“I saw you for a man with a heart too generous to turn anyone away based on something as frivolous as reputation or rank. A man who loves his daughter so much that he pulled her back from death. A man who honored his wife’s memory by not having careless affaires, though doubtless many were offered him.” Her voice wavered and she steadied it. “A man who loved me.”
He turned around. “Your husband didn’t love you, did he?”
“Oh yes, he did.”
“But not enough.”
“Not as much as he loved chess. He was always honest about that. And you—you are honest too. It seems I have a genius for finding men who care more for a game than for myself.”
“I’m certain that you will find someone of your rank,” he heard himself say. The flash in her eyes could have been agony—or dislike, so he opened the door.
He wasn’t walking away, because she had left him, really.
He wasn’t good enough for her. And she didn’t even know the whole of it. His mouth twisted. His valet took one look at him and practically threw his clothing toward him.
Then he was away: pounding down the road, down the slick road, hating her, hating himself, his heart bleeding for Eugenia. How would he explain to her? Harriet didn’t love us enough? What do you tell a little girl who thinks—
Actually, what did Eugenia think?
She knew that Harriet was a woman. But she’d never said much other than that. He hadn’t told her that he meant to marry Harriet.
Although he always meant to marry her, he realized with another sickening lurch of his stomach. Almost unconsciously, he had decided long ago that he was going to do Harriet a favor by marrying her and rescuing her from her boring little backwater of a farm. Bring her to a life of luxury. He kicked his horse and they went faster, until the wind screamed in his ears.
A life of luxury, he was offering. In a tawdry house full of strangers and primero games. While she probably lived in a castle.
If he cried, which he never did, his tears would have turned to icicles on his cheeks.
Chapter Thirty-seven
To Be Better Than a Game
March 18, 1784 Berrow House Country Seat of the Duke of Berrow
H arriet got home, all the way home, by two days later. Villiers’s man, Finchley, gathered up her clothes, and Harriet gathered up the shards of her self-esteem and her love, and took it all home in the carriage with her.
She didn’t even cry until her spaniel, Mrs. Custard, ran to meet her. And then she dropped right down on her knee in the dirt and hugged him. His tail wagged furiously.
“He checked the front door for you every day, Your Grace,” her butler, Wilson, said from somewhere above her right shoulder.
Harriet bit her lip hard. She couldn’t cry in front of the servants. She never cried in front of the servants, not when Benjamin died, not when…
When had anything worse than that happened?
Besides having her heart ripped out and rejected, thrown back in the dirt at her feet.
You’d think she’d be used to it. Benjamin didn’t really love her; neither did Jem. They both loved their games better—the game of chess, with all its intricacies and power struggles, the game of—of being Lord Strange. With all its odd generosity, male camaraderie, celebration, and the game of primero, with all its intricacies, power struggles, and bets.
A tear dropped into Mrs. Custard’s graying fur.
Once, for once, she wished that someone would love her more than a game. The way she loved him.
“The servants await you, Your Grace,” her butler said. He meant they would be all lined up inside the front door, waiting to curtsy.
“My goodness, Wilson,” she said, striving for a light tone. “It isn’t as if I’ve been gone for months. Disperse them, please.”
“But—”
“Disperse them.” She didn’t use that tone often.
“You have a visitor,” her butler continued. His training did not allow him to betray a wounded tone, but she could tell he would have liked to.
“A visitor? How odd. No one knew I was coming home today.”
“She arrived two days ago and has been awaiting your arrival,” Wilson said.
“And?” Harriet said, rising and brushing fur off her hands. “She is?”
The butler pulled himself to a standing position. “The Duchess of Beaumont.”
“Oh, goodness,” Harriet said, walking toward the great stone arch that led to the inner courtyard. “Where is she now?”
“In the conservatory, I believe, Your Grace.”
Harriet walked into the courtyard, and through the west door that led to the conservatory, avoiding the front entry and the waiting servants. She was conscious of resentment. She didn’t want to see Jemma, fond though she was of her. She wanted to fall into the nearest bed and cry. She wanted to cry until she had hiccups and couldn’t stop. She wanted to cry as many tears as she had for Benjamin.
Which was ridiculous.
Jem was not dead. He just didn’t love her enough. A tragedy for her, for no one else. And yet she could feel her blood beating to the rhythm of the tears she wanted to shed.
Because she thought—she really thought—that he would come home with her. That he loved her truly, saw her truly. But he didn’t.
She found Jemma sitting in the section of the conservatory that Harriet called the orange arbor. She had tried to grow oranges, but they flowered and never grew fruit. She couldn’t bear to discard the trees, so they stayed in a corner, all scented shiny leaves.
By the time she saw Jemma, tears were hanging on her eyelashes.
Jemma was seated on a bench under an orange tree, playing chess, apparently by herself. Harriet walked up quietly. It felt odd to be in a dress. Slippers were much quieter than boots. As she watched, Jemma moved a white piece, and then one of the blacks.
She glanced up and sprang to her feet. “Darling Harriet, you’ve come home!”
Then Jemma had her arms around her, and a white handkerchief out, and Harriet collapsed against her. “It’s just—It’s just—”
“I know, I know,” Jemma murmured. “Isidore told me.”
“She told you that he doesn’t love me? She knew? Why am I the only dunce? Why am I the only one who never knows?”
“Isidore didn’t say that,” Jemma said. “She said that you were having a lovely time together but that—”
“He didn’t love me,” Harriet said.
“I can only identify a man in lust,” Jemma said. “I have no idea how reliable Isidore is in these matters.”
“He was in lust,” Harriet said, hiccupping. “But I thought he loved me.” The words wrenched out of the bottom of her heart. “His daughter got sick, and he asked me to be there with her. And I thought—I thought it was because—I’m such a fool!”
“What?” Jemma said, rocking her a little.
“I thought he was thinking of me as being Eugenia’s mother.”
“I’m sure he was thinking that,” Jemma said.
“I was good enough,” Harriet said, “at least while I had my trousers on. He said we could kill off Harry Cope, and then he’d marry Harriet, and I could go right back to playing primero with the men every night.”