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.
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