Page 104 of The Wolf Duke's Wife
Christine walked. Blanche walked with her. They did not look back, because there are dignities one keeps even when one has been stripped of all the others.
Outside, the rain had decided to fall properly. Blanche raised her parasol. “We shall go home,” she said. “We have enough ribbon to hang a man, and I have decided I could be the sort of woman who ties a bow with fury.”
Christine let herself be steered toward the waiting carriage. Only when the door closed and the wheels clattered did she let herhead rest briefly against the squabs. Blanche took her hand then, without fanfare, without comment, and squeezed. Across the street, beneath the dripping eaves, Lady Martha stood for a moment and watched the carriage go.
The rain sketched her in quick strokes, hat, lavender, stillness, and then blurred her into the rest of London. She turned to her aunt, said something brief and bright that made the older woman titter, and stepped into her own chaise.
Thirty
Tristan’s carriage took the last turn into Portman Square, wheels grinding softly, horse breath a white thread in the damp air. The square lay almost still, save for a watchman’s staff ticking the hour somewhere beyond the plane trees and the mutter of distant wheels along the Marylebone Road. Canterbury House stood with its neighbors shoulder to shoulder, clean, correct, and anonymous.
He had rented the place without sentiment—the same way he ordered a new plough. It was a thing needed, then acquired. Christine would require a base in town while she bullied London into providing lanterns and ribbon and every other frippery a county ball pretended not to need. He would present her with keys; she would present him with lists, and somewhere in between they would both find… contentment?
That had been the plan. The plan had not, foolishly, accounted for the thrum under his breastbone that had begun the moment she left Duskwood and had not ceased since. The carriage halted. Rain tapped the roof as if requesting entry. He stepped down,the square’s stones slick beneath his boots, and handed his hat to the footman who had sprinted ahead to knock. The door opened at once on a square hall smelling faintly of coal smoke.
“Your Grace,” said the butler, Hames, tidy as a ruled line, “we did not look for you before morning. I regret there is no fire in the small study.”
“I do not require one.” Tristan shrugged out of his travelling coat. “Lady Christine?”
“Retired an hour ago, Your Grace.” Hames managed to make “retired” sound like what a queen did to armies. “Miss Waldron also retired. Mrs. Cleat waits below stairs if you have orders for breakfast.”
“Not now.” Tristan’s gaze slid past the man to the staircase, where the light from a single lamp pooled and then yielded to shadow. “Did she dine?”
“In her chamber. She and Miss Waldron returned at six. The lady looked…fatigued.”
A butler who had served dukes learned to tint words. Fatigued meant worn thin and pretending not to be.
“From the shops?” he asked lightly.
Hames inclined his head.
Tristan crossed the hall. He had not known until he reached the first step that he had intended to go up. He did not care to be governed by impulses. He was, nevertheless, governed by one now. On the landing, he paused. The city’s hum came up through the walls. A soft, ceaseless breathing. A million lives stacked together. Duskwood had its own sounds—owls, branches, the distant clap of a gate—but London made a different kind of night. It did not sleep; it negotiated.
A carpet runner swallowed his footfalls. He passed the door to the little morning room he had ordered furnished for Christine’s letters. The house smelled faintly of lavender now. At the end of the corridor, a lamp burned low in a niche. Beside it, the door to Christine’s chamber.
He had not intended to stop there. His own room lay beyond.
She sleeps. There is no reason to go inside.
But he had travelled from his ledgers and accounts at Duskwood because he could not stay away from her.
I will check that she sleeps safely, satisfy my eyes.
He would then go down to the dark study and sit with a ledger until the numbers lulled him into a species of sleep. He stood at the door and heard her breathe. It was a small sound, steady and human, and it undid hours of discipline as quietly as steam melts frost. He pushed the door with the back of his knuckles. It gave.
Beyond, the room was a soft cave of lamplight and banked coals, of pale curtains drawn against wet panes. The air smelled of rain and the faint residue of rosewater. She lay on her side with her back to the door, the coverlet drawn up to the narrow of her waist, dark hair in a loosened coil that had escaped pins and law both.
Her walking stick stood like a sentry by the bedpost. A book lay open on the chair beside the bed, facedown, a ribbon like a tongue peeking from its spine. On the small table, a cup of tea had gone cold. He did not step across the threshold. He leaned his shoulder against the jamb and listened. The rain ticked. The coals hissed. Her breath went in and out, and in between the breaths, an occasional word, not quite formed.
I ought to go. Only fools stand in doorways and make wishes.
He stayed.
“Fool,” he told himself.
She murmured again, two syllables, not words. He watched the subtle shift of her shoulders and thought of the last time he had seen them, braced and stubborn when she had refused to ride back to Duskwood after the men on the lane. A picture rose, ugly, of her wrist in a stranger’s grip. He caught himself on the doorframe and breathed through the old, familiar, angry urge. The urge of the wolf: protect one’s own and defeat all intruders.
“Tristan,” she said, distinct this time, and turned a fraction on the pillow.
