Mariana had taken a lover and enjoyed him and left him. And still she hadn’t mattered much to him at all.
It did not solve my loneliness,she’d said.
It seemed impossible to believe in this quiet room with the light pouring in that the woman sitting across from him had wound up in the middle of chaos, scandal, and bloodshed, in part because, once upon a time, she’d attempted to solve it.
He was now on guard.
Because his admission had introduced into the room the phantoms of lovers he’d had in those eight years. Not many. Never for more than a night. Nevertheless, he’d hardly been celibate. She knew this must be true, of course.
He’d revealed this deliberately.
And, of course, it was this she had sought to uncover.
He was mordantly amused to realize that he wasn’t much accustomed to considering himself an object of desire outside of his title and money. It had never mattered.
Loneliness was so much a part of him now that at times it seemed to be the inalienable force, like gravity, that held him to the earth. The invisible plinth that held him up and apart from everyone else. It was simply the fact of who he was. It came along with the supposed greatness.
He undeniably missed thefactof his wife. They had not been compatible; Eliza had neither loved nor understood him, not after the first flush of infatuation so many years ago, but they had not been enemies. He didn’t know whether she’d ever taken a lover, but he would not have begrudged her that comfort. He knew only gratitude that if she had, she’d clearly been discreet. But he missed the fact of a life with all of the parts he thought it should have: a duchess, a family, a title, a fortune, property, a legacy. He’d had all of them, once. But they’d been like a collection in a cabinet. He supposed, long ago in his callow youth, he’d thought they’d be more like a garden. Like lush rolling green fields, growing, surrounding, sustaining him.
“I miss the life we once had in the early days, before the war, when my son was small. And I know my son misses her greatly.”
He turned to look at her again.
She was regarding him with a warmth so newto his experience that it altered his breathing. He could not look away. He ought to. He didn’t think he deserved it.
“And that’s why their miniatures are on your table. So they can look across at each other, and not be alone,” she said.
He stared at her in surprise.
“Yes,” he said finally. Quietly.
They heard the rattle of the tea tray as Dot made her careful journey down the hall.
The news wasn’t entirely good.
Then again, she chose to think it wasn’t entirely bad, either.
“We’ve sold five tickets.”
Mariana appreciated the way Lord Bolt delivered this news without editorial. Though five out of a hundred available tickets—she didn’t need any formal training in “maths,” as the duke had put it, to know this wasn’t ideal for an event scheduled for less than a month away.
It seemed there was a bit of tension at White’s between gentlemen who had grown quite fond of the reformed Lord Bolt and trulywantedto attend a fine musical evening and didn’t want to offend him; and those who were well acquainted with Lord Kilhone, Lord Revell, and their fathers, and didn’t want to offendthem;and those who were jealous of Lord Revell because he’d once been the lover of a pretty opera singer. Then there were those who could not be dissuaded from the notionthat she was a harlot and would never pay to see her even if she sang like a nightingale.
The sum of this conflict apparently was five tickets.
Lord Bolt shared all of this in detail with Angelique and Delilah and Captain Hardy. Miss Wylde was given a kinder, sparer version of the truth.
She was no fool. She could certainly surmise what was going on.
Sergeant Massey, a personal friend of Captain Hardy’s who lived in Dover, would be in town with his wife, Emily, through the end of the month, and he’d purchased two of the tickets.
Still, she wasn’t displeased that three possible strangers had purchased tickets to see her. Perhaps it was only the beginning. It was insupportable to think of it in any other way.
She looked into Mrs. Hardy’s and Mrs. Durand’s faces. They did not seem at all bowed.
There was one more thing she needed to ask, though she suspected she knew the answer to this, too.
“Did you speak to the string quartet I told you about? I think they may agree to play for forty minutes in exchange for standing them a round or three at The Wolf And.Afterthe show,” she added hurriedly.
