Chapter Twenty-three

It was a fine summer morning on the Bristol docks, and for once a ray of fortune was shining on the d’Orsays. A merchant brigantine called the Angelica sailed with the tide, bound for Boston.

Jack would be on it.

Amelia’s nose wrinkled as she squinted at her brother through the blaring midday sun. She wished she’d thought to purchase him a hat with a wider brim. With his fair skin, he’d be crisped to currant red after one day at sea.

“Well?” he said.

In a last sisterly gesture, she smoothed the lint from Jack’s coat sleeves with her gloved hands. “What a grand adventure you’re going to have. I believe Hugh would be very envious.”

“I like to think he’s coming with me.”

“Perhaps he is.” She threw her arms around her brother and hugged him tight. “I love you,” she whispered fiercely. “Don’t ever dream otherwise. But I just can’t take care of you any longer. It’s time you learned to take care of yourself.”

“I know,” he said. “I know.”

She pulled back and withdrew a small bundle from her reticule. The knotted handkerchief contained a heavy clutch of coins. “Your passage is already paid. This is all I have to give you for expenses.”

“Thank you,” he said, reaching for the makeshift purse of gold and silver. “I’ll do my best not to lose it the first night out from land.”

She tried to laugh, but she knew the danger of him doing just that was great. She kept her hand on the handkerchief, refusing to let him take it yet.

“If you do lose it, don’t write me for more. If you wander home a few months from now, having landed yourself in trouble again and looking for my help … I won’t give it.” Much as it pained her to speak those words, she knew she had to say them. Cut the leading strings. Perhaps if Jack understood she wouldn’t be there to catch him, he might take greater precautions not to fall. “This is the very last time I save you, do you understand? I will pray for you and always love you. But after this, not a penny more.”

With that, she let go of the handkerchief. It was much easier to release her grip on that bit of linen than it was to let go of her responsibility for him. But she had to do both. She deserved to be happy, too, and she couldn’t imagine happiness without Spencer. She simply couldn’t risk letting Jack come between them again.

Spencer was right; she did have to make a choice. But this wasn’t a matter of deciding between her brother and her husband. It was a matter of deciding to seize happiness and let go of guilt.

Amelia was choosing herself.

“I’d best be going, then.” He glanced over his shoulder at the Angelica’s gangplank. “I hate to leave you alone here. Is Morland coming for you?”

She shook her head. “He’s taken Claudia home to Cambridgeshire. I’ve sent an express to Laurent. He’ll help me close up the cottage, and then we’ll travel back to London together.”

“Amelia?” He chucked her under the chin. “When I said no one’s good enough for you, I meant it. And I include myself. I know I haven’t deserved half the help you’ve given me, but …” His lips twitched at the corner, tugging on Amelia’s heart. All the d’Orsay men made that face when they were struggling not to cry. “I’m grateful for it. Thank you for loving me, even when I’ve done my devil’s best to be unlovable.”

The look in his eyes, the catch in his voice … her heart squeezed. She was a breath away from flinging her arms around his shoulders and vowing to take him back home, solve all his problems for him.

Taking a step backward instead was quite possibly the bravest thing she’d ever done. But she knew in her heart, it was best for them both.

“Goodbye, Jack,” she said. “We’ll miss you. Please take care.”

Then she turned on her heel. Took one step. Then two. Every pace she took away from him felt like a step taken on wobbly foal legs, but as her boots clopped hollowly on the planked dock, she slowly gained in coordination and confidence. It had taken a little time and much sorrow, but she’d finally mastered the lesson Spencer had given her the night they first met:

Turn those hapless d’Orsay fortunes around. Learn when to walk away.

“Where shall I take you?” As they neared Charing Cross, Laurent turned to her on the carriage seat. “Home?”

Home.

Amelia mused on the word. She wondered which house her brother referred to: the Duke of Morland’s, or his own? Which one was “home”? That was the question for her to decide, she supposed.

“I’ll come with you, if you don’t mind.” No house felt like home without Spencer in it. And though he would still be at Braxton Hall, she couldn’t abide the thought of rattling around that cavernous town house alone.

“Of course you’re welcome. Winifred’s planned some sort of party tonight. Lucky for me we’re returning in time for it. She’d have my head if I left her alone to host.”

“Is it a large party?” Now this might change Amelia’s mind. After two days of carriage travel and a week’s worth of melancholy, a busy social gathering wasn’t really how she wished to spend her evening.

“No, no. A few couples over to dinner. Perhaps a bit of cards and dancing after, you know.”

Well, that didn’t sound too dreadful. As a matter of fact, dinner itself sounded most welcome. And as for the amusements afterward—she could easily plead a headache and slip upstairs. It wouldn’t even be a falsehood. She’d done so much ruminating and pondering and reconsidering in the past two days, her brain ached.

“Did I do the right thing?” she asked her brother, for likely the tenth time since Jack had sailed with the Angelica. “Will he be all right?”

“I don’t know how he’ll fare,” Laurent answered, reaching for her hand and giving it a reassuring squeeze. “But you did absolutely the right thing.”

“I just still feel guilty, letting him believe his debts will remain unpaid.”

“You know he never would have left otherwise.”

“I know.” She bit her lip. “Will you have a difficult time finding another buyer?”

“I don’t expect so. It’s a choice piece of land, even if the cottage is modest. The Earl of Vinterre expressed some interest in it. Wants to tear down the place and build an Italianate palace overlooking the river.”

“Oh, dear. I may vomit.”

Laurent passed her the basin. It wouldn’t have been the first time she’d been ill on this journey. Nor even the second, or fifth. Apparently her unborn child didn’t enjoy coach travel any more than she did.

Afterward, he soothed her back. “Don’t be upset. I’ll find another buyer.”

“No, don’t.” She pressed her sleeve to her mouth. “I think it would be easier to see Briarbank razed than inhabited by another family. Sell it to Vinterre, and do it quickly.”

The sooner all the dealings were completed, the sooner Jack’s debts could be paid. And the sooner that happened, the sooner Amelia could return to Braxton Hall, pockets empty but heart undivided. She would set about convincing her husband that she was devoted to him, above all.

The coach made its creaking turn into Bryanston Square and soon lurched to a halt before the house. Laurent helped her alight from the carriage.

At the door, they were met by a wild-eyed Winifred. After sparing Amelia a brief nod, she latched on to Laurent’s arm. “Oh, thank goodness you’re finally home. I’m beside myself, utterly. We need to order more wine—whole casks of it, likely. And spirits for the gentlemen.” She pulled her husband into the house, and Amelia followed them over the threshold.

“The fish course is a horrid dilemma. Naturally this would happen on a Monday, when there’s no decent fish to be had for gold or silver. Naught but common oysters in the market.” Her voice pitched a half-octave closer to hysteria. “I can’t serve oysters to a duchess!”

Amelia laughed. “I shall do just fine with oysters, thank you. You’ve served them to me many a time before.”

Her sister-in-law turned to her, wearing a puzzled expression. “Forgive me, Amelia. But of course I didn’t mean you.”

Of course not. Amelia sighed.

Winifred’s voice lowered to a whisper. “Her Grace, the Duchess of Hampstead will be joining us for dinner. I’ve just received the note from one of my dinner guests, Mrs. Nodwell. Her cousin is married to Her Grace’s nephew’s adopted brother, you see?”

Amelia didn’t, but she nodded politely anyway.

Winifred turned back to Laurent, pulling him into the Rose Salon, where servants were removing porcelain cherubs from the shelves and pushing the furniture to the sides of the room. “Obviously,” she said, “I couldn’t decline. And then Mrs. Petersham sent a note round, asking if she might bring her cousins visiting from Bath. I couldn’t say no to them, either. And now these cards keep coming …” She gestured toward the row of calling cards propped on the mantel. “I do believe tonight we’re going to be overrun with Quality.”

“But …” Amelia shook her head to dispel her confusion. “At this time of summer? Why?”

“For you, of course! They all assume you and Morland will be in attendance. Everyone is desperate to see your first public appearance in London since the marriage.” She lifted an eyebrow. “There are some very interesting”—she pronounced each syllable distinctly, EEN-ter-est-ting—“rumors coming out of Oxfordshire, you know.”

A bittersweet smile curved Amelia’s lips. She’d known there would be gossip, after that display at the Granthams’. The memory of that night—the dancing, the lovemaking, the conversation and sweet embraces lasting into morning—it wrung her heart with surprising ferocity. The pain made her think of Spencer’s broken ribs. She hoped they were healing well.

Lord, she missed him, with everything she had.

Moving to the side of the room, she took a seat on a recently relocated footstool. “Well, I fear your guests will be disappointed,” she told Winifred. “I’m not feeling well enough for socializing this evening, and the duke is not even in Town.”

“But he is!”

Amelia’s jaw dropped. “He is?”

“Yes, he arrived this very morning in Mayfair, and the news has already appeared in the afternoon papers.” Winifred snapped her fingers at a footman. “Not there. By the window.”

Amelia quietly reeled, trying not to betray the magnitude of her shock. Spencer was here in Town? Could he have any idea of her own arrival? And what about Claudia? Where was she?

As Winifred went into another flurry of instructions for the servants, Laurent crouched at Amelia’s side. “Shall I have the carriage take you to Morland House?”

“No, no.” She couldn’t see him like this, not yet. She wasn’t prepared. She wasn’t even certain he’d want to see her. “I will send him a note.”

With a few more snaps of Winifred’s fingers, a lap desk and quill materialized before Amelia. The paper was a terrifying expanse of white. She was afraid to lay her pen to it at all, fearful of marring that blank perfection with the wrong word and mucking up everything again. In the end, she simply wrote:

I am here in Town, at my brother’s house. You are invited to dinner this evening.

   —A.

There. If he wished to see her, he would know where to find her. Laurent dispatched a runner with the note, and Amelia passed two fretful hours unpacking in her old, modest bedchamber whilst Winifred renovated the downstairs. Finally, just as light was fading, she glimpsed the runner through her open window as he made for the house’s back entrance. She rushed down the service stairs to find the boy.

“Well?” she asked him breathlessly, once she’d collared the youth. He held a folded paper in his hand. “Is that my reply?”

He shook his head no. “The duke weren’t at home, ma’am. Footman told me he’d gone out for a game of cards.”

A game of cards? He’d come back to London just for a game of cards?

“Go back there,” she told the boy. “Find out where he’s gone, and find His Grace to give him that note. Don’t bother coming back until you do.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She released the lad, and he darted off the way he’d come.

Circling one palm over her belly—a habit she’d already developed, even though her abdomen didn’t protrude yet—she took deep breaths and tried to remain calm.

Hours later, she was panicking.

Laurent’s house was crushed, wall to wall, with guests. They’d begun arriving shortly after sundown and continued to stream in even now. The entirety of Bryanston Square was congested with coaches and teams. Most of the recent arrivals didn’t even seem to understand they were lacking an invitation. Amelia wasn’t certain they knew whose house they were at; they were just following the crowd. Winifred’s food had run out hours ago, much to her despair, but her reinforcements of wine and spirits were holding strong for the moment. No one showed the slightest inclination to leave.

In the hall, the hired quartet gamely played over and through the din of rumor and laughter. A few couples carved out enough space to dance a cramped quadrille.

Amelia couldn’t imagine why they all hadn’t given up and gone home hours ago. The duke’s absence was obvious, and tonight she lacked the spirit to compensate with flirtation and witty remarks. Even with every window thrown open to the night air and the barest minimum of candles burning, the air in the rooms was exceedingly close, and Amelia had done her best to seek out the few pockets of relative seclusion. Whenever someone asked after Spencer, she murmured a few words of excuse. Recently arrived in town, delayed by business … et cetera.

She was on the verge of slipping out entirely and hiring a hack to Morland House, where she could perhaps find some restful quiet and wait for Spencer in peace. Then the musicians struck up the first few bars of a waltz, and a raucous male voice called out, “Not yet! Not yet!”

Bemused, she watched as every head in the room swiveled toward the ancient clock, where the short hand wavered just on the brink of twelve. A collective hush amplified the tick, tick, tick … as then the long hand swept past the ten. Amelia suddenly understood why the guests wouldn’t give up on the duke and simply go home.

They were waiting for the hour of twelve, of course. Breathless with anticipation to see if the Duke of Midnight would remain true to his name.

And that realization began the longest ten minutes of Amelia’s life.

She passed the first five minutes asking after and then slowly imbibing a glass of tepid lemonade.

By straightening every seam of her gloves, she managed to while away another two.

Then there came a dark, endless minute in which guilt and regret swamped her, and doubt followed close behind. Perhaps he wouldn’t come because he was still angry and didn’t want to see her. Perhaps he had no use for her now, since she was already with child.

Another minute ticked past, and she scolded herself. If he didn’t appear tonight, it meant nothing. Except that he was off somewhere else, and she would see him the next day. Or the next.

And then the entire assembly passed the final minute simply waiting, watching, listening to the clock’s inexorable ticks. When the slender minute hand finally clicked into unison with the squat hour hand, the room went dead silent. And then the clock’s cuckoo bird popped out from its window and cheerfully mocked them all.

Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Twelve. Dratted. Times. The wretched little wooden creature had probably never enjoyed such a rapt audience.

It was midnight. And no duke had arrived.

Well, that was that.

Now the party was truly over. The musicians struck up a waltz, as they’d no doubt been bribed to do, but no one cared. The guests murmured amongst themselves on mundane, uninteresting topics, in the way people do when they’re thinking of leaving a party.

A week’s worth of fatigue settled on Amelia’s shoulders. For heaven’s sake, she needed to rest. She pressed forward through the packed drawing room, heading for the little pocket door behind the pianoforte. It led to a service corridor, and she could use it to make her escape upstairs.

“Amelia, wait.”

The deep voice rang out over the crowd. Over the musicians. Over even the violent pounding of her heart.

“Wait right there. Please.”

Well, that couldn’t be Spencer. She’d just heard the word “please.” She wheeled around anyway and felt positively biblical when the crowd thronging the hall parted like the Red Sea. And there, standing at the other end of that freshly carved valley of humanity, was her husband. The tardy Duke of Midnight.

“It’s ten past,” she couldn’t help but say. “You’re late.”

“I’m sorry,” he said earnestly, starting toward her. “I came as soon as I could.”

She shook her head, astonished. Not only “please,” but “sorry” now? In public, no less? Was this man truly her husband?

But of course he was. There was no other man on earth so handsome.

“Stay there,” he said again. “I’m coming to you.”

He took an awkward, hobbled step in her direction, and then another. A grimace pulled at his mouth. His injuries were clearly still paining him. As gratifying as it was to watch him at long last moving across a dance floor toward her, and not some preening debutante, she realized this was going to take far too long.

“For heaven’s sake, stay put,” she said. Her heel caught on the carpet fringe as she hurried toward him, and she would have fallen to the floor without the well-timed assistance of a smartly dressed gentleman in green velvet. It made her conscious, as she met her husband halfway and he pulled her into a tight embrace, that they were being observed by one and all. And “all,” in this case, referred to hundreds.

Of course she didn’t mind the attention herself. But she knew how Spencer hated crowds. She pulled him as far to the side as possible, putting his back toward the horde of onlookers.

“There now,” she said, keeping her arms laced around his neck. “Just pretend we’re dancing.”

He winced. “The ride from Braxton Hall nearly killed me. With these ribs, pretense is all I can manage.”

“Why are you in town at all? I heard you were playing cards.”

“Well, I meant to. That’s the reason I came to London. I’d no idea you’d be here. My intention was to win back Jack’s debt from the gaming lord himself. I’d arranged the game, prepared my stakes and sharpened my strategy—do you know that man’s one of the best piquet players in England?”

“I suspect you’re better.”

His mouth tipped with an arrogant grin. “I suspect I’d have proved you right, in the end. It might have taken me hours, though, and we were just sitting down to the table when your boy found me, and I read your note. And after that …” He blew out a breath. “After that, I just said to hell with it. I wrote him a bank draft instead.”

She gasped. “You didn’t!”

“I did. Because whatever amount your brother owed, it wasn’t worth a single hour’s delay in seeing you.” He swallowed hard. “All Jack’s debts are paid, Amelia. You needn’t worry about his safety anymore.”

“Oh, Spencer. You’re very good to have done that. But I wish I’d had the opportunity to speak with you first. Jack’s gone. He sailed from Bristol on a brigantine bound for America. You were right. I was doing him more harm than good. He’s my brother, and I’ll always love him. But I’ll have to love him from afar just now. Our marriage is more important to me than anything.” She lowered her voice and gripped him tight. “You are more important to me than anything. I’ll never let anything come between us again.”

“I … I can’t believe it.” He blinked away a glimmer of emotion. “What of the debt?”

“Laurent has another buyer for the cottage.” When he began to form a question, she added, “The debts are ours to dispatch, not yours. We’ll repay you every penny. Jack is our problem, our family’s responsibility.”

“Your problems are mine. Your family too, if you’ll have me. I was a complete bastard to ask you to choose. And you can’t give up that cottage. It’s your home.”

“It’s a house. Just a pile of stones and mortar, and a crumbling one at that. It’s meaningless without love to fill it. My home is wherever you are.” She felt a smile warming her face. “Here we are right back where we started, aren’t we? You owning my brother’s debt, me with only a drafty cottage in Gloucestershire as collateral.”

“Is it wrong of me to demand Briarbank in payment anyhow? The property needn’t change hands. A very long lease will suffice. I love it there, and I love being there with you. And I love you. God, I haven’t said that to you nearly enough, but I’m going to make up for it now by telling you five times a day. I love you, Amelia. Since the very first night, I knew you were the only woman for me. Until the day I die, I will love you. I love—”

“Hush.” She put a finger to his lips. Had he gone mad, or had he forgotten the crowd of onlookers at his back? Leaning in close, she teased, “It’s a quarter past midnight. Don’t exhaust all five so early in the day. I’d like something to look forward to, once we get home.”

He grasped her hand and kissed her fingers warmly. “You needn’t worry on that score.” He brought her close and whispered in her ear. “God, how I’ve missed you. Not only in bed, but especially in bed. It’s a very big bed, and it’s damned empty without you. Life is empty without you.”

Feeling it prudent to change the subject before she went to custard, she cleared her throat and asked, “How’s Claudia?”

“At Braxton Hall. I’ve promised to return quickly. She’s still considering her options, but I’ve told her she’ll have my support, no matter what her choice.”

“She will have our support.”

He released a deep sigh. “Thank you.” He raised a hand to her face, cradling her cheek in his palm. “And you? You are well?” He flicked a glance downward, toward her belly.

“Yes.” She smiled. “Both of us.”

As his thumb stroked sweetly over her cheek, his eyes warmed to rich shades of gold and green. He gave her one of those rare, devastating smiles. “What a beautiful mother you’ll be.”

He bent his head, clearly seeking a kiss.

She put a hand to his chest, holding him off.

“Spencer,” she whispered, darting a glance to either side. “There are hundreds of people about.”

“Are there? I hadn’t noticed.”

“Your heart’s pounding.”

“That’s for you.”

And now her own heart skipped a beat. She’d spent her whole life loving those around her, and still she’d never dreamed she could love someone this much—so much it stretched the very seams of her soul. Better yet was the knowledge that the love would only grow, and she would have to grow with it.

“You realize, you do have a certain reputation,” she murmured. “Everyone here is expecting to watch you cart me from the room in a scandalous, barbaric display.”

“Then they’ll be disappointed. I’m scarcely fit to lift a kitten at the moment, and even if I were …” He cupped her face in both hands, and his gaze reached so far into hers she felt it warming her toes. “It’s never been my desire to conquer you, Amelia. If you leave this room with me, it must be at my side. As my wife, my lover, my partner …” His thumb brushed her lip. “My dearest friend. Would you do that?”

She managed a tearful nod.

“Then may I kiss you now, in front of all these people?”

She nodded again, this time smiling through the tears. “On the lips, if you please. And do it properly.”