The Ugly Duchess

Page 41

It made her feel unloved, unlovable, as if the very ground shifted under her feet, as if all the years of transforming herself into a swan had come to nothing, obliterated by the fact her husband hadn’t even bothered to visit her when he returned to London.
All the anguish she had felt after James left, when everyone concluded that he couldn’t bear to stay married to such an ugly woman, flooded back. Some of those etchings had depicted James fleeing with an arm thrown over his eyes. Theo had felt reduced to a cipher of a woman then, and she felt it again now.
She kept her eyes closed while James finished his conversation, walked through the chamber and out of the building, and gently deposited her on the seat of the carriage. He was so big that the vehicle actually swayed when he climbed through the door.
“You can wake up now,” he said. There was that thread of laughter in his voice again. Laughter? He thought this was amusing—to make people who had loved him go through the agony of declaring him dead?
James had never been pitiless before. He had never been contemptuous.
She stopped pretending and sat upright with a jolt, eyes open. After all these years, her husband was across from her again. Yet everything had changed. James had become a pirate. A criminal. His eyes were dark and unreadable, yet they somehow still spoke of arrogance and power. She had no difficulty believing that he had forced people to walk down the plank.
Her fingers curled around the edge of the leather seat, holding on for dear life.
“Good Lord,” she said, not quite under her breath. His skin was bronzed by the sun, and the dark blue flower under his right eye was arresting, up close. It was like some sort of alien word, in a language she didn’t understand.
The sight of him filled her head with ridiculous comparisons. Englishmen weren’t—they were white, lily white. With white skin. They didn’t inscribe flowers on their skin.
Not James. He looked fifty times more alive than the white-skinned gentlemen they’d left behind in the House of Lords, and that tattoo . . .
It was a flower, but not a frivolous one. It was sinister. Frightening, even.
Her fingers gripped the seat more tightly. She would never in a million years have thought that she could fear her childhood friend. But now she did. Only an idiot wouldn’t be uneasy in this man’s presence.
“Good afternoon, Daisy,” he said, as calm as if they had parted no more than a month or so ago.
She couldn’t think what to say. Mr. Badger had described the tattoo as being worn by a ferocious pirate called Jack Hawk: should she mention the name? Then she met his eyes, and as quickly as it had come, her fear evaporated, and an incandescent rage took over. James was regarding her with amusement. There wasn’t the faintest sign on his face that he acknowledged the gravity of the ceremony he had just interrupted.
And yet she had been genuinely moved by the formal declaration of his death. She had been struggling not to cry, thinking of the way the old duke would appear in Staffordshire every now and then and inquire whether she had heard anything from his son. That a son could treat his father with such indifference was contemptible.
Angry or not, her instincts warned her to remain calm. “Welcome to England,” she said, finally. She reached up, unpinned her veil, and placed it on the seat beside her.
James merely nodded.
“May I ask what moved you to return?” she asked, quite as if he had been on a short trip to Wales.
“I nearly died after having my throat cut. It’s a trite commonplace, but having a brush with death does give a man to think.”
“You certainly made a dramatic entrance.” Theo was never more proud of herself than when her voice contained not even a drop of reproach. Exquisite self-control had got her through the humiliations of her past, and it would serve her now. She refused, absolutely refused, to let James know how much his nonchalant attitude wounded her.
“Yes. I should add that I had no idea you would attend the ceremony.”
“Would it have made any difference to you?”
He tilted his head just slightly to the side, and for the first time she saw a mannerism that she recognized from the old James. “Yes.”
“Where have you been staying in London while you waited for the ceremony?”
He frowned with what seemed to be genuine confusion. “My ship only docked last night. I went to the town house first to tell you I was alive; the butler was kind enough to inform me that I had better scurry over to Westminster or I might not arrive in time to save myself from dying, so to speak. As I calculated it, I would have been dead seven years on June sixteen. I thought I had several weeks to convince everyone that I was among the living.”
“The paperwork would have cleared Chancery by your death date, thus ensuring that there was no delay between dukes.”
“I was glad to see that Cecil showed no particular reluctance to lose the title he almost inherited.”
“None. In fact, he wanted to wait another year or so.”
“So it was my wife who wished to be freed on my seven-year anniversary.” His voice was colorless.
She smiled at him as politely as any duchess at a musicale. “Only because I had no evidence of your continued existence, nor reason to assume it, I assure you. How did you find the house this morning?” Theo forced herself to relax her fingers, but she could not bring herself to fold them in her lap. Instead she reached for the strap by the window and hung on as if they were madly turning corners rather than sedately making their way toward Berkeley Square.
“I was there only for a matter of minutes. I dropped the baggage I brought with me and went directly to Lords.”
She was unable to stop herself. “By ‘baggage,’ surely you mean booty?”
“So you know?” Perversely, he grinned at that.
She was so enraged that she felt her throat closing. But she schooled her voice again. “We had been told of a possible connection between you and a pirate called the Earl and another named Jack—Hawk, was it? Cecil and I were reluctant to believe that you had entered into that profession.” She left silent the obvious addition: more the fools we.
“Life is full of surprises,” James replied, most unhelpfully.
It might have been the flare of her nostrils; his eyes narrowed and he seemed to grasp a hint of her feelings.
But what he said next did not reflect that. “The traffic around London has become appalling; it took so long to get to Lords that I actually thought I might be forced to play a resurrection scene.”
The carriage was finally coming to a halt. “I am glad we were spared that,” Theo remarked.
“Your butler told me that you left at seven this morning,” he said, in a voice that carried an undertone of possessiveness. “The ceremony didn’t begin for some time thereafter.” James was missing for seven years, and now he thought to return home as the master of the household?
“I paid a visit to your father’s grave,” she replied, gathering up her reticule and veil as a groom opened the carriage door. “He often asked for you before he died. This morning, I wanted to tell him before I took the step of declaring you dead. A foolish gesture—in more than one way, it seems.”
For the first time, he flinched; she saw a flash of deep pain in his eyes.
And she was glad. As she stepped from the carriage, Theo was truly shocked by just how glad she was. She felt as bloodthirsty as any pirate.