The duke rose, and at last he did look at her. His eyebrows were rather bushy and intimidating, combined with his great beak of a nose, but nevertheless she could see both kindness and despair in his eyes. “Don’t worry,” she said impulsively, coming to her feet. “Rupert and I will do our best.”
“It’s not his fault, you know,” the duke said. “He wasn’t breathing at birth, and the doctors believe that had an effect on his brain. It isn’t . . . your children won’t take after the poor boy.”
Olivia took a step forward and picked up the duke’s hand. For the first time in their many meetings, she felt a genuine fondness toward him. Of all the people and things attached to the dukedom of Canterwick, her father-in-law would be one of the very few of whom she was not wary. “We will do our best,” she repeated. “And Rupert will be safe in Portugal. It’s very kind of you to allow him to follow his dream. I’m sure he will be happy to have traveled outside England.”
The corner of the duke’s mouth quirked up. “His mother would have wanted it. I know that. She would have told me that I had to allow him to grow to a man, no matter how much I’d prefer to keep him tied to my apron strings.”
Olivia blinked. She knew very little about the duchess; her parents had always said she was ill and lived in seclusion.
“Elizabeth almost died during his birth,” the duke said heavily. “She lived, but she was never the same again. She can’t eat by herself; she doesn’t recognize me. She lives in the country.”
“Your wife and son were impaired by the same event?” Olivia blurted out, before she could catch herself.
“Aye,” the duke said. “That’s the devil of it. But Rupert has a good heart. He’s a kindly, cheerful soul, and if I don’t think about what might have been, the two of us rub along fairly well together. And my dear, I’ve talked to you about your brains and your hips, but the most important thing is that you’ve always been kind to him. It’s not easy. He tends to jabber, but you have never made fun of him.”
Olivia tightened her grip on his hand. “I promise to be kind to him,” she said, and in that moment, it was as if she said her vows.
The duke gave his odd smile again. “I’ll send him to you.”
And he was gone.
Five
Events That Warrant No Introduction
Rupert customarily entered any room with a hearty stream of greetings; having been coached as to the proper salutations, he took a clear delight in observing the appropriate rules. But now he walked into the library without a word, his eyes lighting on Olivia’s face and sliding away.
Olivia let fly a silent, if heartfelt, string of oaths directed at their parents. She had forgotten—again—to consider what Rupert might be thinking of all this. From the look on his face, she and Georgiana had been right in their surmise that Rupert had not been tutored in the particular situation he now faced.
No more than she had, actually.
But then, people had been getting through the business for years. Luckily, her father kept a brandy decanter in the library, and she handed Rupert a brimming glass and poured one for herself as well, and the devil with the fact that her mother considered spirits to be unladylike. Still without a word, they sat down on the sofa before the fire.
“Left Lucy in the sitting room,” he said suddenly. “Didn’t seem right.”
Olivia nodded. “She will be more comfortable there.”
“No, she’s not comfortable,” he stated. “My father doesn’t like her. Says that she’s fit for hunting rats and nothing else. She doesn’t wish to kill rats. She wouldn’t even know how. And your parents don’t care for her, either.”
“My parents never allowed us to have a pet of any sort,” Olivia said.
“You like dogs, though,” Rupert stated.
“Yes.”
“Said I’d do it because of that.”
Olivia blinked. “What?”
“Marriage.”
Apparently she had underestimated Rupert’s strength of will; she hadn’t realized that he was allowed any part in the choice of his duchess. Nor had she the faintest idea that the meat pies she’d saved for Lucy comprised her audition for the role.
She would have eaten them herself.
“It’s not that I don’t like you,” Rupert said earnestly. “I do. But you like Lucy too, don’t you?”
“She’s a dear dog.” They were on common ground now. She and Rupert had spent many an evening in the last year talking of Lucy.
But Rupert seemed to have exhausted the subject of Lucy, and with his silence the air turned edgy and nervous again.
“We needn’t do it, you know,” she said, after a bit.
“I must,” he said, taking a big gulp of brandy and shuddering. “Told my father I would. Be like a man. Do—be a man.” He looked confused.
Olivia took a sip and thought about how much she’d like to throw her parents and the duke off Battersea Bridge. “Shall we not, and tell them we did?” she offered.
He turned to look at her for the first time, eyes round. “Lie?”
“More like a fib.”
He shook his head. “I don’t lie. Not a gentleman’s thing to do, lying. Better to man up.” He took another shuddering gulp.
In his own way, Rupert was admirable, Olivia thought, realizing for the first time that he would have made a rather exceptional duke, if he’d had possession of all his faculties. He had his father’s strength of will, with an extra layer of honor that his father was conspicuously lacking.
“I understand,” she said.
“No time like the present,” Rupert offered.
“Shall I turn down the lamps?”
“How would I see what I was doing?”
Good question. “Of course,” Olivia said hastily.
He stood up, putting his now empty glass on a side table. “I know how to fall in. I fall in; you fall backwards.” He seemed to be reassuring himself as much as her. “Easy business. They all say.”
“Wonderful,” Olivia said. After a second’s hesitation, she stood up and then moved behind the sofa to remove her drawers. Then she came back around to the fire, wondering if she should take off her slippers.
A quick look at Rupert showed that he was not planning to do so. His breeches were pushed down around his ankles. She took another, larger sip of brandy.
“Perhaps you’d better finish your glass,” Rupert suggested.
She gulped the remains of her brandy and then looked again at her fiancé. He was rather red in the face and his eyes were slightly glassy. Apparently, he had refilled his glass while her back was turned.
“What ho,” he said, rather faintly, and drank it off as well.
Olivia took a deep breath and put her glass down. Then she lay back on the sofa, pulled her skirts up to her waist, and steeled herself.
“Right,” Rupert said. “Do you suppose I should put one knee here, next to your hip? There’s a pillow in the way.”
They wrestled with placement of their limbs for a moment or two until he was more or less in position.
“Do you want some more brandy first?” Rupert asked. “Painful for a woman. My father says.”
“No, thank you,” Olivia said. Unfortunately, what brandy she’d already taken had gone straight to her head, and she had a burning wish to giggle. She could just imagine what her mother would say to that.
“If you feel like crying, I brought three extra handkerchiefs.” Rupert displayed no particular urge to get on with the business.
“Thank you,” Olivia said again, choking down more giggles. “I never cry.”
“Really? I cry all the time,” Rupert said, blinking at her.
“I remember how you wept at the garden party when that dead sparrow fell out of a tree.”
Rupert’s face crumpled at the memory.
“It was just a bird,” she added quickly.
“Quick, bright . . . wild.”
“The sparrow?”
He seemed to have entirely
forgotten what they were supposed to have been doing, even though he was on his knees, holding his tool in one hand. His eyes weren’t glassy anymore, but focused. “I wrote a poem,” he told her.
Olivia wasn’t entirely certain, but she was fairly sure that his tool wouldn’t be effective in its current state. “What sort of poem?” she asked, putting her head back on the cushion. Life with Rupert would have its own rhythm. There was no point in rushing it.
“Quick, bright,” he said again, “a bird falls down to us, darkness piles up in the trees.”
Olivia raised her head. “Is that the whole poem?”
He nodded, eyes on hers.
“It’s lovely, Rupert,” she said, and meant it. For the first time in her life, almost, she truly meant what she was saying to her fiancé. “ ‘Darkness piles up.’ I love that.”
“In the trees,” he said, nodding vigorously. “I cried for the bird. Why don’t you ever cry?”
She had never cried, even once, after meeting Rupert for the first time. She was ten years old; he was five. It was the morning when her dreams of the fairy-tale prince she was to marry crashed to the ground.
Even though he was only aged five (and she only ten), she knew something was gravely wrong with his brain.
But her mother had scoffed when she said as much. “The marquess may not be as quick as you,” Mrs. Lytton had said, “but that is like expecting a duke to learn flower arranging. You are too clever for your own good.”
“But—” Olivia had said, desperation rising in her chest.
“You are the luckiest girl in the world,” her mother had stated. The utter conviction on her face had made the words die in Olivia’s mouth.
Even all these years later, after it became clear that Rupert was lucky to have mastered speech, let alone literacy, her mother had never altered her opinion an iota.
“Perhaps you should begin,” Olivia suggested to Rupert. She waved her hand toward the general area of endeavor.
“Right,” Rupert said gamely. “On with it.” As Olivia watched, he swayed back and forth slightly. “Bit too much brandy,” he muttered, but applied himself to the appropriate place.
It bent in half.
Rupert blinked down. “It’s not working. This part is supposed to be easy.”
Olivia propped herself up on her elbows. It looked as if he were holding a piece of old celery. Bendy and—though one wouldn’t want to say so aloud—flaccid.
“Try again?” she suggested.
“I suppose this is the right place?”
“Yes,” she said firmly.
Rupert tried again, muttering to himself. Olivia let him get on with it, only slowly realizing that he was whispering, “In, in, in.” Giggles built up in her chest again, so she bit her lip hard.
After a while she said, “I’ve heard that this sort of thing never works on the first try.”
Rupert didn’t look up at her. He held his private parts in a fierce grip that looked desperately uncomfortable. “This is easy,” he repeated.
“I think it needs to be stiff in order to work,” Olivia ventured.
He blinked at her. “Do you know a great deal about the matter?” He didn’t seem in the least censorious, just curious.
“It’s just a wild stab in the dark,” Olivia replied. She was fighting giggles again because the phrase lame duck kept running through her mind.
“I thought the most important thing was size,” Rupert said.
“I believe I have heard the same,” Olivia admitted cautiously.
Rupert gave himself a shake. “This is big. I know that.”
“Lovely!”
“But it doesn’t work.” He dropped it and looked at her, his eyes miserable. “Another thing that doesn’t work.”
Olivia wiggled backward and managed to sit up. “Do you know how you never lie, Rupert?”
He nodded.
“We’ll just lie on the sofa together.” She patted the cushion beside her. “Then, we tell them that.”
“You mean . . . not tell?”
“It wouldn’t be a falsehood.”
“No.”
“We’ll just say that we lay together on the sofa.”
“Lay together,” he repeated. “I’d rather . . . I . . . Don’t tell Father? Others? Please?”
Olivia took his hand—the other hand. “I’ll never tell, Rupert. Never.”
His smile was quick and bright.
Considerably later the same night, Olivia scowled at her sister. “Our parents requested that Rupert and I conjoin without the benefit of matrimony, and we complied, just as if we were a pair of breeding hounds.”
“There’s no need to put it in such a depressing fashion. Although,” Georgiana added, with one of her rare smiles, “after this evening Rupert’s prospects as a breeding hound are somewhat in question.”
“If you smiled at men like that, Georgie, you’d have more proposals than you could manage.”
“I do smile,” Georgiana protested.
“But your smile often looks as if you were thinking about the fact that they are lower than the rank of duke,” Olivia pointed out. “You could try smiling at them as if they were dukes.”
Her sister nodded. “I take your point. At any rate, one shouldn’t compare one’s future husband to a breeding hound.”
“His Grace characterized it as such. After which he informed me that he would reward me for this evening’s work with a jointure and an estate. A small estate, I believe he said. I had no idea of how rich a strumpet could become from a mere hour or two of debauchery.”
“Olivia!” But her sister’s protest had no force.
“You’re to benefit from my strumpethood, my dear. He’s told Madame Claricilla to outfit both of us according to my new station.”
Georgiana’s eyebrows flew up.
“The fruits of sin. I am thinking of Cyprians in a whole new light, I promise you. You and I are both getting an entire wardrobe, and I shall refuse to have a single white gown or trailing ribbon.”
“You are not a strumpet,” Georgiana protested. “You were obeying Mother and Father’s wishes.”
“To that point, may I say that I deeply resent the fact that Mother spent years insisting that a lady’s life should revolve around the protection of her chastity, only to toss out that precept the moment she thought I could have a child by Rupert?”
Georgiana chewed on her lip for a moment. Then she said, “You’re right, of course. Our parents are showing an excess of enthusiasm for this marriage, and have done so all along.”
“Given that poor Rupert is harebrained as they come, yes.” Olivia rolled over on her back again. She felt exhausted, and deeply sad; the effects of the brandy had decidedly worn off. She had realized at the age of ten that her married life would be conspicuously different from that of other women. But she hadn’t realized just how appalling the reality might be.
The very idea of having breakfast with Rupert, let alone years and years of breakfasts, made her feel despairing.
“Even if the marquess had a distinguished brain, our parents shouldn’t have been party to a distasteful encounter such as you just described,” Georgiana stated.
“His brain is distinguished, all right,” Olivia muttered. “There are very few like it. Though his poetry is truly lovely, in a fragmented sort of way.”
“I hesitate to ask,” Georgiana said, “but why was Mother so vexed, after the duke and the FF left? Her voice carried even to my chamber, so I hesitated to come down for some time. Yet it sounds as though everything went according to her best hopes; the betrothal papers are signed, and as far as she knows, you may be carrying a future duke. Not to mention her fervent reaction to the possibility of my becoming a duchess.”
“Oh,” Olivia said. “That was Lucy.” Even thinking about it made her start smiling.
“Lucy?”
“Rupert’s dog, Lucy. Surely you remember her.”
“Who could not? It’s not that she’s the only dog
in the ton—Lord Filibert’s poodle has gained some notoriety, given its green bows—but Lucy is the only one with flea-bitten ears.”
“Unkind,” Olivia said, laughing. “I think the bite to her tail proved more detrimental to her beauty.”
“Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but one would have to be blind to praise Lucy.”
“She has very sweet eyes,” Olivia protested. “And it’s rather adorable the way her ears turn inside out when she runs.”
“That is not a characteristic I ever considered essential to an attractive dog.”
“Mother doesn’t admire it either. In fact, she was truly vexed by the idea that I might be seen with the dog by anyone of consequence.”
Georgiana raised an eyebrow. “Lucy isn’t going to Portugal? I thought Rupert was never separated from her.”
“He believes the trip might be dangerous, so he asked me to care for her in his absence.”
“Most people do say that about battlefields. So where is Lucy? She certainly wasn’t in the drawing room by the time I joined you. Is she in the stables?”
“In the kitchens, being bathed,” Olivia said. “Rupert demanded that she remain with me at all times. Of course, Mother was entirely sweet to his face, but she flew into a temper the moment the door closed. She considers Lucy to be an utterly inappropriate companion for a future duchess. Which makes her the perfect companion for me, you have to admit.”
“Lucy does not have an aristocratic air. It’s the rat tail, I think.”
“Or that long waist. She looks like a sausage with legs. But she will smell like an aristocrat. Mother sent her down to the kitchens to be bathed in buttermilk.”
Georgiana rolled her eyes. “Lucy may be enjoying the buttermilk, but the idea is preposterous.”
“Mother also suggested that bows or some sort of embellishment might make her more suitable as a lady’s companion.” In the whole, long, rather horrible day, the only bright spot was the expression on their mother’s face when Rupert, a tear rolling down his cheek, put Lucy’s leash into Olivia’s hand.
“Lucy with bows on her ears—or that tail—does not appeal,” Georgiana stated firmly.
“Do you know what’s bothering Mother the most? I think she’s afraid that everyone will call Lucy a mongrel and then think the same of me. Bows for Lucy and ribbons for me, if you see what I mean.”