Page 31 of A Duke to Undo her (The Husband Hunt #1)
Chapter Twenty-Two
“May I come in, Cassius?” called the Dowager Duchess of Ashbourne, after knocking on the door of the private sitting room that formed part of his ducal suite.
He had been closeted in his rooms for almost the entire day apart from an early morning ride while everyone else was sleeping off the effects of the ball.
Now, it was almost seven o’ clock in the evening and he was aware that all the guests must finally be gone.
Still, he was in no mood for conversation and had deliberately not come downstairs.
“Mother, is all well?” he asked, coming to the door and unlocking it.
“Perfectly, my son. Everyone had departed by five o’clock and the house is quiet again. You might have come down to join me hours ago.”
Was there reproach in her voice, or something else? The duke didn’t know but he was too weary to enquire deeply.
“Thank you for saying all the farewells, Mother. I was not the best of hosts, I know.”
“My time is at your disposal, Cassius. Benedict and I managed well. Still, I do think you might have said goodbye in person to certain guests, Lady Elmridge and her younger sister, for instance. I believe they would have liked to see you.”
Immediately pained, Cassius looked away, wishing his mother had not chosen this particular example but glad that she had not actually spoken Lady Josephine’s name.
Part of him wished still to go searching for this young woman through the house and grounds, even knowing rationally that she was no longer to be found here.
“I could not,” he said thickly. “It was better that you and Benedict sent everyone off with your smiles. Let them remember that of their stay at Ashbourne Castle.”
“Oh Cassius, look at you,” Nerissa Emerton sighed fondly, rather than arguing or criticizing his absence any further. “You have not even changed since last night, have you?”
Looking down, the Duke of Ashbourne saw that several buttons were open on his waistcoat and one actually missing.
His trousers were dusty and rumpled and he stood before her in his socks, having abandoned his dress shoes in the stable and borrowed some groom’s riding boots this morning.
He had a vague recollection of curtly sending away the valet who might have dressed him decently earlier that day.
“We can’t all be Benedict, can we?” he replied with a small laugh. “Always smiling, never a hair out of place. Well, thank God he is like you, Mother, and not like me and Father. He is beloved wherever he goes and will make some woman a fine husband one day.”
“No doubt, although not for some time yet, I suspect. Would you walk with me, Cassius? I had a fancy to look at the gallery before dinner and there is no need to trouble about your dress for that. There is no one here to judge any of us now.”
Bowing his head in accession to his mother’s request, he closed the door and offered his arm to the dowager duchess. Did she only want his company or was there something more on her mind? In either case, it was well enough to stretch his legs before dressing for dinner.
“I am at your command, Mother.”
“It is not necessarily a blessing to be like Benedict and me,” she told him after a few minutes of walking in silence. “When life is difficult, maybe it is better to be stronger, like you, Cassius. A happy disposition and skill in pleasing others did not serve me well when Henry died.”
“No personality is a shield against grief,” the duke told her.
“Nor is any personality proof against love,” she observed in response. “In both cases, it is more a matter of whether that personality breaks under the pressure of resistance. I broke under my grief, where you did not. My fear is that you are more likely to break by resisting love.”
The Duke of Ashbourne said nothing, too tired and too sad to argue about her attempt to urge him down roads he did not wish to travel. They had also arrived now at the gallery and he hoped the art would prove sufficient distraction for his mother from her present pensive mood.
“What would you like to view first, Mother? Old masters, family portraits or the daubing of my great-grandfather William, the Seventh Duke of Ashbourne?”
As he had hoped, Nerissa Emerton laughed at the mention of great-grandfather William.
The seventh duke had possessed far more enthusiasm than talent for painting but had still insisted on hanging his pictures in the gallery alongside those of professional artists.
There was a naive charm to his disproportionate horses and hounds, and generations of Emerton children had tended to love them best.
“Family portraits, Cassius. That is where my mind has been leaning recently, for one reason or another. Let us save the seventh duke’s efforts for another night."
Arm in arm, they walked through to the relatively dim gallery rooms where all the Emerton family pictures hung, protected from the sun by heavy drapes across the larger windows.
Portraits of ancestors in armor or other now-curious dress rubbed shoulders with more modern fare, including the most recent painting of Cassius, Benedict and Nerissa, commissioned by his mother on the occasion of Benedict’s twenty-first birthday the previous year.
It was in front of this picture that the duchess first paused, while Cassius drew back a curtain and let in the still-bright summer evening sunlight.
“Sometimes I cannot believe that both of my boys are grown men,” she reflected. “Do you think Thomas Lawrence captured our family well?”
Cassius gave a little chuckle, his tension loosening somewhat as he contemplated their family group as set out on the canvas: golden-haired Nerissa and Benedict sitting together in smiling harmony and dark Cassius standing, almost lurking, behind them with a touch of disgruntlement in his eyes.
“He captured you and Benedict well enough, but I look a little out of place, skulking at the back there with that peculiar expression, rather like a pantomime villain.”
“Benedict and I sat for hours. You would barely stand still long enough for the poor man to even sketch you, never mind paint you,” his mother accused him, although smiling. “You cannot blame poor Mr. Lawrence for your peculiar expression now. Don’t you remember?”
“I remember swearing never to sit for another portrait,” Cassius admitted and allowed his mother to walk on.
She moved slowly but purposefully and a few moments later, the Duke of Ashbourne found himself in front of a large painting of his father, Henry, the Ninth Duke of Ashbourne.
It was the last portrait ever taken of his father and it included Cassius, his heir, sixteen years old and standing in the foreground before his father’s chair.
Why must his mother choose this picture? Why today of all days? The duke took a long breath and closed his eyes. While he did not actively avoid this picture, he had rarely ever stood before it and usually even averted his eyes when he walked past it through the gallery.
Still, Cassius seemed to know the composition of this picture better than any other in the house: two striking men with thick dark hair and eyes of deepest midnight, one a youthful version of the other and destined to grow into the figure in the chair, a man who died in the prime of life only months after the painting was completed.
“We should do this another time,” the duke announced, turning away before his mother could offer any comment. “I need to bathe before dinner.”
Briefly, the dowager duchess seemed likely to object, but then thought better of it.
“Very well, but Cassius, can I ask a favor of you?”
He hesitated before he agreed, wary of what she might be seeking, given her nostalgic mood and his own present inner turmoil.
“I will grant what is in my power,” he answered.
“Will you come back here another time soon and look at that picture properly with me?”
The duke contemplated this request, knowing that it would seem so small to anyone else in the world but him.
“Is it so very important to you that I must be with you when you look at it?” he questioned, only postponing the inevitable since he would never allow himself to be so cowardly as to run from a painting.
“Yes,” she nodded. “It is very important to me. I would not ask otherwise, believe me.”
“Very well,” Cassius agreed, his heart heavy with a commitment he would have preferred to avoid. “Today, I am…tired. But the next time you ask me, I will make sure I am ready to view that painting with you.”
“Thank you, Cassius. I will detain you no longer this evening. Go and take your bath."
“What will you do now, Benedict?” the Duke of Ashbourne asked his younger brother after dinner, once their mother had departed for her bed.
“Finish my port and retire for the night,” answered Benedict with an easy smile and a yawn. “All the late nights this week are finally catching up with me. Then, I plan to return to London. I am invited to several balls later this week and may attend them all.”
“That was not what I meant,” Cassius said rather heavily. “I was asking about your future life plans. Mother was reflecting today on the fact that we are now both grown men. I wondered if you had thoughts on some useful occupation for yourself.”
Benedict shrugged, with an insouciance that irritated his older brother before he even tried a second answer.
“You always told me that professions were beneath my dignity as heir to the duchy,” he observed.
“Not that I’m really cut out for law or science and the rest. Nor do I have any real artistic or musical talents, so I am no great loss to the stage.
Should I do a second grand tour? I did learn excellent Italian on my first and it is growing rusty. ”
“Life is not just a game, Benedict,” Cassius snapped. “What would happen if I died tomorrow? You ought to be learning how to manage the estate, how to make yourself heard in the House of Lords, finding yourself a wife.”
“Are you planning to die tomorrow?” Benedict retorted, and Cassius thought at first that he was still joking before spotting the steely glint in his brother’s usually mild eyes.
“No? I thought not. If there’s something you want from me, Cassius, you should tell me what it is, not try to scold me into it like an uncomprehending schoolboy. ”
The duke threw back the last of his own port, barely tasting it.
Why was Benedict irking him so much tonight?
Did he really want the young man to be as miserable as he was himself?
Surely, he had raised his brother deliberately not to resemble him.
Cassius had never wanted Benedict to suffer as he had done.
“I am only worried, for you, and for the estate,” the duke tried to explain himself.
“Really? Well, I think you ought to live your own life and let me live mine,” Benedict told him more forcefully than usual. “There are others who agree with me on that point.”
“I have already told you that when you marry, you shall have your own London house and household, Benedict. What more do you need in order to live your own life?”
“You are insufferable!” Benedict declared, rising to his feet and almost knocking over his chair with the force of his movement. “Can you really not see what you are doing?”
Briefly, Cassius thought that his younger brother might actually throw the remainder of his drink over him. Then Benedict, perhaps, thought better of it and placed his glass down hard on the table instead.
“Do you even listen to yourself, Brother? Or is the noise in your own mind too loud to permit self-reflection? It would serve you right, if I did exactly as you ask, Cassius. Do you know that?”
Turning on his heel, Benedict stormed from the room, while Cassius stood frozen at the head of the table. What had he done?!