The Truth About Dukes (Rogues to Riches #5) - Grace Burrowes Page 0,31
for last names were discouraged at such an establishment.
Watching Constance inventory his features, her gaze roaming from his brow to his nose, to his mouth, to his hair, he felt himself becoming the Duke of Rothhaven. Standing a little taller, adopting a slight air of hauteur the better to withstand her perusal.
“Sitting for a portrait is boring,” she said, brushing his hair back from his temple. “You will grow testy.” She eased a finger under his cravat and ran it around his neck. “I will grow testy.” She gently steered his chin a half inch to the left, then a half inch to the right. “We will disagree.”
“I trust your judgment.” He would somehow trust himself to withstand her touch too.
She smoothed his lapels, fluffed his cravat, and made another adjustment to his hair. Her smile said she knew his compliment extended beyond her ability with paints and brushes.
“Let’s have a look at the trees,” she said, leading him through the gate. “I adore the scent of plum blossoms.”
She prattled on, about light and seasons, how many different types of green could shine forth from a single tree branch, and why coronation robes were too trite to be endured. Then she shook a branch and showered herself with petals, and Robert knew himself for a doomed duke.
She adored the scent of plum blossoms, and he adored her. He simply, completely adored her.
“I am making a fool of myself,” Constance said, as the last of the petals drifted down from the branch above her. “Acting like a child.”
His Grace stood just inside the orchard walls, the gate open beside him. Constance knew she ought to be saying something more, making conversation, but she’d never seen quite that expression on a man’s face before.
Rapt, sweet—there was a word for this sort of regard, just as there was a color for every object to be rendered on canvas. Rothhaven’s gaze was respectful, also intimate. His eyes conveyed…She searched her mind for the term that applied, a sort of rosy, soft, deep word. A special word not often used out loud.
“So what if you are acting like a child?” he said. “You were never allowed to be a child, or not allowed to be enough of a child. I at least had ten years of genuine childhood, and they stood me in very good stead.”
Constance brushed plum blossoms from her sleeves. “Childishness stood you in good stead? In that place?”
He approached, a man who always moved quietly, who even thought quietly. How on earth should she paint him?
“Not childishness, though I indulged in much of that, particularly at first. Childlike-ness, perhaps. My saving grace became my mind, which is ironic when an illness of the mind landed me there in the first place.”
“Explain yourself.” The green of his eyes alone would take much consideration, much experimentation, though mixing pigments was not an enjoyable aspect of Constance’s art. Some of the colors were toxic, others volatile, and yet, from those dangerous concoctions could come great beauty.
“A child is curious,” Rothhaven replied, “to the point of folly sometimes. Because I was curious about Pierre’s accent, I learned French, albeit from a footman. I did not understand that it was a farmer’s version of the language, but I can read the proper kind now because I was curious then. I was curious about the stars—they were visible to me even in a walled garden, even through a locked window. I thus learned astronomy and how to navigate by the heavens. If and when I escaped that place, I would need that skill.”
His room had been filled with books, maps, and strange gadgets, becoming a sort of lending library for the other residents, not that anybody had let Soames know about that.
“You thought of escape?”
He came a few steps closer. “For about the first five years. I filled my head with fantasies. Perhaps Papa did not know that John Coachman had left me at the madhouse instead of at school. Papa would come fetch me when he realized the error. Papa had died and Mama was searching for me. I wrote letter after letter, which Soames dutifully sealed and addressed for me. He put them in the boot boy’s sack, and when my back was turned, took them out and tossed the lot of them into the fire—after he’d read them.”
Rothhaven regarded the rambling old pile at the end of the weedy drive. “I gave up on Nathaniel last, and that took more years.”