Page 69 of A Bride for the Ruthless Duke

He lifted his hand, and touched her face, the first time he had touched her with no duty and no rescue in it, only this, and his hand was not steady, and she turned her cheek into the unsteadiness of it and felt the whole of his held breath go out of him at once.

He bent his head slowly, giving her every chance to step away, and when she did not step away he kissed her, and it was nothing at all like the dutiful dark of the wedding night, because there was no duty in it and no dark and no part of him held carefully off at a distance. There was only a man who had been afraid for years discovering, with great care and very little skill and an honesty that undid her, that the thing he had guarded against the whole of his life was not, after all, a loaded gun, but only this, only her, only the warmth of being at last on the same side of a door as the person he was devoted to.

And then she reached behind her, without looking, and found the edge of the door, and pushed it slowly shut, and the latch went home with a small sound in the quiet, and on her side of it the candle she had set on the mantel burned low and steady and lit the rest for no one but the two of them.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

“One sugar,” Theodore said, and set the cup at her place before the footman could reach it. “It is morning, so one. I have been saving that piece of intelligence for a week, waiting for a chance to use it.”

“You are insufferably pleased with yourself.”

“I am. It is a novel sensation and I find I like it. I have been pleased with my own competence for years, which is a cold sort of pleasure. I had forgotten there was a warm sort.”

Five days had now elapsed since the incident of the door, and the house had changed around them in the way a house does when the two people at the head of it have stopped holding their breath. Augusta had taken to humming. The servants had stopped walking softly. Ellen reached across the corner of the table and put her hand over his, briefly, in front of the footman, which a fortnight ago neither of them would have done, and Theodore turned his hand under hers and held it.

He found himself he had been working up to for two days was the answer to the question she had put to him at this table. Her question of ‘Why did you marry me?’ had been deferred, promising her an answer only when his defenses should be further dismantled. The wall was further down. He had decided that this morning he would tell her at last about the shabby morning room that he had chosen her in that half hour, before there was any debt between their houses to settle, because of the chin and the steady hands and a courage he had wanted under his roof for the rest of his life. He had it ready. He had rehearsed it, even, which he had never in his life done with a true thing.

He never said it. The door opened and Pearce came in, and Theodore saw his secretary’s face and let the morning go.

“Forgive me, Your Grace. I would not interrupt for less.”

“What is it?”

Pearce looked once at the duchess, and Theodore said, “Whatever it is, she will hear it from me within the hour regardless, so she may as well hear it now and save us both the second telling.” It was the truest measure of how far the wall had come down, and he watched Pearce register it, and watched Ellen register that Pearce had registered it.

Pearce laid a printed sheet on the cloth. “It is being cried in the coffee-houses, Your Grace. A ha’penny the sheet. My man bought six, so they could not say afterward that he had missed any.”

Theodore read it.

It was cheap work, badly printed, the ink already coming off on his fingers, and it named no one, which was the cleverness of it. It spoke of a certain noble house not a hundred miles from a certain river, and of a duchess lately wedded out of a debt, and of a moonlit walk she was said to have taken without her husband’s knowledge to a folly in her own park, there to meet a gentleman in regimentals to whom she had been promised before her sale.

It asked, in the arch way these things ask, whether the great were to be permitted what the rest of England was hanged or transported for. It was unprovable from end to end. It did not need to be provable. It needed only to be read.

He set it down and was quiet for a moment, and the quiet had a temperature to it that made Pearce take half a step back.

“Greaves,” Theodore said.

“There is no name on it, Your Grace, and the printer will be a hired one who never saw the man who paid him. But yes. The folly failed to make the scandal, because we left no witnesses he could use, and so he has gone home and had the scandal printed instead, since he could not catch it in the act.” Pearce paused. “It is spite, Your Grace. He cannot prove a word. But spite of this kind spreads, and a thing read in a coffee-house does not require proof to do its work in a drawing room.”

“How far has it gone?”

“Three days, by my reckoning. The coffee-houses had it Tuesday. What is in the coffee-houses by Tuesday is in the clubs by Friday, and what is in the clubs is in the drawing rooms by Sunday and the country houses by the week’s end. I will buy back what I can, Your Grace. I cannot buy back what has already been read, and a thing of this kind, once it is in a woman’s mouth at a card table, is past the reach of any printer alive.”

“Can it be traced to him?”

“Not by any road that ends in a court of law. The printer will not know who paid him, or will be too frightened of who paid him to say. Greaves has done this the way he does all things, carefully planned, with clean hands. It is the same method that hired the lieutenant and bought the river land through agents whose names lead nowhere. He never once touches the thing himself.” Pearce was quiet a moment, and then said the rest of it, because Pearce always said the rest of it. “If I may, Your Grace. He has the trick of fighting from behind cover off a master. I have sometimes thought he mastered it by observing you.”

Theodore looked at him.

“You did not hear me say so, Your Grace.”

“No. I did not.” He folded the sheet once, very precisely, along the line of its own bad crease. “Buy them. All of them, every sheet in every house in town, through six different hands so no one knows it is one buyer. Find the printer, and leave the printer to me, and I will deal with him within the law, slowly, in a manner that will discourage the next man Greaves approaches with a purse and a story. Go.”

“Your Grace.” Pearce went.

And then there was only Ellen, with her cooling tea and her hand no longer over his, looking at the folded sheet on the cloth, and Theodore understood that the morning he had been about to have, the thing he had been working up to say for two days, was not going to be had now, perhaps not for a long time, and that there was nothing for it but to tell her the whole of it, because the new rule, the rule he had made himself in the garden, was that he did not hide things from her any longer.

He did not yet understand that the whole of it included parts he had never meant her to learn.