Page 65 of Five Nights to Claim His Duchess

She could see he was eaten with guilt. She could see he wanted to talk. He had begun three separate times, in doorways, and each time she had risen and found something to do at the other end of the room.

And he had begun on Arabella.

That was the part Diana could not look at directly. He had got her a toy horse from the shop in the village. He had sat on the floor of the nursery and rolled a ball back and forth with a child he had not addressed more than a dozen times in eight years. He asked her what she liked to eat. He listened to the answer.

You are eight years late, Diana thought, watching from the doorway. And she will take it. She will take it gladly, because she is eight, and because she has never had it. I have not got it in me to be glad for you. Perhaps I shall have, one day. Not this week.

She was still in the garden when she heard a door, quick footsteps across the hall, and then the sound of a woman sobbing. Diana sighed and shut the book and went up to the nursery.

Arabella was on her stomach on the rug with the wooden horse, galloping it over the hills and valleys of a rumpled counterpane, while the puppy chewed the fringe of it with enormous seriousness. Betsy sat in the window with her mending.

“Diana.” Arabella rolled over. “When are we going back? To see the Duke. I miss him.”

When he comes for me, Diana thought. When I am certain that he wants me.

“Soon, dearest.”

Arabella accepted this with the placid faith of a child, sat up, and went to her little chest. She came back with a boiled sweet in a twist of paper.

“That is Octavia crying,” she said. “I can hear her. May I give her this? To cheer her up.”

Diana looked at her sister. She reached out and pinched Arabella’s cheek gently between her fingers.

“You are a great deal better than the rest of us,” she said. “Yes, you may.”

“Good.”

“Though I am very sad myself, you know.” Diana held her hand out, palm up. “Am I not to have one?”

Arabella shook her head with perfect gravity.

“You get a hug,” she said. “You do not like candy, Diana.”

And she came and put both arms round her sister’s neck and held on.

Diana shut her eyes hard.

I do, in fact, not like candy.

She held on to her sister for rather longer than she had intended, and had to turn to the window afterward for a moment before she could speak.

She left Arabella asleep with the horse under her arm and went down. The kitchen was empty at that hour but for one figure. Octavia sat on the flagstones with her back against the leg of the great table, her skirts spread anyhow, her hair half down and one comb hanging in it. Her eyes were swollen almost shut with weeping.

Diana stopped in the doorway and looked at her.

“He is gone for the afternoon,” she said. “You may stop performing.”

Octavia laughed. It came out ragged and wet.

“Go on and mock me, then. Only I would ask that you do not do it to my face.” She wiped her cheek with the back of her wrist. “Leave me the last of my dignity, if there is any of it left to leave.”

“You did not spare mine.”

“No.” Octavia’s chin came up, and her voice did not shake. “No, I did not. I deserve every word of it. So go on, if that is what will content you. Laugh.”

Diana did not laugh.

She stood there in the doorway and looked at the woman on the floor and found that she had not the smallest appetite for it. She was not, at present, in any condition to laugh at anybody’s ruin.