The Marquess Who Loved Me

Chapter SIXTEEN


With every aspect of Nick’s arrival — from how he’d loved her the night before to the danger he now faced, plus all the uncertainty she felt toward him — Ellie was in no mood to trouble herself with her guests. After leaving the study with the contract they’d both signed, she evaded everyone during the breakfast hour.

She couldn’t be fully alone. For one, she needed to settle the menus with her housekeeper, which she did over tea in her salon. She couldn’t avoid her guests for a second full day, though. They would speculate that she was avoiding Nick. And that wasn’t a rumor she wanted to start.

But Ellie knew how to manage them. Give a group something unexpected and no one noticed anything but the spectacle.

“Are you ready, Maria?” she asked her younger half-sister.

Maria nodded. She lifted the bow and fitted the arrow against the string.

“A shilling says you can’t hit the target,” Maria’s twin, Kate, said behind them.

“Two shillings say you can’t do better,” Maria retorted, taking aim.

She let the arrow fly. It sailed down the portrait gallery, past all the generations of Claibornes who would be horrified to see such reckless hoydens in their house. The arrow hit the target with a satisfying thud, lodging halfway between the edge of the target and the red circle at its center.

The guests assembled behind Maria clapped. Sir Percival Pickett, perhaps the most eccentric of Ellie’s guests, was particularly effusive. “Brava, Lady Maria!” he exclaimed. “I vow a Grecian goddess couldn’t have done better.”

“She didn’t hit the center,” Kate scoffed, taking the bow from her sister. “It would be a poor goddess who couldn’t do that.”

She stepped up, took an arrow from the waiting footman, and fired. Where Maria had missed left, Kate missed right — by exactly the same amount, according to the servant they sent down the gallery to measure it.

The ribbing continued, good-naturedly, as Kate promised Maria three shillings out of her pin money. Ferguson teased that he would cut off their allowances for gambling. Sebastian Staunton offered them lessons — an offer that made the twins glow and Ferguson glower. Sir Percy stared off into space, no doubt casting the twins as heroines in his next epic poem.

Ellie smiled. The snows had finally stopped, but they’d received nearly seven inches the previous night. Setting up an archery contest in the portrait gallery when they couldn’t be outdoors had been inspired. Her younger guests were enthused. Her older guests were equal parts charmed and titillated. Archery was one of the few sports open to women, and something that both sexes could enjoy together. It was only the indoor nature of their contest that any gossips might find shocking, and they would have to be the utmost prudes to condemn her for it.

The long, narrow gallery on the floor above the ballroom was perfect for shooting, especially with a footman stationed on the other side of the far door to prevent accidental entry. And if a wayward arrow hit a painting or a window — well, it was Nick’s house, not hers.

Madeleine stepped up to the line they’d agreed to shoot from. Ferguson stood close behind her — whether to give his duchess pointers or to look down the bodice of her gown was unclear. Ellie ignored them and waved the twins over to a quiet alcove near the door.

“Are you enjoying yourselves?” she asked.

“Of course,” Kate said, as though the question was too obvious to be asked.

“Especially when I am winning,” Maria added.

Ellie couldn’t help but smile. The twins had seemed like a single unit the year before, when they had lived with their father and never saw anyone but each other. But since they’d come out into Society and moved in with Ferguson and Madeleine, they had become individuals — still close, but more likely to compete with each other than to unite against the world.

Kate wouldn’t concede defeat. “You aren’t a better shot, Maria, just a better gambler. And there are still other games to be won.”

Their eyes slid simultaneously to Sebastian, who had lost interest in the archery and was looking out the high, narrow windows to the snow-covered lawn. He had lighter brown hair than his brother Alex, with appealing brown eyes in a face tanned by the Caribbean sun. Why he was still in England, Ellie didn’t know. He had a plantation in Bermuda, but had been in England since November — the longest time he’d spent on this side of the Atlantic in years.

“Be careful, my dears,” Ellie said in a low voice. “If you catch a man like that, you won’t know what to do with him.”

“I have some ideas,” Maria whispered.

Kate giggled as Ellie sighed. “Why the concern, Ellie?” Kate asked. “We are merely flirting. By the time you were our age, you were already married, widowed, and well on your way to bedding half the ton.”

“It wasn’t half the ton,” Ellie protested with a laugh. “Whoever told you that was mistaken.”

“Father did tend to exaggerate when he was angry,” Kate said, pausing to clap too enthusiastically when Madeleine hit the wainscoting behind the target. “But still, you can’t begrudge us a bit of excitement after all the years he kept us locked away.”

Ellie didn’t begrudge them. She’d only taken four lovers since her marriage — not the regiment her father had assumed, although she’d worked hard to cultivate her dissolute reputation to keep him from setting her up with another husband. And she hadn’t regretted them — they were all rakes with secret sweet sides who kept their own counsel and expected nothing from her. None of them had equaled Nick — but then, she hadn’t been looking for love.

She wanted her sisters to find love, though. They’d had little enough of it, raised by their tyrannical father; at one-and-twenty, it was past time for them to have some happiness. “Don’t sell yourselves too cheaply,” she warned. “There are good men in the ton if you are patient enough to find them.”

The twins gave noncommittal nods, then wandered toward Sebastian as though they shared a single mind. Ellie sighed again. They were smart enough — and Sebastian elusive enough — that none of them were in any danger.

But she would rather see them make safe, happy matches than play the game she’d entered with Nick.

Madeleine gave up her bow with a laugh after hitting the wainscoting a second time and joined Ellie by the wall. “If Ferguson ever upsets me, remind me not to shoot him,” Madeleine said. “I’m more likely to injure myself than him.”

“You should take lessons,” Ellie said. “Your cousin seems eager to give them.”

Madeleine wrinkled her nose in Sebastian’s direction. “He’s even more of a rogue than he was the last time he came home. I hope your sisters know he’s not the marrying kind.”

Ellie’s reply was interrupted when Lucia slipped into the gallery. She held a small slip of paper and wore a grim expression. Ellie raised an eyebrow at her in silent question.

Lucia shook her head.

Damn. Ellie had tasked Lucia with adding up the original value of Ellie’s collection from all the ledgers of her acquisitions. She took the paper and read the note like it was a prison sentence.

Nineteen thousand, two hundred and twenty three pounds, six shillings, and four pence.

Her stomach twisted. She might be able to sell most of it. But she couldn’t sell everything. Some pieces would bring more than she had paid, but some were already out of fashion. Her Chinese collection, for example, was not entirely en vogue. If she sold every painting, every sculpture, every scrap of wall hanging, she couldn’t possibly pay Nick in full. All she could do was shorten the length of their arrangement.

And unless she wanted to auction it all publicly — and humiliate herself in the process — it might take months to sell everything.

Ellie didn’t have months. She wasn’t even sure she had minutes. She had always thought she knew her own heart, but last night’s passion and this morning’s regret had surprised her.

Somehow, while she had worked so hard to reforge herself into a woman with no weaknesses, she had made a critical error. Her heart, guarded and locked and left unexamined in the dark, hadn’t healed during its decade of solitude.

It had festered.

The face she showed the world was a dressing expertly applied over her wounds. Her heart, though, couldn’t bear to be touched. Stripping away even a bit of the covering, as Nick had done the previous night — as he would likely do again that night, and every night after that until she repaid him or killed him — caused her unbearable pain.

She recognized the pain. She had sometimes let herself feel it on those rare occasions when her painting drew from the deep well of her heart. She could let the blood flow into her painting without thinking about where it came from or what monsters waited beneath it, then shut it off when she was done making art. But shutting it off wasn’t the same as healing it.

The only way to heal a wound was to examine it, clean it, and keep treating it until no hint of infection remained. But Ellie, who was so good at examining others, couldn’t do the same to herself.

She hated herself for her cowardice. But there weren’t enough opiates or stimulants or lovers or parties in the world to make bearable the pain of really, truly looking at her feelings for Nick.

So she wouldn’t look. The infection would kill her someday. But if she looked, and found that she really still loved him, and he wouldn’t forgive her…

Ellie crumpled the paper and returned it to Lucia, who understood the dismissal implicit in the gesture. Her maid left as quietly as she’d entered. But Madeleine still stood next to her, and she wouldn’t be put off so easily. “Is anything amiss?” she asked.

Ellie turned resolutely toward the archers. Percy Pickett was up next. “Merely some estate business. You should watch Sir Percival shoot. You wouldn’t believe it from his attempts at poetry, but he’s quite the archer.”

Madeleine paused while Percy shot, but she used the stunned, raucous applause of the audience to cover her next words. “I hope you know that you’re welcome to stay at Rothwell House as long as you like. I don’t know what will happen between you and Lord Folkestone, but you will always have a home with us.”

If Ellie moved to Rothwell House, Madeleine would be so sisterly, so smothering in her generosity. Ferguson would try to protect her, even from herself.

Ellie wouldn’t last a fortnight without wanting to stab them both.

“Thank you, but there’s no need for that,” Ellie said. “I can manage quite well on my own.”

Madeleine paused. There was a strange quality to her silence, as though she was taking aim with just as much solemn consideration as Percy did for his second shot. When he let his arrow fly, she spoke. “That’s what I’m afraid of. You don’t have to manage this alone, you know.”

Ellie applauded Percy’s shot, not looking at her sister-in-law. “Don’t worry about me. I vow I’m not in trouble.”

Why didn’t Madeleine heed the warning in Ellie’s voice? Why, when she heard Madeleine draw a breath, did Ellie feel some swift, ugly kick of rage — the rage of a caged, brutalized animal, ready to bite the first hand that might offer it rescue?

But Madeleine had never seen the beast lurking in Ellie’s heart. “Ferguson and I saw you last night, quite late. I know it’s indelicate to mention, but you seemed upset.”

Upset was such a small word for what she’d felt. She hadn’t gone directly to her room from her studio. She had wandered instead, through the disused rooms and darkened halls that she’d never wanted and yet now would miss tremendously. Only something like anger, or grief, or self-loathing, could have kept her from noticing her brother and his wife in whatever alcove they’d secreted themselves in.

Her lips curled over her teeth. “I thought I was clear that this isn’t a bacchanal, Duchess. You should have been abed.”

Madeleine’s shrug would have been at home at Versailles. “If the marquess evicts you and you can never host us here again, we’re keen to explore all its dark corners while we still have the chance. Was it Folkestone who made you so upset? Say the word and Ferguson will take care of it.”

“Will he?” Ellie asked. Her voice dropped and her eyes narrowed as she turned on Madeleine. “The way he took care of himself by abandoning me years ago? Or the way Father took care of Nick? Ferguson will turn into our father, I’m sure — he may as well start by threatening anyone who comes near me. Or will he take care of it by compromising Nick as he compromised you? That would be deucedly awkward, not to mention illegal.”

Through the dark, red-flecked tunnel that had become her vision, she saw Madeleine’s face turn from confused to hurt to furious. Sweet, perfect Madeleine and her sweet, perfect vision of love. Ellie wanted to keep going, keep slicing, until Madeleine left her alone. And then she would burn the house, flee for the Continent, and seek oblivion among people who didn’t know her and wouldn’t pity her.

But it wasn’t Madeleine’s fault that she was happy where Ellie was not. And Ellie had never lost control of herself like that before.

Ellie drew a deep, shuddering breath, raw and rasping, glad her anger had been covered by the crowd congratulating Percy on two perfect shots. “I apologize, your grace,” she said, when some of the red had faded to grey. “That was poorly done of me. I appreciate your offer, but I do not require help.”

Madeleine looked like she wanted to argue, but Ellie’s outburst had shattered her innocence. She sounded wary when she said, “Very well. Just…don’t forget we exist if you need us.”

That was like asking a soldier not to forget that other people were unharmed when he, in a moment of terrible luck, had lost a leg. Madeleine meant to be kind — was kind — but Ellie, in all her unfamiliar pain, couldn’t accept it.

Still, there was no sense insulting her again. So Ellie put on her best smile, nodded, and shifted the conversation to a discussion of which amusements to pursue that evening.

And while they talked, she breathed. She let the pain go with every exhale. She used every inhale to rebuild her shields. If she couldn’t heal her heart, she could at least ensure that no one — not her friends, not Nick, and certainly not herself — could touch it again.