The Duchess War

  Chapter Nineteen

  Minnie hadn’t been able to speak to her great-aunts on the prior evening.

  But there was no putting off the conversation when the Duchess of Clermont sent over a draught from her bank. She brought them into the front room and sat them down.

  “There is something you both should know,” she said. “Yesterday, when Lydia came to get me, it was because Stevens had gone to Manchester. He knows that there is no Miss Wilhelmina Pursling. That I’m an imposter. He knows I was born Minerva Lane.”

  The two women gasped and then looked at each other. “Do they know what—”

  Minnie shook her head. “They don’t know everything.”

  “Don’t scare me like that,” Caro said, putting her hand over her heart. “But what are we to do? With Gardley gone…”

  Minnie looked away. “As it turns out, I’ve come into some money. Five thousand pounds.”

  Her great-aunts stared at her. The women looked so different, and yet the shocked expressions on their faces were mirrors for each other.

  “Dear,” Eliza finally said. “We know that this is a difficult time. But five thousand pounds is a great deal of money, and we would hate it if, ah, if…”

  They really thought she might have come into it by unsavory means. If they thought that, they might wonder…

  “No,” Minnie said bitterly. “I earned this, fair and square.” Well, maybe it hadn’t been fair. And maybe it hadn’t been precisely square. Still, she’d earned it legally. Legally and…rectangularly. That would have to do.

  “How?”

  “I had an offer of marriage. His mother didn’t want me to accept.” Minnie looked away. “I didn’t.” Two words, and still they broke her heart.

  But she’d long since given up any desire to wish that things were different. Wishes were stupid, foolish things.

  “An offer of marriage?” Caro echoed. “But from whom? I cannot imagine—” She cut herself off as the downstairs maid entered.

  “Miss,” she said, nodding to Minnie. “Misses. There’s someone here to speak with Miss Pursling.”

  “Who is it?” Eliza asked.

  Lydia. Lydia had come. Minnie would be able to explain everything, make everything right—

  But the maid ducked her head, suddenly self-conscious, and Minnie knew with a sense of great foreboding who it was.

  “His Grace,” she said, “the Duke of Clermont.”

  Her stomach turned to ice, but her hands seemed too warm. She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, whether to run into his arms or to clamber out the window to escape. She simply stared ahead of her, the draught for five thousand pounds folded in her pocket in silent accusation.

  “Oh,” Eliza said.

  “I had heard rumors.” Caro rubbed her head. “But it sounded so improbable. You would have told us if there was anything to it. Wouldn’t you have?”

  Minnie couldn’t make herself meet their eyes.

  “I—maybe we should discuss this later. Later.”

  Caro nodded. Eliza came to her feet, leaning heavily on the cane she used indoors. “Minnie,” she said softly. “If you don’t want to marry him, you don’t have to. We’ll never force you to do it. No matter what has happened—what you’ve said, what you’ve done. No matter what you choose. We love you.”

  When he was shown in a few moments later, Minnie was fighting tears. She couldn’t even turn to look at him. She could only mark the sound of his boots against the floor, coming close, stopping a few feet behind her.

  He stood, perhaps waiting for her to acknowledge him. But she couldn’t. If she turned around now…

  “I thought of climbing up to your window,” he said, his voice grave, “but I’d have to take off my boots to attempt brick, and besides, the window I thought was yours looked suspiciously narrow. Now I know why Juliet had a balcony. So I decided on the remarkably unromantic route—I knocked on the front door.”

  She let out a shuddering laugh. “Romeo was also sixteen.” She took another deep breath, schooled her face to calmness, and then turned around. “I thought you’d said your farewells already. What are you doing here?”

  In answer, he reached for her hand. While her back had been turned, he’d removed his gloves and laid them on the table. She should have pulled away, but she was still too raw to resist. His fingers entwined with hers. His hands were soft and strong against hers.

  “All right,” he said. “I’m just going to come out with this. I ruined everything.”

  “You ruined everything,” Minnie repeated. “You ruined everything.” She stared at him, wondering if he’d somehow lost his mind overnight. He nodded in response to that, though, and she gestured to a seat. Her head was spinning.

  “You told me,” he said, sitting down, “that you couldn’t be a duchess. I waved off your concerns.”

  She blinked and then sat in a chair opposite him.

  “It didn’t start coming together until my mother told me that she’d paid you to refuse me, not to expose me. And that didn’t make sense either, once I thought about it. My income is a minimum of ten thousand pounds a year—something everyone knows. Given a choice between five thousand pounds and marriage to me, any rational person would choose me. If you were as coldly calculating as I thought, we’d be married, not glaring at each other across two feet of space.”

  She shook her head.

  “Besides, if my mother had paid you to stop me, you would have used my letter right away. You wouldn’t have waited. And how would she have even known what I was doing? That you were the one person who might find out about it? The story doesn’t hold together, Minnie.” He glanced over at her. “I have never been so thankful to realize that I have been lied to.”

  Her throat hurt. All that effort to try to push him away—and still he wouldn’t go.

  “I didn’t listen to what you were telling me.” He looked at her. “I didn’t listen to what you weren’t telling me. Everything I heard was all about me. I heard that you didn’t want me. That you couldn’t care for me. I heard that you were anxious about attention, but I didn’t listen.” He steepled his fingers. “So let me tell you what I should have heard. Your father was one of the world’s foremost chess—”

  Minnie jumped out of her seat. “You know.” Her heart was pounding in great, unforgiving thumps. Her breath came in ever-smaller gasps of air. The air around her seemed to shimmer. But of course he knew. She’d told him her name. Everything beyond that was a matter of research. She took one wild step backward and tripped on her chair.

  But before she could fall in a bruising heap against the bookcase, Robert stepped forward and caught her. His arms were solid and warm about her. “Shh,” he breathed. “It’s just me. I’m not going to hurt you. I’m never going to hurt you, Minnie.”

  She looked up into his eyes. Her pulse was racing, but there was no crowd nearby, no shouting.

  It was just him.

  This time, when he sat, he pulled her on top of him. They fit against one another like two pieces of a puzzle, her head falling automatically to his shoulder, his hand going to her hair. She shouldn’t be leaning against him. This shouldn’t be happening. It had broken her heart to push him away once; how could she do it again?

  “Let’s try this again,” he said softly, clasping his hands around her. “I’ve found out only the bare details. Your father was one of the world’s foremost chess players. What happened then?”

  Minnie’s stomach was still fluttering. But his arms were around her—and he knew. He knew, and he wasn’t throwing things at her. He waited patiently for her to be ready.

  Safe was the last thing she felt when she had to think of those dark times—but at least for the moment, she didn’t feel like vomiting.

  She took a deep breath. “My father was actually a baronet’s fifth son. High standing—although not by your standards—but utterly impoverished. He made his way in the world by trading on his skill at chess. He was gregarious, open, and everyone
liked him. His personal fortune was almost nonexistent, but he was so likable that it never mattered. He always had an invitation to stay somewhere.”

  Sometimes they had been invitations in England, other times offers to visit Europe, to spend months with men who wanted to study chess with a bright, taking young man. Once, on one of those sea voyages she’d taken with him, a sailor had told her to look at the coast when she felt seasick, and the nausea would go away. Now, she watched the bookcase and was surprised to find that her world steadied.

  “My parents were married only a few years before my mother died in childbirth. I don’t remember much before the age of five, except for my father’s visits. My first memories are of him teaching me to play chess. I knew how pieces moved before I knew the alphabet. I looked forward to his visits above all else. And one day, when I was very, very young, he asked me if I wanted to go with him the next time he went abroad.”

  Minnie let out a shaky breath. Robert didn’t say anything. He just pulled her closer.

  “Of course, a young girl couldn’t travel the Continent with only her father—not and stay with the sorts of people we were staying with. I would have needed a nurse, a governess, and by that time finances were too tight to allow such a thing. It was a very simple thing, my father said. He would introduce me as Maximilian Lane, his son. He asked me if I would mind.” She shut her eyes. “I was five. I didn’t know what to think. He said it would be great fun, and I agreed.”

  The fluttering in her belly had begun to calm.

  “I don’t think I understood, in those early years, what a curiosity I was. I remember people posing me chess problems. Sometimes I solved them. Sometimes I didn’t.” She shrugged. “As I grew older, I solved more of them.”

  “The one account I read of Maximilian Lane,” Robert put in, “said he was quiet and solemn and quite, quite brilliant. You’d play with adults who had years of experience and beat them handily—and then, when they praised you for it, you’d put the board back fifteen moves and explain, just as earnestly, what they should have done to win.”

  “Yes,” Minnie breathed, shutting her eyes. “I remember that. Winning all the time—it had the most extraordinary effect on me. I thought I would always win. I didn’t understand the concept of risk.”

  She hadn’t understood the concept of loss, either.

  “The rest, I’ve had to guess at after the fact. By the time I was twelve, my father was deeply in debt. He made promises to people, claimed that he had made fabulous investments in Russian industry. To bolster those claims and attract further investors, he paid out results from his own limited funds. Then he paid the next round of investors with funds gleaned from his newest dupes. But there were no investments, and unless he found some money quickly, he would have been found out.”

  Minnie looked down. She’d only known back then that he became more erratic—wildly happy one moment, enraged the next.

  “I wasn’t invited to the first international chess tournament in London. My father was. A few days before, however, he claimed to have taken suddenly ill and offered me up to take his place. Nobody objected.”

  She couldn’t help it. Little tremors were going through her body.

  “He needed a great deal of money, and the odds were favoring me. So he had one of his friends bet every penny he owned against me. Then he ordered me to throw the game.”

  He hadn’t told her why. They’d shouted at one another that day.

  “Lanes can do anything,” she’d thrown in his face. He’d looked at her so strangely when she’d said that. It wasn’t until later that Minnie realized that he had never expected her to use his own words to defy him.

  Robert’s arms were warm against her ribs, his chest moving in time with her breath. The silence of the room enfolded them. There was nothing around, nobody near. Just her and the memories.

  “As a child, there’s a curious blindness you have to the faults of your parents. My father was my dearest friend. We were always together. He taught me everything I knew. He’d never had a harsh word for me. I absolutely worshipped him. He used to say that if we only believed hard enough, everything would turn out all right. That if you’d just think and wait, you’d find a way. When I refused to throw the game, he found his way.” She took another deep breath. “He told the scandal sheets that I was a girl. In the middle of the tournament.”

  She could still see the board in the final round. She’d just kissed her rook and set it on the board. She had been four moves from mate.

  “The officials interrupted me. They disqualified me. They tossed me out on my ear, and it was all over the London papers the next few days. Everything I had been, everything—all the people who I thought were my friends, all the things that I’d accomplished—were wiped away. I had masqueraded as a boy, and I’d scandalized everyone.”

  “Amazing it lasted as long as it did,” he said.

  “I was twelve. Had it been one more year… Then I would have grown my bosom, and there would have been no hiding the truth at all.” She shook her head. “I don’t know what would have happened in the ordinary course of events. But now that the truth had come out, people began to ask questions of my father. There were thousands of pounds at stake in his business, and his stories didn’t stand up to inquiry. His trial was a very public affair. I attended—twelve years old, wearing skirts for the first time in years, awkward and uncertain. It was there I first heard my father’s defense. He claimed he was driven to do it. By me. He said that I told him to dress me as a boy and take me with him. I came up with the scheme involving faked Russian industry. I caused his ruin. I did it all.”

  Robert put his arm around her. “You were five when it started.”

  “I was an unnatural child. That’s what he said—over and over. I was an unnatural child. And who could disagree? I was demonstrably odd. Able to beat grown men at chess, some of the best in the world. I was so quiet, always watching. It didn’t help that everyone could see me at the trial, could see how strange I was. I had no idea how to move like a girl. My hair was short. I’d spent the years of my childhood with dissolute men. I didn’t know the first thing about proper behavior.

  “My father always said if you believed a thing hard enough, reality would have no choice but to make it true. When he testified on the stand, he’d convinced himself. He called me devil’s spawn in front of all of London.”

  She had thought things couldn’t get any worse than that frozen horror in the courtroom—seeing the man she’d loved, the man who had never had a harsh word for her, point at her and denounce her. Seeing the frightening light in his eyes that said he believed it. He had been all she had in the world—and he’d left her suddenly, publicly alone.

  “He was a charismatic, convincing man. They convicted him, not of theft, but of petty fraud—enough to give him two years’ hard labor, but no more. But the people who had been there were convinced that he’d been wronged. When I left the courtroom, completely unsure of myself, I was surrounded by a mob. They shouted. They spat. I don’t know who threw the first rock. I don’t know how many they threw.” She looked over at him. “I fainted by the time they were pulled off me, but I’ve never forgotten it. Ever since then, I can’t bear crowds. I think of them, and I start to shake. I just utterly panic.”

  “Have you never had anyone to stand by you?” he asked. His voice was low and hoarse.

  “My great-aunts. Lydia, until—” She nearly choked saying those words. But even then, she’d not been able to trust in them. Her great-aunts would pass away. She’d always known that someday, Lydia would find out the truth and take a disgust to her. “Up until the end, I would never have guessed that my father would do that. I like to think that maybe he was ill. That he didn’t know what he was doing when he betrayed me.” Her eyes glistened. “He passed away in prison, so maybe it was true. I have to believe that, because no matter how I try, I can’t stop loving him. He taught me everything I knew. He was my entire life. And I don’t know how to hate
him as much as he deserves. So you see, Your Grace, I can’t marry you. I can’t even think of it without shaking. London society would tear me apart.”

  “No,” he said quietly. “It won’t.”

  She turned to him. “How can you say that?”

  “It won’t,” he promised, “because I won’t let that happen.” He turned her chin so that she looked him in the eyes. “Once, you told me I was lucky because I could look wherever I wished without fear. I don’t think I really began to understand what you meant until I found out…” His arms closed around her more tightly. “I knew you were upset. You told me you were frightened. Lucky me, that I could not understand what you meant—how terrified you were.”

  She was shaking.

  “I give you my word that if you marry me, I will protect you. I will stand by your side and never do harm to you. I’ve already spoken with Stevens and Charingford, and they’ll keep their mouths shut. I promise you on all that I keep sacred that I will do my utmost to keep your past secret, and that if I should fail in that, I will use everything in my power to keep you safe. You will never again need to fear if you marry me.”

  “And what will I have to give you in return?”

  “Your allegiance.” He held her close. “For as long as we can stand one another’s presence, your body would be nice, too. I don’t expect love. I don’t expect you’ll want me forever. But I think that we could make a good go of it.”

  “You don’t expect love.” She shook her head in confusion. “This is the second time you’ve said that. Is this going to be like one of those dreadful novels where you warn me not to fall in love with you, and if I do, then you’ll turn into Bluebeard and try to lop my head off? You’re handsome. You have all your teeth.” She looked into his eyes and lightly touched her hand to his cheek. He grew very still. “I can offer you no promises. If you’re any good in bed, I might fall in love with you. If that is going to be anathema…”

  “No,” he said swiftly. He looked away from her, and when he spoke again, there was a slight rasp to his words. “No. That would be perfectly…unobjectionable.”

  From his words, she might have thought him uncaring. But that catch in his voice and the way he tilted his head toward her again, gave the lie to his indifference. He looked at her like a thirsty man gazing on an oasis, trying to decide if it were an illusion brought on by the heat.

  It made a sudden, impossible sense of everything. He doesn’t want a loveless marriage. He’s just resigned himself to one.

  His mother had said that Robert had the heart of a romantic. Minnie had been overwhelmed by other worries at the time, but perhaps the duchess had the right of it. He championed those who had no voice of their own. And for some reason, he had long since convinced himself that he would never be loved.

  She was so close to falling in love with him that she almost opened her mouth and told him so. But that light in his eyes—the way he’d looked at her when he said it would be unobjectionable—it would be cruel to say it before it was true.

  It will be true soon enough, she thought.

  Ever since her father’s betrayal, she’d scolded herself, saying that she’d brought what happened on herself for wanting too much. For daring to think that at twelve—as a girl—she could challenge grown men and walk away unscathed.

  But maybe her mistake had been not trying hard enough.

  “There is a great deal,” he said, “that a duchess can do that a young, unmarried lady cannot. Come be lucky with me, Minnie.”

  The moment to open her wings was when she plummeted to the ground. If she didn’t try, it would be no surprise that the ground rose up and struck her.

  For so long, she’d told herself that it was stupid to hope. But maybe it wasn’t. She couldn’t see how her future would work out. But she could hope for love and safety, and maybe, maybe she’d not be slapped down for reaching for it with trembling hands.

  “Oh, God,” she said, her voice shaking. “I’m really going to do this.”

  He let out a shaky breath of relief. “Good. Good.” His arm tightened around her, crushing her to him. He held her close and whispered in her ear. “I hope I’m good in bed.”

  It was as close as he’d come to admitting that he wanted her to love him. Minnie smiled and kissed him. He tasted like salt spray from the sea. Her heart fluttered in her chest like the wings of a flock of birds.

  “I hope you are, too,” she said shyly. And then she kissed him again, their hands locking together. She kissed him until the afternoon sun filled the room, until she grew light-headed from the feel. She held him and kissed him until Great-Aunt Caro stood by the door and cleared her throat.

  Minnie blushed, but he stood.

  “You must be one of Minnie’s great-aunts,” he said smoothly. “I’m Robert Blaisdell, the Duke of Clermont, and I should very much like to marry your niece.”