Page 56 of A Most Improper Duchess
‘Your visitor!’ Her mother clapped her hands before her face. ‘Take him into the orchard,’ she whispered hoarsely. ‘No one will see you there.’
Framed in the doorway, the summer sun streaking behind him, his hand tapped the side of his brown coat. He stood tall and stiff, with the same dignified air of a duke, even though he wore a neat town suit and well-worn shoes. He held a bunch of hastily gathered wildflowers. His hair had grown a little long, and his chin had a slight stubble—the afternoon growth of a man who shaved himself.
‘My name is Mr Knight. I’m new in town. I brought you these.’ He held out the flowers. ‘Would you like a walk?’
Vivianne didn’t dare speak until they were away from the house, over the small rise and out of sight of the cottage.
‘Mr Knight?’
Arley laughed. ‘Phineas’s idea of a joke, I assume. But I think I asked you to change enough for me. It seemed to fit. And you?’ His eyes wandered her body, and unmistakably lingered over her stomach and the small bulge of her growing belly, so obvious against her petite frame. ‘How many months?’
‘Maybe four. He kicks sometimes.’
‘He?’
‘I think so.’
A glimmer of delight flashed in his eyes, and he tapped his fist against his side, spending energy he could not otherwise show. ‘I did not expect it so soon.’
‘We did little to avoid it.’
‘I suppose we didn’t. We were very improper.’ Then he laughed, his tone both familiar and fresh. It was not the measured laugh of Arley the duke, or the exuberance of Monsieur West, but a new lightness. It was the laughter of a man in control of his destiny, and with all the freedom and fear that came with it.
His stiffness melted with the sun’s embrace. He told her of his escape and how he had been smuggled first south, then across the Channel in the hold of a merchant vessel, before landing in Nice. From there, he had made the slow journey around the coastline.
‘I took up rooms in town with Cecil. I’ve been teaching. Latin and Greek. Not much interest in English.’ He chuckled. ‘I’m finally putting those lessons from Oxford to use. And teaching children—it’s incredibly satisfying.’
She told him of her life in the spotlight, the article when she’d become unravelled and her departure from Mrs Crofts.
He raised her hand to his lips and kissed her palm. ‘Do you regret it? You could have been a duchess.’
‘No, I couldn’t.’ She leant into his soft linen and slid her hands beneath his coat to gather about his waist, enjoying the awkward push of her stomach against him. She stroked at the centre line of his back and tugged his shirt tail from his trousers.
‘Are you trying to seduce me?’ he asked.
‘I am. I need a father for my baby, and my mother says that if I bed the silly Englishman, he will believe me when I tell him the child is his and he will marry me.’
‘So, everyone will think my child is not mine? Blood, and legacy, will mean nothing?’
‘Oui. And they will think you a fool for being so easily manipulated.’
‘What a fall from grace this is.’ He laughed, then ran his hands down her back and nuzzled into her neck. He found her mouth and stole a kiss. ‘Seduce me, country wench, then lie to me. I cannot wait to make you my wife.’
Meanwhile, back on Honeysuckle Street…
‘He’s not dead. He’s happy. It says so, right here, in his letter. That’s how I know. Because he wrote to us. From an undisclosed location. How else would I know?’ Phineas pushed the note into the centre of the table.
It was the first meeting of Spencer and Co since the wedding that wasn’t. Since Arley had pushed his skiff into the river and Phineas had taken the carriage out past the docks and thrown his oar in the water. Since the world had made a fuss for a moment, then sunk back into itself. Since with a disturbing accuracy, Arley’s prediction that almost no one would miss him had been proved correct.
‘It’s incredibly irresponsible,’ Lawrence said, his voice filling with his familiar stubbornness that he so often directed at Phineas. That he himself took pains to coax from the man. Lawrence leant across the table and snatched the note up, then read aloud.
Phineas has, I hoped, told you enough. I am sorry, my fellow board members and neighbours, to have deceived you. So much of my life has been one of pretence and putting on a show. Some days I could scarce remember where the reality ended, and the façade began.
Until I learnt that it is not the lies that matter, but who we tell them to. And I will live a life of lies so that those I love can be their honest selves.
I spent so much of my life watching you all. Your lives, your loves, your squabbles. Always an onlooker. Until that day last year when Hamish forced me to attend that meeting in the front parlour of Number 4, and it opened a new world. Camaraderie. Friendship. Frustration. What it means to be a neighbour. And while I did not at the time feel it for myself, I believed completely in Iris’s sincerity when she said that travel was not only about discovering new places but discovering oneself.
I am finally ready to embark on my own adventure.
