Page 37 of The Duke's Stolen Heart
Chapter 12
The bell tolled nine-thirty before Antonia slipped through the door of the studio the next morning. Havencrest had had plenty of time to practice his sketches. None ever looked quite right. His mother’s face never quite matched the image from his memory. Warm lips puffing soft words against his forehead. He hadn’t understood them at the tender age of six.
I love you, Malcolm, no matter what they say when I am gone.
“To the theatre?” he had asked in his innocence as he played with the big red gem nestled at the base of her throat. Its scrolled gold setting intrigued him like an endless maze. She was dressed in a midnight-figured silk gown. The bodice was embroidered with gold thread to match the earrings and heavy necklaces custom-made for her upon her wedding. The duchess only wore the set on special occasions.
“Yes.” She had the dreamy, half-awake look on her face again. The one that made his father so angry, when he sharpened the blades of his wit at his wife’s expense. “I may not come home tonight,” she said as though she was already a million miles away. “I love you. Be a good boy for your father. He loves you, even if he doesn’t…” The duchess trailed off. Or, perhaps Malcolm had imagined it.
He scratched his pencil across the paper trying to capture her expression. Loving. Wistful. Calm. Fathomlessly sad. Every time he returned to this memory, it looked more like the miniature of her face, cracked and faded. If he was to have his mother’s image restored it must be a true likeness. Not pieced together from the thirty-year-old memories of a child who hadn’t known he was about to lose his mother.
“Will you tell me a story?” A simple request, routine for a child of six. His mother had smiled again and bussed his cheek with lips as red as the stone.
“The story about this necklace is a sad one. Are you sure you want to hear it?”
He had nodded. He remembered feeling there was more to ask, more to know, but his words had been inadequate to the task. Malcolm listened intently as his mother had told him the story of the Heart’s Cry, why it had been cut and set into two halves of a necklace. He’d unclipped the gold necklaces and refastened them while she talked. When she was done, his mother had kissed his forehead.
“Your father and I are under this diamond’s spell. We cannot break it. We tried. We failed.”
Malcolm’s hand scribbled furiously over the paper. Her expression eluded him. No matter how soft he made her lashes or the precise angle of her eyebrows, he could not recreate his mother’s expression to his satisfaction. Nor could he recall the exact whorls and stacks of gold filigree that bound the diamonds in their eternal dance of grief. If he had the jewel before him, it would dredge up memories of his mother’s expression like clearing muck from the bottom of the river—
“Who is she?”
Malcolm’s hand jerked, marring his drawing with a fat slash of graphite. “I didn’t hear you come in.”
“You were absorbed in your work.” She hovered over his shoulder. Her sumptuous fur-trimmed wool mantle framed her face and body, as exquisite as any artwork.
She spoke truth, but not the whole truth. Antonia moved on cat’s paws. Silent, like his servants had been trained to be.
“I was engrossed in my memories.” He tapped the pages into place and covered the top one with a blank sheet of paper to protect it from smudging. Malcolm sighed. “She wore the parure on her last night with him. They had agreed to try and reconcile.”
“What had gone wrong in their marriage?” Antonia asked, softly. The intimacy of her presence sent sparks shooting through his chest. Malcolm felt exposed and uncertain with his guard down.
He was silent for a moment. But after a minute he took the leap to trust her.
“Nothing unusual. After she birthed me, my mother fell into a deep melancholy. He wasn’t much comfort to her. My father was widely considered a wit, but the greater the tension, the more he used words to slice her to shreds. I remember the harsh things he used to say. I am ashamed to admit that there was a time when I was less than careful with my words. It took a long time for me to learn how not to be so callous.”
“What did your mother do?” Antonia asked briskly. She unfastened her cloak and draped it over the second empty chair.
Malcolm pushed up out of his seat. “She tried to forgive him for as long as she could, but my father did what any self-respecting duke does in the face of wifely dereliction of marital duties. He took a mistress.”
“I imagine that helped matters immensely.”
Antonia’s sarcasm squeezed a wry smile out of him. The pressure in his chest tightened as he recalled the tense silences he had been too young to understand. “Fidelity is not expected of dukes. My mother knew this, but theirs was a love match. They had to fight for permission to marry.”
“Oh? Duchesses and dukes don’t naturally intermarry?”
Havencrest chuckled grimly. “Of course they do, but there was bad blood between Summervale and Havencrest, my grandfather. It was rather a Romeo-and-Juliet situation. Everyone had such high hopes for their marriage. My grandmother was the one who worked to form an agreement in support of their union, and she was bitterly disappointed when her son-in-law sought comfort outside his wife’s bed.”
“And you, a little boy, were caught in the midst of it all.”
Her sympathy brought back the hot, tight pain in the center of his chest. “Yes, though I was too young to understand it all. My mother decided that to prevent the Heart’s Cry diamond from destroying any other lives, she would break up the parure. She doled out the pieces. One to my father’s mistress. The heart to her mother. This red stickpin was a part of the set.” Malcolm gestured to his cravat.
As though sensing they had veered too far into tender territory, Antonia changed subjects. “How did you figure out I was the thief?”
He felt his mouth quirk up at the corners. “It was entirely a coincidence. I had decided to try and obtain my mother’s personal effects, and I had hoped to negotiate a sale by approaching her. But as I was watching the woman in her box at the theater that night, I spied a pretty stranger with dark hair—you—fiddling with something at the back of my father’s former mistress’s neck. When I looked down for the necklace again, it was gone. I didn’t know who you were, but I knew you had taken it.”
Antonia smirked at his compliment.
