“However, I shall insist that the duke either stay in London with you for some months, or, if he must travel back and forth to Scotland, that he do so while you remain in the city. I intend to see to it that there be no question in anyone’s mind about whether the marriage had to be speedily effected due to a breach in proper behavior.”
“But what if Edie finds herself enceinte within a week or so?” Layla asked, raising her head. “Then it will make no difference whether she stays here or goes to Scotland.”
“I won’t,” Edie said hastily. “I’m sure that never happens.”
“It happened to your mother,” her father said, unforgivably.
Layla’s chin stayed admirably high. “The Duke of Kinross certainly seems remarkably virile.”
“I don’t know where we would stay in London!” Edie babbled, her heart racing in response to the tension around the dining room table. What would happen to them once she left? She had played the role of family peacemaker for most of her father’s marriage.
“The duke owns a large town house a short distance from here,” her father said, his tone as measured and cool as ever. “You will have to learn your husband’s holdings, Edith. He holds a castle and its accompanying lands in Scotland, and as well as two other estates at some distance from his country seat, one of which, in the Highlands, is the seat of his clan. He owns a house in Shropshire and the aforementioned town house here. And,” he added punctiliously, “there was mention of a small island off the coast of Italy.”
“That is so romantic,” Layla exclaimed. “Please say that you will invite me to your island, Edie.” In the wake of the vicious little exchange earlier, she couldn’t match her husband’s composure. Her voice shook a bit.
“Of course,” Edie cried. “If there’s a house on the island, we would love to have you join us.”
She felt a bit peculiar about all those estates. It seemed she was marrying a potentate. It wasn’t that she was displeased to find that her husband was wealthy, but she wasn’t overjoyed, either. She’d seen her father run ragged by the responsibilities inherent in managing his estate and various houses.
Without those responsibilities, the earl could have been one of the world’s most renowned musicians. She felt a prickling of sorrow for him at the thought. She’d grown up knowing that women had no chance of performing in public, but for her father, a choice must have presented itself, at some point.
Then, looking at his strong jaw, she was struck by the truth of it: there had never really been a choice. The earl would never have turned his back on his responsibilities. He was as trapped by his birth as she was by her sex.
If Gowan hadn’t inherited his own set of responsibilities, he would presumably have spent his life growing wheat. The idea didn’t have the same force as becoming a world-class musician, although it did have a certain bucolic charm.
“I shall inform the duke of my decision as regards the ceremony this afternoon,” her father said now.
“Since there won’t be enough time to have a wedding gown designed for you, you can wear mine,” Layla put in. “The fashion has not changed so very much since I wore it. We’ll have it taken in, a stitch or two here and there, and it will fit you perfectly.”
“Oh, Layla, that is such a generous offer.” Edie took her stepmother’s hand again, wishing with all her heart that things had been different. Layla had been keeping the gown for her own daughter . . . but had apparently abandoned that dream.
Even in the grip of adolescent charmlessness, Edie had been in awe of her new stepmother’s wedding gown. It was made of silk embroidered all over with pinpoint spangles so that it flowed like water, catching the light and lending its wearer an impossibly ethereal air. Layla had floated down the aisle, beaming at Edie’s father. The memory was unbearably poignant now.
“Edith will wear her mother’s wedding gown,” the earl stated, brushing aside the offer.
Layla flinched.
Edie scowled at him. “I didn’t know my mother left a gown.”
“Her gown and her jewels are to be given to you upon your wedding.”
“I see.” She gave Layla’s hand a squeeze under the table.
Her stepmother’s eyes had grown precariously shiny. She stood up and said simply, “I do believe that I drank too much champagne last night to enjoy this meal.”
Edie and her father finished eating in complete silence. She waited to see if he was going upstairs to talk to his wife, but instead he strode into the hallway calling for his cloak. A moment later, the front door opened and he was gone.
So Edie ran up the stairs and found Layla surrounded by maids—and three open trunks.
“I am leaving to pay a visit to my parents in Berwick-upon-Tweed.” Her face was the color of parchment, but she wasn’t crying. “Now that my father’s gout precludes visits to London, I must travel to them instead.”
Edie sank into a chair.
“The only thing I’m sorry about is missing your wedding,” Layla continued. “But for all I know, I wouldn’t be welcome in the presence of your mother’s dress.”
“Oh, Layla, no!” Edie cried.
Her stepmother’s eyes were brimming with unshed tears. “You know how much I love you. But the idea of standing in a church next to your father during a wedding, and pretending that he is anything other than indifferent to me . . . I can’t do it.”
“I understand,” Edie said, getting up to give her a hug. “I truly do.”
“My parents’ country house is close to the Scottish border, so I’ll pay you a visit before—if I return to London.” She swallowed hard.
Edie pulled her closer, her heart aching. She opened her mouth to say that her father would surely fetch his wife back home, and then closed it. It seemed quite likely that the earl wouldn’t bother.
“The important thing is that you, my darling, are going to be happy with that gorgeous Scotsman of yours,” Layla said, giving her a kiss on the cheek.
Sure enough, when her father appeared at the dining room table that evening he remarked indifferently that there was nothing to do in a small town on the Scottish border. “My wife will find no frivolities to entertain herself, and she is sure to return posthaste. I see no reason to waste my time and energy following her.”
“If you could just be kinder to her,” Edie implored. “She adores you.”
“You know nothing of what you are saying!” her father snapped.
“I know that you love her, and yet you treat her as if she were a veritable concubine. As if the fact that you conduct yourself with such a high moral tone means that everyone must genuflect as you pass. I know that she loves—”
He didn’t wait for the rest of her analysis, but stood up and left the room. Edie sighed. Her father’s rudeness was a sign of extreme agitation, given that he considered manners to be next to godliness, or perhaps even above it.
The house was strangely silent without Layla’s husky bellow of laughter and fluting voice shouting outrageous comments.
At luncheon the following day, the earl’s face was more withdrawn than ever. For the first time in Edie’s memory, he shook his head when she asked if he wished to practice duets. When it was plain that he would not be persuaded, Edie retired to her room and played for hours, but the music sounded as hollow as her heart.
Gowan appeared in the late afternoon and suggested an immediate ceremony, employing a ducal tone that assumed compliance. Her father didn’t bristle, as he would have earlier. And then Gowan added that, as far as he was concerned, it was absurd to stay in London merely to satisfy gossipmongers, and that anyone who wanted to believe ribald rumors could go to the blazes. The earl didn’t argue over that, either. He simply capitulated to everything the duke demanded.
He managed to keep that wooden expression for days, until the morning of Edie’s wedding. Edie came down the stairs wearing Layla’s gown after all because, as it turned out, her mother’s gown had been eaten into ribbons by moths.
Edie was not given to
immodesty, but she could see that Layla’s dress did her proud. All the tiny spangles caught the light and made her look as if she were wearing a gown fashioned from diamonds. Its small sleeves and form-fitting, deeply cut bodice shaped her breast, and fell into graceful folds around her hips. She wore her hair caught up with jewels, just as Layla had, though she wore her mother’s opals, rather than Layla’s pearls.
It was only then that her father’s stony façade cracked: he flinched, and there was a flash of something like agony on his face, but he bowed and stated, “Daughter, you look extremely well,” in that measured tone of his.
Even when they entered Westminster Abbey, her father showed no signs of regret that Layla was not at his side.
Edie, on the other hand, desperately wished Layla were there. What’s more, she hated the idea of leaving her father alone in an echoing house with nothing more than four cellos, no matter how much consolation he derived from playing them.
They had decided to eschew a reception of any sort, given Layla’s absence, so after the brief ceremony they returned to the earl’s house and shared a surprisingly cordial luncheon in which all three of them carefully avoided any mention of the countess.
Instead, Gowan and Lord Gilchrist had, to Edie’s mind, a very good time denouncing the British tax system, particularly efforts by certain astonishingly unsympathetic politicians to reintroduce a personal income tax—which would thereby defraud such innocent persons as the two noblemen at the table of their rightful profits. Edie found herself looking from her father to her husband and realizing that they truly had a great deal in common. It was an odd thought, and one she stored away to consider further.
In the late afternoon, after she had changed into an extremely chic new gown, and all her trunks and belongings had been whisked away by the duke’s men, the time came to say good-bye. Gowan stood waiting beside the carriage, flanked by so many liveried grooms that he looked like a member of the royal family.
She took her father’s hands and tried once more, “Please bring her back.”
He nodded, but it was such a clipped gesture that she knew it indicated only that he’d heard her, not whether he would obey.
She could do no more. So Edie stepped up into the carriage. She was no longer Lady Edith. She was no longer the peacemaker in the Gilchrist household. She was no longer an unmarried daughter.
She was the Duchess of Kinross, and there, sitting across from her, was her husband.
And her husband . . .
Gowan looked entirely calm and inscrutable but she knew the truth: he had been as moved by the wedding rite as she had been.
When he had promised to “love her, comfort her, honor and keep her in sickness and in health,” she had felt color creep into her cheeks at the expression in his eyes. The breath had caught in her lungs and she had clung to his hands as if they were the only things keeping her upright.
She had never dreamed that wedding vows could mean so much. Nor that she would be so lucky as to find the one man in the world who was perfect for her.
And then, when she had promised to “keep thee only unto him, as long as ye both shall live,” Gowan’s eyes had glowed with a joy that she had seen only a few times in the whole of her life.
Now, she was sitting opposite him in a velvet cloak trimmed with real pearls. After a moment, she allowed the cloak to slip down her shoulders so that her breasts gleamed like the opals in her hair.
A banked flame smoldered in Gowan’s eyes, a fierce interest that made her shift in her seat and straighten her shoulders, which merely served to bring her bosom into further prominence. “You’ve got them,” Layla had told her. “Flaunt them.”
Edie reserved judgment about whether Layla’s propensity to flaunt her bosom in public had done her marriage any good or any ill. But Layla’s propensities—and Layla’s bosom—aside, she was keenly aware that Gowan liked her breasts.
They had said to each other all the words that needed to be said.
The rest of the evening?
No words.
Eighteen
Nerot’s Hotel
London
“I’ve never been inside a hotel,” Edie said as they entered, looking about with a great deal of curiosity. “I still don’t understand why we don’t simply repair to your house, Gowan.”
“My town house is not acceptable for my duchess,” he replied. The very idea of bringing Edie into a room festooned with jackals offended him. Nerot’s, on the other hand, offered a suitable level of luxurious privacy. If they could not spend their wedding night at his castle, Nerot’s was the next best thing.
Mr. Bindle, Gowan’s butler, came toward them across the entrance hall, followed by a short man with a remarkably full head of hair, which gave him the appearance of a blown dandelion. It emerged that this flowery fellow was Mr. Parnell, the manager of the establishment.
Gowan saw no compelling reason to spend time with the man—surely Bindle had seen to every detail—but he listened with controlled civility as Parnell babbled about the various arrangements for housing his entourage, including Bindle, his cook, and his personal servants.
Yes, he’d brought six footmen and grooms, his cook, his valet, and various other retainers—not to mention their trunks and the carriage bearing Edie’s cello—but surely his retinue could be housed without his help.
He glanced at Bindle, who put a hand on Parnell’s arm and drew him ahead of them at a brisk walk. They climbed a flight of marble stairs, where, at the end of a short corridor, they arrived at a set of tall, lavishly gilded double doors.
“How lovely,” Edie exclaimed.
Mr. Parnell wiped his brow. “The Royal Suite. The doors were brought from France, where they used to hang in Le Palais-Royale in Paris, Your Graces.” He turned the key in the lock and they entered the suite’s great drawing room. Bindle announced that a meal, which was even now being prepared by the duke’s chef, would be brought up in five minutes.
Edie drifted around the room examining the furnishings. She glanced over her shoulder at Gowan and he felt her gaze as if he’d been struck by lightning. She expected him to refuse the meal; he could see it in the sparkling naughtiness of her gaze.
But omitting the meal wasn’t a part of his plan. The last thing he wanted was for her to grow weak from lack of sustenance. He nodded his assent to Bindle and sent him and Parnell out of the room. Then he prowled toward Edie, enjoying the way she stood before tall windows looking like a column of golden light. Her gown had been designed to drive a man into blithering incoherence. It resembled a mere length of fabric wrapped around her. As if a man might reach out and pluck a pin here or there, and a delectable, naked woman would stand before him.
The door opened again, and Mary, Edie’s maid, bustled in, followed by his valet, Trundle.
Gowan glanced over his shoulder. “You will not enter this suite unless you are expressly summoned.”
Mary dropped into a curtsy so low she almost lost her balance. She and Trundle fled.
“Was that truly necessary?” Edie asked.
“My servants are not accustomed to granting me privacy,” he said, reaching out with a finger and tracing the line of her eyebrow, “because I have never before requested it. They will have to learn new ways.”
“You’ve never requested privacy?”
“In the bathroom, of course.”
“Servants come and go as they please?” Her voice was faintly disbelieving.
“Only if they have reason to enter a room, naturally.”
“I am almost always alone. And no one enters my rooms without warning except Layla.”
“When you were playing, the evening when your father joined you, you looked fit to murder until you knew it was he entering your room.”
“It wasn’t who he was; it was that he was carrying an instrument. I cannot abide being interrupted while playing, or being asked to stop before I am ready.”
“I shall inform my people. They will not disturb you.” He
shifted so that he stood squarely before her, and let his finger run down her cheek and under her chin, tipping it back. “You’re so beautiful, Edie. I am awed.”
“Well, I don’t know why you should be,” she said in that endearingly practical way she had. “Awe is not what I feel when I look at you.”
And indeed, he saw nothing like awe in her eyes; rather he saw a mix of mischief and lust. It made his mind blur, and he nearly lit upon her like a ravening wolf, but he forced himself to remember his plan.
Instead, he bent his head and kissed her gently. The way a gentleman kisses his wife, with reverence.
Edie wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him back. She seemed not to care for the reverence, because her lips were greedy and she demanded a kiss of an entirely different kind. The slightly awkward way she pushed her tongue between his lips lit a slow burn in Gowan’s groin.
Then they were kissing so deeply that he came back to himself only with the realization that she was tugging at his neck cloth. He brought his hand up and stilled hers. “Our supper will arrive presently.” In fact, he was surprised it wasn’t there already. Bindle had said five minutes, and Gowan could usually set his clocks to Bindle’s reckonings.
“Who cares?” Edie whispered. She leaned forward and pressed a kiss on his neck. He felt a pulse of desire so powerful that it nearly unmanned him.
So he did the only thing he could, and stepped back. As her hands fell away, his neck cloth dropped to the floor.
“Oh dear,” she said, shaking her head. “This is not the moment to become stickish, Gowan.”
The door once again swung open, and Bindle bustled in with his usual silent efficiency, followed by his wine steward, Mr. Rillings, and four footmen bearing a loaded table. The footmen set the table down in the middle of the room, placing chairs at the head and foot.
Gowan introduced his wife to those servants whom she hadn’t already met. Edie’s demeanor was exquisite, as befitted a young lady of her pedigree. She was respectful and courteous to all, with slightly more warmth extended to Mr. Bindle.