Page 25 of A Tale of Two Dukes
Viola remained in her chamber the next morning, and Richard could not blame her for it.
He sat down to breakfast with his cousin and Lord Marchett, and he hoped his face did not betray any of the turmoil he was feeling, and especially his burning anger with Winterflood.
He could not detect any difference in Edward’s manner towards him, and so was still unsure whether the Duke had attempted to visit his wife last night or not; if he had, and found her absent, he was concealing his feelings about the matter exceedingly well.
Richard would not have suspected him capable of such subterfuge, such ruthlessness, but then, perhaps he’d never really known him.
He should have realised that everyone had secrets – not just him.
The butler came in to tell his master that the estate steward Thompson would be grateful for a word as a matter of some urgency, and Edward excused himself, leaving his friend and his young cousin alone in uneasy silence.
Richard drank coffee with a show of unconcern and waited for what he had a shrewd idea was coming.
Marchett struck him as the interfering type.
‘Mean to make a long visit here, do you, Armstrong?’ the older man said with no marked degree of friendliness.
Here it comes, Richard thought resignedly.
‘Edward has been good enough to tell me he is happy to host me for as long as I am able to stay,’ he responded with a show of calmness.
‘But the necessity of earning a living will take me away soon enough, I am sorry to say. This has been a brief holiday for me.’ Not that it’s any of your affair, you nosey old toast, he wanted to add.
‘You’re employed in some capacity in the City, I understand.’ The man’s tone suggested he might as well have asked if Richard emptied privies for a living. And perhaps he did, in a sense – after all, someone had to.
Richard met the Earl’s gaze steadily. The old man was something high up in the Foreign Office, he knew, and therefore could not be a complete fool.
‘I am, sir. My cousin paid for my education and offered to make me an allowance when I was grown, but I did not think it right to take him up on it, not least because he has made no such offer to my brother, his heir, saying with justice that he would only squander it. And – unlike my brother – I am not one for sitting idle when I can be filling my time more usefully.’
‘I can see that,’ Marchett said drily. ‘Very busy, active sort of a fellow, it’s quite plain. I’m sure your business in London – and elsewhere – must be pressing. Best you go back to it, don’t you think?’
‘Do you mean to report the matter of this conversation to Edward?’ Richard asked with a spark of anger.
‘I do not.’
‘So then I may speak openly. You want me gone, which is understandable, but my cousin, as you know very well, wants me here, for his own reasons that have nothing at all to do with the pleasure of my company, or any such normal feeling. If he heard that you had warned me off, he would be angry with you, furious, I daresay, and ask you, with some justice, what gave you licence to meddle so egregiously in his private business.’
‘Good God, boy, I’ve heard unsavoury rumours about you in Town, but I didn’t know the half of it. You are very cool and high-and-mighty, and so I must assume that you know what he’s about, and you… you are colluding in it! Taking advantage of his addle-pated folly!’
‘You have not the least right to say that, and you know it. I have done nothing of which I need be ashamed – I have broken no vows, and I assure you, though it is not in the least your affair, neither has the Duchess. I would be interested to see if you can tell me honestly that you think the same of Edward.’
Marchett’s bluster seemed to collapse suddenly, like one of Lunardi’s balloons coming down in a field.
‘Very well, then,’ he said gruffly. ‘What I think is, he’s run stark mad.
I’ve never heard of such a thing. Don’t tell me if the girl knows of it – I don’t want to hear anything I may later feel obliged to tell him.
I won’t stay here and appear to condone this dangerous folly of his.
What a confounded mess he’s made for himself.
But the last thing I mean to do is to make more trouble for the poor old fellow.
I don’t give a damn about you or the silly chit otherwise. ’
‘The poor old fellow, as you call him, is treating his wife appallingly. Jesus Christ, man, she was seventeen when he married her last year! But it’s quite clear to me that you don’t care a button for that.’
The Earl waved his hand as if such womanish sentiments were not of the least consequence. ‘And it’s quite clear to me that you do, for all your fine words and protestations of innocence. More than you should.’
Richard laughed mirthlessly. ‘What do you suppose he’ll do, if you tell him of it?
Call me out? Threaten me with a horsewhip?
Because – let me be sure I understand you, sir – it would be perfectly acceptable for me to play him false under his own roof if I don’t give a damn for his unfortunate wife, but somehow, it would not if I do happen to care for her? ’
‘None of it’s perfectly acceptable!’ the much-tried Earl said. But after a moment, he recovered himself and said, ‘It’s shaken me, this, I don’t mind admitting. But I don’t see how in all honour you can stay either, knowing what you do.’
‘Then I should leave her alone with him, you think? You wouldn’t be at all worried that if I fail him, he’ll start looking measuringly at the footmen?’
Marchett rubbed his hand over his reddened face, and groaned behind it. ‘He wouldn’t,’ was the muffled response. ‘He’s a gentleman, and he wouldn’t.’
‘I wouldn’t have thought he’d do this either, and yet here we are. I doubt either of us knows him in the least, or what he’s capable of. It seems to me he is quite ruthless in the pursuit of his ends, and entirely careless of the feelings of others.’
‘I was afraid of this, but the fool can’t see it,’ the older man said.
‘You’d have to be a scoundrel to co-operate knowingly with his damned unsavoury scheme and if you’re not a scoundrel, if you care for the girl as you seem to…
If she runs off and leaves him for another man like the other one did, it’ll break him.
Twice – can you imagine what people would say that he must have done to drive them both to it?
He couldn’t endure that again, the shame of it, the whispering, never mind this business of his precious heir. I know that much.’
‘I can see why you think I might just care about all that, as an Armstrong, but there’s no reason the Duchess should. You know there’s a name for what he’s doing to her, and it’s not a pretty one.’
‘Don’t you think I tried to tell him that?’
‘And yet if any sort of legal proceedings were brought on her behalf, in the manner of Mrs Addison’s notorious case against her husband last year, and you were asked on oath if your friend had told you of his infamous plan, I’ll wager you’d lie through your teeth to protect him and say you knew nothing of it. Leave her swinging in the wind.’
‘Damn it, man, the Addison case was different! That was a matter of incest – quite exceptional circumstances, and the husband considered not in his right mind! You can’t possibly be telling me that this girl would think to seek a divorce from Edward on her own account, tell the world what he’s been up to, with all the cost and scandal that would involve! ’
Richard would not dream of sharing anything that Viola had said to him in private with this man, and so his reply was somewhat evasive.
‘No doubt she is aware that last year, for the first time, a woman was granted a divorce because of her husband’s gross betrayal of her, but I have no reason to think that she has any intention of trying such a thing for herself.
And I don’t suppose for a moment she’d get one even if she did seek it.
I’m sure she should if there was any justice in the world, but that’s a different matter, as we both know there isn’t.
I doubt you and I could ever come to agree on the rights and wrongs of this, and God forbid that the precious status quo of England should be threatened for the sake of a mere woman’s wish for decent treatment from her husband. ’
Lord Marchett did not have an answer to that, or not one he was prepared to say out loud, and Richard, disgusted, left him to his breakfast.