Page 41 of A Duke to Undo her
If they were both so sad, why should they not comfort one another? Josephine recalled the warm, compelling scent of Cassius’ skin and the strong beat of his heart against her naked body. She ached to experience both again.
Instead, she now forced herself to eat a little bread to please Vera, and to drink the lemon and ginger concoction that Benedict Emerton and his mother had procured for her. Then, she joined with as much merriment as she could in all of Benedict’s enthusiastic planning for the remainder of the party and especially the ball on its final night.
“How wonderful!” Rose remarked joyfully as the three young ladies made together for the garden after breakfast, Lady Elmridge dropping a little behind them to walk with Lady Sudbury. “I believe he must love you very much indeed, Josephine.”
“What do you mean?” demanded Josephine with an alarmed intake of breath, having been thinking only of Cassius and quite shocked by such an idea. “Why do you say that?”
“Mr. Emerton kept those seats for you at breakfast and would have no one’s help but yours for the ball. Then he ordered that special drink for you because you looked unwell.”
“Oh,” Josephine replied, relieved and deflated. “Mr. Emerton is a very amiable young man, isn’t he? Perhaps you could both help with all this planning too.”
“How romantic it is!” Rose sighed with a smile of enjoyment, as though she was watching a play at the theatre. “I do feel you were made for one another. You think the same about so many things: dancing, charades, riding…”
Lady Rose had paid avid attention to every moment of Benedict Emerton and Josephine’s breakfast conversation. Josephine reflected sadly that her friend might have paid even more attention than she had herself. Despite her best efforts, Josephine’s mind had kept willfully drifting to Cassius Emerton and their half-ecstasy, half-agony encounter in the library.
“Mr. Emerton does seem very favorably disposed towards you,” Madeline put in more practically, but seeming just as interested in the relationship as Rose. “Whatever his family may think of you, Josephine, I do not think he will let them keep him from your company.”
“I like Mr. Emerton’s family,” Josephine spoke up then, slightly defiantly, not wanting to hear any repeat of her own early criticism of the duke. “His mother has been very kind to me and the Duke of Ashbourne has been…”
She broke off, unable to complete the sentence without the risk of crying. The Duke of Ashbourne had been her lover? Josephine thought that was what they had become but had so little experience to judge from. Without a background of love ormarriage, what even was a lover? She had not been raised or educated to answer this question, although she knew the answer was likely indecent.
Whatever Josephine and Cassius they were to one another, it felt absurd that he could tell her to go away and marry Benedict, especially in that moment. It made no sense.
“I’m sorry, I am very tired and must go inside,” Josephine excused herself before Madeline or Rose could see the tears threatening to overspill her eyes. “I shall find you a later.”
“I expect she’s really going after Benedict,” Josephine heard Rose whisper to Madeline as she departed. “He is her true love, after all.”
How childish the words now sounded, and how silly! With a sense of sad inevitability, Josephine realized that she could never again share anything of her inner life with Rose. The old games were over and there would be no more giggling over heroes in novels or building up stories about men they barely knew at balls and parties.
Where Rose was still a girl, Josephine was a woman. Her dreams and longings had now advanced and developed far beyond fantasy games, although they still seemed too strange and unfamiliar to name or lay out precisely.
The only person who might help her to understand herself was the one person who was now avoiding her: Cassius Emerton.
Chapter Nineteen
“Are you quite comfortable there, Lady Josephine?” enquired a woman’s voice and Josephine looked up with a start, from her curled up position on the Persian rug before the fireplace in the library, disoriented at being called back from the pages ofFrankensteinto reality.
Clad in an outfit of lilac silk, Dowager Duchess Nerissa stood near a bookcase, watching Josephine with kindly curiosity in her sky-blue eyes.
“Oh, Your Grace, yes, I am quite comfortable. But I am not disturbing you, am I? I could read in my room if you wish to use the library.”
Josephine wondered how long she had been watched and self-consciously hoped that she had not made too many excitable sounds as she read, the story being a very melodramatic and sometimes startling one. It had been a relief to divert herself intoMary Shelley’s strange and absorbing world when the real world was so painful and confusing.
“Not at all, my dear. You stay right where you are, but do let me sit down on this chair and talk to you for a while, if you don’t mind pausing in your book.”
“I think I should pause,” Josephine said with a small smile, putting a bookmark into the volume and closing its covers as the older woman took a seat in a comfortable chair beside the rug. “It is quite a frightening story, all about a man of science who uses the power of lightning to create a monstrous creature, and how hard his creation then finds life.”
“Dear me!” exclaimed the duchess with a little chuckle as she settled herself in the chair. “I think I remember Benedict reading that story and unsuccessfully trying to explain it to me. You have succeeded where he failed, Lady Josephine, but I do not think I shall want to read it when you are finished.”
“No, I don’t expect that any of my sisters would like it either, or their husbands,” reflected Josephine, standing and fetching more cushions from another chair for the dowager duchess’s back as she saw her struggling to adjust her position.
She herself sat down on the rug again once Duchess Nerissa was seated comfortably. Josephine often preferred to sit like that when she could, on the floor and hugging her knees. She couldn’t remember now whether it was polite or not but her hostess didn’t seem to mind.
“Is that what you prefer reading, Lady Josephine?” Duchess Nerissa inquired pleasantly, seeming genuinely interested in her answer. “Fantastic and horrific stories?”
Josephine shook her head with a smile.
“I like romances and adventure stories better,” she conceded. “I like valiant heroes and beautiful heroines and dastardly villains who get their just deserts in the end…Of course, I read more serious books too and my oldest sister Constance has a list I am supposed to read before I am one-and-twenty. I like Shakespeare but many of the others are so… I mean, I don’t have much time left.”
