The Truth About Dukes (Rogues to Riches #5) - Grace Burrowes Page 0,25
anybody, she knew what his imprisonment had been like. He loathed that she knew, and he was tremendously relieved to have had a witness to his suffering.
Unwitnessed suffering could come to feel like imagined suffering, after all.
“You have divined my plan for assuming the duties of the dukedom,” he said, watching her hand on Saint Valentine’s cold stone robes. “I will be boring. I will look like a duke, talk like a duke, and comport myself like a duke. I will do nothing to draw attention to myself or to my household.”
“You will be a wallflower duke?” She surveyed his garden, awash in color and imported blooms, appointed with trellises and espaliered greenery, not a wallflower to be seen. “Good luck with that. I am happy to aid you.”
“I was hoping you would be, but you must tell me what I can do to aid you in return. Perhaps something to do with the dream of your heart, the one dearer than a year spent painting in Paris?”
She turned her blue-eyed gaze on him. “How do you know I aspire to anything more ambitious than pursuing my art in Paris?”
Because in some way, he knew her. Not from long acquaintance, but from shared experience. “I was hidden away, lest my family be shamed by my condition. For at least a brief time in your youth, you hid yourself away. I was hidden because my father’s dreams for me as his heir turned to dust. What lost dream sent you into service at a private madhouse?”
“We weren’t to speak of that. We agreed.”
No, they hadn’t. They’d danced around an overt pact, and agreed not to acknowledge the past when others were present.
“People who dwell in the shadows have dreams,” he said. “We need them or we go truly mad. What is your real dream, Constance? The one you never allow to see the light of day?”
She paced away, taking a seat on the old wooden bench between the Cupid birdbaths. “I have spent years in London on the edges of ballrooms, at the backs of the theater boxes. I have watched polite society as one watches a pantomime and I have noticed something.”
She had doubtless noticed far more than anybody would ever realize. “What have you noticed?”
“Much of what happens in polite society is based on connections, on who is neighbors with whom back in Shropshire, whose auntie went to school with whose mama. The Wentworths have few such connections.”
Robert took the place beside her. “You want a connection with me?” The notion flattered, it did not please. “I have some influence through my mother, or I will if she ever returns from France. I am happy to exert—”
“No.” Constance sat up very straight and appeared to become fascinated with the rosebushes across the walkway. “I want a friend, Rothhaven. I want somebody who is truly my friend. Not a sibling, not a fellow wallflower, not another artist seeking to curry favor with my wealthy brother. I want a friend of my own.”
Her ladyship was clearly poised to flee, and for less provocation than the sound of approaching coach wheels. The wrong word, the wrong smile, and she’d withdraw as surely as if she’d removed across the water to Paris, never to be seen again.
Robert studied the roses, the jewel in this little floral crown, though they looked like so many angry weeds now. “How curious that you should harbor that aspiration, for as it happens, I am in need of a friend too. I am once again in need of a friend.”
He had embarked on that reply meaning to appease her worries, to assure her that her request was reasonable and welcome. He’d completed those few sentences wishing with all his heart that he could be the friend she longed for.
They sat side by side in a comfortable, introspective silence. When Nathaniel and Althea came laughing out onto the terrace from the library, Robert was still sitting beside Lady Constance—beside his friend—in the sunshine.
The ladies left shortly thereafter, electing to walk home with Nathaniel as their escort. Robert remained in the garden pondering, for he was certain that Lady Constance, for all her honesty, had not yet confided to him the dream of her heart.
“Rothhaven likes my sister.” Althea made that observation while watching Constance stride off down the path to Lynley Vale’s stables. “I am amazed.”
Nathaniel tugged Althea by the hand away from the front drive and around to the side of the house where the formal garden lay.