The Shadow of Albion (29 page)

long center table. The room filled with light, the illumination banishing its aspect of

ghostly disuse.

There was a fire on the hearth, ready-laid for morning, and it kindled quickly,

radiating a welcoming warmth. Wessex searched out the brandy decanter and

poured himself a generous glassful. Langley kept the decanters filled; the Dowager

might use this room, but she would not materially change the way it had been when

her son was alive.

Automatically, Wessex looked up to the portrait above the mantelpiece; a LeBrun

portrait of his father as a young man, wearing the satin and lace of a vanished age

and swaggering with a rapier upon his hip. That swashbuckling dandy had died a

dozen years ago, in a fatal, foolish attempt to save me Dauphin of France from the

Terror, but Grandanne lived in patient waiting, as if some day Andrew Dyer might

walk back in the front door – even though a dozen men had pronounced him lost in

France and a Chancery Court had ruled that the tide should pass to his son.

Still, somehow, Grandanne thought against all reason and sense that Andrew

might someday return, and sometimes Wessex felt as if she were right; as if the

so-distant certainties of his life were only a masquerade, their foundations built upon

shifting sand.

He shook his head, dourly amused at his own fancies. He needed either more

liquor or not to have drunk what he already had; with a quick, brutal gesture he

raised the glass of brandy to his lips and half drained it. He had not meant to give

Sarah the Heart of Flame at all. A petty gesture, he knew, as if having lost the game

of freedom he could not bear to capitulate utterly. For the Heart of Flame was a gift

between lovers, and he and Sarah were not lovers, nor would they ever be: he had

married her at the command of the King, and at the same command she had

accepted him.

But he had given Sarah his name and his title, and she was entitled to all of the

jewelry that went with them. There was no reason for him to withhold any of the

traditional gems simply because the act of their presentation was a lie.

He emptied the glass and refilled it again, knowing that the liquor was a substitute

for steadiness of nerve, and tomorrow he would have to learn to face his wife

without its aid.

Tomorrow and for the rest of his life.

Wessex sighed, and carried his glass back to the fire. As he passed the stool, his

foot struck something that lay upon the carpet and set it skimming across the floor.

Intrigued, Wessex stooped and picked it up. A sketchbook, bound between boards

of gold-stamped buckram. He carried it back to the chair and sat down,

automatically moving the workbasket as he did so. Neither Grandanne nor Dame

Alecto sketched, to his knowledge. He wondered whose it was.

The pages were rilled with careful, intricate drawings, some of them finished in

watercolor and ink. Obviously the sketchbook of a young lady of fashion, the

contents were very much what one would expect: bowls of fruit, studies of flowers

and horses’ heads, drawings of long-limbed ladies in elaborate gowns, apparently

copied from Ackerman’s Repository.

But there were other drawings, harmless enough in themselves, but oddly

disturbing to Wessex. The deck of a ship, carefully executed but oddly generalized,

as if the artist were attempting to reconstruct something from memory. A Colonial

settlement, its crude whitewashed buildings scattered along a stretch of unfamiliar

coast. A woman churning butter. Another sitting at her spinning wheel.

And then page after page of Aborigines, wild and splendid in their feathers and

paint. The artist had spent a great deal of time on these subjects, rendering every

detail of their barbaric costumes and wild surroundings with scrupulous care… and

accuracy. Wessex had reason to know the drawings were accurate, as he and the

volatile Mr. Koscuisko had spent some six months traveling with the People in the

American colonies during one memorable adventure.

But it would be an extensive search to find any woman – even one born and bred

in the Colonies – who had as intimate an experience with the Cree as this artist

seemed to possess. Who was she?

There were some letters interleaved with these pages, and from them he

discovered the name of the book’s owner: Sarah, Marchioness of Roxbury.

His wife.

Surely this was not possible. If Sarah had traveled to the American Colonies

Wessex would know… and if she had not, he did not think she could have drawn

such detailed and precise images.

For the first time, Wessex began to wonder precisely who it was that he had

married.

Sarah ran from the Terror that pursued her through a landscape that grew

increasingly more unreal, until its very unreality drove her out of sleep and into

waking.

She was lying in an unfamiliar bed in an unfamiliar narrow room. Golden morning

light turned the mural of aerial London spread across the ceiling to glitter and fire.

She was in Dyer House, and yesterday she had married the Duke of Wessex.

Sarah groaned, rolling over. She’d thought, for a brief dazzling moment, that it

was all part of the dream.

The dream! But even as she tried to grasp at it, those memories filtered through

her fingers. There was something she’d learned – some truth that she needed to

remember….

But it was gone.

Sarah pounded her hand against her pillow in frustration, and yelped as something

cold and supple slithered against her wrist. She jerked away, sitting upright and

opening her eyes.

There was a necklace lying in the bed, where it had fallen from the pillow.

Confused, Sarah picked it up, wondering if in all the confusion of yesterday she

could possibly have worn such a thing to bed.

No. This was none of her jewels. Sarah stared down at the ruby heart cradled in

her hand as understanding came to her. The Duke of Wessex had been here,

sometime while she slept, and left this.

Sarah turned the glittering prize over in her hand, and gazed at the intertwined

initials engraved upon the back. A pretty token; an opulent bribe, intended to buy her

compliant silence on the subject of his absence the night before. To buy… as if she

were a tradesman, a servant, a common prostitute walking the London streets. As if

there were no honor between them, or even duty, but only an acquiescence that must

be bought.

Sarah ground her teeth in irritation rapidly turning to fury. Wessex must not think

his dukedom a very worthy thing if that was the sort of person he was willing to have

for his Duchess. Pure furious anger swept away all the ambiguity and uncertainty of

the last several weeks and the last clinging cobwebs of her strange dream. Wessex

had offered her a mortal insult, and Sarah was going to make him very sorry that he

had.

The yellow-and-white breakfast parlor on the first floor gave one a fine view of

the bustle of the street below. The Duke of Wessex regarded it with a baleful

disinterest. The fine china cup before him held strong black coffee instead of his

usual morning chocolate; even with Atheling’s sternest measures and a great deal of

ice-cold well water, Wessex felt as brittle as the delicate cup he held.

He had cornje down to breakfast as if everything were perfectly normal; he had

greeted Grandanne (the Dowager was a notorious early riser, and her grandson was

not surprised to see her up and doing at an hour when most of Society still clung to

its bed) and told her that Sarah was still asleep. So far he had told nothing but the

truth; if the conclusions he wished his grandmother to draw were not precisely the

truth, that was merely another sin upon his far from lily-white conscience.

If the Dowager had anything to say about the lateness of Wessex’s arrival at Dyer

House or his choice of nocturnal beverage, she made no comment. The morning

light sparkled upon the linen and silver, and upon the bright spectacle of oranges

filling the colorful Export Ware bowl on the table. The Dowager placidly ate her

marmalade and toast and drank her tea as if this were any ordinary morning, and

Wessex realized that he had made yet another miscalculation in this whole disastrous

affair.

He had undertaken to enact a masquerade with the aid of an only

somewhat-willing partner; well and good. But it was borne in upon him that unlike his

many other impersonations, he had no idea of what this one entailed. How was he to

carry off before the eyes of the ton – and, a slightly more urgent question, before the

eyes of his own grandmother, a far more critical audience – the illusion of an

ordinary marriage?

He was saved from further consideration upon that head by the entrance of his

Duchess. Sarah swept into the room as regally as if she were making her bow before

Royalty, and stopped beside Grandanne’s chair to drop a kiss upon the Dowager’s

cheek.

„Good morning, my dear. How radiant you look,“ the Dowager said placidly.

„Thank you, Godmama,“ Sarah answered.

She was dressed in a pale pink morning robe trimmed with ribbons of darker

pink, and the Heart of Flame was a vivid blaze about the base of her throat. She

looked across the table to Wessex, who had stood when she entered the room.

„Rupert,“ Sarah said calmly.

Of course she had every right to use his Christian name – they were more than

mere acquaintance, they were married – but Wessex found himself slightly nettled by

her cool assumption of her new status. However, he bowed over her hand in the

fashion that had charmed countesses and courtesans in half the capitals of Europe,

and conducted her to her seat.

„I trust you slept well?“ the Dowager asked, as a footman stepped forward from

his post beside the door to pour tea for Sarah. „Sometimes it is difficult to do so in

a strange house.“

Sarah smiled at Wessex, color rising in her cheeks, and raised her cup to her lips.

„I slept entirely well,“ she said.

The ring that held the device of the Boscobel League glimmered upon Sarah’s

finger, made to fit by a plug of beeswax inserted between the finger and the band.

Gazing at his new-wed bride, Wessex felt himself relax. She had agreed to his terms,

then, and would help him play out the game. Married by the King’s command, theirs

would be a marriage blanc, with no sordid tangle of bodies or passions to mar it.

Sarah would have a Duke’s ransom in jewels.

But no Duke.

Chapter 13

A Singular Duchess

It was exceedingly fortunate, the Duchess of Wessex told herself on a fine June

morning precisely one week after her wedding day, that her husband had been called

from Town on Royal business of the most urgent. Fortunate because if he were not

there to see it, he was not there to rebuke her for removing back to the comfort and

familiarity of her own home – fortunate, too, that his absence carried with it a

ready-made justification for such a move that even the highest sticklers must accept.

The move back into her own house gave her a breathing space while she

considered how she was now to manage her life. For King Henry and the

still-unknown Princess Stephanie of Denmark’s sake, Sarah must present the world

with the illusion of a happy marriage. And that meant that she must see Wessex

every day. They must live in the same house.

But not yet, Sarah told herself with craven relief. Her husband was off to the fen

country, and she was left in Town, to sample the delights of being Wessex’s

Duchess without suffering the inconvenient presence of the Duke.

Those delights were both powerful and pervasive, but Sarah possessed a sense of

standing apart from the pleasures of Society. Others might desire these things, but

she did not.

The puzzled looks of her servants and of her acquaintance told Sarah how very

much she had changed from the Marchioness of Roxbury that they had known. But

she was not that woman, and in her troubled, restless nights, Sarah wondered if she

ever had been. Only Mooncoign seemed real, and not the ritual and the pomp that

surrounded it – and certainly not this London life of endless revelry.

At least she had made one true friend in her time here. And Sarah had discovered,

to her delight, that a ducal coronet seemed to carry enough weight with Meriel's

wicked uncle to overcome his prohibition against Mend’s going forth into any form

of society whatever – for Miss Bulleyn had been granted permission to call upon the

Duchess of Wessex today to drink tea.