A Secret Affair

“Precisely,” he told her. “I do too. Devil and duchess. We deserve each other.”

In the eyes of the world? Or … in truth?

She did not ask the questions.

“If we were not so close to the house,” he said, “I might begin on all the reasons you ought to go back home, Duchess. To Markle, that is.”

She leaned forward to pat Clover’s neck as they stopped outside the stables and a groom hurried out to assist them.

“Point taken,” she said.

Chapter 16

WATCHING HANNAH over the next hour and a half, Constantine tried to make the connection with the Duchess of Dunbarton as he had always known her, and as he had encountered her earlier in the spring in Hyde Park, at the Merriwether ball, at the Heaton concert, at the Fonteyn garden party. It was rather disorienting to discover that he could not do it. He could not see her as the same person.

It was not just that she wore a faded blue, almost shabby, riding habit. Or that her hair was dressed simply and was even slightly untidy after she removed her hat inside the house. It was not even that she donned a large white apron, which had been hanging on the back of the door in the manager’s office. It really had nothing to do with her outer appearance.

It had everything to do with the woman inside the outer shell, the woman he had not seen at all until after they became lovers and had seen only in snatched glimpses since then. At Land’s End that woman stood fully revealed, a butterfly free of its cocoon and fluttering about, beautiful, energetic, sparkling with joy and bringing that joy to all around her.

He was, quite simply, dazzled.

He was also quite alarmingly in love.

It was not upon him that her beauty and energy and joy were focused, though she did smile at him every time she looked his way and included him in the aura of her magnetic charm.

She presented him to Mrs. Broome, the manager, a lady of middle years and pleasant appearance and soft-spoken manner, and together they began a tour of the home. But it did not last for very long. An elderly man who was sitting in the residents’ drawing room caught hold of the duchess’s arm—he called her “Miss Hannah,” as they all did—and proceeded to tell her at great length about the latest exploits of his grandchildren. They were a figment of his imagination, Mrs. Broome explained as she walked onward with Constantine, leaving the duchess behind, but they brought him pleasure nonetheless and he loved to have someone willing to listen to his stories. And then two elderly ladies, who were sitting side by side in a wide upper hallway, wanted to know after they had been introduced to him if Mr. Huxtable had come with Miss Hannah—they had heard she was here. When he admitted that he had, they wanted to know if he was going to marry her. She deserved someone young and devilishly handsome like him, they both decided, and they cackled with glee when he grinned and winked at them and told them they would have to ask her that. Mrs. Broome meanwhile had been called away to deal with some emergency.

Constantine wandered alone after that, keeping mainly to the lower floor, where it seemed that most of the rooms were open for the communal use of the residents, though Mrs. Broome had explained that all had rooms of their own, where they could be private and no one could enter without first knocking and being given permission to enter. It was one of the few rules of the house.

“It is a home,” she had added. “It is not an institution, Mr. Huxtable. There are very few rules, and all have to be first suggested and then voted upon by the tenants themselves. It may sound like a recipe for chaos, and I was a little dubious when her grace insisted upon it, I must confess, but for some reason it works like a charm. People, I suppose, are less likely to break rules that have been imposed by themselves and not by some autocratic outsider.”

He stopped several times to speak to elderly people as he moved about and to a few of the employees who cared for their needs.

Hannah was still listening to the elderly gentleman with the imaginary grandchildren when he went downstairs. She was holding his hand and giving him her full, bright-eyed attention. The next time Constantine saw her, she was in the plant-filled conservatory, patiently feeding an old woman who was staring blankly ahead of her, and this time she was doing the talking, smiling and animated just as if the woman could understand and respond. And who knew? Perhaps she could understand. A little later Constantine saw Hannah on the terrace outside the conservatory, a thin old man leaning on her arm as they walked. She had her head turned toward him and was laughing. He stopped walking to look up at her, and he was laughing too.

The older one got, Constantine thought, the easier it was to believe that all lives followed their own very definite pattern, that all things happened for a reason. Not fate exactly. That took away free will and made nonsense of life. But some unseen force that drew each person toward the lesson that needed to be learned, the life that needed to be lived, the fulfillment that needed to be achieved. And perhaps ultimate happiness. The disasters of life in retrospect were often its greatest blessings.

Hannah’s heart had been broken when she was nineteen in a particularly cruel manner. She had simultaneously lost the man she loved and the future she had planned with him and her trust in her only sister. And her father had let her down, even if he had been caught in a nasty situation. And then she had married a man old enough to be her grandfather, and he had lived for ten years, until her youth had gone.

But in the process of all that, she had not only learned how to guard herself against those who would exploit or resent her beauty without ever seeing her, how to control her life rather than be at the mercy of those who would do it for her and then blame her for being so beautiful and so vulnerable. She had also discovered what was perhaps the true purpose of her life—a deep love of those weaker than herself, specifically the elderly. And that discovery had released that part of herself that might forever have remained submerged beneath her beauty and its effect upon those around her if Young had married her. It was a self, Constantine was willing to wager, that was far more warm and vibrant than the person she had been when she was betrothed to Sir Colin Young.

The past eleven years of her life had followed a definite pattern, something she could never have predicted or planned twelve years ago. Those years had not been an interval in her life, a lost youth. They had been integral to it, a well-spent youth.

It had been no coincidence that she had discovered the truth about her betrothed and her sister at that particular wedding, or that Dunbarton had attended it and escaped to the very room where she had unburdened herself to her father. It had been cosmic theater in progress. Except that only the scene had been set by the master producer. The script had not been written.

Even now, of course, she was fearful. She hid herself behind the Siren’s mask of the Duchess of Dunbarton. But that too was part of the pattern. She was still fragile. Like a person trapped in a burning building and clinging to the sill of an upper floor, she was afraid to take the final drop to the safety of the blanket being held below. She needed to be given time to do it in her own way, when she was ready.

But who was he to judge?

Besides, it would be a pity if the Duchess of Dunbarton were to disappear entirely. She was a magnificent, fascinating creature.

She was coming inside with the elderly man, Constantine could see, and she smiled warmly at him when she saw him standing there.

“Are you going to sit in the conservatory and enjoy the sunshine, Mr. Ward?” she asked.

“I am going up to my room to rest for a while,” he said. “You have exhausted me, Miss Hannah. I shall sleep and dream of you and of being a young man again like this one here.”

“Have you met Mr. Huxtable?” she asked. “He came here with me today. He is my friend.”

“Sir.” Constantine inclined his head. “May I help you to your room?”