“I did not plan this,” he said wearily. “I did not plan that wewould come to bicker and set our wills against each other. I did not foresee that you would come to see me as a tyrant and that sometimes I would be forced into acting like one. I hoped for a good marriage. I did not foresee that we might come to hate each other.”
“Sometimes,” she said, burying her face in her handkerchief, her voice a thin thread of misery, “I hate you for pretending to be dead and coming back alive. I hate you for driving Thomas away when you knew what we had become to each other. Sometimes I find it hard not to hate you, Adam, though I try not to. You are my husband.”
She started coughing again and could not stop.
White-faced, he crossed the room to her, took out his own handkerchief, went down on one knee before her, and held it out to her. But she slapped his hand away.
“Sybil,” he said, and rested a hand lightly against the back of her head while she coughed.
But she squirmed away from him, got to her feet, and fled to her dressing room, slamming the door behind her.
The Duke of Ridgeway remained on one knee, his head bowed forward. And he wondered, as he had done dozens of times before, if she had ever loved him. Had she said she did only because she wanted to be his duchess and mistress of one of the most splendid homes in the kingdom? Had all the kisses, all the melting looks and sweet smiles, been artifice?
He had grown up knowing that he would be expected to marry her. And the idea had never disturbed him. But he had not fallen in love with her until he came home from Spain to find her grown up and lovely and fragile, her blue eyes wide with admiration for him. He had fallen deeply in love, painfully in love.
And had it all been completely one-sided? Had her protestations of love been all lies? Or perhaps she too had been bound by the expectations of years. Perhaps she had tried tofall in love with him or at least to develop a regard for him. Perhaps she had tried.
He supposed that she might have felt some regard for him then, when his face was whole, when perhaps he could have been described as a good-looking man. He would never forget the look of deep revulsion on her face when he had caught her up on their first meeting after his return and twirled her about and kissed her.
She had hurt him badly. But he had expected the look to disappear once she had got used to his new appearance. It never had. But by the time of his return, of course, she had been betrothed to Thomas. He had made far too light of that fact at first.
The duke got wearily to his feet and put his handkerchief away in his pocket. If someone had told him that spring of Waterloo and the spring after, when he was coming home, that his love for Sybil would ever die, he would have laughed in derision. A love like his could never die this side of doomsday.
So much for love, he thought with heavy cynicism.
He turned to the door, aware of his wife coughing in her dressing room. There was not the spark of an ember of his love left. Only a certain pity for what she had undoubtedly suffered, and the vague hope of some peace between them. Some hope that he would not always appear to be the villain in their life together.
But it seemed that he was not to be granted even peace.
IT WAS PETER HOUGHTON WHO INFORMED FLEUR of the new arrangement later that same morning while she waited in the schoolroom for a pupil who would not come because her nurse insisted that she was ill with exhaustion from her exertions of the day before.
Fleur was a little afraid of Peter Houghton because he undoubtedly knew who she was and what she was. And yet he had treated her with unfailing courtesy in the two days since his return to Willoughby—they both ate with the upper servants at Mrs. Laycock’s table. Not by word or gesture had he shown that he felt any distaste at having to consort with her on terms of near-equality. There had been not a whisper or a hint of what she was to any of the other servants.
She was relieved by the new arrangement, not because she wished to have power over Lady Pamela’s nurse, but because she wished to feel that she was doing something to earn her salary and keep. She had had the uneasy feeling for the previous weeks that she was there on false pretenses.
The duke himself brought his daughter to the schoolroom that afternoon. Fleur curtsied and did not look directly at him. But, she realized before many minutes had passed, he had no intention of leaving immediately. He settled himself quietly on a chair in one corner of the room and watched.
They worked with the alphabet book for a short while, making a game out of memorizing the letters, each of them thinking of some absurd word that began with the letter in question and then trying to remember each word and its letter in sequence.
“Faradiddle,” the duke said when Lady Pamela had puzzled over F for several seconds.
She exploded with sudden laughter.
It was his only contribution to that particular lesson.
They counted up to fifty and back to one again and did some simple sums on paper. They examined a tablecloth that Fleur had found folded in a drawer in her room, and she named each embroidered stitch for Lady Pamela and promised that she could start a handkerchief of her own the next day and learn one of the stitches.
“Can I choose whatever colors I want?” she asked Fleur.
“Any colors you wish,” Fleur promised with a smile.
“Red daisies and blue stems?”
“Purple daisies and canary stems if you wish,” Fleur said.
“But everyone will laugh.”
“Then you must choose whether to pick your own colors and be laughed at or pick the expected colors and not be laughed at,” Fleur said. “It is quite simple. The choice will be entirely yours.”
