White Regency 03 - White Knight (11 page)

Grace had no idea where she was headed
after she left the dining room. Nor did she care. She simply turned away as
quickly as she could, fleeing blindly down the nearest hall as she dashed away
her tears in frustration.

As she walked, she fought to soothe her
bruised emotions. She had come to this marriage knowing full well it would be
work, but it was work she was willing to take on, especially if it meant that
she and Christian would one day have the love and respect and commitment to one
another that both her parents and her grandparents had found. Was it foolish of
her to have even tried? She had expected to make mistakes but she had also
expected to learn from them as she had learned everything else in life—from the
proper way to pour tea to the right techniques for making sketches. She had
never been one to quit, even against great odds. She had always tried to find a
way to make things work, approaching a problem from all directions until she
found a solution that put things in order. She had known it would take time to
get past their initial unfamiliarity. What she hadn’t expected was to be denied
the slightest chance to succeed.

From the moment she had agreed to wed him,
Grace had made it her foremost wish to be a wife her husband could be proud of.
When the vicar had spoken the vows the day before, she had listened closely to
every word— better or worse, richer or poorer, in sickness and in health—and
she had taken each one of them to heart. Yet here she was, the morning after
her wedding, already abandoned by Christian. What in heaven’s name
had she done wrong? No
matter how terrible the experience of their wedding night might have been for
him, Grace just couldn’t believe that she deserved to be forsaken for all of
the household to see. Had he expected that she would wake to find him gone and
simply sip her morning tea, eat her toast, and await him in the carriage,
saying when they met, “Thank you for seeing to the distasteful task of my
virginity, sir; might I offer you the seat with the best view?”

Grace stopped walking and looked about at
her surroundings. She didn’t recognize anything. She stopped to listen, but
when she didn’t hear any of the servants moving about, she realized she must
have wandered into one of the hall’s vacant wings. She wondered what would
happen if she were to come up missing, delaying their return to the city. Would
Christian simply leave without her? Not wishing to be the cause of further
discord between them, she decided she should try to find her way back. She
wandered on through unfamiliar hallways and abandoned chambers, each just as
cold and forbidding as the last. It seemed as if laughter couldn’t possibly
have touched these walls, nor could merriment have danced across the rich
Turkish carpets. This place wasn’t a home. It was a relic haunted by sadness
and misery.

She came to a door at the far end of a
hallway and quietly opened it. Inside she found a sitting room that was set off
from the main house, the furnishings hidden beneath dust covers. She would have
turned to leave except that the place drew her somehow, standing out as
different from the rest of the house. Grace crossed the room and gave the heavy
drapery a yank, allowing the morning sunlight to come pouring in through the
grubby mullioned windows that lay underneath.

Carpets of the lightest yellow and blue
revealed themselves in the sunlight, set beneath furnishings of delicate
fruitwood and rosewood; the walls were covered in elegant pastel Chinese silk.
It was a room that spoke of softness and femininity, and Grace wondered at the
way it differed from the rest of Westover Hall. It was almost as if the chamber
didn’t belong there—just like Grace. It, too, seemed to have been left to fend
for itself.

Grace lifted the cover from one of the
pieces and
found
an elegant Queen Anne secretary underneath. It was crafted of the finest cherry
and engraved across a brass plate on its top were the words “For Frances,
my wife… my love.”

She decided the room must have once been a
withdrawing chamber for the dowager marchioness, Christian’s mother. Grace
remembered her from the wedding—how polite Lady Frances had been to her. She
remembered something else too—the shadow she had seen behind the woman’s eyes,
as if a part of her wasn’t really there.

Grace ran her fingers thoughtfully along
the polished desktop as she imagined the marchioness sitting in that room,
reading or watching the rabbits at play on the lawn outside. Had she been
happy? Or had she felt trapped by the coldness of this unhappy place? The desk
had undoubtedly been a gift to her from Christian’s father, but why was it
here, Grace wondered, forgotten and locked away in this place, instead of with
Lady Frances at her own residence in London? It was such a special piece, with
its inscription telling of the marquess’s regard for his wife. Had their
marriage been an arrangement like Grace and Christian’s? Or had they married
for love? Was such a concept even possible in the House of Westover?

A thick layer of dust had accumulated on
the fireplace mantel, revealing it had been some time since the chamber had
been put to use. As she turned from it, Grace noticed a painting high on the
wall concealed by a cloth. Curious, she stood on tiptoe, tugging at the lower
corner until the cover slid away.

Underneath was a portrait of a man, a
woman, and a young child of no more than five years of age. Grace recognized
the dowager marchioness, Christian’s mother, but a younger, more vibrant
reflection of her. The child, a boy, was kneeling at her feet, his head resting
softly against his mother’s full skirts while her fingers played lovingly with
his dark hair. The man who stood beside them resembled Christian, particularly
in the way he held his head. He had the same captivating silver-blue eyes,
which regarded his wife with an unmistakable expression.

He loved her.

Grace moved her attention from the marquess
to study the boy’s image more closely. It was Christian, but a carefree,
innocent boy who bore little resemblance to the man she now called husband.
Missing were the cold reserve and the unreachable eyes. This boy had known
happiness and laughter. He had known love. Grace could only wonder what could
have happened to have changed him into the guarded, inscrutable man he was now.

Her study of the portrait was interrupted
when she heard the sound of someone walking on the gravel outside. She glanced
to the window, where she caught sight of Christian moving from the house down a
narrow path through the trees. There stood a door to her right that led to a
terrace. Grace opened it quietly, slipping outside.

The wind rustled through the trees,
lifting the hem of her skirts and tugging at the tendrils of hair that the maid
had left loose as Grace fell in step behind him. She kept a good twenty paces
away so that he wouldn’t hear her following. She wanted to see Christian,
wanted to watch him without his being aware of her. People often behaved
differently in diverse situations and she wanted to see if his indifference was
a thing directed only at her.

As she came around a turn in the pathway,
Grace stopped, lingering behind the sizeable trunk and thick overhanging
branches of an oak. Christian had arrived at a small area shaded by other oaks
and enclosed by a twisting iron fence. A number of tall headstones lined the
interior, flecked gray against the rich, grassy carpet. Grace stepped off the
footpath and onto the lawn so that Christian wouldn’t hear her approach. Coming
under a curtain of new spring leaves, she watched as he stood in contemplation
over one of the headstones, watched him crouch down to pluck away an offending
weed from beside it. He smoothed a hand over the lettering, laying his palm
flat against the stone as one might set a hand in welcome upon another’s
shoulder.

As she drew a few steps closer, Grace saw
that the
gravestone
he knelt before was that of Christopher Wycliffe, his father.

Christian remained kneeling, his head bent
for some time in silent prayer. As she watched him, Grace thought of the man
she’d seen depicted in the portrait, Christian’s father. He looked as if he’d
been the sort of father a boy of five would have worshipped. She remembered her
own grief at the loss of her parents, the disordered feeling even at her young
age, as if her place in the world was no longer secure despite the fact that
she hadn’t really even known them.

Grace’s birth had been accidental, an
imposition on the lives of two people bent on personally conquering the world.
She had been left with Nonny as a babe while her parents had gone away
traveling more than they had stayed at home. They would return every so often
to visit, never remaining long enough to unpack all their belongings before
setting off for some other new and exciting destination. They had come home
most often on special occasions—a random birthday, the marriage of a distant
cousin, the death of Grace’s grandfather, the marquess. Still Grace could
remember the last time she’d seen her parents, could even remember the clothes
they had worn, the smell of her mother’s lavender perfume, the way the wind had
ruffled the ends of her father’s neckcloth as he’d patted her on the head in
parting. She remembered how her mother had bent to kiss her on the cheek,
retying the ribbons on her straw bonnet with the promise that soon she would be
old enough to join them on one of their jaunts around the world. “Next
time,” she had vowed to her daughter. “Next time we will take you
with us and we will see the lions and the elephants in faraway Africa.”

But that promised journey had never come.
Instead, a messenger had arrived from London a month later with the news that
the ship they had sailed upon had gone down in a storm. There had been no
survivors. Ironically in death Grace’s parents had become touchable in a way
they had never been while living, for from then on she’d had the twin
headstones that had been erected in the Ledysthorpe cemetery to visit. She remembered
the last time she’d gone there—the morning
she was to leave Ledysthorpe forever. She had
whispered her good-byes and cleaned away the weeds, just like Christian was
doing now.

Grace remembered how Eleanor had told her
of her brother’s closeness to their father. No doubt such an attachment would
make facing the memorial of his death difficult, even after all the time that
had passed. She wondered that perhaps their shared loss could provide a way for
them to lay the first stepping-stone across the river of unfamiliarity that
stood between them. Hopeful, Grace threw caution to the wind and started toward
the cemetery.

The gate squeaked as she pushed it inward
and the sound brought Christian to lifting his head. He stared at her for a
moment, his expression unguarded. In a moment later, however, his eyes turned
icier than the bitterest winter.

Grace froze, hovering just inside the gate
as he stood. For a moment, she thought she saw the sunlight shine in a tear at
his eye. He continued to stare at her without speaking, his face set without
expression. He needed no words to convey that he was heartily displeased to see
her there.

“You must have loved him very
much,” she said awkwardly.

Christian turned, tossing the weeds he’d
pulled over the fencing. “What are you doing here?”

Grace blanched. “I… I saw you come
here and I thought you might like someone to talk to. You had been kneeling so
long, I—”

“First my dressing room, now this.
This is the second time you have stuck your nose where it didn’t belong. Do you
make it a habit, madam, of intruding on the privacy of others?”

Grace ignored his bitter words. “I
know what it is to lose a parent, Christian.”

For the barest second, her statement
seemed to reach him. His expression softened and the tense lines around his
mouth went smooth—but only for a moment. Then the ice returned to his stare,
and his voice was clipped and sharp as a blade. “You will do well in the
future, madam, to avoid meddling a third time.”

Grace brought her arms around herself,
chilled despite the warmth of the spring sun. She had only hoped to offer
Christian comfort, a wife’s tender touch to ease his obvious pain at the loss
of his father. She had wanted to talk to him, share with him the memory of her
own parents, commiserate in their mutual experience. Instead she had met with
his anger and hostility.

Grace turned her face away so that
Christian wouldn’t see the tears that so quickly came to her eyes at his harsh
words. Was she doomed to displease him at every turn? She looked back when she
heard his bootsteps on the walkway and simply stood there, watching him leave
her again, just as he had the night before, stripped raw of anything but
humiliation and despair.

Christian stared at Grace as she sat
across from him within the closed carriage. They had left Westover Hall nearly
an hour before. Since then she hadn’t spoken above two words other than to ask
how long their journey might take and if he would prefer the front-facing seat
instead of the back. But he would have known she was troubled even without her
silence. She had one of those intelligible faces that showed the thoughts going
on behind it as clearly as if they’d been written on paper. This, coupled with
the book she was reading—and the fact that she was holding it upside down—gave
a clear impression that she was still smarting from his harsh words to her in
the cemetery.

She was wondering at his indifference,
trying to understand why it seemed he was doing everything humanly possible to
avoid being in her company when just the night before he had touched her more
intimately than she’d ever been touched. Their meeting in the cemetery had
taken him unawares. He hadn’t expected to find her there, coming upon him so
quietly as he knelt before his father’s gravestone. The moment he had seen her,
the memory of his failure the night before had come back to him like a dousing
in Westover’s ice-cold fish pond. He hadn’t meant to rail at her as he had; he
was simply unaccustomed to having someone—most especially a wife—suddenly
insinuating herself into the most private moments of his life. Even more so, he
was unaccustomed to having anyone affect him.

As Grace sat lost to her thoughts and her
upside-down tale, Christian took the opportunity to look at her, truly study
her for the first time. When one considered it, the
old duke hadn’t done
badly in his choice of a wife for him. Grace had the loveliness of generations
of aristocratic blood. Her hair was the perfect shade of blonde, not too light
nor too dark, but the color of honey warmed by the summer sunlight. Lashes
framed eyes that were brilliant blue, inquisitive, and full of strength and
spirit. Her nose was straight and unobtrusive, her mouth full and pleasingly
shaped, her skin unblemished, untouched…

Christian had known his wife—whoever his
grandfather decided upon—would be an innocent. The great Duke of Westover would
never consent to a secondhand maid as the mother of the future heir. Christian
wondered, though, if the duke had assumed Grace’s delicate features betokened a
meek and accepting manner and an easily governed nature. It was a mistake one
might make when first faced with her. It had been for that reason alone
Christian had sent up the tea the previous night. He had known Grace wouldn’t
be accustomed to strong spirits and hoped they might ease her fears at giving
over her innocence to a virtual stranger. He had prepared himself for her
apprehension, even her tears. What he hadn’t been prepared for was her trust.

Christian could see Grace now in his
mind’s eye as she lay beneath him on the bed, clad in that prim nightgown even
as her virgin’s body awakened for him. Her soulful eyes had told him that while
she might fear the unknowing, she would never question anything he might do to
her. Though she knew next to nothing about him, she’d had faith in him,
something few others had ever shown him. That simple gesture had taken away any
thought he’d had of indifference toward her, and his plan to keep her at a safe
distance had slipped like sand through his fingers.

But if his reaction to her emotionally had
taken him unawares, the physical response of his body to hers had undone him
completely. In his life, the position he’d been born to, marriage was as
certain and as inevitable as death. It was his duty, his sole purpose in life,
to sire the next Westover heir, and he wouldn’t have been at all surprised had
the old man insisted on standing present to assure that Christian fulfilled his
end of their bargain in
bedding her. Bedding his wife once had been exactly
what Christian had planned on doing, and without spilling his seed to deny the
duke the one thing he wanted more than anything else in life.

An heir.

But from the moment Christian first
touched Grace, knew the scent of her, tasted the softness of her skin, looked
into the bottomless blue of her eyes, he’d been lost. Every thought he’d had of
restraint and control had vanished in a haze of lust and passion and need. But
what did it mean, this reaction to her, really, truly? It signified nothing, he
told himself, nothing at all. So he’d had one night where he’d lost his command
over his body. Regardless of Westover tradition, chances were that Grace
wouldn’t conceive a child from that one encounter. And one encounter was all it
would be. The mystery of her was past, her virginity no longer an issue to be
dealt with. He had done his part. He would not again visit his wife’s bed, not
until the time came that he was ready for a child—and that wouldn’t be until
his grandfather was dead and gone.

For a moment Christian wondered why he
shouldn’t just tell Grace the truth, explain that he could not be a husband to
her in the physical sense because of the agreement he’d made with the duke. But
then she would want to know the reasons why he had made such a promise—why he had
agreed at the age of nine to give over his firstborn son to the duke. It was
something she could never be told, not when the lives of his mother and sister
hinged upon it.

Christian could, he knew, through his
influence and that of his grandfather, arrange a marriage for Eleanor quite
easily and be done with running from the past. As a Westover, she would be
sought after by any of the best of society’s families. But Christian had vowed
he would never do that. He had vowed that Eleanor would be given the luxury of
choosing. She would meet a man, talk to him, share her thoughts, know as she
should know the man she would spend her life with. She would reveal her love of
music, her fondness for lemon tarts and gillyflowers. She would admit to him
her distaste for mushrooms. She would discuss her favorite books, would
show her talent for
poetry. She might meet with a boor or two or maybe even three, but she would
eventually find the one man who shared her likes and dislikes and who cherished
her. She would be allowed to imagine herself in the role of wife long before
his permission as her brother and the family patriarch was sought. And when
that time came, when the honor of her hand was requested, she would be given
the choice to accept or decline.

Put simply, Eleanor would be permitted the
one thing Christian had known all his life he would be denied. Eleanor would be
given the chance to fall in love—and then the very ugly truth that put at peril
her every chance at this happiness would pose a threat to her no longer.

Christian looked at Grace again. Her brow
was furrowed now and her mouth was pressed in a frown. For a moment he wondered
that she had perhaps been as much a victim as he in this marriage. Then he
wondered where that thought had come from. He wondered at her reasons for
wedding him, a man she had only seen once when she had come tumbling through
the wall of his dressing room. She was a nobleman’s daughter, certainly lovely
to look at. He had read the marriage contracts and knew she had brought a sizeable
dowry. Surely she could have had any number of noblemen interested in wedding
her. What had she gained by agreeing to be his wife? And why had his
grandfather chosen her above all others? Had she been bolstered by the myth of
who society thought him to be?

She could have no idea what she had agreed
to when she had consented to be his wife. Grace thought him honorable, a
gentleman worthy of her devotion. Her head was filled with dreams of a white
knight on a charger coming to rescue her. She could know nothing of the past.
The Westover secrets were long buried, unknown to the rest of the world. She
knew only what she had been told, smooth words meant to influence the romantic
whims of a fanciful young lady.

Thus, Grace could have no clue she had
just married a murderer.