The Ugly Duchess

Page 40

His speculation was interrupted. “Does no one recognize me?” the man asked. Gismond had never heard a voice like his: powerful, deep, a growl that quivered in the air like the howl of a bear.
Yet despite its roughness, it was unmistakably the voice of an English gentleman. There was no mistaking the vowels. Now there truly was dead silence in the chamber.
From the corner of his eye Gismond saw the Lord Chancellor twitch, caught between the exercise of his authority and a shock so profound that he—like everyone in the room—simply waited for whatever would come next.
“Given that you were so distressed to consign me to a watery grave,” the man added, turning to the Lord Chancellor, “I quite thought I would be recognized.”
His lordship made a noise like the squeal of a young pig. “Impossible!”
“Entirely possible,” the intruder replied. He seemed to be enjoying himself. “The arms of heaven have not yet pulled me into their embrace, you see.”
A wave of excited babble followed this observation. Gismond craned his neck to look at the countess, tucked into the gallery. It occurred to him that the lost duke—if it was indeed he—didn’t realize that the peeresses were in attendance; he hadn’t looked in their direction. But Gismond could catch only a glimpse of her face, white as parchment.
Then Mr. Pinkler-Ryburn came to his feet and once more climbed to the dais. Though the man claiming to be duke was by far the more ferocious figure, Mr. Pinkler-Ryburn had an odd dignity of his own.
“I do not recognize you, sir,” he said. His voice was cautious and respectful, the sort of address one might give a lion that has suddenly expressed, in the King’s English, a wish to eat you.
“We never knew each other very well,” the man replied.
“If you are indeed the duke, your voice has altered beyond recognition.”
“Having your throat cut tends to do that.” The man tilted his head back. There was a little gasp in the room, as everyone saw the wicked scar that ran across his brown throat as neatly as a cravat.
Gismond had the impulse to clutch his own neck, but luckily he remembered the pristine beauty of his starched neck cloth in time.
“Where have you been during the last seven years?” Mr. Pinkler-Ryburn inquired.
“Spending my time with cutthroats.”
Mr. Pinkler-Ryburn drew himself straight and squared his shoulders. “Then, if you would be so good as to answer a question, sir. By what name was I ridiculed in school, a name which you never yourself used?”
For the first time a smile softened that savage face. “Pink,” the man said. “They bloody well called you Pink.”
If there were any in the room who believed that Pink secretly wished to be duke, they knew at that moment that they were wrong, for he threw his arms around his cousin as if he had discovered his own long-lost brother.
It was such a mesmerizing sight that not everyone on the dais noticed immediately that Lady Islay—now the Duchess of Ashbrook—had fallen into a dead faint and toppled into her neighbor.
It was her own husband, the returned duke, for one had to assume that he had the right to the title now, who saw the furor, brushed off Pink’s embrace, and leapt directly off the dais.
Gismond committed the impropriety of stepping forward, the better to see. (As he told his wife sometime later, it was better than a play.)
The duchess lay, still and white, against Mrs. Pinkler-Ryburn. She didn’t stir when the duke bent over her. A moment later His Grace straightened, holding his wife in his arms.
(“A play,” Gismond repeated that night. “Her head against his shoulder, if you take my meaning. All hero-like, except, of course, no hero looks like that.” He couldn’t explain himself. “It was his expression, maybe, not a patch of nervousness or even excitement. As if this sort of thing happened to him every day of the week.”)
Wearing easy confidence like an ermine-trimmed cloak, the duke strode back to the dais and stood before it, holding his wife in his arms. He nodded up to the Lord Chancellor. “I do believe that my cousin, Mr. Pinkler-Ryburn, will withdraw his petition for declaration of my death.”
“Yes!” Pinkler-Ryburn said immediately, his voice coming with a gasp. “Absolutely. The man’s not dead. Not at all.”
At that, the duke actually threw back his head and laughed. And even though it showed that terrible white scar again, Gismond almost found himself laughing as well. But he had never flouted ceremony in such a fashion in his life, and he did not intend to start now.
The peers, though . . . there was an eruption of unrestrained laughter, the kind that follows and relieves pent-up tension.
(“He’s got a charming laugh,” Gismond told his wife hours later. “Looks a proper savage, but when he laughed, it was an English laugh.”
“What’s an English laugh?” she asked skeptically. “And what was he doing, standing around talking to people while his poor wife was in a dead faint? I certainly hope and trust that you would never treat me so cavalierly, my dear.”
Gismond manfully pushed away the thought that he would be utterly unable to pick up his wife—who outweighed him by more than a few stone—let alone carry her more than a step. “I shall not,” he promised solemnly. “Never.”)
Twenty-three
Theo’s first thought was to flee. The savage, sunburned man on the dais could not, simply could not, be her James.
The way the man stood in front of all those lords, shoulders wider than anyone else’s, the way his eyes calmly moved over the room, the color of his skin, his tattoo, and the way his hair didn’t even touch the nape of his neck . . .
James didn’t look like that, and he didn’t act like that.
But, of course, she was wrong. It was actually the scar on James’s neck that convinced her. She gasped at the sight, her heart gave one huge thump, and the room turned hazy.
She climbed back from a pool of darkness to find herself clasped in James’s arms as he walked across the chamber. Something deep inside her instantly recollected the windy, outdoors smell of him, even though his voice was nothing like what she remembered.
As her head cleared, she became aware of a sardonic note of amusement in her husband’s voice as he conversed with the peers on the dais. There wasn’t even the faintest concern in his voice for her, for the woman—his wife!—in his arms.
She instantly decided not to open her eyes. The last thing she wanted was to meet the pitying gaze of those in the chamber, given that James could not have displayed his utter lack of concern for her any more flagrantly. It wasn’t an experience that she would wish on her worst enemy.
One had to assume that her husband had been lurking around London for days, waiting for the moment when he could charge into the House of Lords like a marauding Visigoth and shock her into a swoon.
It wasn’t that she would have expected him to throw himself into her arms if she’d known he was returning. They had parted in anger, after all. But they were married.
He could have halted this farce before it even started. He could have pretended that he cared about her opinion, that he bothered about her enough to tell her he was alive before informing an assembly of nearly two hundred. Such a public shaming felt like a punishment. Her heart beat painfully in her ears. She hadn’t felt this mortified since first glimpsing the “ugly duchess” etchings.