Any Duchess Will Do

Page 43

Perhaps he didn’t know his mother at all.
She turned to him with tears in her eyes. “Oh, Griffin. I’ve been so worried for you. I knew you were hurting, and I knew the cause must be something horrible. You’ve looked horrible.”
Griff rubbed his face with both hands.
“No, I mean it. Just perfectly wretched.”
He made a gesture of helplessness. “My apologies.”
She sighed. “I was so hoping it wouldn’t come to this. Stay right there.”
She left, and returned within a minute, approaching him where he sat in the center of the room.
From beneath her arm, his mother unfurled the ugliest, most malformed knitted muffler he’d ever seen. She wrapped it once, twice, thrice about his neck.
It was the tightest, warmest hug he’d ever received.
He stared up at her, bewildered. “Where did this come from?”
“The knitting? Or the affection it represents? I’d rather not talk about the knitting. As for the love . . . it’s always been here. Even when we haven’t discussed it.”
He rose to his feet and kissed her on the cheek. “I know.”
For so many years now they’d been all the family each other had. He suspected they’d avoided admitting how much they meant to each other, for the simple fear of acknowledging how close they were to being alone.
She touched one of her cool, papery hands to his face. “My darling boy. I’m so sorry.”
“How did you bear it?” he asked. “How did you bear this three times?”
“Not as bravely as you have. And never alone.” She looked around at the painted walls. “The loss was keen. In my heart, I have a room something like this for each of them. But even in the darkest hours, your father and I took comfort in each other. And in you.”
“In me? God. I never felt good enough to be one son. Let alone take the place of four.”
“I hate that you felt that way. Looking back, we should have been more nurturing. But we were so afraid of coddling you, when we knew the strong man you’d need to become. Left to my own devices, I could have hugged you to my bosom and held you there until your sixteenth birthday.”
“Well.” His mouth pulled to the side. “I suppose I’m glad you resisted that urge.”
She patted his cheek. “Griffin, I’ve always looked at you and seen a generous, good-hearted man. I’ve merely grown impatient waiting for you to see the same.”
“I wanted to be better for her.” He lifted his eyes to the ceiling. “I didn’t hide all this because I was ashamed of Mary Annabel. I was only ashamed of myself, my dissolute life. I’d resolved to make myself a better man. I didn’t want anyone to look at my daughter and see one of my mistakes.”
Mistakes he kept right on making, it seemed.
“She was right,” he said. “Pauline was right about our chances, but she had the blame laid wrong. If society won’t accept her, it’s not her fault. It’s mine. A stodgy, boring sort of nobleman might fall in love with a commoner, and society would give her the benefit of the doubt. An even chance to prove herself, at least. But with my sordid history, people will always assume she’s just a debauched duke’s latest, greatest scandal. She deserves better than that. I want better for her.”
“It’s not too late,” his mother said. “Let her come here. Not just for a week, but months. You can take your place in Lords, and we’ll introduce her to society slowly next year. You’ll see, people will eventually—”
“No. No, that’s just it. She doesn’t want this life, and I don’t blame her. I don’t even want it, but I know it’s my duty now.” He sighed. “There may never be a ninth Duke of Halford, but I want the eighth to be remembered well. For my daughter’s sake.”
“And what about Pauline?”
Pauline, Pauline, Pauline. She’d been gone from his life a matter of hours, and he already missed her so acutely. He would spend his life digging out from landslides.
“I just want all her dreams to come true.”
Had the cottage always been this small?
Pauline stood in the lane, just staring. Uncertain how to approach her own home. Major the guard goose came honking toward her, alerting those within the house.
“Pauline?” Her mother’s face appeared in the window. “Pauline, is that you?”
She dashed a tear from her eye. “Yes, Mum. It’s me. I’m home.”
Later, up in the sleeping loft, Pauline and Daniela hugged and cried. Then they brushed and plaited one another’s hair and laid out their Sunday dresses for the next morning.
As always, Griff’s sovereign went straight in the collection box.
During the church service, Pauline could feel all the curiosity of Spindle Cove focused on her. She knew she’d have to answer a great many questions, but she just wasn’t ready yet.
And even though she managed to delay her first trip to the All Things shop for another several days, she still wasn’t prepared to answer them.
Sally Bright pounced on her the moment she walked through the door. Aside from being her oldest and dearest friend, Sally was the most inquisitive, gossipy person in Spindle Cove. Pauline knew the curiosity must be gnawing at her friend with a hundred teeth.
“You”—she lifted and waved a stack of newspapers—“have so much explaining to do! Did you really attend a ball? Make a duke fall madly in love with you?”
“Sally, I don’t wish to speak of it yet. I just can’t. It’s all too . . .” Her voice broke.
Sally didn’t press for more. She hurried out from behind the counter and wrapped Pauline in a tight hug. “There there. We’ll have years to talk it over, won’t we?”
Pauline nodded. “Sadly, I think we will.”
She’d been harboring the absurd hope that Griff would come chasing after her, perhaps show up at the farm cottage some morning, unshaven and smelling of cologne. But as the days passed, her hope seemed more and more like a fanciful dream. That wasn’t the fairy tale he’d promised her.
“I have some news that will cheer you,” Sally said.
“Oh? What’s that?”
“It’s nasty old Mrs. Whittlecombe. She’s moving to Dorset to live with her nephew.”
“Truly? That is good news, I suppose. For everyone but the nephew. I thought she’d never leave that tumbledown old place.”
Sally shrugged. “Well, she did. And cleared out of the neighborhood quickly, too. Now I’m stuck with a half-dozen bottles of her noxious ‘health tonic.’ I don’t suppose anyone else is going to want it.” Her eyebrows lifted. “And there’s something else. Something for you.”
“What’s that?”
“Come see.”
Sally pulled her over to the storeroom. On the floor in the center sat an immense wooden crate, labeled with Pauline’s name.
“A man delivered it special yesterday,” she said. “It didn’t come through the regular post. But he told me it wasn’t to go to your cottage, ever. I must wait until Miss Simms came to the shop, and I couldn’t speak a word of it to anyone. It was all just painfully mysterious.” She gave Pauline’s arm an impatient shake. “Can’t we open it now? It’s heavy as anything. I’m dying to know what’s inside. Dying.”
Pauline nodded. “Of course.”
Sally gave a little cheer of excitement. With the help of a slender crowbar, she pried the top from the crate and sifted through a top layer of straw.
“Oh,” she said flatly. “Well, that’s disappointing. I hope you didn’t have your hopes too high. It’s only books.” She lifted a red-bound volume off the top and peered into the crate. “Yes. Books, all the way down.”
“Let me see,” Pauline said, snatching the book from Sally’s hand.
She ran a palm over the fresh red Morocco binding, brushing aside a blade of straw so she could read the cover: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure: The Life and Adventures of Fanny Hill.
“Who’s this Mrs. Radcliffe person?” Sally lifted a handful of books from the crate. “She wrote a great many books.”
“Be careful with them, please.” Pauline went to her side and began to sort through the volumes. Radcliffe, Johnson, Wollstonecraft, Fielding, Defoe. All the books on the list that Griff had dictated that day in Snidling’s bookshop.
He’d remembered. And he’d known not to send them to her home, for fear her father would pitch them all into the fire. She lifted the book to her nose and inhaled that aroma deeply—her second favorite smell—before setting it aside to look at the rest.
Halfway through the crate, she found a small volume not bound in red Morocco, but instead covered in the softest, most impractical fawn-hued leather. Collected Poems of William Blake.
Tears welled in her eyes as she opened the cover. Inside, right on the exquisite marble endpaper, there was affixed a bookplate with a stamp.
FROM THE LIBRARY OF MISS PAULINE SIMMS
“Oh, Griff.”
This crate wasn’t merely stuffed with books. It was full of meaning. Messages too complicated to explain and too risky to send in a letter.
He knew her, this crate of books said. He knew her to the deepest, most hidden places of her soul. He respected her as a person, with thoughts and dreams and desires.
He loved her. He truly did.
And most poignant of all, this crate of books held one clear, undeniable message:
Goodbye.
Chapter Twenty-seven
A few months later
If there was anything better than the smell of books, it was the smell of books mingled with the scents of strong tea and spice biscuits—and all of it on a rainy afternoon.
A celebration was in order. The Two Sisters circulating library was exactly one month old today.
All the Spindle Cove ladies had come to their party. The small shop was crowded with young women poring over scandalous books and dunking their biscuits into cups of milky tea.
Pauline loved this shop, as she’d never thought she could love something that was supposed to be work. And she did work hard—every day, from dawn to dusk—but the labor was a fatiguing kind of joy. Spindle Cove was bustling with a new crop of ladies on holiday, all of them eager for new reading material.
Some days, a young woman might come through the door looking rather lost. And then she’d find an old friend sitting on the shelf, bound in red Morocco. Or perhaps a new, exciting acquaintance. She’d leave with a book in her hand and a smile on her face. Those days made all the hard work worthwhile.
And she never worked alone. She had her sister.
She and Daniela had traded one sleeping loft for another. They lived above the shop now, the two of them. Except for visits to Mama on Sundays, they kept their own hours, made their own meals, cleaned as little or as much as they liked. They were wildly extravagant with candles, burning them late into the night and reading verses to each other.
This place truly was home.
“Who’s that walking across the square?” a lady said, peering out the window. “Do we know him?”
A second young lady laughed. “I think we might.”
“Oh goodness,” said Charlotte Highwood. “Not him again.”
It couldn’t be. He wouldn’t have come. But in the end, curiosity won out. Pauline made her way to the window and peered out through the rain.
Oh, Lord. Oh, Lord. It was him. Even with the rain, she’d know those strong features and broad shoulders anywhere. The Duke of Halford was walking straight toward her shop.
Griff.
Her pulse began to pound. Why was he here now, after months had passed with no word? Just when she’d gathered the pieces of her heart and built it a new, safer home.
“Don’t worry, Miss Simms,” Charlotte said. “I’ll devil him before he can trouble you.”