The Taming of the Duke

Page 50

But Imogen pushed that thought away as disloyal. After all, Gabe was her… her something. She led Posy over to the mounting block, but Rafe was already at her side, arms outstretched.
She had a moment's qualm. He was framed in the sunlight, grinning up at her, all tumbled hair, the old linen shirt and a coat that was as old as the shirt. And then a second later she was on the ground and he was turning away, greeting the Maitland butler with a cheerful "How do you do," and a flurry of chatter.
Imogen knew exactly what Rafe was doing. He was giving her time to get her bearings.
After all, this was the courtyard to which Draven brought her as a new bride. This was the house where they lived as man and wife. It was from this house that her husband's body was carried forth to burial, a mere two weeks after they married.
The courtyard was lined with old stones, warm in the fall sunshine. Thistledown was blowing over one wall, filling the air as if gentle snow were falling, the kind that spins and dances in the air before landing in a hand and keeping its perfect shape for a second.
The butler, Hilton, positively tumbled down the stairs to greet her. "Lady Maitland!" he said, bowing.
She smiled at him. "It's a pleasure to see you again, Hilton."
"If we had known you were coming," he was saying, "we would be more prepared, we would have a tea for you and his lordship."
"I have no wish for tea," Imogen said, "but I would be dearly grateful for a drink of water, if I could trouble you so far."
His face brightened and he trotted back to the open door. Imogen followed him slowly. There were no ghosts in the bright courtyard, but in the house, perhaps?
Yet she walked in without hearing an echo from the querulous voice of her mother-in-law, Lady Clarice. Nor yet the rather bullish, boyish voice of Draven. The house felt like a place dreaming in the afternoon sun along with its courtyard… at peace, waiting.
She looked up at Rafe. "I do believe…" But she couldn't put it in words.
He took her hand, as if she were a child of five, and led her into the sitting room. It was a gay room, papered with cheerful sprays of flowers.
"Lady Clarice loved this room," she said softly, touching the little china cat on the mantelpiece. There was no dust.
Rafe stood in the middle of the rug, looking like a man of the outdoors rather than a duke. More like old Henry who lived in the field. "It's a good old house," he said, looking around. "Strong bones, as one says."
"Is it as old as your house?"
"No. My house goes back to the days of Henry VII, and if I remember rightly, this little manor was constructed in anticipation of one of Queen Elizabeth's progresses. She stayed at Holbrook Court, but her people spilled over here."
Lady Clarice's sewing basket sat next to her favorite chair, a scrap of white linen poking from the top. Annabel bent down and touched it, and for the first time since she entered the house, she felt a pang of true sadness.
"There's always work left unfinished," Rafe said, appearing at her shoulder. For a moment she felt him there, large, solid, and comforting. "Shall we go upstairs?"
So they headed upstairs, past the crimson flocked wallpaper to Lady Clarice's chamber. It was neat as a pin, clean, swept of dust. No ghosts here.
But her own chamber… did she really want to enter?
With Rafe, there was no allowance for cowardice. "Better to get it over with," he said over his shoulder, and before she knew it, there she was, looking at the great postered bed where she and Draven had spent all of ten days of married life before he died.
The room looked as if it had never had an occupant, as if it were waiting for those happy gentlefolk of Queen Elizabeth's to come traipsing down the road.
Rafe leaned against the closed door to the hallway. "I found Peter's bedchamber the hardest to manage," he said, not looking at her. "I was such a dunce about it."
"Tell me," she said, moving over to smooth the cover-pane. "Please."
"I wouldn't let them change the sheets. I slept on a cot in his room, as if he would return any moment. Ridiculous. I wasn't a child, you know. Peter died when I was thirty-two."
She could feel the tears now. Her vision blurred a little, but she swallowed hard. "I did that too," she admitted. "And I slept with Draven's nightshirt for oh… ages."
"Then one day, I realized that Peter had gone," Rafe continued. "Somewhere… who knows where? But he was gone. Truly gone. And I tore the sheets off myself and walked out of his bedchamber. But I had the room repapered before I entered it again."
"Which chamber was it?" She wandered across the room and opened the wardrobe.
"The west chamber."
"So you put in that deep cherry stripe."
"Yes."
"I'm impressed," she said, smiling at him faintly over her shoulder. He walked toward her. "Maitland's clothing?" he said.
"Yes."
"Hilton will give them away."
But she was reaching out, soothing an embroidered vest that she remembered Draven wearing the very first night she met him on English soil. And so Rafe, without saying a word, helped her bring Draven's clothing to the bed, where they left it for Hilton to distribute to the poor. And if a salt tear or two stained some of the brilliant embroidery, Imogen trusted that no one would care or notice.
She took only one thing from the room, a tiny figure of a leaping horse chased in silver, small enough to fit in a pocket.
"Rather lovely," Rafe said, bending over her hand so that his hair brushed against her forearm, soft as silk.
"It was Draven's lucky piece."
"Was he wearing it when he died?"
"He always wore it," she said sadly. "I cursed it afterward, for having not lived up to what he expected."
"Well," Rafe said, "he was doubtless wearing it the day he met you, Imogen. Perhaps that was all the magic this poor little horse had to give."
She smiled at him, and then she couldn't stop smiling, and her fingers closed over the little horse and slipped it into the pocket of her riding costume.
A second later, Rafe took her hand again—vastly improper, that was—and they walked through Lady
Clarice's room and made fast work of dividing her jewelry into piles and instructing Mrs. Hilton to have them sent to her relatives.
They started home slowly. At one point Rafe leaped off his horse and snatched her tiny hat from a long rose thorn where it was hanging. And then he caught up a bunch of hogsweed for Josie because the chicory had indeed closed itself up.
Imogen got off Posy to take a closer look, because in Scotland what Rafe was calling hogsweed was termed yellow cow parsley, a prettier and certainly more descriptive name. And then they waded farther into the field, brushing past dandelion clocks and yellow willow spears blown from the willows between Rafe's land and Maitland land. The sun was warm and the afternoon sleepy, with not a sound in the field but the "tink tink tink" of blackbirds calling to each other in the trees.
Imogen turned around to find that Rafe had thrown himself onto the ground, and was lying in a great heap of rough yellow flowers, arms and legs all akilter, as if he were no duke, and had never heard the word "gentleman." He was chewing a long blade of grass, like a country laborer taking a rest after a day spent hoeing.