The Scandalous Love of a Duke (24 page)

“What now?” Phillip questioned.

John met his old friend’s hard accusing gaze. “I have a special licence. I meant to tell you last night I wished to marry Katherine.”

“Really?” There was a dubious note in Phillip’s pitch.

“Here,” John reached into his inside pocket, withdrew the thing and held it out.

Phillip looked at it dismissively as though it proved nothing.

John turned to Katherine. “I’ll take you back to town and find a minister.”

“And when the child arrives months early…” Phillip stated.

John sighed. “We’ll go somewhere out of the way, and I’ll not publicise the marriage, so the date will be unclear. I have been in mourning, a quiet wedding will not be noted, but I can do no more, Phillip, my family will know.”

Phillip nodded, grimly. “I’ll come to London with you, now.” Because, John assumed, Phillip trusted him no more than Katherine.

“Let me clean your lip first,” Katherine whispered. “Sit down. Have you brandy in here?” John looked at her, surprised she cared. “Where, John?”

“Over there.”

She took the handkerchief from his hand, and walked away to douse it in brandy.

“Sit,” she ordered when she turned back.

He did, occupying the chair he’d used when searching the ledgers. Now he was searching his damned soul. How could he not even have thought of the possibility she might be with child? Because he was spoilt, arrogant and selfish. She was right. He did not deserve this woman’s consideration.

Her gentle fingers dabbed the cloth against his lip and it stung a little, but her touch made his heart ache more, and he watched her face.

She was to be his duchess. She would not find it easy. She wouldn’t have a clue how to go on. She would need his support. He could not be selfish anymore.

“He’s got a valet and a house full of footmen to do that,” Phillip grumbled.

His valet wasn’t here though, and John preferred her attentions.

Her gaze lifted to his as she finished, and she blushed. His heart bled for her and he stood, still holding her gaze. “I suppose I ought to change. You will not wish to marry a man with blood all over him.”

She did not reply. Of course, she did not want to marry him at all.

Katherine watched him go, then her gaze swept about the sitting room. Crimson damask decorated the furniture and draped the windows, and even the ceiling here bore paintings of semi-clad women – the muses – while the walls were coated in gilded leather, it glowed in the daylight. It would sparkle in candlelight, which would complement the glossy satinwood furniture.

It was sumptuous and beyond anything she could have imagined, and this place was to be her home soon. She could not absorb it.

She heard Phillip approach and turned expecting to be berated, but instead he hugged her and she hugged him.

“You could have told me”, he whispered to her ear as he let her go when John came back.

John had changed clothes, and she could not help herself remembering the torso those clothes hid. Was he really going to marry her?

The sensitiveness in John’s heart as he looked at Katherine during their carriage journey back to town was akin to that in his lip. How could he have attributed his feelings for her as lust?

She was silent, and avoiding his gaze. He and Phillip were silent, too, all sitting in corners, poles apart, east, west and north.

John longed to touch her, even just to take her hand. She’d said she no longer loved him earlier. He hoped it wasn’t true. He had been all the things he despised to her though. He could hardly blame her if she did not.

Phillip suggested they use a church in Cheapside. He said the vicar there could be trusted to keep the marriage secret.

John gripped Katherine’s hand and held it tightly when they alighted, leaving Phillip to make the arrangements. When the vicar came to greet them, he was accompanied by his housekeeper, who would be there second witness. “Have you the licence?”

John nodded and retrieved it with his free hand, not letting go of Katherine’s.

“Thank you. Come this way.”

They were led into the church and stood before the altar.

John’s heart began to pound as the enormity of what they were doing struck him. This was a lifelong commitment.

Katherine gripped John’s hand, holding on so she did not fall, holding on to receive his strength. But she didn’t have the courage to look at him. They hadn’t spoken in the carriage. All his professions of love had already fallen into silence. But he was about to marry her.

She was terrified. He did not love her and she could never live in his world.

The vicar opened the service as though he was speaking to a full church, and Katherine remembered Richard, left behind and hurt by her, as she had been hurt by John.

She felt like weeping – on her wedding day.

She looked up at John, because she needed him to look at her, but he was watching the vicar. The coloured light from the stained glass glossed his black hair.

She stood on the side of his swollen lip, and his cheek had a lump which was dark purple. The vicar must think this a forced match. But John had come to her before he’d known of the child. At least she knew his offer was not forced.

This would have been so different if he had waited two more days. She would have been married in a church full of people, with her father there as well as Phillip. But then she would have married Richard, not John… Her father didn’t even know she was getting married… He’d be wondering where she was. They hadn’t sent a message before leaving.

“Katherine Spencer, I…” John’s ducal voice echoed about the church and he looked down at her at last, his hand holding hers more tightly, “…in sickness and in health…”

Promises, promises.

She met his gaze but did not trust him, he was no longer John, and she barely knew the Duke who stood before her with crystal clear unfathomable eyes.

He spoke as an orator, announcing his words with authority. This was the façade behind which he hid the young man he was. It was a barrier of steel armour people could not pierce, to ensure they never saw the man beneath. The man who was human, who might love and could feel fear and pain and vulnerability.

But which was true, the man who’d shown all those feelings at her father’s house, or this man?

The other, her heart told her, she must remember even in this man he was there, beneath. But she was afraid of the Duke. He’d hurt her.

“Now, Miss Spencer, say after me…” It was her turn to make promises. He’d promised to honour her, she had to obey.

When it came to exchanging a ring, John did not have one, and so he took a gold signet ring from his small finger. It was not overly loose. He had long, artistic, slender fingers.

Yet still her finger curled to hold it there when he let her hand go.

I am going to be his duchess
. How could she be? This Cinderella ending did not feel like a fairy tale. It felt like a nightmare.

“I now pronounce you man and wife.”

It was like living in a dream. She was watching the scene from the rafters above.

John gripped her shoulders and kissed her temple when she did not lift her face, but then he reached for his handkerchief because his lip had split open again.

He took her hand once more when they moved to sign the register, but even that grip was impersonal now he was the Duke.

He wrote John Harding in the book, with no title, and she wondered if the vicar even knew who John really was.

Phillip and the vicar’s housekeeper signed as witnesses.

Then she knew for certain how little the vicar had been told when he took her hand and said, “Felicitations, Mrs Harding.”

She wished she was merely Mrs Harding. If she were merely Mrs Harding she would be happy, because then
he
would just be John.

Sheer terror beset her when John said outside the church, “I’ll take you home now, but I ought to warn you, my family are there, my parents and the children are staying with me for a while. Mary made her debut recently.”

Phillip then said, “I’ll leave you here. John’s groom will have taken my curricle back to the mews. I can make my own way back.”

John nodded with a matter-of-fact manner, while Katherine felt her lifeline being cut.

“Phillip.” She hugged him tightly, not knowing what to say. She could hardly ask him to stay. She had a new life to begin, and yet she felt petrified at the thought of stepping into it. How could she do it? It was one thing to have dreamed of being with John. It was another to achieve it. “Phillip,” she said again before letting him go. She felt like a limpet clinging to a rock on the beach, holding back against the tide. John was the tide, shifting and unsteady.

Phillip kissed her cheek and whispered, “I will call on you tomorrow to see how you go on.”

She nodded and tried to smile but could not, instead she bit her lip.

When she took John’s hand to climb into the carriage, she remembered she had not one stitch of clothing with her, only what she wore. She was a ragtag, bastard girl, the illegitimate daughter to a dairymaid, and now his duchess. What on earth would his family think?

He said nothing to her as they rode through the London streets. He appeared in his own world, looking out the window. She longed for some sign of John, a gentle word or gesture, but John was in retreat behind the Duke. She supposed he must be concerned about taking her to meet his parents too. He could not have told them he’d obtained the licence, nothing he’d said implied he had.

The horses’ hoof-beats rang sharply on the stone as the carriage rocked across the cobble.

She longed for her bedroom at home, to be sitting in the window seat with her mending, in a life she knew.

The houses on either side of the street grew grander. She felt too uncomfortable now to look at John. He’d paid her no attention. Then she recognised the streets from their journey on the day of the funeral and felt trapped. If she obeyed her instinct, she would leap from the carriage and run. She did not. But she clasped her hands and held them together in her lap. She did not even have her reticule or a bonnet or a pelisse. What on earth would his family think?

At least the opulence of his townhouse was not a shock when the carriage drew up outside it.

The carriage rocked as a footman jumped down from the back, and then the door opened. The house door opened too when the footman helped her down.

Katherine recognised the butler who stood at the top of the stairs.

Her heart pounded. John alighted after her and offered his arm. The action looked purely instinctive, not intentional. Still, she clung to it, feeling his solid muscle beneath the cloth of his coat.

He was dressed entirely appropriately in gloves and hat and coat. It would make the state of her undress only more remarkable. John’s fingers covered hers on his arm as they crossed the threshold and the butler’s gaze skimmed over her attire, from her uncovered head to her worn half-boots.

She could have cried she was so glad of the reassurance John’s touch provided. She looked up at him, but he was facing the butler. “Are my mother and father at home, Finch?”

“Lord and Lady Edward are in the family drawing room, Your Grace.”

“And Finch…” John added, as the man bowed far less deeply to her than he had done to John, “gather the staff in the library in half an hour. I will speak to them shortly. I need to introduce the Duchess of Pembroke.”

The man did well to cover his shock, she would swear his mouth nearly fell open but his lips closed tightly instead, yet his nod at John was clearly a slip before he recovered himself and bowed more markedly again. “Certainly, Your Grace.” Then he turned to her. “Welcome, Your Grace.”

“Thank you.” Her voice was steady despite her fear. She must set John’s staff an example from the beginning if she was ever going to cope. She’d learned that with the Sunday-school children. The thought made her wish to laugh nervously. The butler would feel insulted if he knew she compared him to a child.

When they climbed the stairs a moment later, John said quietly, “Are you bearing up?”

She glanced at him, and for the first time in four hours, she saw John in his eyes. Her fingers squeezed his arm, but she didn’t answer, she was not quite sure what would come out if she did.

“You’ll manage, Katherine,” he stated on such a down-to-earth note she found her voice.

“I’m glad one of us thinks so.” He laughed and she felt a rush of relief sweep in like a wave over her limpet-like self but it was a comforting feeling.

She smiled. He smiled in return, only to open his split lip again. He reached into his pocket for his handkerchief.

As they walked along the landing she could hear conversation and laughter, it grew louder the further they progressed. The laughter sounded boyish but it was punctuated by the occasional girlish squeal. Her heartbeat thundered.

When they reached the open door the sound came from, he stopped and tucked the bloodstained handkerchief back into his pocket. Then his arm dropped from beneath her hand.

She felt bereft for an instant, but then he took her hand and gripped it tightly as he’d done at the church.

She remembered at last how strained his relationship had appeared with his family the night she’d conceived their child. She felt sick as they entered, but straightened and lifted her chin.

“I’ve brought you a surprise,” John stated.

The room was huge. Over half a dozen times the size of her father’s parlour. It was decorated in pastel greens and yellows, with gold gilt edging and magnificent plaster cornices and mouldings on the ceiling. It was hardly less grand than the state rooms downstairs.

John’s father was kneeling on all fours, forming a climbing frame for the younger children. He carefully spilled John’s younger brothers from his back onto the floor and knelt up. One of the girls tried to climb on his shoulders then, but he steadied her and stopped her climbing. “Look, your brother’s here.” She looked at John then looked away as though he was of no interest.

The two older boys were playing a game of chess in one corner, Robbie, the elder, looked up and rose.

John’s mother held John’s youngest sister on her lap as she sat in between two of the older girls who were busy sewing samplers, and five-year-old Georgiana was on the floor with a tiny china tea set spread before her.

Mary was not here.

“What did you do to your lip, did you fight?” Robbie challenged from across the room, in a surprised yet awed tone.

All the children looked.

Obviously his mother and father must have noticed the state of his face, but had been too polite to say.

Katherine smiled, looking at the children first. Then she smiled at his parents but her smile felt stiff and awkward.

His mother was looking at John, but then she glanced at Katherine and smiled uncertainly, rising and passing Jemima onto one of the other girls. “Kate, it is indeed a surprise.”

John’s father was crossing the room. “Kate?” It was a welcome and a query.

John’s fingers gripped hers almost painfully tight. “Mama, Papa, Katherine and I are married.”

“Married?” His mother sounded surprised, and hurt.

“John!” His father’s expression was disbelief and reprimand.

Katherine wished for a hole at her feet she might leap into but John’s firm grip would not have let her jump.

“I’m sorry,” his mother said then. “That was very rude of me, Kate. I mean to say, welcome to the family, I wish you well. I am pleased.” She sounded anything but pleased. “It is just a shock,” she added. Then she looked at John. “Why did you not say? When were you married?”

“Today,” he said quietly. “We needed to keep it understated for a reason, Mama.” He took a breath then concluded, “Katherine is with child.”

Katherine felt herself turn crimson as his mother turned pale. “John.” It was a scolding voice.

Not a single nerve or muscle in John’s face indicated any discomfort, but he did not look at Katherine and she knew he had slipped back into his ducal armour. She clasped his arm, but he did not respond. Then she was forced to let him go as his father embraced him.

It was only a cover. She heard him whisper by John’s ear. “That was badly done, son. Very badly done.”

She longed to tell them this was not his fault, as his mother clasped Katherine’s hand, and then kissed her cheek.

Afterwards, his father did the same.

They must be thinking ill of her.

“Still, explanations can wait,” his father said as he let Katherine go. “Congratulations, welcome to the family, Kate, Your Grace,
daughter
. Or should I say welcome to the rabble.”

She bit her lip, feeling the heat of a blush again. “Thank you, my Lord.” She was about to curtsy deeply, then remembered she should not now. Now people ought to curtsy to her.

“Just Edward, Kate,” he answered, smiling. Then he looked back at his offspring, “Children, come and meet your new sister.”

She had always liked John’s father and mother. She thought they’d liked her, too, though they could never have thought she might one day be their daughter-in-law.