of repeating myself, Miss Burke, what in God’s name are you doing?”
She gripped a little piece of scrollwork so hard she feared it would snap off in her fingers. “Your Grace.” She closed her eyes, muttered a fierce, swift prayer, then jerked her chin a notch higher than its proper place to meet his gaze.
And promptly wished she hadn’t.
Even before the rebellion, she had not been the sort of woman to be taken in by a man in a red coat. A military uniform was all trickery, the sartorial equivalent of smoke and mirrors. The gold epaulets were designed to make his shoulders appear broader. The cutaway of the coat, to make his legs look longer.
Yet she had the distinct impression that his tailor had found no need to embellish on what nature had given Tristan Laurens.
Worst of all were those tight white knee breeches, which drew the eye to places a proper lady’s eye ought not to be drawn. And proved once and for all she was not a proper lady.
She