An American Duchess (29 page)

* * *

For some reason, Nigel could take in her words, but his brain refused to understand them. “What do you mean by ‘you can’t be married to all of me’?”

“You wallow in guilt and grief, Nigel. I can’t. You want me to surrender every joy in my life and I can’t. I can’t live like this for the rest of my life.”

“What in God’s name are you saying, Zoe?”

“I want a divorce.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Don’t you remember when you proposed? You said you would agree to my terms. If I wanted to be a duchess for five minutes or forty years, you would agree.”

He had said that. He regretted the words now. “I was wrong.”

“Well, I’m leaving. For good.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“I can’t do this anymore. You lash out and then you’re contrite. I’m tired of absorbing your anger, tired of my emotions being utterly controlled by yours. I’m tired of disappointing you. I am going home. Brideswell is secure and you have done your duty. If you want to marry and have a child, you will have to divorce me.” She picked up her scarf, threw it around her shoulders. “One more thing. Your mother and the dowager won’t accept a marriage between Julia and Dr. Campbell. Don’t stand in the way of Julia’s happiness.”

“Julia has been raised to be a lady, to run a grand house, not to be a wife living above a doctor’s surgery. She belongs in a house like this. Just as you belong here, because you are my wife.”

Zoe leveled him a direct glare. “It doesn’t matter what Julia was raised to do—what matters is what she
wants.
”

Then she walked out of her room.

Nigel ran to the top of the stairs, leaned over the railing. All he had to do was call her name. Call to her to wait, to give him another chance. But she would stay only if he did the one thing he could not do.

It wasn’t changing. That wasn’t what scared him. She wanted the truth from him. Wanted him to admit what still haunted him from battle. He couldn’t because if he told her he would lose her anyway.

It was better to let her go.

He released the smooth polished balustrade. Shoved himself back so he stood at the top of the stairs, where she wouldn’t see him. He heard the murmured voice of Bartlet. He could not make out her answer, but the soft, rich tone of her voice wrapped around his heart.

Zoe was right. He had made her unhappy.

He loved her so damn much. It was why he had to let her go.

To where she could be happy.

He heard her walk away, heels echoing on the foyer floor. He saw shafts of sunshine spill into Brideswell as she opened the door. Then the door slammed shut and the loud
thud
echoed in his ears.

 22 

NEW YORK

Four months later
Early July 1923

Nigel poured over newspapers and the society sheets. For four months, the closest he had been to Zoe was to see her face in grainy black-and-white print in the news. The American and British press loved to report every antic of the “American Duchess” as she cut a swath through New York. Every party she attended, every restaurant she frequented, the speakeasies where she was photographed leaving at dawn. She celebrated her twenty-first birthday in New York in April—and he hadn’t even known it was her birthday.

The attempted flight around the world by Major Quigley never happened. But in early May, Zoe flew solo from New York to Florida. Nigel had felt a deep shot of fear and nerves as he read about it. She could have crashed. He could have lost her forever.

But when he saw the picture of her—her bright smile, her wave for her well-wishers—he’d experienced an intense surge of pride.

There was no woman equal to Zoe.

On this morning, the fourth day of July—America’s Independence Day—Nigel went through the papers, ignoring articles on the state of the world, searching for a story about Zoe.

Touching her photograph wasn’t as good as touching her. But it was all he had.

There were two pictures in the paper. One was of Zoe sitting at a round table with a bald, bespectacled man. The caption read: “The American Duchess steals another heart. Rumor has it Hollywood director Theodore O. Drake (pictured) plans to make Her Grace, the Duchess of Langford, the star of his new picture.”

In the second, Zoe stood in front of a ribbon. “The American Duchess opens new art exhibit of the works of modern artist Jack Donahue.” A young man in bohemian clothes gazed adoringly at Zoe.

He was going to lose her.

The realization hit Nigel hard. Like a shell exploding in front of him.

“No, damn it,” he muttered. It wasn’t jealousy or possessiveness. He loved her. These past four months, he had thrown himself into his hunt for missing Lily Bell. But it hadn’t worked—there wasn’t a moment when he did not think of Zoe.

Bartlet moved soundlessly into the room. “There is a telephone call, Your Grace. It is Her Grace.”

Nigel stared, stunned. Zoe had never called him on the telephone. He had never even tried to speak to her over the instrument.

He pushed his chair back and went out into the hall. There he picked up the receiver of the telephone, held it awkwardly against his ear. “Hello? Zoe, is that you?” Crackling filled his ear. He shouted, “Zoe? Are you there?”

“I’m here, Nigel.”

She sounded different over the phone. Older. The softness to her voice was lost in the cables that spanned the ocean. God, there was so much to say. But he couldn’t shout it over the telephone. “I want you to come home.”

“What? I can’t hear you, Nigel.”

“Why have you called, Zoe?” His heart ached with hope. She was returning to Brideswell.

“Nigel, I need to have a divorce.”

“Zoe, not a divorce. No.” Could she even hear his hoarse voice, thousands of miles away?

Her voice came through clear. Sad, but determined. “Nigel, I don’t want to be alone for the rest of my life. I am only twenty-one. I want to have love, and you won’t give that to me. I’ve met men who would love me. Please let me go.”

“Zoe, I can’t.”

“It’s not fair, Nigel. You don’t want me.”

“God, Zoe, I
do
want you,” he shouted. Across the foyer a maid gasped and dropped her duster. He looked at the young woman with agonized eyes. He did not care that she had heard his pain. Once he would have cared about appearances and scandal, but not anymore.

“I want you,” he said loudly. “I have lived four months of hell.”

“You want me only on your terms. I thought you would come after me. I really did. But you aren’t coming, are you?”

“I cannot travel, Zoe. I am a scarred-up wreck of a man—”

“You aren’t! And aren’t I worth crossing an ocean?”

“I could ask the same of you. Why will you not return to Brideswell?”

“Because I would do that—in a heartbeat—for you. But I have to know you’ve changed. So far from this conversation, I don’t think you have. Come after me or let me go, Nigel. That’s your choice. Tell me right now what you are going to do.”

“Zoe—” There was Lily, who was still missing. There was the thought of crossing the ocean, stuck on a ship with people shocked by his scars. “I don’t know.”

She hung up.

A telegram came the next day. Simple. Direct. It read:
Let me go
stop

Nigel drove into the village the next day and sent one of his own, addressing it formally since it was correspondence, and he could hardly be familiar when it was being inputted into a machine.

dear madam
stop
the duke of langford does not divorce his wife
stop

In response, the next day he received a telegram that read:

my dear husband
stop
our marriage is a drafty and leaky institution with sagging roof and no modern plumbing
stop
we are not comfortable in it anymore
stop
we have outgrown the edifice
stop

So once again, he found himself at the telegraph office in the village:

speak for yourself madam
stop

To which she replied:

there must be some scandal that would make you willing to let me go
stop
intend to cause embarrassment in the extreme
stop

* * *

“Nigel, something must change,” Julia said.

He looked up. He stood at the edge of the small lake, tossing in stones. Zoe had swum in here without any clothes, lit up by moonlight.

“The weather has to,” he said. The air pressed on them like a hot, wet blanket. In some places the cloud in the sky was black as night, as if it were stoking up its anger before it stormed. “This heat has to break. Have you seen the news from London? All this heat is fomenting civil unrest.”

His sister took off her hat and used it to fan her face. “I am not talking about civil unrest. I came here to talk about your
marriage.
”

“I know what you want to talk about.”

“You aren’t any happier without her.”

“I never expected to be,” he said.

Julia waved her hat at a buzzing bee. “Then why did you let her go?”

He’d spent months trying to answer that question. “I was afraid to keep her, afraid to convince her to stay. Afraid I would hurt her. Hell—” He had not meant to curse in front of his sister. “I
had
hurt her.”

He took a deep breath, watching the water ripple under the sunlight. “When Zoe went back to America,” he said softly, “I didn’t go back to what I was before. Neither did Brideswell. It became something new.”

There were no strains of jazz music floating from the drawing room. No cough and sputter of an aircraft engine. There was no woman who jauntily walked into breakfast, determined to challenge his every belief and defy his every command.

“I understand what it was like for you,” he said. “I thought Brideswell would always be a refuge. I dreamed about home when I was in the trenches. This place seemed like heaven. But it isn’t like that for me anymore. The house, the estate, they are filled with memories. Bad ones and good ones. I could fight to sweep them away, but I realize I don’t want to lose them. After you lost—” He hesitated. Even now, five years later after the War, he didn’t want to remind her of loss. After what Zoe’d said, he’d expected Campbell to come to him any day asking for Julia’s hand. But the surgeon hadn’t. He didn’t understand why not.

He suspected Zoe would. If only she were here so he could ask her.

“You can say his name, Nigel. Anthony Carstairs.”

“It’s been five years. I suppose you are healed now that you care for someone else.”

Julia picked up a stone from the pile he’d gathered. She skipped it. While his had splashed in the water and sunk, hers skipped four times.

“I will never forget him,” she said. “I will always have memories. I suppose if I live to be very old, some of them may slip away, but I will keep them alive as long as I can. My first dance with Anthony was in the ballroom here. I remember it so vividly. I remember the very first time we stood in the foyer after everyone else had left, and I had a few precious unchaperoned moments. At first, living with those memories was like walking on glass. Every step was filled with stabbing pain. Now those memories are sweet. The pain is still there. His life was cut short. It was an awful loss, and I can’t do anything about it.”

“But you can embrace life,” he said. “Zoe was right. But I’ve realized that too late. I drove her away because I couldn’t embrace life, and I tried to stop her from doing it, too.”

“Zoe is not gone forever, Nigel. She was in love with you.”

“She wants a divorce, Julia.”

He expected Julia to be surprised or shocked. She wasn’t. But she said, “I don’t think that is truly what she wants. She left because she was hurting terribly. She wouldn’t have felt such pain if she didn’t love you deeply.”

“That doesn’t make sense. How could the fact I drove her away prove she loves me?”

“Do you love her?”

Julia’s abrupt question startled him. She sounded like Zoe.

“Yes.”

“Isn’t that enough reason to try to win her back?”

He turned away from his sister, from the question in her eyes. “I’m scared to try. I have too many sins in my past that she knows nothing about. I cannot be the man Zoe wants me to be. I would like to embrace life, live for the moment or even for the future, but I can’t escape the past.”

“Perhaps you don’t have to. Perhaps what you must do is share your past. Tell her about the things that trouble you.”

Ever since Zoe had gone and Lily Bell had gone missing, his nightmares had got worse. He barely slept. Exhaustion dragged at him. “I cannot.”

“I don’t see what you have to lose,” she said bluntly.

“Zoe has lost so much—her brother, her fiancé, two babies even before they were born. She needs her happiness. I don’t know if I can give her that.”

“Can I marry Dougal Campbell?”

The question threw him off balance. “Yes. I want to see you happy.”

“There was a time when I don’t think you would have agreed. You would have thought the marriage beneath me. You have changed, Nigel. It has happened little by little, so gradually you haven’t noticed it happening. You accepted Sebastian’s decision to live in Capri. You have accepted my relationship with Dougal.”

“I listened to Zoe about those things.”

“You changed for Zoe. You can do it again, Nigel. You love her.”

“And I should go to America and fight to win her back.”

Julia nodded. She brushed away a tear and threw her arms around his neck. “I am happy you’ve changed,” she whispered. “I was afraid for you. I hated seeing your pain, hated knowing you had been through hell and it still haunted you.”

“You knew all that?” he asked slowly.

“Of course. We all did. We’ve tried—Mother, Grandmama, myself—to be careful around you. If I could have turned back time for you, I would have done so.”

Dear God, he had trapped them all, hadn’t he, with his grief and guilt? He had not been protecting them. He had been hurting them. If it had not been for Zoe, he would not have let Julia blossom or Sebastian follow his heart. His mother had been locked up in grief over losing Will and probably over losing some of her babies before they were born.

He gave Julia a kiss on her cheek, but she waved him away. “Go and pack to sail to America.”

Nigel ran back to Brideswell. He raced in through the drawing-room doors. His mother sat in a wing chair, pouring tea for his grandmother. Isobel was away at school—something he had been able to afford using the income from Zoe’s settlement on Brideswell, now carefully invested.

“Nigel, what is going on?” Grandmama cried. “Are we being invaded?”

Panting from his sprint, he pushed back his sweat-soaked hair. “No, I am going to America. To bring Zoe back.” He couldn’t catch his breath but he declared, “I’m sorry. I’ve been a bloody fool. We have to change. We have to open our hearts to the future. I let Zoe go, and that was the damned stupidest thing I’ve ever done. I tried to build walls around Brideswell. Now I want to knock them down. I want to throw open the doors. I want to see my family happy. If you will excuse me, I have to pack and book a ticket on a steamer to New York to win back my wife.”

He ran out of the room and heard his grandmother say, “Goodness, I think the heat of this summer has gone to his head.”

“No,” his mother answered softly, but in strong and happy tones. “I think, finally, my son is healing. I am so very glad.”

* * *

Nigel cursed every minute it took to travel. First by the Daimler to the train station. Then by train to Southampton. He took a moment to send out one final telegram:
am coming to New York
stop
expect me on the 20th
stop.
The journey by ship was ten days of sheer frustration. He paced the decks as if his fast, tense strides could propel the liner faster. In the evenings he was invited to dine at various tables—everyone wanted to dine with a duke. People tried to ignore his scars, and he tried to ignore how hard they attempted to do it.

After the War, his scars and his shell shock had made him reclusive. Now none of that mattered as much to him as getting Zoe back.

Once he reached New York, a cab dropped him off at the front gate of Zoe’s family home on Fifth Avenue.

He did something Zoe would do—he let out a whistle. His eyes bulged at the sight.

An ornate French château had been re-created, with turrets that soared to the sky. The house took up half the city block and was surrounded by a tall wrought iron fence, with a gate inset with a gold coat of arms.

An archly correct butler opened the door. “Good afternoon, sir. Is the mistress expecting you?”

“I am the Duke of Langford. The mistress of the house is my mother-in-law. At this point, I cannot speculate if she is anticipating my arrival.”