She felt like a husk. Awestruck by the completeness of the pain.
But, despite it all, mordantly amused: after this, she could not imagine that anything would be worth crying over.
She’d known this thing with the Duke of Valkirk would be a bloody opera. She’dknownit was foolishness from the start. She liked to think she could not have saved herself, that she’d had no choice in the matter at all, but the truth was, she’d made a decision each time she’d stealthily visited his room, each time she kissed him, each time she took his body into hers.
She’d accepted that role, and she’d played it right through to the predictably dramatic end.
She lay awake until dawn, empty, yet somehow complete. As if every emotion she could possibly experience had been funneled through her in a month’s time, so nothing could ever surprise her or hurt her again.
Most importantly, she knew now what love felt like.
She was suddenly aware of the silvery thread of outrageous luck and kindness woven through her dramas and tragedies. Fate might have made a shuttlecock of her more than once, but each time she’d been batted sky-high again. From penury to the Italian Opera House. From scandal to The Grand Palace on the Thames. From hope to heartbreak.
From heartbreak into the job of a singing lobster.
No one hadeverbeen more grateful to be batted right into that job, because it meant she could be gone from England in two days, and after that, perhaps forever.
She breathed through the pain.
She imagined him lying awake next to some young woman with a title. Together and still utterly alone. His spirit going arid. Perhaps yearning for her, because of course he would.
She really didn’t think she’d be easy to forget.
He deserved to live with love.
Oh God. He ought to be loved.
But he’d be comforted, naturally, by the fact that he had done his duty. That he’d done the “right” thing.
She brought her knees up to her chest restlessly. She curled in on herself to muffle the pain.
And yet. How grateful she genuinely was to know what love really was. To learn that loving, fiercely, with her whole self, was yet another of her gifts.
Shewantedto love.
But he would be her definition of love for the rest of her days. She was certain of that, too. How could any other man possibly factor?
Well, then. So she would just go on loving him.
Perhaps he would open a window one night, and the faintest echoes of her voice from some faraway stage, singing of love and yearning and sorrow, would drift outward on a breeze. It would drift into his window, and he would feel it, and feel loved.
And tomorrow, she would look into the faces of Dot and Helga and all the maids, and she would give her all to a night they would never forget. Beauty ought not to be available only to the wealthy. They would carry that memory with them through their days like a precious thing, and perhaps their joy in it would touch someone else who would be changed or soothed or inspired.
Andthiswas how she would love him for the rest of her days. Not by pining. She would send it out into the world, and her love for him would be as endless and renewing as the tides, and come back to her that way, too.
When the maids crept into the duke’s rooms just after dawn the following morning, they found the bed smoothly made, all of the duke’s belongings missing, including the miniatures and the clock, and the duke gone.
Which was startling, as it was still dark.
In the corner was a neatly swept pile of shards from a vase.
“Looks like writing his book finally sent him crackers,” they said sympathetically, and they swept it up and took it away.
He knew precisely who was in town because he had a stack of invitations to prove it.
Viscounts, earls, barons, marquesses, wealthy merchants—more than a dozen men and their wives were roused before dawn by tremblingly apologetic but determined servants who were less afraid of their employers than the Duke of Valkirk. He’d arrived before any light tinged the sky, in person, eyes burning with implacability, to thump on townhouse doors and request to be waited upon at once.
Because at the end of a night of suffering, James knew salvation meant doing the unthinkable: laying his burdens down.
