“His grace’s family from generations back,” Mrs. Laycock said. “You would need the master himself to explain it all to you, Miss Hamilton. There is nothing about Willoughby that he does not know.”
Fleur identified a Holbein, a Van Dyck, a Reynolds. It must be wonderful, she thought, to have such a line of ancestors to picture in one’s mind. The Duke of Ridgeway, Mrs. Laycock told her, was the eighth duke of his line.
“We are all waiting for an heir,” she said, her voice turning a little stiff. “But so far there has been only Lady Pamela.”
The offices and most of the guest rooms were behind the long gallery, Fleur was told, though she was not taken there.
The great saloon was on the central axis behind the hall, two stories high, its wall hangings of crimson Utrecht velvet, the heavy furniture arranged neatly around the perimeter of the room upholstered in the same material. The great pedimented doorcases and the cornice and mantel were gilded, the ceiling painted with a scene from some mythological battle that Mrs. Laycock could not identify. Large landscape paintings in heavy frames hung on the walls.
The dining room, the drawing room, the library, other rooms, and the private family apartments were in the other wing, the one that balanced the gallery wing.
Fleur was awed by it all. She had grown up in a grand house. Indeed her father had been its owner until his death in an inn fire with her mother when Fleur was eight years old. Both the house and his title had passed to his cousin, Matthew’s father, and she had become a mere ward of the master, kindly though carelessly treated by him, unwanted and resented by his wife and daughter, ignored by Matthew until recent years.
But Heron House was not one of the great showpieces of England. Willoughby Hall evidently was. And despite her regret over the lost dream of a cozy manor and a small family group, she felt excited. She was to live in this magnificent mansion. She was to be a part of its busy life, responsible for the education of the duke and duchess’s young daughter.
Good fortune was to be with her, after all, it seemed. Perhaps she was to have a small glimpse of heaven to balance her other recent experiences.
“I would take you walking in the park,” the housekeeper said, “but I can see that you are weary, Miss Hamilton. You must go upstairs and rest for a while. Perhaps her grace will wish to speak with you later and perhaps you will be expected to become acquainted with Lady Pamela.”
Fleur retired gratefully to her room. She was feeling somewhat overwhelmed by it all—by the events of the past two months, by the great good fortune of finding such a post when she had not been to that employment agency for a week, by the unexpected discovery that the post was no ordinary one at all. The journey had been long and exhausting.
And she had just that morning had one of her great fears put to rest—she was not with child.
Altogether, she thought, sitting by the window of her room, enjoying the peaceful scene outside and the gentle breeze that lifted the curtains and fanned her cheeks, she was far more well blessed than she could have expected to be just two months before.
She might have hanged. She might still hang. But she would not think of it. Today her new life had begun, and she was going to be happier than she had been at any other time in her life—since the age of eight.
She removed her dress, folded it neatly over the back of a chair, and lay down on top of the bedcovers in her chemise. How different from her room in London, she thought again, looking up to a silk-covered canopy over the bed, and looking about at neatness and cleanliness and hearing nothing but silence about her, except for the distant chirping of birds.
She closed her eyes to float on blissful drowsiness. And saw him again—his face dark and angular and harsh, the scar a livid slash across it from the corner of his eye to his chin. Bending over her, his dark cold eyes looking directly into hers.
His hands on her, first between her thighs and at the most secret place and then beneath her. And that other part of him searing its red-hot and relentless path into her very depths. She could feel it tearing her apart.
“Whore,” he said to her. “Don’t think ever again to escape that label. You are a whore now and will be for the rest of your life, no matter how far or fast you run.”
“No.” She shook her head from side to side on the bed, braced her feet more firmly on the floor, tried to pull back against his powerful hands so that he would not push so deeply into her. “No.”
“This is not rape,” he said. “You have sold yourself to me of your own free will. You are going to take my money.”
“Because I am starving,” she said, pleading with him. “Because I have not eaten for two days. Because I must survive.”