“Two dresses are all I need,” said Adele. “Some formal gowns to accompany the duke to society functions.”
Madame Auguste pursed her lips. “And what will you wear when you marry the duke.”
“Oh.” Adele hadn’t thought about it. “I guess I will need…”
“Lady Adele has some money,” said Lady Louisa, stepping forward, “but please bill the Duke of Swynford for whatever she cannot pay for today.”
Madame August winked at Louisa.
“My father gave me this money for my trousseau,” Adele said weakly, recognizing how futile this was becoming.
“Let your husband buy you some gowns,” said Louisa.
“I knowexactlywhat you need,” said Madame Auguste. “You are a pretty girl, but I can make your betrothed’s heart stop when you walk down the aisle. Are you ready?”
Adele let out a breath. “Do your worst.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Perhaps the greatestchallenge to Hugh in the lead up to his wedding was going to sleep at night knowing Adele was in the adjacent room.
His London home was compact in a way Swynford House was not. He had a sense of that, at least. He lay awake one night a little over a week after Adele had moved in and tried to picture his home in Kent but could not.
It didn’t quite work as a distraction. Adele was tantalizingly close. He kept picturing the expression on her face when she’d come apart in his arms that one night they’d spent together. He pictured the long lines and curves of her body, the rise of her breasts, the roundness of her hips, her beautifully formed legs. Having her in his home made him want to touch her nearly constantly, and he’d been sneaking in touches, but women wore a great deal of clothing, and Adele seemed to have put a wall between herself and Hugh.
Whywas an important question. Did she not want him?
Well, he would have her on their wedding night without shame or fear of his mother’s reprisal. Because Adele must know by now that she had nothing to fear from him, but she was likely quite intimidated by the dowager.
He lay in bed, unable to sleep, painfully hard. He grunted and got out of bed. He walked to the library thinking he’d find a book that might distract him enough to make him sleepy, butwhen he arrived, he saw the row of books on one of the shelves, ten volumes bound in yellow leather describing the history of the Dukes of Swynford. That gave him an idea.
Perhaps something here could help jog his memory.
The ten-volume history of the Swynfords was likely just the sort of dull reading that would put him to sleep, but a large volume that said “Swynford House” on the spine caught his eye. He slid it off the shelf and sat at the table in the middle of the room. The book turned out to be the family’s records regarding construction and renovations at the Swynford ancestral home. He could not remember what it looked like, but he had a sense of its size. He flipped through the book’s pages and found drawings and diagrams of the house.
It started to come back to him.
According to the book, the house had been built in the fifteenth century by one of Hugh’s Baxter ancestors. The first Duchess of Swynford was primarily responsible for a large renovation in the 1670s that reinforced and expanded the house. Dukes of Swynford throughout the eighteenth century had renovated and modernized the house. Then there were a series of notes in Hugh’s own hand indicating that, in the time since his father’s death, Hugh had been working on his own improvements.
He closed his eyes and tried to remember the house. A lot of it was still hidden behind the curtain, but then he had a sudden memory of approaching the house in a carriage and was overwhelmed by the feeling of coming home. He could see now the long row of manicured shrubbery on the path to the front door, the house’s blond brick facade, the columns that framed the door. The house itself was four stories tall and quite imposing as one approached it.
He looked at a diagram of the floor plan. The house had an H shape, which made Hugh recall referring to the vertical parts of the H as the east and west wings.
According to the floor plans, there was a grand suite of rooms on the third floor that included bedrooms for the master and mistress of the house, connected by his and hers dressing rooms and a grand tiled room with a bathtub. A separate room for bathing had been one of Hugh’s own improvements the previous year, according to the notes in his handwriting, intended to keep mold from getting into the floor. There was a nursery on that floor as well; some previous Duchess of Swynford had wanted to care for her children rather than just handing them off to nannies and governesses, so the nursery was close to the duke’s quarters.
Hugh’s mother had been that way; he’d had a nanny and a governess and a tutor who taught him basic business, but spent most of his time before leaving for Eton with his mother. Portraits of her as a younger woman had brought those memories back to him. She’d doted on him, spoken with him often, and snuck him sweets when his father wasn’t looking. It was why he felt so guilty for defying her now; he knew she loved him. She never said the words, but he knew it somewhere deep in his soul. But her insistence on the integrity of the Swynford name over all other things was… well, maybe something else was going on here, now that he thought about it.
He made a mental note to follow up on that later.
He was still looking at diagrams and floor plans when he heard a small sound behind him. He turned and saw Adele standing in the doorway to the library, wearing only a flimsy dressing gown over her nightgown.
“I didn’t expect anyone to be here,” she said.
“I couldn’t sleep.”
“Nor could I. I thought to come to the library and find something to read. Daisy mentioned that the duchess has been collecting Sir Walter Scott’s novels, so I thought to try one of those.”
“I had a similar thought and then fell into reading the Swynford House records. I’m trying to remember the house, but there are parts of it I cannot picture in my mind.”
