Page 64 of Five Nights to Claim His Duchess

Levi came out through the garden door without turning his head. His wife came after him, it was the first time in a twelvemonth that Diana had seen the two of them in that order.

“Levi. Levi. Only speak to me. Say one word to me and I shall⁠—”

He walked straight across the sand to the bench where his daughter sat with a book she was not reading.

“Diana.”

She did not look up.

“I go into the City tomorrow and shall be back by evening. I would ask that you do not leave before then.” He turned his hat over in his hands. “I must speak with His Grace before you go. There are things I—” He stopped, and began again. “I must speak with him.”

Diana turned a page.

Her father stood there a moment longer.

“Take care of yourself,” he said, and went.

Behind him, by the door, Octavia stood quite still with her hands pressed against her skirts, and did not follow him any further.

Diana let out a long breath and closed the book upon her finger.

I ought never to have come.

It had been the last resort and she had known it at the time. She had stood in her own bedchamber that morning with the small trunks open on the floor and gone through every door in England that might open to her, and there had been so very few.

Henrietta first, of course. Hen would have taken her in before the carriage stopped, and Uncle Edmund would have given her the best rooms in the house and never asked her why. That was precisely the trouble. Hen would not have asked, and would have wanted to, and would have looked at her across the breakfast table every morning with the question in her whole face until Diana said it aloud.

My marriage was merely an agreement, a contractual dealing. She could not have said that. She could not have got the words out of her mouth to the one person in the world who would have understood exactly what they meant and once said, they could never be unsaid. Hen would never look at Valentine again the same way as long as she lived.

So she had come here instead. To the house she had walked out of.

There was a kind of grim justice in it. Half of this house had been her mother’s, Cassandra Fernside had been born a Beaumont, and gently, and her portion had bought two-thirds of the land it stood upon.

Diana had never once used that fact in her life and used it now without the smallest scruple. She had come in through the front door with Arabella by one hand and Betsy behind her and had said, before her father could speak: I am with child, I am tired, and I mean to rest from my duties for a few days. My mother’s rooms will do.

And the truth beneath it was that she would rather sit across a table from Octavia Fernside and her useless father than stand one hour longer in a house where her husband’s face had gone back to what it was.

She had told him she was with child and she had watched him become, in the space of a breath, the man she had walked up an aisle toward. The man with the cold sea-colored eyes and nothing whatever behind them. She had spent eleven weeks unlearning that face. She had begun to think she had imagined it.

And it had come back at her, and she had run from it, and she was not proud of that.

The thing was that she had come home to a house at war.

Betsy had it inside a day, out of the kitchen, and brought it up to her over the pressing of a gown with the door shut.

“It come from his lordship’s own friends, Your Grace. That Mr. Halloway and the merchant gentleman who dines here. They had it from a fellow in the City who knew her when she was in Bath.” Betsy set the iron down. “She wasn’t ever any widow. Nor any lady, neither. She was in a house — well. In a drinking house, they say, though what’s got about is a good deal worse than that, and you know how a thing grows in the telling. They say she’s had two husbands before his lordship and left the pair of them without a penny between them.”

Diana said nothing.

“He went off like a powder magazine, miss. Beg pardon — Your Grace.” Betsy’s mouth went thin with satisfaction. “Roaring the house down. Then he sent for every book in the place, the household and the estate both, and sat up with them two nights running with the candles going. Sally says he never once went to bed. And what he found—” She lowered her voice. “Four hundred and sixty pounds, Your Grace. Gone off out of the household accounts across the twelvemonth, in bits, and every bit of it into her own hand. And the clothes and the plate she’d sold off besides.”

“Oh?” Diana said

“Since he has not said one word to her.” Betsy picked the iron back up. “Not one, in eleven days. She has tried everything a woman can try. He walks past her like she’s a chair.”

Diana had spoken to her father perhaps twelve times in two days.

She had told him she was with child, because it would have been absurd not to. She had not told him anything else, and had answered his questions in as few words as would serve, and had been so scrupulously civil that it must have been worse for him than shouting.