Beguiling the Beauty Read online

  One more glimpse. Just one more when he alighted at his destination.

  “Mum, you’d ’ave ’im sooner if you’d let ’im ’ave a good look at you,” said the cabbie.

  How she wished that were the case. “Hurry.”

  His carriage turned west. She thought he was headed for his club on St. James’s Street, but the carriage didn’t stop until it had reached Cromwell Road, right before that magnificent cathedral to the animal kingdom, the British Museum of Natural History.

  Where her dinosaur was housed!

  She threw a handful of coins at the cabbie, leaped off the hansom, and cursed her dress with its narrow skirts, which made it impossible to attempt anything remotely athletic.

  He ascended the front steps and passed under the beautiful Romanesque arches into the museum. The main display in the central hall was the nearly complete skeleton—missing only three vertebrae—of a fifty-foot sperm whale. She’d never before visited the museum without stopping to admire the skeleton, but now she only looked about wildly for him.

  Let him go to the west wing to amble among the birds and the fish. Or let him go upstairs. But no, presently he peeled away from the cluster of visitors gathered before the whale skeleton and headed to the east wing, where the paleontological collection was housed.

  Thankfully, the gallery that greeted visitors upon first entering the east wing dealt with mammals: the great American mastodon, the perfectly preserved mammoth unearthed in Essex, the rhinoceros-like Uintatherium, the northern manatee, hunted to extinction toward the end of the previous century. Perhaps they were all he intended to inspect this afternoon. Or the human and primate fossils in exhibit cases that lined the southern wall. Or the extinct birds in the pavilion toward the end of the gallery—the moas were very interesting, as were the eggs of the aepyornis, a bird said to have weighed half a ton.

  But he paid only cursory attention to these wonders collected from all over the world for his enjoyment and edification and made for the gallery that ran parallel to the mammalian saloon, where the reptilian remains were kept.

  She still hadn’t lost all hope. Several perpendicular galleries, full of marine curiosities, branched out from the Reptilia gallery. Perhaps—perhaps—

  Perhaps not. He slowed, stopped before the Pareiasaurus skeleton from the Karoo formation of South Africa, and then leaned in to read the small plaque that gave the names of the discoverers and the donors.

  Her heart thudded. Her name was on a plaque barely fifty feet away from where he stood. Although he wouldn’t immediately be able to make the connection, should he find out, subsequently, that she had crossed the Atlantic at approximately the same time as he, then the coincidence would strike even him as too great, no matter how unwilling he was to think of Baroness von Seidlitz-Hardenberg and Mrs. Easterbrook as the same person.

  He turned from the Pareiasaurus. Along the south wall of the gallery were the great sea lizards: the Plesiosaurus and the ichthyosaurs. Against the north wall were the cases that held the land monsters.

  As if pulled by a compass, he strode toward the north wall.

  Why he was puttering about the premier British natural history museum Christian had no idea—there wasn’t even a Swabian dragon on display, as far as he could recall. If anything he ought to be checking the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin or the Institute of Paleontology and Historical Geology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich.

  Yet something had propelled him here. It was possible she had already arrived in London. And if she had, wouldn’t she wish to avail herself of the best collection of Dinosauria in all of England?

  It was a sunny, crisp day out, and the gallery was not crowded: half a dozen young men who looked to be university students; a middle-aged couple, plump and expensively dressed; and a governess with two charges whom she hushed from time to time when their voices grew too excited.

  Out of an utterly irrational hope, he looked several times toward the governess. It had occurred to him that the baroness was perhaps the commonest of commoners, and therefore did not consider herself worthy of an alliance with a duke. But that was the least of his worries. What was the point of being a duke with a lineage going back eight hundred years if he couldn’t marry as he wished?

  The governess, a severe-looking woman in her thirties, was not amused by his attention. She gave him a hard glare and pointedly turned her attention back to her charges, pronouncing that they had better head for the fossil fish if they wanted to look at everything before it was time to go home for tea.

  Her head held so high her nose pointed almost directly at the ceiling, she ushered the children out. As she did so, another woman entered the gallery from its far end. She stopped to study the flying lizards fossils on display against the wall.

  His heart turned over. She wore a simple light gray jacket-and-skirt set, nothing like the romantic, softly draped dresses he’d seen on the baroness. But from the back, her height, posture, and way her clothes hung on her person—had he kept one of the baroness’s dresses, it would have fit her perfectly.

  The woman turned around.

  The world stopped. The years fell away. And he was again the nineteen-year-old boy on the cricket grounds of Lord’s, staring at her with an arrow in his heart.

  Mrs. Easterbrook.

  Francis Bacon once wrote, “There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.” The man must have had Mrs. Easterbrook in mind. Her nose was noticeably long. The unusual shapes of her lower lash lines made her eyes widest not at the center, but more toward the outer corners. And surely those eyes would look absolutely ridiculous were they set even a tiny fraction of an inch farther apart. And yet the effect, together with her high cheekbones and full lips, was simply stunning.

  He wanted to make cast models of her. He wanted to take a set of precision calipers and measure every distance between her features. He wanted her blood and glandular fluids analyzed by the finest chemists in the world—there must be something detectibly different in her inner workings for him to respond so dramatically, as if he’d been given a drug for which science had yet to find a name.

  But more than anything, he wanted to—

  He yanked himself back to his senses: He was a man who had committed himself to another. The baroness might very well not reciprocate said commitment, but he expected more of himself when he gave his word.

  “Nasty brutes, are they not?” said the ravishing Mrs. Easterbrook, setting her reticule down at the edge of the display case.

  He glanced at the case next to him. Earlier he had been standing next to a display of giant turtles, but now he was in front of a Cetiosaurus. He must have drifted toward her, mesmerized.

  “I happen to think they are very handsome specimens—this one, especially.”

  She glanced at him, her gaze a caress upon his skin. “Pah,” she said. “Squat and ugly.”

  She stood so close they nearly touched, but her words came to him only faintly, as if muffled by fog and distance. And when he turned his head away, so that he wasn’t looking directly at her, he became aware of a subtle yet decadent fragrance of jasmine.

  “If you do not enjoy God’s creatures, madam,” he said curtly, “perhaps you ought not to visit a museum of natural history.”

  With that, her lover turned on his heels and left.

  For a brief minute, as they headed toward each other, the air had crackled with expectation. So familiar, this sensation of closing the distance between them. Any moment now, he would smile and offer her his arm. They would stand together and admire her wonderful discovery. And nothing, nothing, would ever pull them asunder again.

  Then she’d noticed his expression: that of a man sleepwalking. A man bewitched, his will confiscated, his faculties forsaken.

  He had not exaggerated.

  Such reaction on the part of a man used to mortify her—it confirmed that she was a freak. But coming from him, she adored it. She wanted him to gawk at her endlessly
. It didn’t change the fact that he loved her for who she was.

  And maybe, just maybe, she could use her looks as a lure, reel him in, and keep him close at hand until he realized that he didn’t dislike her. That, in fact, he liked her thoroughly and ardently.

  But then he’d recalled himself—and flinched. The self-reproach was plain in his eyes. He thought it unforgivable that for a brief minute, he’d forgotten himself, and forgotten the baroness.

  So much for hoping that he’d allow prolonged contact between them. She felt like a reaped field, her harvest gone, and nothing but a long, barren winter ahead.

  Slowly she lifted her reticule, which she had set down directly atop of the plaque that read, The fossils of the Cetiosaurus courtesy of Miss Fitzhugh of Hampton House, Oxfordshire, who unearthed the skeleton in Lyme Regis, Devon, 1883.

  She’d told him that her dinosaur was a Swabian dragon because the Cetiosaurus was such a quintessentially English fossil and she had not wanted to reveal her English origins. She gazed at its heavy head, its thick legs, and its stout spine, forever associated with the exhilaration of discovery and the limitless possibilities of youth.

  “Madam,” said a man in his early twenties at her elbow, someone she’d never met before.

  “Madam, my friends and I, we row for Oxford. And we wonder—we wonder if you have any plans at all to attend the Henley Regatta?”

  The beautiful Mrs. Easterbrook had struck again, apparently.

  “I wish you the very best of luck, sir,” she said, “but I’m afraid I shan’t be there.”

  CHAPTER 12

  Millie found it difficult to keep her eyes off her husband.

  They’d spent the entire day together. Most of the afternoon had been taken with matters having to do with Cresswell & Graves, the tinned goods firm Millie had inherited from her father. After tea they’d discussed the improvements to be undertaken at Henley Park this year. And until the note from Venetia had come, asking them to wait for her in the study, he’d been showing her the changes he’d made to the town house during her absence.

  One would think this many consecutive hours would be quite enough. But the more she looked at him, the more she wanted to look at him. It had ever been the case. Today, however, was worse than usual. Today she’d come off the train to find that he’d rid himself of the full beard he’d worn for the past two years. The impact of his unobstructed features, all those lean lines and fortuitous angles, had knocked the breath out of her.

  He was Helena’s twin, but he resembled Venetia in bone structure and coloring—dark hair and blue eyes. A gorgeous man, much to Millie’s detriment. But if she’d fallen in love with him because he was beautiful, she’d remained in love with him because she could not imagine spending her life with anyone else.

  Half an hour ago, when he’d revealed the one betterment to the town house that had not been on their list, a sparkling new commode in blue enamel with white daisies—quite the private joke between the two of them—they’d laughed so hard they’d both had to lean on the wall to stay upright. Afterward he’d smiled at her, and she’d felt as if she were above the clouds again.

  But now his face was grave as he listened to her recount what had happened at the Harvard lecture, in far greater detail than she’d felt prudent setting down in the cable she’d sent to him earlier, advising him to refrain from too many questions upon Venetia’s return and to be sensitive to her moods. Not that he needed such reminders from her—one could always count on Fitz to be tactful and solicitous.

  “I find it curious that she is not angry,” he said. “Have you noticed since you came back? She is distracted and melancholy, but she is not angry.”

  Millie hesitated, then shook her head. Not because he was wrong, but because she hadn’t had eyes for anyone else in the hours since her return.

  A knock came at the door of the study. Venetia slipped in. “Sorry it took me so long. Helena came into my room. I don’t know why she is so worried about me; she really ought to worry for herself instead.”

  Millie looked closely at Venetia, trying to gauge whether Fitz was right. But the grimness in Venetia’s expression overrode everything else.

  Fitz yielded his chair. “Have a seat, Venetia.”

  He came to stand behind Millie’s chair, his hands braced on the chair’s back. She wished her posture weren’t so ramrod straight. She’d love to lean back a little, and have his fingers brush against her nape.

  Venetia sat down. “During the crossing, I found one of Helena’s jackets among my belongings. I’m not sure when it was mistakenly packed into my trunk, but since it doesn’t fit me, I left it alone. Tonight as I was getting ready for bed, I remembered the jacket, took it out of my armoire—and found this.”

  She placed a piece of paper on the desk, a letter. Millie picked up the letter; Fitz read over her shoulder. Her heart sank with each line.

  Fitz walked away to the window.

  “No signature, but he mentions his book and his mother’s house by name in the letter,” Millie spoke into the heavy silence. “This removes all doubts, then.”

  “I don’t know whether I am relieved to know for certain, or disappointed beyond words,” said Venetia. “I guess I still clung to the hope that we’d grossly overreacted.”

  Millie glanced toward her husband. He stood with his arms crossed before his chest, his face devoid of expression.

  “What should we do, Fitz?” asked Venetia.

  “I’ll think about it,” he said. “You are not looking well, Venetia. Go to bed. Have a good night’s sleep. Let me worry for a change.”

  Millie paid closer attention to Venetia—sometimes it took her a while to see anything besides Venetia’s beauty, especially after an absence. Venetia did appear somewhat nauseated.

  Venetia rose and smiled wanly. “It’s the turbot from dinner. Didn’t quite agree with me.”

  “But you hardly ate anything at dinner,” Fitz pointed out.

  “Should we send for a doctor?” Millie asked.

  “No, please don’t take the trouble!” Venetia paused, as if surprised by the emphatic nature of her answer. She softened her voice. “A little indigestion is hardly cause for alarm. I had a couple of soda tablets. I should be all right in no time.”

  Venetia left. Fitz took the chair she vacated. “You should be abed, too, Lady Fitz,” he said to Millie. “It’s late and you’ve had a long trip.”

  “Long, perhaps, but hardly strenuous.” She got to her feet anyway. They’d been married long enough for her to recognize that he wanted to be alone. “Are you going out?”

  “I might.”

  To visit a lady friend, probably. She was used to it, she told herself. And it was better this way—why tinker with a friendship as satisfying as theirs? “Good night, then.”

  “Good night.”

  He was not looking at her, but once again reading Andrew Martin’s letter.

  She allowed herself to gaze at him another moment before closing the door behind her.

  God damn it, Fitz!” Hastings doubled over, his hands over his abdomen. “You could have ruptured my spleen.”

  Fitz flexed his fingers. The punch to Hastings’s belly hadn’t hurt, but the one to his face had. The man had a skull hard as an ingot. “You would have deserved it. You knew it was Andrew Martin, didn’t you? And you didn’t tell me a thing.”

  Hastings straightened, groaning. “How did you know?”

  “I saw your faces when the two of you were taking your turn in the garden. It was plain as day you were holding something over her.”

  He should have taken it up with Hastings sooner, but the Cresswell & Graves decisions couldn’t wait any longer. And Millie’s company had been so agreeable, he’d de-layed his departure from the house again and again. Incomprehensible—she was his wife; her company was his anytime he wanted.

  Wincing, Hastings made his way to the coffee service that had recently been brought in. “I told you enough.”

  He hande
d a cup of coffee to Fitz. Fitz accepted the peace offering. “You let us hope, you numskull. If my sister is throwing away her future over some bastard, I don’t want to spend my days praying that I’m wrong. I want to know everything beyond a shadow of a doubt so I can act.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “It’s not as if I’ve a wealth of choices, do I?”

  “Want me to come along?”

  Fitz shook his head. “The last thing I want is to bring along one of her frustrated suitors.”

  “I’m not one of her suitors,” said Hastings, sounding remarkably like a boy who had his hand caught in the biscuit jar. “I’ve never wooed her.”

  “Only because you are too proud.”

  Hastings might fool the rest of the world, but to Fitz he was an open book.

  “Sod off.” Hastings gingerly felt his cheek, on which Fitz had left a nasty cut. “Why do you have to know me so well?”

  “It’s the only reason I like you.”

  “If you say anything to your sister—”

  “I haven’t said anything to her in thirteen years. Why would I start now?” He set aside the coffee. “I’ll be off now.”

  “Give my respects to Martin, will you?”

  “That I will do—in abundance.”

  Venetia threw off her covers and left her bedroom. She didn’t mind tossing and turning, but the ache in her breasts—an unfamiliar tenderness around the areolas—disconcerted her. She’d had her heart broken before, but this time her wretchedness had increasingly translated into miscellaneous discomforts and eruptions of bile that had nothing to do with lovesickness.

  And she was so tired. Despite all the thoughts in her head swarming like locusts, she’d fallen asleep after tea. After tea, when she’d never napped in her entire life, and certainly not at that strange hour.

  She padded down the stairs. In Fitz’s study, there was an encyclopedia with an entry on fossilized footprints. Hers were in storage—God forbid Christian should find out that Mrs. Easterbrook had acquired such an object. A picture in a book was hardly the same thing, but she had no other mementos. And she needed to be reminded that he used to actively campaign for the pleasure of her company, that her continued presence in his life had mattered as much as the sun’s daily climb from the eastern horizon.