Page 20 of The Truth About Dukes
She was being polite, giving him an opportunity to avoid further mention of his odd behavior. From her, he did not want that courtesy.
Robert escorted her ladyship into the corridor, glad to be away from the cozy parlor. “I was not allowed out of doors for several years at one point. I look like my late father, and Soames was concerned that some gardener or village child might see me and note the family resemblance.”
“He told you that?”
“Of course not. His only explanation was ever and always concern for myterrible condition. One of the attendants made a comment about my resemblance to my father, another resident made another. I reached the obvious conclusion based on available evidence, though Soames wasn’t above withholding basic pleasures for the bloody-minded hell of it.
“As the old duke aged,” Robert went on, “Soames and I negotiated various truces. This began not long after you left. I was eventually allowed out for short periods, but only into the walled garden—the small walled garden, not the kitchen garden—and only for short periods. At the sound of carriage wheels, I was to return to my room immediately. We all were, or we would lose the privileges of the house.”
He ushered Constance out onto the back terrace, trying to view the irises, tulips, and daffodils before him as an orgy. Perhaps a riot of color? But no, he’d planned the color scheme of the garden very carefully.
“‘Privileges of the house’ meaning,” Lady Constance said, “the right to leave your rooms?”
“And to dine in company, though meals were to be silent but for basic requests. ‘Pass the salt,’ ‘May I have the butter.’ Soames purported to believe calm kept the seizures at bay.”
Lady Constance stood at the top of the garden steps and took in a deep breath. “Did it? Keep the seizures at bay?”
“Nothing keeps them at bay.” Robert wanted somebody to know that. Nathaniel never asked, and Mama’s timid and vague questions never ventured close to that topic.
Lady Constance slipped her arm through his. “Walk with me. Does anything bring them on?”
As Robert wandered the paths with his guest and stopped to sniff the occasional bloom, he explained to Constance what he had learned about his affliction: Calm and order did seem to help, insofar as they guaranteed regular and ample rest, regular and modest meals, a very limited intake of spirits, and only modest exertion at any one time.
“Gardening is perfect, then,” Lady Constance said. “It’s physical, but doesn’t result in all-out sweating and panting like fencing or hill running. You might enjoy riding horseback for the same reasons. One can daunder along, enjoy a canter, or exhaust oneself in a hard gallop.”
“I do not ride.”
She stopped with him beside a bed of rosebushes still more thorns than leaves. “But you could.”
“And if a seizure occurs while I’m in the saddle, then I take another fall, suffer another injury to my head. I had never had a seizure until I came off a damned horse as a boy.”
She patted his lapel. “So fierce. Stephen can teach your horse to halt the instant you begin to tremble, and he can show you how to fashion a brace, such that you cannot fall from the saddle. He needed that brace to learn to ride, and now he’s happiest in the saddle. It’s very discreet. A belt around your thigh.” She drew her hand across the top of her leg. “Here, where your riding jacket obscures it.”
He seized her by the wrist because he could not conduct a proper argument when she was petting him, much less mentioningthighs.
“My lady, it’s not that simple.”
“It’s not that complicated either.”
“I cannot ride in a walled garden. You saw me on the drive. A common, everyday sound, one heard a dozen times a day in any village, and my dignity deserted me.”
They had not put their gloves back on after their meal, and thus when Lady Constance laced her fingers with Robert’s, he and she were hand in hand.
“From what I can see, Your Grace, your dignity is still very much intact. Your instinct for survival is too. They simply need to learn to converse on different terms.”
With anybody else, even with Nathaniel, Robert could have continued the argument.You have no idea what you’re asking of me. You speak from well-intended ignorance.Constance, however, had survived the slums, survived a violent father, survived months away from the sheltered life her family had eventually been able to give her.
What else had she survived?
“I’m not ready to ride,” Robert said. “I might never be.”
“Fortunately, one need not ride to be a duke or to be happy. Tell me where you acquired these gorgeous tulips, the ones with the interesting variegation? I find the usual tulip rather boring, but these catch my eye.”
They meandered along, talking about flowers, until they returned to the statue of Saint Valentine at the foot of the steps.
“Conversation tires you,” Lady Constance said, smoothing a hand down the saint’s granite robes. “Talk tires me too. Some people have the knack of monitoring a discussion with half an ear, dropping in and out as they would call upon a neighbor of long-standing. I cannot do that.”
“There’s something Lady Constance Wentworth cannot do? I am agog at the very notion.”
