Page 4 of A Tale of Two Dukes

Emily, mild eyes sparkling with unaccustomed anger, agreed instantly that the letter was a grave insult, and one that should be rejected in the coldest terms, if indeed it merited a reply at all.

But Viola, once she had overcome her initial impulse to have a fire lit in the breakfast room purely in order to throw the paper into it and watch it burn to ashes, was not so sure.

Damn him to hell along with his mad aunt, he was quite right when he said that her growing boys would benefit from the presence of a father figure.

How could they not? Especially when one of them had succeeded far too early to the dignities, titles and looming responsibilities of the dukedom, and the other had not.

What a burden to place on a young boy, and what a cruel division to make between him and his twin brother.

Ventris also pierced right to the heart of her reasons for not considering the suit of any other man she had met in the years of her widowhood.

She hadn’t spent very much time with her sisters and her mother in London society since she put off her black, being fully occupied with her children and the estate.

But she had attended local assemblies and private parties often enough with Emily, and had been left in no doubt at all that if she wished to remarry tomorrow, she could find many candidates for her hand.

It wasn’t necessarily a flattering thought.

No doubt the prospect of living at Winterflood as its master, at least till Ned came of age, which was more than ten years off, added to any attractions her person might hold.

And her own widow’s portion was respectable enough by itself.

Not to mention her damned proverbial fecundity, and the salacious rumours about her bedroom skills that had plagued her in her youth.

It wasn’t true to say that any of the men who had swarmed about her had wooed her – she had not let them go so far, having instead made it very clear that she had not the least interest in courtship nor any kind of flirtation.

If she were ever to marry again – and a little voice inside her said, After all, I am still only nine and twenty!

– it could only be to a man whom she could trust to care for the boys with genuine affection.

Trust utterly, for she too might die and leave them in his sole care.

And Ventris – damn him again – was the only man now living in the world in whom she could place unequivocal faith in that manner.

She didn’t have to like him or trust him in any other respect to admit the truth of that.

The quickest way to put herself at the risk of death, she thought with mordant humour as she sat gazing into the fire now and Miss Naismith watched her anxiously, was to engage, as Ventris had put it, in the chancy business of attempting to give birth again.

It was no small thing he asked of her, and despite his flippancy, he knew it.

He was also right in saying that she appreciated honesty and disdained idle flattery, so, however shocked Emily was, however shocked she too had been at first, she could not judge him for his bluntness.

She knew she had been a byword among the members of the haut ton for producing twin boys when her husband, quite five and forty when he wed her, had been married twice before and neither of his previous wives had, as far as anyone knew, ever even been in a delicate condition.

His first ill-suited duchess had deserted him to run off with another man after five years of marriage and he had been obliged to divorce her, with great expense and scandal; his second, with whom he had shared a much happier and longer union, had died childless in an epidemic of some infectious disease that swept through London in 1800.

A year after that lady’s death, fresh out of mourning and still grief-stricken, he had married Viola, who had been only seventeen and just out.

Considerably less than two years later, she’d given birth to the twins.

So she and Edward had indeed been the subject of a great deal of most prurient gossip; she knew this because her oldest sister had kindly told her so, in excessive detail.

Sabrina, who in private loved a salty tale, had been most entertained at the wilder speculation over what, precisely, the nubile Viola must have done to stimulate Winterflood’s previously sluggish masculine ardour to the point where she conceived; the Duchess herself had not been nearly so amused to know herself discussed in such a humiliating manner.

Would the Duke have hated it too? Surely any man would, and especially him, but it didn’t matter one jot now.

Viola refused to dwell on such unpleasant matters.

She and Edward had been happy enough in a fashion, at least once the boys were born.

Not passionately in love, on either part, but contented in their mutual love for their little sons, who were, as he had often told her, the greatest gift any man had ever been given.

She moved uneasily in her seat; this letter had brought back long-buried memories that she was generally extremely adept at suppressing.

Ventris had wisely made no direct reference to the intimacy that must inevitably take place between them if she accepted him.

Emily thought his letter indelicate, and it was, but it could have been a great deal more so, in Viola’s opinion.

There was an undertone to it, of course…

Emily too had noticed that, she thought, but it was such a nebulous thing that she hadn’t found words to refer to it.

And that was not a conversation the Duchess herself had any intention of initiating.

If she were to be honest, that part of it wasn’t the problem, or not directly.

Richard was an attractive man, had always been an attractive man even in his early twenties, and she’d been alone for a long time.

Her bed was cold; she could not doubt that his presence would warm it.

And she would like another child. A daughter, perhaps, a baby in her arms again after so long. She didn’t really care, boy or girl. The idea made tears rise to her eyes, the deep-seated yearning suddenly so strong, it took her by surprise. That was a stark fact.

What was the problem, then? Setting aside her shock and fury, taking into account the pressing reasons for acceptance that he had not failed to list, and those he had not listed but only referred obliquely to – the boys’ safety not least among them – what was the problem?

He didn’t love her and made no bones about it; she really didn’t expect him to, and, as he’d said in his letter, wouldn’t have believed him if he’d said he did.

Empty professions of love and devotion really would have been insulting.

Her concerns, then, should be her lost independence, won at such cost and too precious to give up lightly, and his appalling reputation.

He was known as a rake who had engaged in scandalous relations with many ladies of the ton, as her friend had said, but that was not the whole of it.

Many men were libertines; that would not make him in the least notable.

But there were darker rumours that swirled about him; rumours that painted him as not merely dishonourable, but actually criminal.

This was not a matter, as one might imagine, of cheating at cards or some such commonplace transgression of society’s codes; the gossips, even around Winterflood, spoke of actual theft, theft of money and incriminating private documents.

Of blackmail, based upon those thefts. And that was not by any means all.

She had once heard it whispered – but surely, surely it could not be true – that he had killed a man in Yorkshire and somehow got away with it; that he was a cold-blooded murderer.