Page 50 of A Duke to Undo her
Josephine said nothing to this naive and useless truth. Madeline, however, looked at her with greater understanding and compassion than Rose was yet capable of displaying.
“I think Josephine already knows that, Rose. Sometimes, in real life, love does not conquer all.”
To this, Josephine nodded. That was her thinking too. Believing himself broken in some manner she could not fathom, Cassius Emerton would never allow himself to love her. He would likely avoid her forever, regardless of any friendship between her family and his younger brother.
How could she bear it?
Chapter Twenty-Two
“May I come in, Cassius?” called the Dowager Duchess of Ashbourne, after knocking on the door of the private sitting room that formed part of his ducal suite.
He had been closeted in his rooms for almost the entire day apart from an early morning ride while everyone else was sleeping off the effects of the ball. Now, it was almost seven o’ clock in the evening and he was aware that all the guests must finally be gone. Still, he was in no mood for conversation and had deliberately not come downstairs.
“Mother, is all well?” he asked, coming to the door and unlocking it.
“Perfectly, my son. Everyone had departed by five o’clock and the house is quiet again. You might have come down to join me hours ago.”
Was there reproach in her voice, or something else? The duke didn’t know but he was too weary to enquire deeply.
“Thank you for saying all the farewells, Mother. I was not the best of hosts, I know.”
“My time is at your disposal, Cassius. Benedict and I managed well. Still, I do think you might have said goodbye in person to certain guests, Lady Elmridge and her younger sister, for instance. I believe they would have liked to see you.”
Immediately pained, Cassius looked away, wishing his mother had not chosen this particular example but glad that she had not actually spoken Lady Josephine’s name. Part of him wished still to go searching for this young woman through the house and grounds, even knowing rationally that she was no longer to be found here.
“I could not,” he said thickly. “It was better that you and Benedict sent everyone off with your smiles. Let them remember that of their stay at Ashbourne Castle.”
“Oh Cassius, look at you,” Nerissa Emerton sighed fondly, rather than arguing or criticizing his absence any further. “You have not even changed since last night, have you?”
Looking down, the Duke of Ashbourne saw that several buttons were open on his waistcoat and one actually missing. His trousers were dusty and rumpled and he stood before her in his socks, having abandoned his dress shoes in the stable and borrowed some groom’s riding boots this morning. He had avague recollection of curtly sending away the valet who might have dressed him decently earlier that day.
“We can’t all be Benedict, can we?” he replied with a small laugh. “Always smiling, never a hair out of place. Well, thank God he is like you, Mother, and not like me and Father. He is beloved wherever he goes and will make some woman a fine husband one day.”
“No doubt, although not for some time yet, I suspect. Would you walk with me, Cassius? I had a fancy to look at the gallery before dinner and there is no need to trouble about your dress for that. There is no one here to judge any of us now.”
Bowing his head in accession to his mother’s request, he closed the door and offered his arm to the dowager duchess. Did she only want his company or was there something more on her mind? In either case, it was well enough to stretch his legs before dressing for dinner.
“I am at your command, Mother.”
“It is not necessarily a blessing to be like Benedict and me,” she told him after a few minutes of walking in silence. “When life is difficult, maybe it is better to be stronger, like you, Cassius. A happy disposition and skill in pleasing others did not serve me well when Henry died.”
“No personality is a shield against grief,” the duke told her.
“Nor is any personality proof against love,” she observed in response. “In both cases, it is more a matter of whether that personality breaks under the pressure of resistance. I broke under my grief, where you did not. My fear is that you are more likely to break by resisting love.”
The Duke of Ashbourne said nothing, too tired and too sad to argue about her attempt to urge him down roads he did not wish to travel. They had also arrived now at the gallery and he hoped the art would prove sufficient distraction for his mother from her present pensive mood.
“What would you like to view first, Mother? Old masters, family portraits or the daubing of my great-grandfather William, the Seventh Duke of Ashbourne?”
As he had hoped, Nerissa Emerton laughed at the mention of great-grandfather William. The seventh duke had possessed far more enthusiasm than talent for painting but had still insisted on hanging his pictures in the gallery alongside those of professional artists. There was a naive charm to his disproportionate horses and hounds, and generations of Emerton children had tended to love them best.
“Family portraits, Cassius. That is where my mind has been leaning recently, for one reason or another. Let us save the seventh duke’s efforts for another night."
Arm in arm, they walked through to the relatively dim gallery rooms where all the Emerton family pictures hung, protected from the sun by heavy drapes across the larger windows.
Portraits of ancestors in armor or other now-curious dress rubbed shoulders with more modern fare, including the most recent painting of Cassius, Benedict and Nerissa, commissioned by his mother on the occasion of Benedict’s twenty-first birthday the previous year.
It was in front of this picture that the duchess first paused, while Cassius drew back a curtain and let in the still-bright summer evening sunlight.
