Page 59 of Seductive Reprise
He didn’t respond immediately, and eventually the silence ran so long it became clear something was amiss. Rose looked up.
His face was dark, his tone as severe as his thick brows when he finally spoke. “And why,” he said as he stood from the couch, staring down at her, “would that be of your concern?”
“I… I only meant…” She frowned, and twisted the handkerchief as she searched for the words to say what she meant. “You never said whether or not you were, so I’d just assumed…”
“Assumed what?” Why did his voice have to be so cold? He wandered away, pretending to look at some Georgian ancestor of his.
“Joseph! I don’t care a whit whether you are or aren’t—I was just making conversation, is all.” She stood up and followed him. “You never speak of…” She hesitated, not wanting to touch upon a subject that might be as sore for him as it was for her. “Your mother.”
“Your assumptions, in this case, are correct. My mother’s people are Coptic.” He turned and regarded her again with an intractable stare. “My nurse, our cook, the other servants, however, were not.” He raised an eyebrow. “Does that arouse your suspicion? Your censure?”
Rose frowned. “What?”
Joseph did not move, but stared at her for a long moment. Finally he blew out a sigh, then rubbed at his forehead. “I’m sorry. Some slights, it seems, are not easily forgotten.” He turned away and added, almost to himself, “As if they’re etched into my bones.”
“I meant nothing of it,” Rose whispered. She placed a hesitant hand on his shoulder, her heart breaking when she felt him flinch. “I only wish to know you. All of you.”
He didn’t respond, only crossed his arms, his jaw set as he stared at the portrait above him. Just when Rose thought she might ask who had slighted him so unforgivably, he spoke.
“My grandfather.” He nodded at the painting. It depicted a man even more remote than the current Duke of Marbury, with no spectacles to soften his haughty expression. Even as he held the viewer’s gaze, one was left with the impression that he’d much rather not. She knew it had been painted by Sir Thomas Lawrence, so she assumed the likeness was true to life.
Uncertain of what to do, Rose took her hand from Joseph’s shoulder and placed it over her heart, feeling its heavy beat. Shecould hear the faint strains of the orchestra in the distance, and wondered what all the people in the ballroom were about. She wondered what her patron, the Earl of Ipsley, and his mother, the dowager countess, must be doing, and if they’d noticed she’d abandoned the ball. Rose bit her lip. She did not want to do the earl ill; without his generous support she would not be studying art at all, and certainly not in London. She’d be stuck serving rude and tired travelers at The Bit and Bridle, washing the sticky floors and mucking out horse stalls when one of the lads took ill. Spending her nights with Elmer and his narrow view of the world.
She wouldn’t be here, with Joseph. Beautiful, sophisticated Joseph. Suddenly her heart was in her throat as she watched his emotions battle each other across his face.
“He nearly disinherited my father when he heard news of me. Couldn’t believe his son would—” He cut himself off as he turned, and crossed his arms.
“His son would what?”
Joseph considered it a moment, then frowned. “Never mind all that. Of course, he didn’t actually make good on the threat. Apparently he hated the notion of my uncle as his heir enough that he forgave him—Marbury, that is.” He turned back to look at the portrait. “Ironic, really, that Lord Robert shall be the next duke after all that. For the only son my father has is his bastard.” Disgust tinged his words.
Unease crept through Rose. She started to reach out again, only to pull away, fingers curling back into an uncertain fist. Never in any of their correspondence had he spoken with such candor about himself. A million questions swam in her head, but none of them seemed the right one, the key that would unlock his heart to her and decipher the mystery that was him. And she’d already blundered once this evening. Yet she couldn’t bear the silence, or his distance, much longer.
So she swallowed and offered, “It’s intolerable.”
He spun about, a dark sort of amusement on his face. “Really? I’d say my situation is rather tolerable.” He hesitated, then added, raising one brow, “Unlike yours.”
Her heart fell through the floor. “What do you mean?” she asked, in a voice so timid it didn’t feel like hers.
“Come off it. You’ve what, nearly twenty years now? And still you claim ignorance.”
“Ignorance? To what? Do you think there are things I wouldn’t be able to understand just because I’m… common? Is that it?” Her ears were hot now, pain giving way to anger.
He barked out a laugh, and took off strolling about the gallery once more. “Didn’t your father tell you? One would think…” And then he shook his head, as if he refused to follow through with whatever he’d begun to say.
“Tell me what?” she said, her voice still so small, so breathy. Angry at him for being so infuriatingly obtuse—and at herself for being so meek—she frowned and repeated herself, louder this time so he might hear it, halfway down the gallery as he was. “Tell me what?!”
He paused, thinking, then turned to amble back toward her as he spoke. “Well then,Miss Verdier, do you happen to recall what your mother might’ve said to you when Ipsley invited you to his little dinner party four years ago? Anything interesting?”
Rose blinked, not expecting such a strange question. Puzzled, she cast deep into her memory. Visions of her mother, vibrant and alive, fretting over Rose’s dress and hair. Cursing as she attempted to scrub the dirt from her hoyden of a daughter’s nails. How Rose had wished in that moment to be as tidy and beautiful as her mother was, with fine porcelain skin and smooth golden hair, neat, even teeth, and a dainty stature. Rose’s heart ached. And then she recalled a shift in her mother’s demeanor, the faraway look in her eyes as she dropped Rose’s fingers backinto the basin.The earl’s wife has passed,she’d said, almost apropos of nothing.‘Tis a sad business for him. And then her lovely blue eyes looked at Rose with such warmth, and she smiled and said,But a happy business for you, for you’re welcome at last.
A queer feeling had settled upon her back then, and it settled upon her again now. Her mother, for all her beauty and charm, was also tormented by dark periods that came on without warning and did not leave for days, sometimes weeks. So miserable could it make life upstairs and down at the inn, that Rose and her father had learned to tread carefully where Ellen Verdier was concerned. So she hadn’t dared to question the odd sentiment. Rose had assumed it was just a peculiarly worded expression of her mother’s excitement, that her daughter was to attend a party at the big house and entertain the fine folk there.
But now, watching Joseph’s eyes and seeing them change, horror began to creep up her spine, cold and slow. He didn’t even wait for her to answer, only took her gaping expression as confirmation of what he’d meant to impart.
“And what, if you would be so kind, did Ipsley say to you, when he extended his patronage this summer?”
Shaken, feeling as though something terrible was around the corner that she might give life to by speaking it aloud, Rose stammered, “That… he’d been certain of my talent since that day at the party. That it was an honor to sponsor me and that he was glad my father had agreed to it and that…” She drew in a breath before weakly adding, “And he expressed his profound sorrow at my mother’s…” She bit her lip, her heart beating so hard it felt like it would break free from her ribcage.
