The Duchess War (The Brothers Sinister) (28 page)

“Simple,” he said. He wished that he’d been sitting down, only so that he might stand at this moment. “I’m here to say good-bye.” He strode to the door and then turned. She was gaping at him. “And now I’ve said it.”

And on those words, he strode out.

It seemed to take ages to traverse the hall back to the entry and another age to get his hat and cloak. He could hear his heart racing in his chest.

This time, Minnie would run after him. She would throw herself at his feet and beg for clemency, and he—why, he would take great satisfaction in not even glancing down. He would brush her off his shoes like so much dust.

He wouldn’t forgive her. To forgive her, he would have to care, and to care, he would have to let himself feel.

But she didn’t come, and so he never had to decide what to do.

B
REAKFAST WITH HIS MOTHER
the next morning suited Robert’s dark mood all too well. The clink of her teaspoon as she stirred in sugar interrupted a silence that seemed weighted down by a hundred conversations they’d never had. Today, he was in a mood to be irritated.

The duchess set her cup down with the finality of a builder slapping bricks in mortar, finally, and looked at him.

“I suppose,” she said, tilting her chin in the air, “that you agreed to see me because you’re angry about what I did.”

He simply folded his arms and looked at her.

“I didn’t tell her what to do, mind,” she said. “That, your Miss Pursling decided on her own. But yes, I admit it freely. I
did
pay Miss Pursling five thousand pounds to refuse your offer in as ungracious a manner as she could.”

His mind blanked. It took every ounce of will that he had to keep his arms folded, to keep staring at her. But this time, his silence didn’t produce any comment. She simply took another sip of tea, leaving him to make sense of the confusion he felt.

“You paid her to refuse me,” he said.

She nodded.

Stevens had said—he had said most distinctly—that Miss Pursling had been paid to find out his secrets. He’d thought she intended to entrap him. He’d thought that the attraction had been all on his side. He’d remembered, with chagrin, the way she’d pretended to be withdrawn and shy, and wondered how it was that he hadn’t noticed this element of untrustworthiness.

“Why, Mother,” he finally drawled. “I didn’t know you cared.”

For all the sarcastic cast of his words, there was a good deal of truth to them. She’d never done anything that could be termed remotely motherly. Interfering in his marital prospects was almost as good as a kiss on the cheek from her. It was…touching. Infuriating, too. Wrong. High-handed. But…touching.

She sniffed and looked away. “It was just money. Don’t make anything of it.”

“On the contrary. I am excessively grateful. If she can be bought off so cheaply, it’s best that I know it now.”

She watched him for a few moments, as if she didn’t believe that he could be so calm, so unruffled.

“I told her,” his mother said, “that if her betrayal was bad enough, you’d never think of her again. It turns out I was right.”

She seemed to take no joy in her victory. She didn’t smile. There was no hint of gloating in her voice.

“You are too forgiving,” she said, “until you don’t forgive at all. So tell me. At what point did you finally give up on me?”

He sucked in his breath. “What an odious assumption. I never had any hope of you.” He couldn’t look at her as he spoke, though. She’d had too many letters from him to believe that.

“It was your father’s funeral, wasn’t it?”

He did not even allow himself to blink.

“You wrote me beforehand, asking me to come. Now that he was gone, you said—”

He slammed his fist on the table. Tea splashed everywhere. “Asked you to come?” Now he looked at her, glaring. She didn’t shrink back from him. She didn’t glower in return. She simply looked at him calmly, as unruffled as she always was. She might have been a china doll for all the response in her eyes.

“I didn’t ask you to come,” he said quietly. “I begged. Did you know, I honestly believed that you would take me back with you? I had convinced myself that the only reason you put off knowing me better was that you could not abide my father’s presence. That once he was gone, we might have a chance. When you weren’t at the service, I told myself you would come after it was finished. When you didn’t come then, I convinced myself that you’d wait until everyone else had departed. Finally, I said that once it was dark and nobody would know, you’d come and get me. Until that day, I believed—I don’t know how, as I had no evidence of it—that it was only my father that kept us apart. But it wasn’t that. You didn’t care.”

“No,” she said softly. “I didn’t.”

“Did you ever? Or do you hate me as much as you hated him?”

“As much?” She frowned. “I would say that I hated you in a different way.”

He wished he could find that imperturbable calm he’d had just a few moments ago. Even though he’d known it had to be true—even though he’d suspected that his mother disliked him—to hear it spoken out loud made it real. Even after all these years, after all that time he’d spent making himself indifferent to her, it still cut.

“Those first months,” she said, “when your father took you from me—I thought I’d never breathe again. But I could not let him know how important you were. If I had, God knows what he might have threatened you with. So I woke every morning and dressed and went in company. I laughed when things were funny and expressed sympathy when they were not, all the while feeling as if a cavern had been made of my chest.”

She didn’t look as if she’d ever had anything inside her chest, so smoothly did she speak.

“By the time you were three, you were a trap for my heart. Every word that came to me of you, every short visit your father grudgingly allowed, was like a wall closing in around me. The more adorable you became, the more certain your father was of my return—and the more he’d threaten me. I had to pretend not to care. After a while, I became so good at pretending that…that perhaps I stopped caring in truth. And yes, I resented you every time you made me feel anything.” She shrugged, nonchalantly. “But what was I to do? Stay with him? I tried it. But by that time, he was impossible. After that last time, when you were nine… I spent an evening barricaded in my room, with him bellowing and pounding on the door, threatening to…” She gave him another sidelong look. “I believe if he had not been quite so drunk, matters would have become exceedingly ugly. I couldn’t stay. And legally, you were his. What was I to do, except stop caring?”

Robert shook his head. “Every time you left, he used to tell me it was my fault. That I had failed to captivate you. That I should have been more—”

More lovable, although his father had never used that word.

She looked at him. “When your father died, I assumed he’d made you over in his image. By the time I realized it wasn’t so…” She shrugged again. “By then, it was too late to salvage anything of mother and child. Luckily, by then, I didn’t care. I didn’t feel anything at all. So now, knowing I’m far too late to do anything, now…”

She looked up at him.

“Now,” she said, “I find I still don’t care.” Her eyes glistened momentarily, and she looked away, her jaw squaring as she clamped her lips together.

“I see,” he said in puzzlement.

“I really don’t care. I can’t. I don’t know how anymore.” So saying, she took out a lace-edged handkerchief and dabbed at her eyes.

“Are you…”

“No. I never cry.” She met his eyes fiercely.

“I see,” he repeated.

And he actually thought that he did. This trip—her visit out here, her ham-handed pronunciations, her foolish interference—maybe she didn’t care. Maybe, after all these years, she’d forgotten how to care about him. But she was trying to. She made him think of a foal just-born, struggling up onto spindly legs, attempting to stand and falling down flat.

She sniffed again. “By the time I figure it out,” she said, “you’ll have given up on me entirely. It seems a fitting punishment.”

She set down her handkerchief and glared at him, daring him to contradict her.

Once, when he was young, she’d come for a visit. He’d run out to meet her at the carriage. He didn’t know how old he had been at the time, but he remembered hugging her knees, as high as he could reach.

She hadn’t touched him back, hadn’t even bent to pat his head. She’d simply glanced at him, told him to show some decorum, and kept walking.

So he didn’t move to touch her now. He didn’t think she would like it, and he felt too raw to risk a rebuff.

“Well, then,” he said briskly. “Thank you for taking time from your indifference to meddle in my marriage prospects. I thought she was made of sterner stuff. Apparently.”

“Oh, no,” the duchess said. “I approve of her. Find another girl just like her, but a marquess’s daughter this time.”

“You know,” he said, “I have no idea who her people really are. Pursling isn’t even her real name.”

“No?”

“She was born Minerva Lane.”

At that, his mother gasped aloud. “Minerva
Lane?”

“You know who she is?” He looked at her in surprise. “She told me it would be a scandal.”

“Scandal? Her? No.” She shook her head violently. “
Scandal
is what happens when girls are too easy with their favors—a simple matter to overcome, one that can be papered over, if not forgotten, by a good marriage and enough money. Miss Lane wasn’t ruined, Robert. She was destroyed. Utterly destroyed.”

Chapter Nineteen

M
INNIE HADN’T BEEN ABLE TO SPEAK
to her great-aunts on the prior evening.

But there was no putting off the conversation when the Duchess of Clermont sent over a draught from her bank. She brought them into the front room and sat them down.

“There is something you both should know,” she said. “Yesterday, when Lydia came to get me, it was because Stevens had gone to Manchester. He knows that there is no Miss Wilhelmina Pursling. That I’m an imposter. He knows I was born Minerva Lane.”

The two women gasped and then looked at each other. “Do they know what—”

Minnie shook her head. “They don’t know everything.”

“Don’t scare me like that,” Caro said, putting her hand over her heart. “But what are we to do? With Gardley gone…”

Minnie looked away. “As it turns out, I’ve come into some money. Five thousand pounds.”

Her great-aunts stared at her. The women looked so different, and yet the shocked expressions on their faces were mirrors for each other.

“Dear,” Eliza finally said. “We know that this is a difficult time. But five thousand pounds is a great deal of money, and we would hate it if, ah, if…”

They really thought she might have come into it by unsavory means. If they thought that, they might wonder…

“No,” Minnie said bitterly. “I
earned
this, fair and square.” Well, maybe it hadn’t been fair. And maybe it hadn’t been precisely square. Still, she’d earned it legally. Legally and…rectangularly. That would have to do.

“How?”

“I had an offer of marriage. His mother didn’t want me to accept.” Minnie looked away. “I didn’t.” Two words, and still they broke her heart.

But she’d long since given up any desire to wish that things were different. Wishes were stupid, foolish things.

“An offer of marriage?” Caro echoed. “But from whom? I cannot imagine—” She cut herself off as the downstairs maid entered.

“Miss,” she said, nodding to Minnie. “Misses. There’s someone here to speak with Miss Pursling.”

“Who is it?” Eliza asked.

Lydia. Lydia had come. Minnie would be able to explain everything, make everything right—

But the maid ducked her head, suddenly self-conscious, and Minnie knew with a sense of great foreboding who it was.

“His Grace,” she said, “the Duke of Clermont.”

Her stomach turned to ice, but her hands seemed too warm. She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, whether to run into his arms or to clamber out the window to escape. She simply stared ahead of her, the draught for five thousand pounds folded in her pocket in silent accusation.