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Page 26 of Where Have All the Scoundrels Gone (Dukes in Disguise #2)

Chapter Twenty-Six

It was a sketch of Nathaniel. His lean, sculpted visage with its distinctly sloping patrician nose stared out at Bess from the page.

Henrietta had captured the circles under his eyes, which were the color of ice chips in the drawing, the dark fringe of his eyelashes the only softness in his harsh, wintry face.

His eyelashes, and his lips—sharply cut, yes, but there was a plush fullness to the bottom lip that Bess knew, intimately, and it was soft and tender and God above, but she longed to kiss that mouth.

It was the expression Henrietta had caught, though, that made Bess feel as though her skin had been stripped off, leaving her bare nerves exposed to the cooling evening breeze.

He looked…wrecked. Without a single tear or scowl or any obvious sign, somehow the sketch conveyed a bleak despair, a devastation, that Bess recognized innately.

Because she felt it too.

As though she’d died, days ago, but no one had noticed. And she somehow had to keep getting up and moving her body from place to place and uselessly taking air into her lungs.

“Oh yes, dear Nathaniel,” Henrietta said around a mouthful of trout in cream sauce. “He’s been on my mind, rather. Well, you know all about that.”

Bess stiffened, closing the sketchbook with a snap. “I have no idea what you mean.”

“Come now.” Henrietta pursed her lips, suddenly looking very much like Gemma. “It’s only the two of us here. There’s no need for pretense.”

The way Henrietta was looking at her, quizzical and expectant as she spooned pie into her mouth, made Bess sit back in her chair with a breath that was almost a laugh. Henrietta knew. “What on earth did he put in that letter to you?”

“Nathaniel? Oh no, dear, he never said a word about you. But he is hardly my only correspondent.”

Bess pinched her brows together. “No one else knew about us.”

“My dearest Bess.” Henrietta laid down her spoon and regarded Bess pityingly. “I can understand this blind spot in someone like my stepson, but I would have thought you, of all people, would realize that of course there were others who knew what you and Nathaniel got up to. Did you really think you could come and go as you pleased in a house full of servants whose whole job is to pass unseen and unnoticed through their duties attending to their employer’s needs?”

“The servants,” Bess breathed out, a belated blush scorching her from head to toe. “But why are they writing to you?”

“I’ll have you know, I was very well-liked as Duchess of Ashbourn,” Henrietta replied pertly. “I always think you can tell a lot about a woman by how many lady’s maids she goes through, and I kept mine for years and years. All the servants, really—it was easy. I was loyal to them and paid well and didn’t scream at them, and they were loyal to me in return. The bar is really shockingly low. At any rate, when I left you and Lucy at Ashbourn House, I renewed my acquaintance with the head housekeeper, Mrs. Drummond. She is a very lively letter writer, I must say, quite handy with the turn of a phrase. She kept me apprised of all your goings-on; I daresay I knew you were in love with Nathaniel before you did.”

The easy, matter-of-fact way she said it stole the breath from Bess’s lungs. Wheezing a bit, she said, “Henrietta. I beg of you.”

“Oh, don’t worry, dear. I didn’t have any spies at The Nemesis at that time, though not for lack of trying. So a veil may be drawn, shall we say, over the particulars of those evenings. Still, I knew that Nathaniel went there sometimes, and then that you went also, and eventually that you seemed to both be there on the same nights. I don’t have much formal schooling, but I can do arithmetic when it’s as simple as that.”

Bess put her hands over her face and very deliberately did not scream.

“I didn’t want to bring all this up, you know,” Henrietta said, her tone a little waspish in a way Bess rarely heard from her. “I wanted to let you and dear Nathaniel resolve things on your own, but you’re making such a muck of it, and it’s dragging on so long, I really feel I must intervene.”

“There’s nothing to intervene in,” Bess said, attempting to be firm. “Whatever I had with Nathaniel—Ashbourn, I mean. It’s over now.”

“Mm, so I hear. I wonder if you would feel the same, if you read the last letter I received from Mrs. Drummond.”

Bess’s mouth went dry. “What does she say?”

Henrietta took a final bite of her pie and wiped her lips with the serviette Bess had brought. She tilted her head to take Bess in. “First, I’d like to know if I’m correct. I have a theory, you see, about why Nathaniel left Five Mile House with barely a word, looking like a man on his way to his own hanging.”

“That is between Nath—the duke and myself, surely.” Bess did not want to talk about it. She could hardly breathe for how much she didn’t want to talk about it.

“Gemma thinks he got cold feet and ran home,” Henrietta mused, unheeding. “But that girl has always known how to hold a grudge. She would say that I am too forgiving, on the other hand, but I don’t think there is such a thing. Forgiveness is only another form of love, after all, and there can never be too much love in the world, can there? At any rate, I think you are the one who put an end to it. And I believe I know why.”

It was excruciating to hear Henrietta’s light voice twitter like a bird over a wound so fresh and deep, Bess was still bleeding. “I don’t—please. Henrietta.”

“We tried not talking about it,” Henrietta pointed out, uncharacteristically firm. “And that didn’t work. So now we’re trying something else, and if you want to find out what’s in Mrs. Drummond’s latest report on the state of affairs at Ashbourn House, you will let me say my piece first. You sent Nathaniel away, didn’t you? Tell me if I’ve got it wrong, but I don’t think I have.”

Bess couldn’t stay still. She leapt to her feet and paced over to the rose bushes. “That’s not…exactly what happened. I would have gone with him—but not as his wife.”

Her cheeks flamed but she should’ve known better than to think Henrietta would be shocked. “Ah, so that was the rub. And you would not marry him because…”

“You know why,” Bess choked out, glaring down at the roses without seeing them. “Or maybe you don’t—maybe you’re braver than I could ever be, if you had no doubts and fears about marrying your duke.”

“Oh, my dear girl. Of course I was afraid. Though I can’t say I understood exactly what would happen, exactly how upset the Ton would be—but I understood the choice I was making. And I chose love.”

“But didn’t you worry that it wouldn’t be enough—that it wouldn’t keep him from one day regretting the marriage?”

Henrietta looked surprised. “Is that what’s stopping you? Love, real love, is forever. It’s more than enough. Bess, my dear. You are enough.”

The inside of Bess’s nose stung and her eyes burned. “You make it sound so simple.”

“Well, it was, in the end.” Behind her, Henrietta’s voice was thoughtful. “Our marriage caused such a fuss, so much trouble and strife. We made terrible mistakes—we hurt our children with our choices. It wasn’t perfect. And losing my darling duke…I thought I should never recover. It still hurts; I know it will hurt until I close my eyes for the last time and go to join him. But Bess. Even with all of that.”

She paused, her high, fluting voice choking off for a moment. Bess turned to look at Henrietta, who gave her a heartbreakingly tremulous smile and said, “Even with all that, I would not change one second of the time I had with Benedict. I would marry him again, a thousand times. With no regrets.”

Bess brought a hand up to cover her mouth, to hold in the hiccupping sob that wanted to come out. “Oh, Henrietta.”

“There will always be hard times, in every life.” Henrietta used the serviette to dab at the corners of her eyes. “The choice isn’t between being happy or unhappy. Or even between doing the right thing and the wrong thing. The choice is between being together…or being without each other.”

Without looking, Bess reached out an unsteady hand for something, anything to hold onto. Her fingertips found the velvety bloom of a rose. Shaking, she looked down at the blossom cradled between her fingers. So fragile; she could crush it without a thought.

It was so easy to destroy things. Much harder to keep something soft and tender safe, to hold it close and nurture it and protect it from the world.

Had she made a terrible mistake? Had she let fear come to her in the guise of pragmatism, using the excuse of being sensible to be the kind of coward she swore she’d never be?

For Mama and Papa, for Kitty and Martin, for Davy—when she survived them, Bess had vowed to do more than merely survive…she would live .

A life she could be proud of. A life without regrets.

She’d gone to London, to The Nemesis, to search out the vibrant, vivid life she’d promised her beloved ghosts she would live.

Now that she’d found it—why hadn’t she been brave enough to take hold of it?

“I think you’re ready to hear about my letter now,” Henrietta said, breaking into Bess’s whirling thoughts. “You should know, after all the help he was in tracking Lucy’s movements that night she ran off, I suggested Nathaniel hire young Mr. Charles Truitt as a footman. He agreed, and I must say, Charlie has become an invaluable source of information. Mrs. Drummond quite dotes upon him. And according to Charlie, Nathaniel has been out every night since he returned to Town, till all hours.”

Bess’s blood ran cold. “At parties and balls?” She pictured him waltzing with Miss Devensham and felt sick.

“No, dear,” Henrietta shook her head, her slim, dark brows drawn down sharply. “Unless those balls usually end in brawls. No, he has been at The Nemesis every night. For hours and hours. And when he finally comes home…well. Charlie says it has been very bad, indeed.”

Involuntarily, Bess’s hand clenched around the rose, releasing the heavy fragrance into the air. “He’s been fighting. Is he…losing?”

The Berserker never lost.

But Henrietta shook her head. “According to Charlie, he still wins every bout. But Bess, he’s fighting…too much. Two, even three bouts a night. He wins, but…he is breaking himself to do it. He is breaking himself over you.”

Bess’s knees gave out without warning. She sat down, hard, on the ground. She could not see or hear anything around her—her mind was hundreds of miles away in a crowded, loud Haymarket tavern, imagining Nathaniel throwing himself into the ring over and over, uncaring of the cuts and bruises and pain.

Or worse, seeking them out. Punishing himself.

Because of her.

A tickle at the heel of her hand drew Bess’s consciousness back to the garden. Something tracked down her wrist in an erratic, meandering line, and she glanced down without curiosity to see a trickle of blood. She had crushed the rose, stem and all, and the thorns pierced her palm.

She felt nothing.

There was no physical pain that could compare to the whistling wasteland of her soul.

Henrietta knelt next to her in a flutter of pink and white striped skirts, and Bess wanted to resist when the older woman drew her to her motherly bosom, but she couldn’t. She owed Henrietta too much.

“My dear girl,” Henrietta hummed, rocking Bess a little. “Take a moment, if you must. But then, I think…you have somewhere you need to be?”

Where there had been nothing but devastation, empty and aching, suddenly purpose flooded in and buoyed Bess up like a ship upon a wave.

She straightened, her entire body humming with a surge of energy, as though she’d been struck by lightning. Bess felt as though she’d been half-asleep for days and was only now, finally, waking up. She blinked at Henrietta’s understanding smile and said, “Yes. I…I have to go. Henrietta! I must leave at once, as soon as I can arrange a carriage. And pack!”

Oh, God, how she hated to waste even one moment on the practicalities. Her legs moved restlessly; she felt as if she could run all the way to London, without pause.

The two women pulled each other to their feet in a haphazard embrace which Henrietta turned into a real hug. Into Bess’s ear, she said, “Gemma sent her carriage from Kissington Manor; it’s already waiting for you in the courtyard. Lucy packed your bag before supper. Go.”

Amazement nearly knocked Bess over once more. She staggered and clutched at Henrietta, wide-eyed. “You were so sure you would talk me round?”

Henrietta cocked her head, the tall plumes of feathers atop her bonnet bobbed madly. With an expression of perhaps justifiable smugness, she said, “Well. It’s not so very difficult to talk someone into doing what they already clearly, desperately want to do. You only needed a little nudge.”

Suiting action to words, Henrietta nudged Bess laughingly in the direction of the courtyard. Bess went, feeling as though a cord had wrapped itself around her ribs and was pulling taut, drawing her toward London. Toward Nathaniel.

Toward the rest of her life.

She only paused long enough to press Henrietta’s hands tightly between her own and say a swift, heartfelt, “Thank you. For everything.”

Then she was picking up her skirts and running, pell-mell, for the courtyard, only vaguely aware of Henrietta waving that serviette in farewell and crying, “Write to me! I want to hear everything! If you don’t, I’ll just get it from my other sources! I have spies everywhere!”

Bess threw herself into the carriage, laughing and crying at the same time. “To London,” she called to Gemma and Hal’s driver. “As quick as you can. There’s not a moment to lose.”

The coachman whistled and the horses took off at a fast clip. Bess settled back against the cushion and closed her eyes. There was a swoop in her belly, a weightless sensation of falling from a great height—no, leaping.

She spread her arms wide and let the great unknown rush up to meet her, smiling all the while.