Page 62 of My Deceitful Duchess
He pounded up the stairs, wending his way toward the back of the building on the upper floor, finding the room at the end of the hall—the only one her window could be within. It was dark inside, and blessedly quiet in comparison to the chaos below he had escaped, without even a fire lit in the grate, and he left the door ajar to use the light from the lamps in the hall to illuminate what little he could of her room. His strangled breaths came easier here in the relative silence, and he turned his attention away from the lingering discomfort as his gaze slid across the confines of her room.
Sparser than he had expected, furnished with the absent attention of one who did not spend a great deal of time within it. Or perhaps it was more likely that she simply hadn’t felt the need to collect trinkets or other decorations which she might have had to abandon suddenly—either in flight or in jail. What use was there in growing attached to things that she could not keep?
But she would never have to run again. She would never have tohide, or lie, or be anything other than who she was.
He laid her upon her bed, settling her cheek upon her pillow and easing her onto her side to work the buttons running up the back of her gown, then fished for the strings of her stays beneath it, relieved to hear her breathing ease into a steadier rhythm once the minor constriction had loosened around her ribs.
Vaguely he was aware of movement behind him; the scuttling of the staff running about, fetching and carrying. Alice’s doing, no doubt—but the room brightened as a maid lit a lamp, and began to warm as another built up a fire in the hearth, and suddenly there was a bowl filled with water and bobbing chunks of ice with a freshly-pressed cloth for a compress, and a silver tea service on a tray atop the dresser.
“Dinner,” he said, to no one in particular, but certain that he had been heard nonetheless. “She needs to eat something.” There was another flurry of motion, and then the room was still and quiet once more.
Sebastian settled at the side of the bed, and he felt around her hair for the stiff prick of pins against his fingertips, plucking them out one at a time until the whole coil of it came loose and spread across the pillows in a spill of tousled blond locks. He swiped the damp cloth across her forehead, her face, washing away the sheen of perspiration—wishing the cloth could take that terrible pallor with it.
It was another few moments before she began to stir, her lashes fluttering, a low groan rising in her chest. She shifted to her back, struggling to rise, to support herself on arms that trembled like a bowl of blancmange.
“Don’t,” he said, laying his hand against the hollow of her throat to keep her motionless. “You fainted. I’ve sent for a doctor.”
Her voice was rusty, crackling oddly across octaves. “How long—”
“Only a few minutes.” But they had been some of the most terrifying of his life. “Ambrosia has closed for the evening.”
“What?” She had tried, to her credit, to screech it—but her throat was too dry to have managed more than a tight, forceful wheeze. He rose to pour her a cup of tea, preparing it with the overabundance of milk and sugar that she preferred, and when he returned she had struggled up into a sitting position anyway. “Did you unbutton my gown?” she snapped, snatching the tea cup from his hand.
“And unlaced your stays. You weren’t breathing well.” There was no point in attempting to sound apologetic about it, because he wasn’t the least bit sorry.
She drained her tea cup in just a few mouthfuls, and when she set it down at last, her voice was much improved, even if her color was not. “You need to leave.”
“Little chance of that. I doubt any of your staff could make me—not that they’d be particularly inclined to try. More tea?”
“No.” She tugged with one hand at the neckline of her gown, easing the tight fabric away from her throat. “Allow me to rephrase.I don’t want you here.”
“I know. I’ll leave once you’ve eaten and seen the doctor.” He hadn’t expected her feelings to change, even after being exonerated—but neither had he expected her tofaintwith the news of it.
Her fingers snarled in her loosed hair, and she muttered a curse as she dragged the tangle of it over her shoulder. “I don’t need a doctor. It was only a faint.”
“Nevertheless, you’ll see one.” It was an effort not to touch her, not to take her hand in his. Not to offer the comfort she clearly needed. He did not doubt but that such a gesture would only be rebuffed. “You’re not well,” he said. “You need to be examined.” And then, because it seemed important, he admitted, “I suppose I miscalculated. I didn’t want you to learn of it in the papers. You deserved to be told the truth of it in person.”
Her shoulders trembled. The lamplight flickered across her face, which was still far too pale, and she averted it until it was just a shadowy profile buried in the darkness beyond the reach of the lamp. “What will happen to them?” she asked, her voice muted.
“Transportation, most likely,” he said. “It seems the authorities are just as reluctant to hang a duke as they were a duchess. But with a confession totwomurders, they’ve little choicebutto act.” His fingers twitched upon the surface of her counterpane, just inches away from her own. “That sapphire you saw Nerissa Amberley wearing—it was the Pendleton sapphire, reset from a brooch into a pendant. Officers of the Magistrates’ court found other gems as well; some even from the Venbrough estate.Youbrought them to justice, Jenny.”
A shattered sob began in her chest, and she lifted her hands and pressed them to her mouth to stifle the sound. But she could not disguise the shaking of her shoulders, the little shreds of sound that burst through the gaps in her fingers.
He had never seen her cry. Not ever; not when he’d betrayed her to the authorities, not in jail—not when she had had every reason in the world to devolve into a flood of tears. And now that shehad, his hand hovered near her cheek for a moment—curled into a fist, and drifted away.
Once he might have had the right to offer her his shoulder, to draw her into his arms and hold her.Once.
But not any longer.
Chapter Twenty Nine
“How is she?” Sebastian peeled himself away from the wall, where he had stationed himself just outside of Jenny’s door for the last half hour.
Alice had not only summoned the doctor—she’d sent for Ladies Clybourne and Livingston as well, and they had descended upon him like wrathful guardian angels. They had not the physical strength to remove him from Jenny’s room, but Lady Clybourne had a grip like the devil himself, and she’d seized the shell of his ear in an intractable, vicious pinch, and he’d been obliged to let her drag him from the room lest she pull his ear clean off his head.
Then they had slammed the door in his face to await the doctor. The man had left some minutes ago, and had brushed off Sebastian’s inquiries—and so he had waited, arms folded over his chest, ear smarting something awful, until the ladies slipped from her room.
“Resting,” Lady Livingston said succinctly.
