Prickles of heat and ice were running over Selina’s body. It had never been more difficult to maintain her composure. Across the table, Anthea was watching her curiously. Selina touched her cheek and found it flaming hot.
“Are you well, Selina?” asked Anthea, leaning forwards to whisper it so that no one else heard.
“Please excuse me,” she said, rising from her seat without a further thought for decorum. “The heat.”
In fact, the day was remarkably cold, but nobody objected when Selina hurried from the room. She stumbled upstairs to the cosy chambers she and Anthea had taken for the nights of the election and, alone at last, gulped in air as though she had just surfaced from a raging torrent.
Malcolm was a flirt. Insubstantial. Fleeting. His constant silly quips about the vacancy for a Duchess of Caversham had never meant anything. Yes, he had proposed to her recently, but that was to assure his victory in the election. Any affection he felt for her was a recent development. Nothing serious. Nothing deep.
Selina clutched at the bed post and lowered herself carefully onto the soft mattress. There was no help for it. She no longer believed a word of her old assumptions about the duke. She had not believed them since the night he first kissed her. No, since before that. She’d told him a secret she’d never breathed to anyone else over a game of piquet, hadn’t she? She’d returned his letter unread because she knew what it would say. She’d given him a brush-off at the ambassador’s ball far colder than any man deserved. It hadn’t seemed out of the ordinary then. It was the same way she’d treated him for years.
How many of those years had he spent secretly longing for her, unable to admit it – not to her, and certainly not to himself?
What a tragic waste of a good man’s heart.
Outside, a steady, grey rain was falling. The view over Twynham’s rooftops blurred and distorted, its shades of dull slate all running together.
Malcom had never felt further away than he did now.
18
“Damn and blast!”
Malcolm was amazed to find that the words had not exploded from his own lips. His coachman’s face, when it emerged from beneath the body of the phaeton, was red with embarrassment.
“Forgive my language, Your Grace. It’s the axle. It’s completely torn in half. I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do without –”
“Without a master who is smart enough not to drive his own carriage into ditches. Or, at the very least, one who doesn’t neglect overseeing the repairs in favour of an extra hour with a lady who despises him. Is that it?”
The coachman gaped. “I – I’m sorry, Your Grace?”
Malcolm removed his glove and wiped his hand across the sweat beading on his brow. The air had grown muggy, despite the season, and there was a metallic tang on the wind that only ever heralded a storm. “It’s not your fault, Higgins,” he said. “I broke the phaeton at Lady Aldershot’s, and I failed to check that it was sturdy enough to bear another journey. I drove like the wind while you clung on behind.” He slapped his glove absent-mindedly against his leg, looking down the long road until it disappeared over the brow of a hill, Twynham still out of sight. The grey misery of the skies seemed rather appropriate. “It’s all my own fault.”
“I’ve made the carriage secure, at least,” said the coachman. “Please step inside, Your Grace, and wait under the hood while I go to fetch help.”
A spot of rain landed on Malcolm’s nose, cold and sharp, and woke him from his self-recrimination. “No, Higgins. That won’t do at all.” He narrowed his eyes at the brow of that inauspicious hill. “How far are we from Twynham, do you suppose?”
“At least five miles, Your Grace. I’ll be back with help before dark.”
“No, no.” Malcolm eyed up the horses, a matched pair of greys, lively and full of temper. Precisely the sort of horses which made a man proud as he careened about town. Distinctly not the sort of horses that a man wanted to ride bareback, in kerseymere trousers.
Higgins was unfurling the umbrella. “Please, Your Grace, I’m sure you’ll be more comfortable inside the carriage.”
Malcolm held up a hand, stopping Higgins with the umbrella awkwardly half-open. The duke removed his hat and tucked it under his arm.
A steady rain was falling now, barely more than mist, cold as an icicle and light as a kiss. He turned his face towards it and bore the shudder that ran down his spine without as much as a murmur.
“Get into the carriage, Higgins,” he said. “There’s a pistol under the seat which you can use to keep footpads away. I’ll send someone up to you presently.”
Before the coachman could protest again, before he could change his mind, and just as the skies opened and the storm began in earnest, Malcolm was running along the Twynham road.
“Selina?” Anthea’s smile was kind and brisk, as though determined not to mention her sister’s wan expression. “It’s time.”
Selina sighed and rubbed her temples. “Forgive me, Anthea. I must have been half-asleep. I’m ready.”
There would be no joy in witnessing the inevitable outcome of the Twynham election, but Selina was determined to see it through to the end.
“We don’t have to go,” said Anthea, as Selina stopped to run a hand over her coiled curls in the mirror. “It’s raining hard enough that nobody will expect us.”
Selina straightened her shoulders. She looked a little paler than she would have liked, but there was no helping that. Everything else was in place, from the gauze of her fichu to the single dark lock of hair tucked behind each ear.
“I expect it of us,” she said. The usual iron was back in her tone. Anthea smiled in recognition.
“Then of course we’ll go.”
They joined Mr and Mrs Forrester, Lord Louis, and the rest of their party at the door of the inn. A maidservant
