Under A Duke's Hand (25 page)

Her bottom lip trembled, her expression set
to crumble again. “I want to go home. I want to go back to
Wales.”

Perhaps it was that trembling lip that set
him off, or perhaps it was the way she stood there in her grand
velvet gown, with her black locks tumbling over her shoulders. His
fairy queen had never been his queen. She didn’t want to be. He
felt like a toad, him, the Duke of Arlington, whom everyone had
always admired. He was not good enough for her, no matter what he
did, no matter his commendable attributes. It infuriated him.

“You know what? Go then,” he shouted. “Pack
your bags and go to Wales. If it will fucking make you happy, then
go. Leave tonight if you want, in the rain and the ice. Get out of
my damned house, if you hate it here so much.”

“I can’t wait to get out of your house,” she
shouted back.

He went to the door, yanked it open, then
spun to face her with a skewering gaze. “Only use the back door,
would you? The door for the servants and common people.”

That was too cruel, wasn’t it? But he didn’t
stop to apologize, or take her in his arms. He went down to the
dinner party and sat at his place, and told everyone his wife had
unfortunately exhausted herself planning the event. He avoided
Minette’s gaze, and those of his friends.

Gwen had made him exactly what she accused
him of being: a cold and haughty tyrant without any heart.

Chapter
Fifteen: So Cold

Pascale had made herself scarce while she and
the duke were arguing, and so Gwen undressed herself, taking off
the ruby necklace and earrings and placing them in their specific
drawers. All must be in good order for the duke, excepting his own
wife, whom he seemed to believe a lost cause. He had told her to
get out. She knew he hadn’t meant it, that he had only been ranting
and waving his arms in anger.

She was still leaving. Tonight.

She squirmed out of her gown by pure
determination. She heard a seam rip at some point, but she didn’t
care. She laid the dress over a chair and went to one of her trunks
from home, and pulled a drab gray traveling gown from the bottom. A
bonnet, gloves, even a coarse wool cloak that was perfectly
nondescript for her purpose.

She would indeed take the back door. In fact,
it was the easiest way to slip out without being noted. The
servants were busy with the party, and the kitchen was in an uproar
of pots and trays. Gwen pulled her hood about her face and snuck
out as the cook was calling for more wine to be served. The stables
were equally busy, managing the horses and carriages of the guests.
She went to Eira’s stall and saddled her for riding. She’d always
saddled her own horses at her father’s manor. Eira snorted with
pleasure to see her, and regarded her with great shining eyes.

“We are not really going to Wales,” Gwen
assured her, stroking her mane as she led her out the back way,
beneath the shadow of night. “But you must take me away from here,
as far as you can go.”

The London streets were quiet because of the
holiday, or perhaps because of the miserable weather. Everyone
seemed to be at home, inside, out of the icy cold elements. The air
hurt Gwen’s throat, but she trusted her cloak would keep her warm
enough on this journey, wherever it took her.

She did not have a specific plan. She only
knew she would ride west as far as Eira could take her before her
legs tired, and then Gwen would find a respectable lodging and use
some of her pin money to hire a room. While she was there, she
would write an explanatory letter to her father and ask his advice,
and this time the duke would not be able to stop her from sending
it. She would tell her father she was too homesick to stay here.
Perhaps he would come and meet with Arlington, and realize the duke
didn’t really want her. Perhaps they could create some arrangement
where she only spent part of the year with her husband, enough time
to fall pregnant, and mollify the king.

Even as she thought it, she knew Arlington
would never agree to any such arrangement. How many times had the
man named himself her owner and master?

Perhaps she could hide at an inn long enough
for him to give up on her, or consider her dead. Perhaps she could
ride all the way to Wales, if he was not able to find her. Perhaps
she would meet a farmhand there who loved her, and live in his
shambling cottage and sweep his hearth and bear his babies. She
would not mind to do it.

Perhaps she was an utter fool.

It was so cold. She hadn’t imagined England
could be so cold. Her anger’s heat warmed her at the outset, but
now, a mere half hour into her journey, she couldn’t stop shivering
and she couldn’t get warm. She had not gone far enough to take a
room. The duke would find her before sunrise if she stopped
hereabouts. She grasped the reins with stiff fingers and urged Eira
to a canter.

“We might go to Wales,” she whispered,
patting her mane. “I ought to. I might meet a handsome stranger
there.”

But she had already met a handsome stranger.
She lived in his house, ate his food, entertained his friends, wore
his priceless rubies.

“I want a different handsome stranger,” she
said to Eira. “One who loves me for who I am.”

Are you sure he doesn’t love you?

Who had spoken those words? The horse? Gwen
was so cold now, she was hearing things. And what a ridiculous
question to ask. If he loved her, he wouldn’t scold her, and punish
her with birchings and spankings and canings, and make her feel
something less than what she was. He wouldn’t use her body the way
he did, holding her down and hurting her, and...

You love the kind of hurt he gives. You
crave it. Even now, you crave his touch.

“I don’t,” she whispered. “I know I don’t.”
It had started sleeting again, the moisture chilling her face and
seeping into her cloak. She couldn’t control her shivering. She’d
long since ceased to feel her feet, and now her hands felt frozen
about the reins. She tried to shake them, to waken them and
reassert her grip, but Eira took it for a signal and lurched into a
gallop. The mare lost her footing a moment later, and Gwen slid
from her back. It barely hurt. In fact, it all happened rather like
a dream, as she tumbled into an overgrown hedgerow. It felt almost
like falling into a bed.

She was so tired and cold, she could not pull
herself out of the waxed leaf branches. She tugged her cloak around
her and put her hands over her face, and looked around for Eira,
but the sleet had turned to great flakes of snow. She wanted to cry
but her tears felt frozen, so she prayed instead, the way her
mother had taught her.
Ask the heavens for what your heart
wants...

“Please,” she whispered. “Please help me,
Mama. I don’t know what to do.”

* * * * *

They only found her because of the horse. The
shivering beast had stayed beside her mistress in the frigid cold,
so that the snow-dusted hedge revealed itself to be more than a
hedge. It was a lost, fallen duchess, half-frozen, wrapped in a
common wool cloak.

Fifty men had spanned out, and they had found
her in time to save her. Townsend had opened his own shirt and held
her hands and face against his skin, and carried her back while the
others went to fetch Aidan.

Now Townsend was suffering from the cold too,
and the house was in an uproar. Most of the guests were still
there. Ladies were crying, servants were scurrying to and fro with
water and towels and more wood for the fires. Aidan carried his
wife’s limp figure toward the stairs. “Are you the physician?” he
barked at the nearest stranger.

“No, Your Grace. I’ve a delivery, promised
today. The painting you commissioned from Master Oglesby.”

“Damn your painting. Get out of the way.”

He carried Gwen upstairs as fast as he could
without risking a tumble from his iced-over boots. They said she
was alive, but she was so still. She ought to at least shiver, as
Townsend had shivered when he brought her inside.

“Where is the physician?” he roared as he
took her down the hall to his chambers. “Where are the blankets?
Who is building up the fire?”

The housekeeper and butler hovered about him,
but he didn’t hear any of what they said. He kicked off his boots
and threw off his cloak, and stripped his wife of her sodden
clothes. The housekeeper came behind to wrap her in a blanket.
Pascale wept in the background, praying in French. He stripped down
to his breeches and got into bed beside her, and pulled her against
him so he could warm her. Servants brought hot bricks and more
blankets, but she was still too cold.

Get out of my damned house.
He had
shouted that at her earlier, mere hours ago. He deserved the
torture of her cold flesh against his. He deserved more, much more.
At last she moved, and trembled, and began to shiver. Around that
time the physician arrived, and checked Gwen over, listening to her
heart and rubbing her hands and feet. Now and again he murmured
“hah” and “hmm,” and Aidan had to bite his tongue against shouting
at the man.

“She’s lucky, Your Grace,” he said when he
finished. “She’ll survive unscathed, although she may be weak and
feverish for a spell.” He poked at her wool cloak on the floor. “If
she’d ridden out in a fine silk cape, I fear she might not be with
us, but this servants’ garb is hardier stuff.”

Aidan recognized her traveling clothes, and
her cloak from home. “It’s not servants’ garb,” he said tautly.

The doctor pulled the blankets closer about
her. “Well, Sir, you must keep your wife warm, and feed her hot tea
and broth until she regains her strength. Don’t overheat her, lest
you give her body a shock.”

“Why won’t she wake?” Aidan asked.

“I warrant she is exhausted. She must
conserve her energy.” The silver-haired doctor packed up his
instruments.

“She has to get better,” Aidan said. “You
have to make her better.”

“She has to rest,” said the physician
firmly.

“Is there no medicine? Nothing you can give
her?” He rose from his sleeping wife’s side and pulled on his
shirt. “The fire is not warm enough. Are the guests still
downstairs? They must go home.”

The housekeeper curtsied as he piled logs
onto the fire. “The guests have gone, except for your friends,” she
said. “They are belowstairs. The ladies have asked if you will move
the duchess into her rooms, so they can help tend her.”

“She’s not moving anywhere. She’s warm where
she is.” He didn’t want her out of his reach, not when she was so
wan and lifeless. He’d come so close to losing her, and it was all
his fault. If not for that bloody horse, they would be planning a
funeral. They would never have found her in that blasted hedgerow,
not until daylight had melted the layer of snow.

He went back to the bed and helped the
housekeeper clothe Gwen in her warmest flannel gown, a red,
beribboned nightmare that made her look even paler than she already
was. Gwen stirred as they laid her back down, the first sign of
life she’d shown since he brought her inside. He lay beside her and
caressed her cheek, and fought back terror.

“As soon as you are better,” he whispered,
“I’m going to kill you.”

“It’s c-cold,” she said in a hoarse stammer.
“So cold.”

* * * * *

A fever afflicted Gwen in the middle of the
night, raging hot and relentless. She suffered paroxysms that
terrified him, and then fell into a torpor-like sleep. The
physician came again and checked her heart and listened to her
lungs, and told Aidan he must control the fever and make her drink.
So Aidan spooned liquid into her mouth, bit by bit, weak, cool tea
and broth which she would not keep down. He sponged her and soothed
her, the ladies taking over for him when he thought he would lose
his sanity.

It went on like that the entire next day too.
Her long, slender limbs trembled and her cheeks burned. He lay
beside her on the bed and whispered that she had to recover, that
he couldn’t live with himself otherwise. He watched her chest rise
and fall and imagined her breath extinguished. When the fever let
her sleep, he held her hand and prayed in a mindless terror,
Give me another chance. I’ll try harder this time. I’ll never
stop trying, if you’ll only let her live.

But his prayers seemed to do nothing. He ate
and drank only to sustain himself enough to tend her. She suffered
into the night, until the ladies had to rest, and the housekeeper
took over with her trusted staff.

“When will you sleep, dear man?” asked
Aurelia before she left with the others.

“When she is better.”

“When she is better, she will need you to be
strong and rested.”

“No. She needs me to be strong now,” he said.
“Now, when she is in danger.”

“She is in good hands with Mrs. Fleming. At
least go down and speak with Townsend and the others. They’re
worried too.”

He’d forgotten his friends were even here,
but of course they would remain until the end of the crisis. He
still hadn’t thanked Townsend for finding his wife. He took a last
look at Gwen and headed downstairs to the parlor. Exhaustion dogged
him but he couldn’t sleep, not until her fever broke. The men
looked up at his appearance.

“How is she?” Warren asked.

“Struggling. She won’t drink. She can’t keep
anything down, and the fever won’t break.”

“She’s a strong woman,” said Townsend.
“She’ll pull through this.”

Aidan started to pace. “Damned little fool,
setting off in the cold of night like that.” He turned back to
Townsend. “Thank you for warming her the way you did. The doctor
said she might have lost her fingers to frostbite otherwise. Thank
you for…bringing her back to me.” His voice went ragged on the
final words.