The Truth About Dukes (Rogues to Riches #5) - Grace Burrowes Page 0,2
could not—the time and the place were wrong.
Constance could drop French phrases into her conversation in a proper Parisian accent. Robert’s French was that of Provence, and he hadn’t realized there was a difference until Nathaniel had asked him about his odd inflections.
“What shall you have to eat?” Constance asked. Lady Constance.
The buffet presented another ordeal, for Robert’s palate was quite particular. “I favor fresh fruit and cheese, a bit of bread and butter. Meat served without sauces.” Peasant fare, oddly enough, was the best diet for minimizing the effects of his illness.
“That appeals to me as well.” She had them through the line a few moments later, their plates only half full. “Come with me,” she said, leading him into a side passage. “I cannot abide to eat in a crowd. I am afraid somebody will steal my food.”
Her comment reassured him that she was still the same blunt, self-possessed, make-no-apologies female he’d met years ago.
“Are you tempted to steal food that belongs to others, my lady?”
“Not anymore.” She opened a door and preceded him into a cozy parlor. “My sister won’t mind us using her private sitting room when the alternative would be to make a scene before the neighbors.”
Robert set the plates on a writing desk angled near the window. “My grasp of proper manners is shaky at best, but should we be alone here?”
“You are safe with me, Your Grace.”
“But are you safe from the Mrs. Weatherbys and Lady Phoebes?” he asked, naming the most malicious of the neighborhood gossips.
Constance closed and locked the door, then pulled the draperies shut. “We are safe from them. They are all too busy gawking at Althea and Lord Nathaniel.”
“Did you close the drapes out of concern for our privacy or out of consideration for my peculiarities?” In either case, Robert was grateful. Constance was thinking clearly, while he was nearly overwhelmed with the need to be back at Rothhaven Hall.
“Both. Let’s eat, and then you will answer my questions.”
He owed her that. “Will you answer some questions for me as well?”
“Perhaps.” Her ladyship took a seat at the desk, handling her skirts as gracefully as a princess managed her ermine robes. She set about applying butter to her bread, her hands competent and mannish.
Robert adored her hands. He’d missed much about her, especially her hands. She still wore no rings, not that such details mattered to a man longing for another five years of relative solitude.
“What questions have you, my lady?”
“Eat first, Your Grace.”
Robert wasn’t hungry, or didn’t think he was hungry. His minders at Dr. Soames’s establishment had controlled everything he’d eaten for years, and he’d learned to separate himself from bodily appetites. Then five years ago, Nathaniel had fetched him home to Rothhaven Hall, where the kitchen’s efforts were so indifferent that food remained a means to an end rather than a pleasure in itself.
“I still have the falling sickness,” he said, accepting the butter knife from her.
“I wasn’t aware it could be cured.”
“One can outgrow it, or it can abate in adulthood. With me…” He considered his bread and butter. “I am not as prone to fits, but they still plague me on occasion. I also have staring spells, or so Nathaniel tells me.”
Constance considered a deep red cherry. “You don’t know for a certainty?”
He knew, more’s the pity. “I lose track of conversations. I see a certain look on Nathaniel’s face and grasp that he’s trying not to appear worried. Occasionally, I can hear everything going on around me, but I cannot speak or react to it. Sometimes my vision will blur.”
The list of symptoms from that point grew long and strange: blurred hearing, though explaining what that meant was beyond Robert’s powers of articulation. Forgetfulness that was in itself temporary. Strange lights in his field of vision, a sense of having over-imbibed despite not taking spirits, and crushing fatigue.
A veritable buffet of miseries, and no pattern to which ones befell him when.
Constance tossed the cherry into her mouth. “But what does it feel like when you are staring off into space like that?”
In all the years Robert had been locked away out on the moors, nobody had asked him such a question. “Sometimes anxious, like when you’ve forgotten something, but you aren’t sure what. Sometimes blessedly peaceful.”
“You aren’t in physical pain, then?”
The same curiosity that allowed Constance to plunder his privacy as an epileptic made her a ferociously talented painter. Robert was surprised that she’d held on to her inquisitiveness, given her family’s recently