Page 3 of The Truth About Dukes
Robert set the plates on a writing desk angled near the window. “My grasp of proper manners is shaky at best, but should we be alone here?”
“You are safe with me, Your Grace.”
“But areyousafe from the Mrs. Weatherbys and Lady Phoebes?” he asked, naming the most malicious of the neighborhood gossips.
Constance closed and locked the door, then pulled the draperies shut. “Weare safe from them. They are all too busy gawking at Althea and Lord Nathaniel.”
“Did you close the drapes out of concern for our privacy or out of consideration for my peculiarities?” In either case, Robert was grateful. Constance was thinking clearly, while he was nearly overwhelmed with the need to be back at Rothhaven Hall.
“Both. Let’s eat, and then you will answer my questions.”
He owed her that. “Will you answer some questions for me as well?”
“Perhaps.” Her ladyship took a seat at the desk, handling her skirts as gracefully as a princess managed her ermine robes. She set about applying butter to her bread, her hands competent and mannish.
Robert adored her hands. He’d missed much about her, especially her hands. She still wore no rings, not that such details mattered to a man longing for another five years of relative solitude.
“What questions have you, my lady?”
“Eat first, Your Grace.”
Robert wasn’t hungry, or didn’t think he was hungry. His minders at Dr. Soames’s establishment had controlled everything he’d eaten for years, and he’d learned to separate himself from bodily appetites. Then five years ago, Nathaniel had fetched him home to Rothhaven Hall, where the kitchen’s efforts were so indifferent that food remained a means to an end rather than a pleasure in itself.
“I still have the falling sickness,” he said, accepting the butter knife from her.
“I wasn’t aware it could be cured.”
“One can outgrow it, or it can abate in adulthood. With me…” He considered his bread and butter. “I am not as prone to fits, but they still plague me on occasion. I also have staring spells, or so Nathaniel tells me.”
Constance considered a deep red cherry. “You don’t know for a certainty?”
Heknew, more’s the pity. “I lose track of conversations. I see a certain look on Nathaniel’s face and grasp that he’s trying not to appear worried. Occasionally, I can hear everything going on around me, but I cannot speak or react to it. Sometimes my vision will blur.”
The list of symptoms from that point grew long and strange: blurredhearing, though explaining what that meant was beyond Robert’s powers of articulation. Forgetfulness that was in itself temporary. Strange lights in his field of vision, a sense of having over-imbibed despite not taking spirits, and crushing fatigue.
A veritable buffet of miseries, and no pattern to which ones befell him when.
Constance tossed the cherry into her mouth. “But what does itfeellike when you are staring off into space like that?”
In all the years Robert had been locked away out on the moors, nobody had asked him such a question. “Sometimes anxious, like when you’ve forgotten something, but you aren’t sure what. Sometimes blessedly peaceful.”
“You aren’t in physical pain, then?”
The same curiosity that allowed Constance to plunder his privacy as an epileptic made her a ferociously talented painter. Robert was surprised that she’d held on to her inquisitiveness, given her family’s recently exalted circumstances.
“I am not in physical pain,” he replied, but not carefully enough, because Constance regarded him across the desk, her expression disgruntled.
“I want to be furious with you, but here you are, still frail in a sense, and all brave and honest about it. I cannot be as angry with you as I’d like, though no gentleman ignores correspondence from a lady. I violated every rule of propriety to write to you, and you never wrote back. I’m glad you are no longer in that awful place.”
Robert still had her letter, still read it from time to time. Sometimes he simply held it in his hands or traced the pretty loops and curls of her penmanship. As long as he’d been out on the moors, he’d forbidden himself to think of her. Since coming home to Rothhaven Hall, he’d tormented himself with reminiscences.
“Are you glad you aren’t there either, my lady?”
“Only a fool would long to be confined in such a place. The cherries are an exquisite choice with this Brie. Althea’s cook is a mage of the kitchen, even when all he’s doing is concocting a menu. The man has powers beyond human explanation.”
She ate with such obvious pleasure that Robert did as she suggested and tried the Brie and the cherries.
“This is…good.” The flavors and textures contrasted, which made a bland cheese and simple orchard fruit more complicated, more interesting. “I will request this pairing at Rothhaven.”
