Page 11 of The Truth About Dukes
Chapter Three
Robert found that indulging Lady Constance Wentworth’s urge to do some sketching was oddly restful. Her sitting room was small, which soothed a few of his sundry anxieties, and she herself was a distraction from those same worries.
He did not know if the locking mechanism on the door worked from both sides, for example. Had no idea if the windows were locked or merely fastened. Did the adjoining bedroom have its own door to the corridor? How, precisely, was her balcony situated?
To investigate those factors—they werenotdetails—would have been the behavior of an eccentric. Her sitting room was carpeted—always a fine thing, when a man might fall to the floor insensate at any moment—and her sofa plush and comfortable.
Her lips were plush too. They were an extravagance in an otherwise spare and serious countenance, though she pressed her mouth into a line as she concentrated on her drawing. Behind a practiced, blue-eyed guilelessness, her gaze was still wary. She’d done her hair in a simple chignon worthy of a chambermaid, and she wore a plain blue afternoon dress, only a touch of lace at the collar and a dash of white embroidery at the cuffs.
Lady Constance was trying very hard to appear unremarkable, a wren among the Wentworth peacocks, and yet in the intensity of her focus, in her quiet, in her studied plainness, she begged for further study.
“What happened to you?” Robert asked.
She spared him not even a glance. “I went home, as you apparently did, eventually.”
“You left home of your own volition, while I did not. Did your family receive you decently?”
He’d worried for her, for years he’d worried whether the soft-spoken, blue-eyed maid had found safety. She’d shown courage, ingenuity, and kindness in a place those virtues had all but deserted. When she’d left, he had not dared reply to her letter for fear his epistle would get her in trouble.
Then too, slipping another letter past Dr. Soames’s watchfulness would have been tempting fate.
“Chin up half an inch, Your Grace. My family was excessively understanding.” She made the wordunderstandinginto something burdensome, a quality that induced both guilt and resentment.
A combination Robert knew all too well. He tipped his chin up. “Shall we make explicit an agreement not to discuss our former association?”
Over the top of her sketch pad, she aimed the most fleeting scowl at him. “I do not violate confidences, and if I know anything about you, it’s that you don’t either. My family has no idea that we’ve met, and I prefer they remain in that blessed state of ignorance. They would speculate. Chinup.”
“Nathaniel has never asked about conditions at the hospital. Some of it, he saw for himself. Some of it, I described for him to explain my otherwise unexplainable behavior. I would not want my brother to learn the whole of it.”
This glance was different, a little bleak, a little curious. “I don’tknowthe whole of it, Rothhaven. I wasn’t there that long, and I had the sense you’d learned much about managing your situation before I arrived. You had newspapers, the other residents generally did not. You had that violin, you had books.”
She fell silent, her pencil pausing. Then she took up her eraser.
“Are we agreed, my lady, that our present acquaintance will appear to be one of first impression?”
“You are a duke with a known illness. That your father, born in a less enlightened age, hid you away to keep your falling sickness a secret will make a certain sense to those who learn of it. They will pity you or they will derive mean satisfaction seeing a man of high station afflicted. What explanation can there be for a duke’s sister plucking chicken carcasses and chopping leeks?”
She considered her sketch, then bent close to the paper and resumed drawing. “Why would a girl raised in dire poverty,” she went on, “actively seek out the lowliest employment in the most scandalous place she could find, once that girl’s station in life had considerably improved? Such stupidity has no plausible explanation. The scandal would be ruinous, and I owe my family too much to bring that down upon them.”
She fell silent, curling that full lower lip under her top teeth.
Robert reminded himself that the girl who’d run from her improved station hadn’t known her brother would become a duke. She’d had no idea at the time that nieces would come along whose options could be foreclosed by a scandalous auntie.
She had known, though, where she could blend in, where her family would never think to look for her. She’d been clever, that girl—and desperate.
“You have my word,” Robert said, “nobody will learn of our prior acquaintance from me.”
“Nor from me, though mind you, my siblings are abominably clever. Stephen in particular likes to solve puzzles, but Jane and Althea notice details too.”
“And what of His Grace?” Robert asked. “How did he react to your return?” If Quinn Wentworth had hurt his sister in any way, Robert would hurt him back. To betray trust when a prodigal came home broken in spirit and exhausted in body demanded punishment.
“Quinn was all that is decent. He’s always decent, because Jane expects it of him. Jane married him because he expects decency of himself. Here.” She sat up and tore the page free from the sketchbook. “It’s rough, but not a bad start. You are an interesting subject.”
Robert took the sketch with a sense of foreboding. He saw himself in mirrors, and when a man lived a reclusive life, his turnout became a low priority. He wasn’t exactly going to pot, but he did not ride, he did not fence, he did not—as Nathaniel did—strip off his jacket and cravat on occasion and join in with the laborers mending wall or clearing a drainage ditch.
On this occasion, though, Robert had donned company attire and acquitted himself as much like a duke as possible. That had been a challenge. His only pattern card for how a duke behaved had been an arrogant, self-interested father willing to consign his firstborn to hell for the sake of appearances.
Robert studied the image on the page in some surprise.
