Page 113

Your Sebastian

Esme drew a long breath. If one were to receive only one love letter in a lifetime, surely this was the letter to receive. A tiny smile blossomed in her heart. He refused to leave. Sebastian refused to leave her.

She could hardly force him to return to Italy. I am a weak woman, she thought. Then she read the love letter—her first love letter—again.

< 42 =

Unwelcome Revelations at Supper

That evening Keyes put her in a chemise as light as a spiderweb, trimmed with lace so fine that it tore with a fingernail. Henrietta wore no corset. Darby had thrown out all her corsets. Over her chemise went a white satin petticoat, made quite short and embroidered all around the bottom with silver spangles. The bodice was of figured silk adorned with the same spangles. Finally, she wore a robe of white lace on top that fell in easy folds to the ground, quite like a Grecian gown. The costume was exceedingly graceful. Everything that Henrietta wasn’t. Even given her limp, the lace floated about her in such a way that she seemed to glide rather than walk.

Henrietta watched numbly as Keyes’s nimble fingers gathered up all her hair. Rather than harnessing it to the top of her head, the way that Henrietta normally did, Keyes shaped it into a glittering stream down her back, held back from her face with a silver ornament that matched her spangles.

“Are you quite certain?” Henrietta asked dubiously, straining to see over her shoulder. “I thought that the current fashion was to tie up one’s hair, leaving just one curl to the side.”

Fool for Love

321

“Madam has such lovely hair that she should ignore fashion.”

Henrietta frowned at her reflection. To her mind, she looked like a puffy marigold.

Keyes leaned forward. “Your husband always ignores fashion when it comes to his lace, madam.”

“Oh, all right then,” Henrietta said, although she didn’t really see that as a justification for marigold hair. But what did it matter anyway? She still couldn’t imagine that Darby would want to display his limping wife to the public, given a pressing necessity to find a mistress. From now on, she would be little more than a nursemaid, after all. As he had said. Recognizing that she was being childish didn’t help. She could feel the pull of an overwhelming black mood, such as she hadn’t experienced since she was a girl, and the reality of her situation became clear.

Darby preferred his butler, Fanning, to leave the room during the second course. After Fanning had taken a last eagleeyed look at the table and left, Henrietta took a large swallow of claret. It was a far stronger wine than she usually drank and made her head swim. But tonight it gave her courage. A black mood was pulling her into its embrace. There were days when she was a young girl when she raged against her fate all day long. When she could not tolerate the idea of an existence dictated by an error of nature. It was even more embittering now, when she knew what a delight it was to lie in Darby’s arms.

“I need to tell you something,” she said. He was looking particularly handsome. The candles on the table between them emphasized the lean hollows in his cheeks and made him look rakish, almost Eastern, not like a fine upstanding English gentleman at all. He raised an eyebrow. She loathed the fact that she could feel his gaze on her, as if he were the sun and she a violet. She took a deep breath. And another swallow of claret.

322 Eloisa

James

“I have been wanting to tell you something too, Henrietta. Last night you said you loved me.”

In the cold morning’s light, she wished she had kept that fact to herself. She needn’t have stripped herself of every bit of dignity.

“I don’t know very much about love. I doubt I love anyone, to be honest. I simply wasn’t brought up to the emotion. But I do want you to know how very much I honor your feelings for me. How—how pleased I am by your affection.”

Lovely, Henrietta thought. At least she didn’t have to worry about her husband feeling heartbroken once she could no longer act as his partner in bed. He could find affection elsewhere. It was she who would wait out the nights of her life in an empty bed. The black well in her heart grew and spilled into anger.

“I’m carrying a child,” she said bluntly. He was fingering his wineglass and watching her with an impenetrable expression on his dark face, almost as if he were waiting for her to say something shocking—but not that.

“What?”

She spelled it out. “I have not experienced a flux since we married.”

“We’ve been married three weeks.”

“Four weeks tomorrow. And I am very regular in that respect.”

There was a pause, then: “God damn it to hell.”

That seemed to sum it up from Henrietta’s point of view as well.

Darby stood up, walked the sideboard, and retrieved the bottle of claret. Then he poured them both another glass. Henrietta’s hand shook as she reached for her wineglass.