Devotion (11 page)

"What makes you think so?" Maria cast her curious friend a sideways glance.

Gertrude pointed to the scattering of wadded papers littering the top of the writing desk. "Looks like
ya
were
havin
' a bit of trouble
puttin
' yer
feelin's
into words."

"Perhaps," she replied, thinking of John Rees with a touch of melancholy. Did he miss her? Was the emptiness and loneliness she felt due to this separation from someone who had been the only close friend she'd had, aside from Paul?

"Never mind,
luv
. It'll all work out.
Wot's
meant to be is meant to be. As me dear
ol
' mum use to say, 'The goodly hand of fate don't do aught for nothin'. If we listen to that little voice wot whispers loudest into our ear
tellin
' us wot choices to make, we'll always tread the proper path to our destiny.'"

Maria pondered the idea. "You're saying our lives have already been laid out for us? And only if we follow the true path that fate has dealt us will we discover absolute peace and happiness?"

"Aye, lass.
When it seems that life is at its bleakest, rest assure that yer not
experiencin
' the difficulty for naught. There's a lesson to be learned;
a strength
to be won by
meetin
' the challenge and
risin
' above it. If
ya
believe that, the dark times won't seem so insurmountable. The trick is not to dwell on the hopelessness of the situation, but on the hope."

Taking a deep breath, Maria laughed. "Well, my dear Gertrude, I fear if we don't dwell on our chore at hand we might find our own situation insurmountable . . . meaning His Grace, of course. Our path at the present is to find a manner in which to rouse him."

"
Ye'll
soon learn that His Grace
don't
do aught that
he don't want to do, when and how he wants to do it.
it's
the way of the aristocracy, love."

"Occasionally we're all forced to do things we wouldn't necessarily want to do. Our purpose is to give His Grace the desire to continue living, my dear
Gerti
."

"Long as we don't lose our own ability along the way," Gertrude muttered, and followed Maria through Salterdon's bedroom door.

A pair of stocky
boyservants
looped the duke's long arms around their shoulders, and with much effort, raised him to a sitting position, his weight like that of a dead man's. Once they caught their breaths, they then heaved him into the wheeled
bathchair
, where Gertrude propped him up with her hands on his shoulders.

"Fetch me a rope!" she cried to Maria, who scrambled around the room until spying a drapery cord which she yanked from its harbor. Gertrude then anchored the duke to the back of the chair and stepped away, breathing hard, perspiration beading her brow and upper lip. "I wouldn't want to be in this room if he was to come to right now. I ain't so certain he'd appreciate
beiti'
trussed up like some
Boxm
' Day game fowl. It ain't exactly
ennoblin
', is it?"

"There is little about His Grace that remotely resembles the ennobled,' Maria replied, keeping a safe distance from the duke, her kerchief pressed to her nose. '"Tis hard to believe this is the same man who bathes, or bathed, in such sweetly scented water as I washed in last evening."

"Oh, he didn't bath in that." Gertrude mopped her
face. "That was for the ladies he invited to stay over—his mistresses and such. No doubt about it, he made certain his paramours wanted for nothin',
includ
- in' Parisian toilet waters." She chuckled. "When
ye've
settled in a mite I'll treat
ya
to a peek at their wardrobes. They'll make
ya
turn ten shades of pink, I vow. Scanty dainties such as them would make yer judgmental father drop dead of shock," she whispered behind her hand, and giggled again.

"Hard to imagine," Maria said softly, unable to stem the shiver of aversion she experienced each time she was forced to share space with the offending duke. Still, for some odd reason she could not help staring, her gaze locked on his profile.

His head fallen forward, hair a tangled web spilling over his shoulders, he looked like some
Huddersfield
bone grubber—hardly the sort who could tempt beautiful women down the path of damnation. Then again, if she were to believe her father, the sort of woman who could be tempted down
that
path deserved nothing better than Satan's damnation.

"Push him to the window," Maria directed.

With a grunt, Gertrude rolled the cumbersome chair to the window, placed it in a shaft of pure, pale light flooding the floor, then moved away.

"Bring food," said Maria. "Then a bath. Make the water steaming. And bring pails of the coldest water you can find. A plunge into a hot bath followed by a plunge into cold does much to purge the poisons from one's flesh and rouse one's spirit."

"Does much to rouse the temper as well, I imagine.

Are ye certain
ya
want to undertake such a scheme—I mean until yer fully aware of wot yer up against?"

Peering at Gertrude over her hanky, she declared, "I would rather cope with his sore disposition than his smell. And while you're at fetching water, bring me a few bottles of those bath salts. The violet was very nice."

"Aye, lass."
Gertrude scurried from the room, and, with some caution, Maria settled into a nearby chair, hands clasped in her lap, her gaze locked on the Duke of Salterdon, slumped in the invalid's chair, chin resting on his chest, his dark brown mane lying limply over his concave shoulders that seemed very wide but very thin inside the dingy nightshirt.

She thought aloud, "You look so like Paul did in those last horrid days, when his soul hovered on that fine line between life and death. The Vicar Ashton believes such disasters are God's way of punishing His lambs
who
go astray. Paul's punishment was loving a woman forbidden to him, yet in his own heart and mind he did nothing wrong,
Your
Grace. Her husband abused her unmercifully in every unimaginable way. He flaunted the fact that he carried on . . . illicit acts with every tavern slattern in two counties. He treated her like chattel, Your Grace, whipping her publicly if she so much as questioned his authority."

Spreading her hands before her as if pleading her point, she said in a choke-filled voice, "When my brother happened upon the brute beating her, his only sin was attempting to stop him. Was not the crime, sir, in this man's breaking my brother's back?
Of causing his eventual death?
Yet . . .
the Vicar Ashton proclaimed it the
bastard's
right to do such!"

She hesitated, her entire body turning warm with anger, and the fact that she had spoken such profanity so openly and easily. More angrily she added, "The Vicar Ashton, Your Grace, turned his back on his own son and, even until Paul's dying day, would not set eyes on him again. If a man as good and charitable as my brother deserved such a cruel and destructive rod, then what, Your Grace, do you deserve?"

Dust motes hovered in the sun-drenched air around his head. The light reflected from his hair in little auburn rainbows. Leaving the chair, she moved cautiously around her charge, never taking her gaze from him. The sleeves of his nightshirt having been rolled back, exposed his forearms; they were strong, she noted, and had once been darkened by sun (had he ridden shirtless on his much prized Arabian horses?)—
their
once tanned color having grown jaundiced-looking over the last many months of hiding away in this dark and grim cavernous chamber. And his hands: Their frame was there, as well as the muscles, standing forth like the guttering of a candle; there were broad blue veins going up the back and crossing every finger, but the color—there was no color save the
yellowishness
of his flesh—no flame of life, nor spark of evidence of what he once had been.

"Is he decently situated?" Maria
asked,
her back toward the tub.

"Aye," Thaddeus replied. "I reckon this ought to do him."

Taking a fortifying breath, Maria turned, hesitated at the sight of her patient's naked torso, his head back and resting against the ornamental tub, a deep black enamel fixture painted with golden dragons. The tub, however, was even grander than the one in which she had bathed the previous night . . . large enough for two, she thought with a wicked lift of one eyebrow, then felt her cheeks warm with dismay as she looked up to discover Thaddeus watching her, mouth drawn into a sarcastic tilt, eyes glowing with something other than humor.

She cleared her throat and grabbed a fire poker from the hearth, used it to lift the duke's nightshirt from the floor, and thrust it toward her smirking companion. "I suspect Gertrude will be waiting for these."

Thaddeus and his companion stepped back, their shirtfronts spotted with dampness, their faces flushed by rising steam. Maria rewarded them with a nod of dismissal. The young man, whose name she had not caught, shuffled from the room, while Thaddeus continued to stand his ground, ignoring the proffered clothing.

"Have you something to say?" she asked, avoiding his eyes, feeling her cheeks become as flushed as they had been the previous evening when she stood before him wearing nothing more than violet-scented bathwater.

"Aye," he replied, and shifted his weight to one hip. His stance looked cocky if not outright arrogant. His countenance was smug. "I'm
wonderin
' why you ain't
toi'
Gertrude yet about me and Molly."

"'Tis none of my business," she replied shortly, casting him a glance from beneath her lashes.

He grinned again but made no show of leaving or taking the shirt.

"Is there anything else?" she asked.

He shrugged. "I was just thinkin' that I ain't ever seen hair the color of yers. It's a little like moonlight, ain't it?"

"Moonlight?"

"All silvery white and shiny soft."

Maria smoothed back the loose tendrils at her temples and lowered her eyes briefly, the nagging image of him and Molly making her frown.

"I wager it's beauteous when it's loose," said Thaddeus more roughly.

She said nothing more, and finally he grabbed the nightshirt and quit the room, pausing only long enough to glance back at her, then to His Grace, at which time his face became stony with an odd emotion.

Maria continued to stand very still after Thaddeus departed, long enough to contemplate the last moments, acknowledging that the young man had flirted with her, recognizing too that his sober reflections on her hair had caused a ripple of thrill in her breast. To encourage such compliments (especially in light of what she had witnessed between him and Molly—and especially what had taken place between Thaddeus and herself the previous night) wouldn't be right. Even to acknowledge them to herself would plant the dreadful seed of vanity in her mind.