For Love of the Duke(77)

A parlor.

She wrinkled her nose. A rather garishly gold parlor.

Her gaze landed upon the maid who polished a small porcelain figurine. The maid gulped and fell into a deep curtsy. “Your Grace,” she said softly.

“I’m sorry,” Katherine blurted.

The young maid cocked her head, frozen in the dip of her curtsy. “Your Grace?”

Katherine waved her hand. “For…for…being unpleasant. It was not my intention.” The girl angled her head further. “To be unpleasant, that is.”

The maid’s mouth fell open wide, like the trout she and Aldora used to fish from father’s well-stocked lakes. Well, his one-time well-stocked lakes. The fish were one of the first items to go upon Father’s gambling debts.

“Have a good day…?”

“Mary,” the young woman blurted. “My name is Mary.”

A perfectly suitable Christmastide name. An unspoken reminder that this was a joyous time of year; a time of beginnings and hope and birth. “It is a lovely name,” she said with a smile.

The maid beamed. “Why, thank you, Your Grace,”

“Lady Katherine,” she corrected. If she wasn’t to receive guests and her family was not welcomed, then the friendship of a maid would be welcome.

“Oh, I couldn’t,” the maid held her hands up in shocked protest.

“Of course you can. It’s merely a name,” and I’m hardly a wife, in the true sense. Why with just a slip of paper, an unconsummated marriage could be annulled. Not so very easily, but still, it could be severed, and… “Of course you can,” Katherine said again.

Mary smiled, and curtsied again.

“Good day, Mary.”

“Good day, Your…Lady Katherine.” Katherine turned and took her leave, and continued to make her quiet path through the house, this time less fury to her footsteps.

She ran her fingers over the wallpaper, done in dressed stone, a somber, dark remodeling done at some point to match the foreboding darkness of Castle Blackwood. Katherine paused in the corridor and traced the fabric fauxed to look like stone. How very real it seemed, how very much like the thick blocks that were used to construct this castle many, many years past. And yet…she layered her palm to the wall, aware the texture of the smooth fabric was at odds with the image presented to those who walked by these walls.

From the corner of her eye, she detected the white sheet draped across a door.

Then, no one passed through these halls.

There are to be no guests.

Katherine removed her hand from the fabric and hugged her arms to her chest. No one had visited this castle since her husband shut himself away from the world and ordered draperies hung upon doors and over objects reminding him of all he’d lost.

Suddenly, a vicious, potent loathing of that wholly pure white sheet filled her. She’d be glad to never see a reminder of the color white.

Her feet carried her onward, toward the drapery. Katherine tilted her neck back and stared up at the covering. She grasped it between her fingers and tugged it free. It danced down in heavy, noisy flutters, unleashing a soft breeze.

Katherine glanced around, but the corridor remained eerily silent. Who would be here after all? Certainly not Jasper, who’d not come after her. And why should he? Katherine was nothing to him.

Nothing at all.

With a stony set to her lips, she pressed the handle, half expecting it to be locked. The door opened and she stepped inside.

An ivory silk wallpaper striped in thick gold bands lined the portrait room. Katherine hesitated, but an enigmatic pull lured her deeper into the generous space.

With a slowness of step, Katherine moved down the row of lords and ladies and children forever memorialized within these hallowed walls. Paintings of long ago, of ladies in modest, somber tunics, and gentleman with thick, well-trimmed beards and serious frowns.

Katherine paused beside a portrait of a stunning couple with a small boy at their feet. The brittle set to the woman’s red lips bespoke of anything but happiness. One of her hands rested upon the sleeve of a familiar-looking, great big bear of a man with a broad nose and blackness in his emerald green eyes. The gentleman’s hand lay possessively upon the shoulder of a somber, angry-looking boy. Katherine stepped closer. Oh, God. Her heart tugged, and she focused on the boy’s young, but harshly noble, features.

Jasper and his parents.

My parents were cold, selfish individuals. It was a match based on their mutually distinguished positions in Society.

She shivered, and the cold inside had little to do with the chill of the dark, closed-off room and everything to do with Jasper’s miserable childhood.

Katherine’s father had left her family in financial ruin. He’d left them desolate and seen them stripped of all their worldly possessions. As a young girl, she’d known the cloying fear of their desperate circumstances. But never once had there been a shortage of love in their oftentimes noisy, usually chaotic, household. Katherine shared a bond with her twin sister Anne, and a deep love for Aldora and her young brother Benedict. Even Mother with her social aspirations for her children had shown affection toward her daughters and son through the years.