Page 71 of The Duke
“This is going to sound silly, but it’s the juniper, I think. You know that delicious smell of a freshly cut Christmas tree? Juniper reminds me of that, a little, and so gin makes me feel like I’m tasting Christmas.”
He let out a grunt, though she again had a hard time telling if it was born of amusement, derision, or pain as she pulled yet another stitch through his arm.
“I drink Scotch, mostly,” he said after a time. “Ravencroft’s is a particular favorite, though I had a valet who turned me on to fine Irish whiskey, as well.”
“O’Mara?”
“Yes.”
“He’s a cheeky sort.”
“You have no idea,” he commiserated. “Keep him away from your maids.”
“I have my hands full keeping him away from my sister.”
“God help you.” The irony in his voice was laced with a thread of humor, and Imogen’s heart lifted a little.
“Well,” she ventured, now that some of the tension had dispelled. “Now that we’ve established we’re both nocturnal creatures, if you ever need a conspirator with which to brood or to drink, I’ll offer my excellent company in both regards. If I’m not mistaken, you can see my kitchen light from your study.”
The suggested impropriety of her rash invitation worried her almost as much as the danger of his increased proximity posed to her secrets.
“You would not welcome my company when I am in such a state.” The shadows had reclaimed him, and Imogen mourned.
“Do you revisit that place in your nightmares?” she queried, feeling both concerned and bold. “Is that why you do not sleep?”
“Yes,” he said darkly.
“You can tell me, Cole,” she whispered, fearing that, even as she said the words, he’d deny her.
“There are no words to convey my time in that place,” he said after a contemplative moment. “It made Newgate seem like a palace. Filth is too clean a word. Despair is too happy a word. Cruelty is too kind a word. Perhaps if you imagine endless days in a room hot as a furnace, bearing witness to things so unimaginably horrific that you close your eyes hoping to escapeintoa nightmare… that might begin to convey my time there.”
Imogen couldn’t think of a thing to say, couldn’t trust her voice past the tight emotions crowding her throat, so she remained quiet and moved on to another stitch. Her silence seemed to encourage him, and he continued in a flat, toneless voice, as though he addressed someone far away, or dictated a letter.
“I thought I knew grief before then. I thought I knew pain. I was a soldier and a spy, after all. I’d lost my entire family. But I came to understand that before that year, I never knew a man could be broken in so many ways. My captors, they wanted me to beg for the barest scraps of dignity, but I refused and so I was denied even those scraps.”
Why?she wondered, and didn’t realize she’d breathed the word out loud until he answered her in a hard, mordant tone.
“I am the Duke of Trenwyth. I beg fornothing. I bend my knee to no one but the queen.”
“You told them this?” she marveled.
“Of course I did.”
“And they didn’t kill you?”
He lifted his shoulders in a devil-may-care motion, which reminded him of what she was doing to his shoulder, and he stilled. “I’m convinced it is my rank that kept me alive. They were trying to coerce Her Majesty and Prime Minister Disraeli into a secret treaty, and I think they succeeded.”
Imogen had never paid much mind to politics until her acquaintance and subsequent marriage to Lord Anstruther. His fondness for her reading the paper to him not only amused her, but kept her informed as well. Britain had not been a great friend to the Ottomans, though they had been allies against the Russians in the Crimean War. However, that bond was beginning to fray, and both empires had broken faith. The April Uprising had been the proverbial nail in the coffin, forcing the crown and Parliament to withdraw all military and financial support from the Ottomans. The British Navy had sat idly by as the Russians exacted costly revenge on the Ottoman Empire. It seemed that the Duke of Trenwyth had been just the leverage the Ottomans had needed to force Disraeli’s hand. That and the island of Cyprus, granted to England by the Cyprus Convention in secret in 1878.
“It must have made you very angry,” she supposed aloud.
He made another sound devoid of any mirth. “You can’timaginethe rage.” His fist tightened, sending a resounding ripple up the muscles in his arm and bunching the shoulder upon which she worked. “It is my only companion these days.”
She tied off the knot she was working on, and began the final stitch. “Is that why you so value your silence and solitude?” she ventured. “Because you share it with your rage?”
His chin dipped, though she couldn’t say it was a definitive nod in the affirmative. “Men like me spend our time containing within ourselves the worst of man and nature. All the lusts, the avarice, the fury and the pain; if I revealed them, if I indulged them, I would be weak. I would become the animal they tried to make of me. After dedicating my day to such a struggle, there isn’t much left of me for anything else.”
Heart aching, Imogen fought the urge to lean in to him, to console him with a press of her forehead against his. Instead she worked on keeping her hand steady as she finished stitching him and reached into the basin of warm water for a cloth to clean the blood from his arm and back.
