Page 24 of A Tale of Two Dukes

He looked at her for a moment and she could not tell what he was thinking. ‘I can’t,’ he said heavily at last. ‘I love you – Viola, I do, more than I can adequately express. I could ask for nothing more than to spend my life with you. But I have no money to support a wife, or…’

‘Or a mistress.’ She was surprised at how level her voice sounded in her own ears.

He looked shame-faced, and did not try to deny that that was what she would be.

She knew it would be childish for either of them to pretend otherwise.

‘We could say that we were married, and strangers at least would believe it, but I live in a squalid little room when I am not travelling. And I’m away for months at a time.

You’d be no better off than you are here, no less alone.

It would be so wonderful when we were together, but we so rarely would be. What would you do all day long?’

‘What do I do now? Nothing with any point to it.’ But she didn’t say this with any energy. She knew he was right.

‘But at least you’re safe. You would be all alone in London, in a down-at-heel area, which is all I can afford. Your family might easily cast you off if you left Edward – they would have to, if I understand their situation, because your reputation as a runaway wife, an adulteress…’

‘Would damage that of my sisters, and utterly ruin their chances of making decent marriages. Threaten the whole family’s future, in fact, and fill my poor father’s last years with terrible anxiety.

Destroy everything my mother has worked for.

Mean that if Laurence did not support them for the rest of their lives, they would all be close to destitute.

’ She laid out all the horrors of her situation in quite a matter-of-fact manner, and she was proud of her ability to do it when she felt her heart was breaking apart in her chest. She needed to be strong.

‘It is so wrong,’ he said passionately, ‘that you should have so much pressure placed on you. Your life is pulled out of any natural shape by what your family want from you, and what Edward wants from you. There is no space for what you want, and the damnable fact is, there’s nothing I can do for you.

I cannot even ask you to wait, because I have no prospects.

Even if I make my way in the world through my own efforts, which I hope to, it may take years till I have any security. There is none at present.’

‘I know. The horrible truth is, however furious I am, however much I hate him now, I am tied to Edward forever. There can be no escape for me save through his death, or mine. Even if it were possible for me to free myself through divorce, my family situation, my concern for my sisters’ futures, means I could never contemplate such a scandalous course of action.

It would ruin them as well as me. That would still be a fact even if I could afford the enormous cost, which of course, I cannot.

It was a foolish, selfish thing to say – forget it, if you can. ’

He fell to his knees at her feet, taking her cold hands in his and kissing them fervently.

‘It was not foolish. Don’t say that, or even think it.

I would wish for nothing better in the world than that we could be together always, and as happy and secure as we deserve.

Both of us. But the forces that seek to keep us apart are so powerful – it’s not even the people, it’s not even your mother and your sisters and bloody Edward, or my employers; it’s great impersonal forces of circumstance. ’

‘They can’t keep us apart tonight, however powerful they are,’ she told him with sudden heat.

‘I absolutely refuse to go back to my room and wait meekly for Edward to come to me again, or not to come, if he has stayed up drinking too late with Marchett and feels himself to be incapable. He knows he is infertile, he says – well then, he might as well leave me alone. I am sorry if he needs the pretence – no, I am not. I don’t know if I want to lie with you tonight, Richard, as a woman does with a man – I feel cold and sick and used.

And I don’t want to think, or for you to think, that if I give myself to you fully, it might be out of shock or even some perverse desire for revenge on Edward.

We both deserve better than that. But I would like to sleep in your bed, in your arms. If you will have me. ’

‘Come, my love,’ he said, rising and taking her in his arms. ‘At least we can give each other comfort.’

With great tenderness, he helped her undress down to her shift, and in a little while, they were embracing.

She lay close against him with her head on his chest, and he stroked her dark hair and held her, and after a while, she cried silently at the hopelessness of it all, and he wiped her wet cheeks, and kissed them.

But he did no more than that, and she did not want him to.

Perhaps the Duke went to her chamber to seek her out and found her absent, or perhaps that night he did not – they had no means of knowing.

At last, they fell asleep and lay curled together until early morning, when Richard woke her and she left him wordlessly.

She went creeping along the silent corridors with her gown bundled in her arms, realising as he had that it really would be folly to allow the servants to know that she had not slept in her own bed.

Her situation was quite complicated enough without that fresh danger.