Page 33 of The Duke’s Hidden Duchess

“Georgiana tells me that you defended me this afternoon,” he said. “To her face, she added, and upon the morning-room floor, surrounded by the evidence of her misjudgement. She reported the occurrence as one might report a wonder.”

“I told her the truth as I have begun to understand it. Some of it happened to favour you. Do not grow accustomed to the circumstance. I told her a great deal which did not.”

“May I ask what you saw that fell in my favour?”

Selina set aside the book. “That you are not cold, only frightened. That the fear is old. I could not tell her its origin, which I disliked, because I am not accustomed to defending what I cannot see.” She watched him pour the wine.

He poured but did not sit. Instead, he crossed to the darkened window and stood with his glass in his hand, his back half turned towards her.

“My father died ten years ago,” he said. “I was four-and-twenty. That is where it begins, I suppose.”

“Is it?”

He stood with the decanter still in his hand and appeared to have forgotten it. After a moment he put it down on the table beside her, considered its position and moved it an inch.

“No.” He paused. “No, it is not.”

Selina waited. Nathaniel turned his glass slowly by the stem, and the wine caught what little light remained before releasing it again.

“My mother was beautiful,” he said. “That is the heart of the trouble, and I have never found a way to say it without making her beauty sound like an accusation. She was beautiful and deeply unhappy, and she sought consolation in the few forms society permitted an unhappy married woman. Admirers. Attention. A growing carelessness about the distinction between them.” He stopped. “This is not proceeding as I intended.”

“Nothing worth saying ever does. Begin further back if you must. I am not going anywhere.”

“There was a summer twelve years ago. I was two-and-twenty, and my father was already ill. What began as flirtation became an attachment the town could see. There was very nearly a scandal which would have touched my father’s name and Georgiana’s future. She was seven years old and might have grown up beneath the shadow of it.” He drank. “I spent that summer containing the damage. Standing between my father and the knowledge of it. Between my mother and its consequences. Between this family and the precipice towards which it seemed determined to lean. Then she died, the scandal never broke, and that was considered the end of the matter.”

The room had grown very quiet. Outside, the last light had left the garden.

“How did she die?”

“Grief, they said.”

Selina closed the book upon her finger, then slowly withdrew it.

“That is what they said.”

“Yes.”

“I did not ask what they said.”

He did not answer. He remained at the window with his back towards her, the glass motionless in his hand. The silence continued until she counted its length and then went beyond counting. He was not gathering an answer. He had chosen not to give one.

“Nathaniel.”

His shoulders shifted.

“She asked me for money,” he said. “That August. She came to my rooms, which she had never done before, and asked me for money and a carriage. She intended to go abroad with him. She wanted my help in arranging it quietly, so that her departure would resemble a rest cure rather than a flight. She sat in my chair and asked her son to pay her fare.”

He placed the glass upon the sill with great care, as though it were the glass which might break.

“I refused. I stood in the doorway and explained why with perfect clarity, because I was two-and-twenty and believed clarity the only virtue required of me. She looked at me for a long while. Then she said, ‘Very well, Wexford.’ She had never called me Wexford before. It was my father’s title, and he was not yet dead.”

“Nathaniel.”

“She never spoke a complete sentence to me again. Eight weeks. Not one. She remained perfectly civil at table.” He continued facing the window. “Then she was dead, and they called it grief. I have had twelve years in which to decide whether they were right. I have not decided, and I do not intend to, because no answer would allow me to sleep more easily.” He drew a breath. “There. You have it. That is more than I have ever said aloud, and I should be obliged if you did not require me to say any of it twice.”

Selina sat with the book upon her knee and one hand resting flat upon its cover. For once, she found that she had nothing to say.

The fire shifted behind the grate. Nathaniel did not turn.