When the Duke Returns(65)

Only to be told by the butler that His Grace had eschewed breakfast. Jemma had pretended total indifference, naturally.

Can there be anything more humiliating than living out one’s life in front of servants who are both observant and intelligent? Sometimes Jemma felt as if she were acting in a play, and she seemed to have lost her ability to dissemble. Brigitte, her maid, surely suspected. Her butler, Fowle, quite likely.

It was humiliating to hanker after one’s husband. To be dazzled by his eyes and his attention, until he suddenly withdrew it.

Perhaps Elijah has an appointment with his mistress, she told herself, just to test the pain of it. But she was no better at believing in mistresses now than she had been when they were first married. She would never, ever have thought Elijah had a mistress. She couldn’t have imagined that he rose from her bed only to welcome the woman to his chambers at noon.

Even now…

Even now she couldn’t believe it.

She stared unseeingly into her glass. Was it that she thought she was too beautiful to be scorned? The only person who had ever scorned her, so to speak, was her own husband. Perhaps the right way to put that was that the only person who had ever shown indifference was her husband.

For a moment, an image of Villiers flashed across her eyes. Her revenge was ready at hand. She needn’t watch as her husband turned from her company to the House of Lords, with as much interest as if he had selected a game of billiards over one of macao. She could turn to Villiers. All of London would know within hours of their first public appearance together.

Elijah would be humiliated and it would serve him right.

But she knew even as she envisioned it that she couldn’t—or wouldn’t—do it. Villiers was no pawn; he was a man. A dangerous man: beautiful, witty and easy to love. That was where the danger lay, in the fact she could fall in love with him.

Then her marriage would truly be over.

Somehow, it had never been over in her mind, not even when she fled to France and Elijah didn’t follow, nor the first time she found herself in bed with another man. Even when she tormented herself with remembering Elijah’s declaration of love for his mistress.

He never said he loved her, Jemma, his wife. Surely that in itself was enough to end a marriage?

The invisible bonds had grown thin over the years that she lived in France without him. Attenuated by memory and her dalliances with other men.

But they never broke.

And all those memories were fresh to her now: of their wedding, when she hardly knew him, and yet her heart thrilled at the sight of him waiting for her in St. Paul’s Cathedral. Of their wedding night, when she was so awkward and he thoughtful, if (she thought in retrospect) rather reserved. But of course he was in love with another woman. Still…

There was a habit of mind, a way of thinking and talking, that came from being married to someone. A sort of bone-deep intimacy that survives even blows such as their marriage had taken.

Love, it could be called.

Odd, fugitive, undeserved. She had done nothing to deserve his love, and she rather thought he hadn’t given it. Sometimes she thought, recently, that she saw something tender in his eyes, almost longing, but…

But somehow she had poured out her love when they first married, and there was no taking it back, no matter how she tried.

And no matter how he rebuffed her.

Perhaps…perhaps she was making a mountain from a mouse. Elijah worked too hard. He always worked too hard; that was why he had fainted in the House of Lords last year. Overwork and lack of sleep.

Perhaps he needed to be reminded that life was not work. She could…

But the idea of going to his chambers in the Inns of Court made her physically ill. She could remember what his mistress’s hair looked like, flowing over the edge of his desk. Surely he still had that desk. It was a large solid oak one, good for the weight of a sturdy woman.

It hadn’t been making a creaking sound as she entered, though he was surely thrusting with some strength…

It was all so far in the past, and yet close enough to touch.

She couldn’t go to his chambers. What if she did and there was some evidence of his current mistress, if he had one?

Or had he told her that he had no mistress these days?

She couldn’t even remember: such a crucial detail and it was gone.

Jemma rose to her feet; her letters fell to the carpet. She was not a woman, she told herself, to sit around bleating and wringing her hands. She was a person who—

Who went and got a man if she wished.

She wasn’t a mere lass anymore. If she wanted to see her husband, she would do so. And of course she would have his clerks properly announce her, so that in the remote chance he was entertaining a woman, he could bundle her out the back door.