Mary Balogh - A Secret Affair

“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.

WATCHING HANNAH over the next hour and a half, Constantine tried to make the connection with the Duchess of Dunbarton as he had always known her, and as he had encountered her earlier in the spring in Hyde Park, at the Merriwether ball, at the Heaton concert, at the Fonteyn garden party. It was rather disorienting to discover that he could not do it. He could not see her as the same person.