The Duke's Governess Bride (3 page)

Yet there’d been far more to her journey than medieval cathedrals, and this was to be found in the letters she’d received from Lady Mary and Lady Diana since their marriages. These were filled with rare joy and the happiness that each of them felt with their new husbands, and so much love that Jane’s eyes filled with tears.

How she missed her ladies, her girls! Jane had thought she’d been prepared for their inevitable parting, the lot of all governesses; she just hadn’t expected it to come so soon. As much as she’d enjoyed Venice, she would have much preferred it in their company, the way it was originally planned. But love, and those two excellent young gentlemen, had intervened, and though Jane would never wish otherwise for Mary and Diana, there were times when her loneliness without them felt like the greatest burden in the world. The two newlywed couples planned to meet here in Venice for Carnivale later in the month, and at their urging, she’d decided not to risk the hazardous winter voyage back to England, but remained here instead to see them once again. They’d convinced her that, since everything had been long paid for, she might as well make use of the lodgings, and she’d hesitantly agreed. But now, everything had changed.

She’d never expected the duke to surprise her like this, or to make so perilous a journey on what seemed like a whim. Yet as soon as she’d seen his face, she’d understood—he’d missed his daughters just as she missed them now, and he would have travelled ten times as far to see them again. She’d been stunned by the raw emotion in his face, the swift transition from anticipation to bitterest disappointment. At Aston Hall, he never would have revealed so much of himself; he was always simply his Grace, distant and omnipotent, a deity far above mere governesses.

Yet tonight, she’d glimpsed something else. Loneliness like that was unmistakable, as was the love that had inspired it. Didn’t she suffer the same herself?

Swiftly she tied the letters together once again. Better to go to bed than to sit about weeping like a sorrowful, sentimental do-nothing. She climbed into her bed, blew out the candle and closed her eyes, determined to lose her troubles in sleep.

But the harder she tried to sleep, the faster her restless thoughts churned, and the faster, too, that her first sympathy for the duke shifted into indignation on behalf of Mary and Diana.

She could just imagine him, snoring peacefully in the huge bed in the front bedchamber upstairs. Even asleep, he’d be completely resistant to the notion that his daughters might be happy with men of their own choosing instead of his. He didn’t want to hear their side. He’d already made his decision, and he was so stubborn he’d never change it now, either.

He wasn’t just a duke. He was a bully and a tyrant to his own daughters, and it was time—high time!—that someone stood up to him on their behalf.

She flung back the coverlet and hopped from her bed, grabbing her shawl from the back of the nearby chair. She gathered the ribbon-tied letters from Mary and Diana into her arms and, before she lost her courage, hurried from her room and up the stairs to the duke’s chambers. The rest of the house was silent with sleep, and by the pale light of the blue-glass night lantern hanging in the hall, her long shadow scurried up the stairs beside her.

She stood only a moment at the duke’s tall, panelled door before she thumped her fist. She waited, her bare feet chilled by the marble floor, heard nothing, then knocked again. In truth, she was only summoning the duke’s manservant, Wilson, or perhaps Mr Potter, but she’d still make her point.

The
duke.
Hah, more like the Duke of Intolerance than the mere Duke of Aston, to say such impossibly cruel things of his own new sons-in-law, without so much as the decency of—

‘Yes?’ The door swung open, not just a servant’s suspicious crack, but all the way. ‘What in blazes—Miss Wood!’

She gasped, clutching the letters more tightly in her arms. Not Wilson, or Potter, but the duke himself stood in the open door, scarce a foot apart from her. Clearly she’d roused him from his bed, and from a deep sleep, too, for he was scowling at her as if he wasn’t quite sure who she might be. She understood his confusion; she’d never seen him like this, either. He wore only his nightshirt, rumpled and loose, yet somehow revealing far more than his usual dress did because beneath all that snowy linen, he was…
naked.
The darker shadows beneath the fabric, the way the linen draped over his body, left no doubt, and Jane’s cheeks flamed at the horrible realisation. To make matters worse, the throat of the shirt was unbuttoned and open to reveal his chest and a large thatch of dark curling hair, his sleeves were pushed up over his well-muscled arms, and his stocky legs and large, bare feet showed below.

Hastily she looked back up to the safer territory of his face. Or perhaps it wasn’t. In all the time she’d been in his Grace’s employment, she’d never seen him this dishevelled, his hair loose around his face and his jaw roughened with a growth of darker beard, his whole expression without its usual reserve and control. It was unsettling, seeing him without his guard like this, and it made him less like his Grace, and more simply like any other man.

A large, scarcely dressed and surprisingly handsome man that she’d just summoned from his bed.

Heavens preserve her, what had she
done?

Chapter Three

T
he duke stared down at Jane, clearly not pleased to find her standing at the door to his bedchamber in the middle of the night.

‘Miss Wood,’ he said again, sleepily rubbing his palm over his jaw, ‘why are you here? I thought we’d agreed that in the morning—’

‘Forgive me, your Grace, but this could not wait,’ Jane said, speaking to him more firmly than she’d ever thought she’d dare. ‘It is most important, you see.’

‘But it can’t be more than two hours past midnight,’ he protested. He was looking downwards, not at her face, and his scowl had become less perplexed, more thoughtful. Belatedly she realised that if she’d noticed he wore nothing beyond his nightclothes, then he was likely noticing the same of her. Yet instead of being mortified or shamed, she felt her irritation with him grow. How could he let himself be distracted in this idle fashion when so much—so
very
much!—was in question?

‘Forgive me for disturbing you, your Grace.’ She raised her chin, and impatiently shook her hair back from her eyes. ‘But your daughters and the gentlemen they wed deserve that much from me, your Grace, and I would never forgive myself if I didn’t speak on their behalf.’

His frown deepened, his thick, dark brows drawing sternly together. ‘No gentlemen would steal another man’s daughters. They are rogues and rascals, and I will deal with them accordingly.’

‘Your daughters would not agree with your judgement, your Grace.’

‘My daughters are too young to realise their folly, mere girls who—’

‘Forgive me, your Grace,’ Jane interrupted, her voice rising with uncharacteristic passion, ‘but they are women grown, who know their own hearts.’

‘“Their hearts,” hah,’ he scoffed. ‘That is the sorriest excuse for mischief in this world, Miss Wood. When I consider all the sorrow that has come from—’

‘Such as your own marriage, your Grace?’ she demanded hotly. ‘That is what I have always been told, and by those who would know. Did you not follow your heart when you wed her Grace, and at the same age as your daughters are now?’

His face froze, his anger stopped as cold as if he’d been turned to chilly stone.

And at once Jane realised the magnitude of what she’d done and what she’d said. The late Duchess of Aston was often mentioned at Aston Hall, and always with great affection and respect, and sorrow that she’d died so young. Her beauty, her kindness, her gentleness, all were praised and remembered by those who’d known her, and over time in the telling the duchess had become a paragon of virtue, a veritable saint. By an order so long-standing that its origins had been forgotten, no one spoke of her Grace before the duke. It was terribly tragic and romantic, true, but it was also the one rule of the house that was never broken.

Yet this was Venice, not Aston Hall. Things were different here, or perhaps it was Jane herself who was different after having been away for so many months. Either way she likely wasn’t a member of the duke’s household any longer, and certainly not after this.

‘Forgive me for speaking plainly, your Grace,’ she said. The words could not be taken back now, nor, truly, did Jane wish them unsaid, not in her present humour. ‘But how can you not wish the same contentment for your daughters that you found with—?’

‘You presume, Miss Wood,’ he said sharply. ‘You have no knowledge of these matters.’

‘I know the young ladies, your Grace,’ she insisted, ‘and what brings them joy and happiness.’

‘I know my own daughters!’

‘You may know them, your Grace, but you will never know the gentlemen they love, not so long as you remain so—so set against them.’

He drew back as abruptly as if she’d struck him. ‘Love,’ he said, practically spitting the word. ‘What do my daughters know of love? What can you know of it, Miss Wood?’

‘I know what I have read for myself in your daughters’ own words.’ She thrust the bundled letters into his arms, making him take them. ‘I know they are happy, and that they love the gentlemen they chose as their husbands. And
that
is what I know about love, your Grace.’

She curtsied briskly in her nightshift, then retreated without waiting to be properly dismissed. He did not try to stop her, nor did she look back.

She ran down the steps to her room, her shawl billowing out behind her shoulders. She closed the door to her bedchamber and took care to latch it. For what might be the last time, she sat at the gilded desk before the window, curling her feet beneath her and pressing her trembling palms to her cheeks.

She stared out at the mist rising from the canal and waited for her breathing to calm and her racing heart to slow. The night was still and quiet, with no sounds coming from his Grace’s rooms upstairs. By now he must have returned to his bed to sleep. By now, too, he would have made up his mind regarding her future. Which was just as well, for she’d decided it, too.

With a sigh, she reached for a clean sheet of paper and a pen, and began to write her letter giving notice to the Duke of Aston.

‘Your Grace!’ Bleary-eyed, Wilson hurried out from the shadows, his striped nightcap askew over one ear and his nightshirt stuffed haphazardly into his breeches. ‘Forgive me, your Grace, I did not hear you call.’

‘I didn’t.’ Richard still stood in the doorway to his rooms, scowling down the stairs where Miss Wood had vanished. She’d appeared like a wild-haired wraith, and disappeared like one, too, so fast that he wondered now if he’d dreamed the whole thing. ‘I answered the door myself.’

‘Oh, your Grace, you shouldn’t have done that, indeed you shouldn’t have,’ his manservant said, scandalised. ‘It’s not safe, not in a queer foreign place such as this.’

‘I’m safe enough, Wilson,’ Richard said. ‘Besides, it was hardly some brigand come to the rob me. It was Miss Wood.’

‘Miss Wood, your Grace?’ asked Wilson, clearly astonished. ‘Our Miss Wood? Come here, at this hour? Why, your Grace, I’d scarce believe it, not of Miss Wood.’

‘Nor I,’ Richard said. ‘Yet here she was, and in a righteous fury, too.’

He glanced down at the two bundles of letters she’d left with him, each tied neatly with ribbons. Of course they’d be neatly tied, just as he was certain they’d each be folded back into their seals and sorted in precedence of the date they’d been received. That was the way Miss Wood always did things, with brisk, predictable order. But there’d been nothing orderly or predictable about her outburst just now—not one thing.

‘She must’ve had a powerful strong reason, your Grace,’ Wilson said, hovering like the old nurse-maid he very nearly was. ‘It don’t seem like her in the least.’

‘It didn’t, indeed.’ Earlier this day he’d barely noticed Miss Wood at all, except to register that she was in fact the same governess he’d trusted with his girls’ welfare. She’d simply been Miss Wood, the woman that had lived beneath his roof for nearly a decade, the same stern, plain Miss Wood that would have cowed him into obedience as a boy and had gone completely unnoticed by him as a man.

Or had until now. He’d never seen her as he just had: looking younger, much younger and more beguiling, her hair not scraped back beneath a linen cap, but loose and tousled like a dark cloud over her shoulders, her usually pinched cheeks flushed with emotion, her eyes anything but serene. Gone, too, was the strict shapeless gown, with her body bundled and barricaded within. Instead she’d been clad in only a worn linen nightdress that had slipped and slithered over her shoulders, and had revealed far more than it hid, likely far more than she’d intended. As a man, there was no conceivable way he could have overlooked the heavy fullness of her breasts, or how the chill had made her nipples tighten enticingly beneath the linen.

He grumbled wordlessly to himself, a kind of mental shake, and pushed the door shut with his elbow. God knows plenty of scullery-maid seductresses would flaunt themselves before their masters to secure extra favours, but he wasn’t that kind of master, and Miss Wood wasn’t that kind of servant—which had made this evening all the more unsettling. He’d always thought of her as a dry old virgin, scarcely female, and now—now he saw that she wasn’t. Not at all. No wonder he couldn’t forget how she’d looked, standing there with her little toes bare to lecture him about love.

About
love.
Miss Wood, coming to rouse him from his bed to challenge him in her nightdress. Damnation, what was it about this infernal Italian air that seemed to turn everything upside down?

‘Here you are, Your Grace,’ Wilson said, holding his dressing gown out before him. ‘Put this on, and warm yourself. This is a perilously damp place, your Grace, all this water and musty old plaster, and I won’t have you taken ill from standing about. Now here, let me take those papers from you.’

‘No, I’ll keep them,’ Richard said, ignoring the dressing gown and returning to his bed, or rather, the bed that had come with the room. No respectable Englishman would ever consider such a bedstead as ‘his’, not when it was tricked out with gilded swans and crimson hangings shot with gold thread. All it required was a looking-glass overhead in the canopy and a naked whore or two to make it fit for the priciest brothel in London.

Grumbling, he let Wilson pull the coverlet up and plump his pillows as he picked up the first package of letters, the ones that had come from his older daughter Mary. One look at that familiar, girlish penmanship, and he forgot all about Miss Wood and her bare feet.

How could his girls marry without his consent? How could they abandon him like this, without so much as a by your leave? How could they possibly have changed so fast from his little girls in their white linen dresses and pink silk sashes into women grown and wed to other men?

‘Ah, your Grace,’ Wilson said, beaming. ‘Letters from the young ladies?’

‘That will be all, Wilson ,’ Richard said curtly. ‘Leave me.’

Leave me—
that was what his girls had done, hadn’t they? He’d come all this way for them, yet they’d already gone.

He waited until Wilson had gone, then slowly opened the first of Mary’s letters and tipped the sheet towards the candlestick on the table beside the bed. It felt strange reading letters not addressed to him, like listening at a keyhole or behind a fence, practices no gentleman would do.

Yet as soon as he began to read, he heard the words in Mary’s voice, as clearly as if she were in the room speaking to him, and his heart filled with emotion. The letter seemed to date from early autumn, soon after her marriage, after Miss Wood had continued on to Italy with Diana and left Mary behind in Paris with her new husband.

Ah, Mary, his dear Mary. Mary had always been his favourite of his two daughters. It wasn’t that he loved her any more than he loved Diana, for he didn’t, but Mary was easier to
like
than Diana. With her calm, thoughtful manner and pleasing serenity, Mary was the opposite of her impulsive and passionate sister. For better or worse, Diana took after him, while Mary favoured her mother, and as she’d grown older, Richard had come to rely on Mary to handle things about the house that had once been his wife Anne’s domain. Even now he’d put off making certain decisions at Aston Hall—new paint for the drawing room, improvements that Cook wanted in the kitchen—telling himself that they could wait until Mary came home to guide him.

Except that now, as he read, he learned she wasn’t coming home. No, worse—that home for her no longer meant Aston Hall, but wherever this Irish-born rascal she’d married took her. He learned that though this man seemed to have some sort of income, he’d no proper home for Mary beyond bachelor lodgings in London. Instead they seemed to be content to live like vagabonds in Paris—in
Paris!
—dining out and wandering about day and night. To be sure, their lodgings were in an excellent area that even he recognised by name, and at least Mary had enough of a staff to be respectable. Richard could learn that much from the letters, and know his Mary wasn’t in any need or want.

But as he read on, Richard discovered that Mary had found more than simply respectable lodgings in Paris. In this Lord John Fitzgerald, she also seemed to have discovered a man who shared her interest in musty old pictures and books and long-ago history: a man who could make her happy.

And Mary
was
happy. There wasn’t any doubt of that. Every page, every word seemed to bubble with unabashed joy in her new life and her new husband. Richard couldn’t recall the last time she’d been as jubilant and light-hearted as this, not since she’d been a small girl before her mother had died.

Diana’s letters were shorter, less thoughtful, and full of the dashes and false starts that made her writing so similar to her speech, darting here and there like a dragonfly over the page. Her new bridegroom, Lord Anthony Randolph, was delicious, and sought endlessly to please her. Their life together in his native Rome was full of music and friends, parties and other amusements. She’d ordered a new gown, a new hat, yellow stockings to his lordship’s delight. He’d given her a talking bird from Africa. Like her sister, she was happy, more happy, she claimed, than she’d ever been in her life. She was also already four months with child.

His
grandchild.

Richards groaned, and let his daughter’s familiar girlish signature blur and swim before his tired eyes. He wasn’t even forty, yet tonight he felt twice that. Oh, he’d learned a great deal from the letters. He’d learned that though he’d always done his best to make his girls happy, these unknown young men had succeeded far beyond his lowly paternal efforts. He’d learned that, no matter that his daughters had been the very centrepiece of his life, he really didn’t know them at all, not as they were now. He’d learned that Mary and her husband were likely even now on their way here to Venice to meet Diana and her husband, and together to bid their favourite Miss Wood farewell before she sailed away for England. But the blistering greeting that Richard would have offered them earlier wouldn’t happen. Not now, not after he’d read these letters.