The Devil’s Due by Boucher, Rita (free reads txt) 📗

a son; I suppose all men do,” she said, giving voice to a long-held realization. “But there was only me. Mamma was scandalized, of course, but there was no denying Papa when he had the bit between his teeth. He taught me to hunt, to shoot, to ride and to know when the cards are marked.”

“All the essential skills for a young gentleman,” Duncan remarked.

“Aye, I suppose so.”

Despite the dark, Duncan could envision her self-deprecating smile from her tone.

“To be fair, Mamma did her best. She and Daisy both tried to make me a lady as well. But it was an unfair competition. Fine needlework and furbelows cannot compare with handling the ribbons of two high-steppers and a phaeton. And skirts and sidesaddle are a blamed nuisance, if one wishes to keep pace with the hounds. But I did try to be a lady, for their sakes.”

“And succeeded,” Duncan noted. “You achieved the ultimate objective, marriage to a well-born man, a family. . . What went wrong, Kate?” At that question, he heard her draw a sharp breath. Clearly she did not wish to talk about that part of her past. But even though he had found the lever that would move her, that would get rid of her, he did not want her to go. “You need not name names,” he told her. “Give me no clues. Surely you realize that if I really wished to, I have enough information to find out who you truly are. How many women have an abigail named Daisy and a child of six or seven who is as silent as a doorpost. You are obviously genteel, you hated Almack’s and are not overly fond of Prinny. When we add the facts that you are the oddly indulged child of an army officer, raised as a daughter of the regiment, I am sure that it would take but a wee bit of investigation to uncover your real name.”

She gasped and he cursed the whiskey for loosening his tongue. He had frightened her. “I won’t Kate, I swear. I won’t seek out what you are unwilling to tell me. I just want to understand. All considered, is that too much to ask?”

He felt a mixture of regret and relief when she turned away.

“I was a failure.”

Her voice was faint, almost a whisper.

“My husband thought himself grievously deceived, to marry a woman whom he expected to be the epitome of femininity and find himself leg-shackled to a hoyden.”

She stopped for a moment, framing her words carefully before she went on. “When I found myself increasing, he was monstrously relieved. My father was his superior officer and it was just the excuse that my husband had been seeking to ship me back to England, you see.” She could hear no reaction from him. Marcus had not spoken of her, of that she was almost certain. Her late husband had told her often enough that she was less than a source of pride to him. “I was hidden away in the country to whelp. Yet another disappointment.”

If it had not been for the darkness, he might have taken her words at their surface value, given the detached tone of Kate’s voice and the fact that her countenance was hidden from him. But he was listening carefully, weighing every nuance and there was no mistaking the pain beneath her deliberate nonchalance. “I take it he had hoped for a boy?”

“As did my own father. What man does not wish for a son to succeed him,” Kate said, omitting the fact that Anne could inherit her father’s title in her own right. There were so few exceptions to the rule of male heirs. It would be almost tantamount to revealing that it was Marcus Denton, Lord Steele that she spoke of. “Perhaps we could have made things right, if there had been time. I was very young, full of childish expectations. If I had tried a bit harder, perhaps-”

“Ah, poor Galatea,” Duncan murmured, “you blame yourself.”

“If I had done different, we would not be at this sorry pass. If we-”

“If, if, if,” Duncan mocked. “‘If wishes were horses then beggars would ride,’ my old nurse would say. What is the use of dwelling on ‘if’? There is no certainty that you could have changed your husband’s attitudes. Even if you had made yourself into the perfect statue of a spouse that he so obviously desired, what would have been the cost to you, Kate? Would you have so willingly destroyed everything that you are?”

He rose, taking a step towards her, but halting just short of reach. “You would have died by inches, woman, a part of you perishing with every insipid afternoon call, every banal ball, and every commonplace remark. The words that you really wanted to say would stick in your craw and choke you. Your cogitations would crowd your mind until it was fit to burst, but you could never give your boiling thoughts voice for fear of angering Pygmalion.”

Duncan’s hand lifted to touch that shining fall of chestnut flame but he recalled himself. “The fool thought that you were his creation, he saw only that beautiful shell, that silken marble skin that can be found in a heart of stone by any sculptor of skill. But it was not he who gave life to you, Galatea, it was the gods. You were blessed in bow and saddle by Diana, the huntress; given understanding by Athena, the wise; and it was Aphrodite herself who granted you the capacity for love. For a statue cannot love, Galatea and heaven knows that the assembly halls of London are filled with walking statues.”

He could see the shimmer of her robe. She was shaking and when she turned round to face him once more, he could see the silvered trail of tears on her cheek. “Do not live in ‘ifs,’ Kate,” Duncan told her. “Else you will make your life a hell. I know.”

It was all he could do to