“Looking for you?” Lord Brocklehurst asked, turning back to Fleur and removing his hand. “He is something of a watchdog for you, is he not, Isabella? Rather strange for a duke with a lowly governess, wouldn’t you say? Do you grant him what you deny me? Have a care if you do. If I find it to be true, you will hang by the neck until you are dead. You have my promise on it.”
“Words of love indeed,” she said.
He kissed her fiercely, cutting the inner flesh of her mouth against her teeth.
“Words of a jealous and frustrated lover,” he said. “I love you, Isabella.”
She would have gone to her room when he finally brought her down from the gallery. Her mouth felt swollen, her hair disheveled. She felt dirty. But he had a hand on her elbow. And she had agreed to play at a dance for the evening, however long the evening lasted.
She was relieved to find on her return to the drawing room that Mr. Walter Penny hailed her with some eagerness. He wished to dance with a reluctant Miss Dobbin.
Fleur seated herself at the pianoforte and resumed her playing. She wondered just how late it was. It felt as if dawn must surely be lighting the windows. But it was not.
THE DANCING HAD BEEN A GOOD IDEA, THE DUKE of Ridgeway thought. Most of the guests appeared to be enjoying themselves, and it was certainly preferable to another evening of charades. The music was lively. Miss Dobbin was competent and Fleur Hamilton good. And the latter had not seemed to resent at all being asked to play.
It would have been a good evening if everyone had stayed in the drawing room to enjoy the dancing and one another’s company. But as always seemed to happen during balls and dances, however informal, couples inevitably disappeared.
He would not worry his head over Mayberry’s having withdrawn with Mrs. Grantsham, though it angered him that people could behave with such impropriety in other people’s homes and under the knowing eyes of other people’s servants. But he would worry about Sybil and Thomas, and about Fleur and Brocklehurst too.
Sybil and Thomas had been gone for half an hour. And he was torn between the desire to stay in the drawing room to talk and smile with his guests and dance with the ladies and his need to pursue them and bring them back before gossip settled irrevocably about them.
But perhaps that had already happened. They were certainly making no great secret of their preference for each other. And was that his chief concern—gossip? Was he willing to watch all the signs of the resumption of an affair between his wife and his brother provided they were discreet?
And then Fleur Hamilton left the room with Brocklehurst, and his mental battle was intensified. He had promised her that she was safe on his property and under his protection. But was she being harassed? She had been smiling when she left the room, and there had been no evidence that she was being coerced. Perhaps she was glorying in the chance of mingling with the company, dancing with one of them, being singled out for even more marked attention.
But there had been her terror the first evening she had set eyes on Brocklehurst. There was the fact that both of them claimed only a slight acquaintance, and yet he had called her Isabella. There was the fact that he was the owner of Heron House and she had lived at a place called “Her—.”
He watched the gentlemen take their partners for a quadrille, made sure that no lady who appeared eager to dance was without a partner, and slipped from the room.
There was no one in the great hall. The footmen had been withdrawn for the night. And yet he heard voices as he entered it. From behind one of the pillars? From the arches leading to the staircases? He strolled about quietly, but there was no one to be seen. And the voices had ceased. Perhaps he had imagined them. The doors into the salon and the long gallery were closed.
But of course, he thought at last, standing in the middle of the hall and resisting the urge to look up. The old hiding place, which he and Thomas had used countless times as boys, lying flat to observe new arrivals, snickering over the conversations of the footmen when they had thought themselves alone, making owl noises in an attempt to frighten the same footmen.
It would be Thomas and Sybil. Should he look up? Call to them? Climb the stairs to confront them? Give them time to come down of their own accord and return to the dancing?
The confrontation would have to be made. But he would prefer to postpone it to a time when he did not have to return to entertain the guests immediately after.
And what of Fleur Hamilton and Brocklehurst? They had been in the long gallery the last time they had been together—that night with its ghastly aftermath. He crossed the hall to the gallery, opened the door, and stepped inside.
One set of candles halfway along the long gallery was lit. The room was almost in darkness, heavy shadows spreading outward from the central source of light.