The Duchess’s Secret. Elizabeth Beacon

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СКАЧАТЬ Rosalind back to now with a thump. Oh, for goodness sake! Here she was, lolling against the ancient stone with a foolish smile on her face. Cross with herself for reliving that silly, broken dream, she stood upright hastily and hoped nobody had seen her. No, the heath was as empty as usual at this time of year. Even the almost-wild heath ponies kept to lower ground and sheep were safe in winter pastures. She heaved a sigh of relief. Rosalind Feldon, one-time society beauty, was still safely hidden under Mrs Meadows’s stern disguise. Cold nipped at her fingers now so she pulled on knitted gloves, wrapped her shabby cloak closer to her chilled body and waited to feel warmer, but the cold seemed to have crept into her bones.

      Hunger, she told herself practically and ate the small pie she had put in that useful pocket as she left the house. It was time she set off for home if all she could do up here was brood on the past. She soon found the bridle path that would take her back by an easier route and settled to a steady pace. She wondered why those rooks were still complaining like harsh-voiced old women discussing a scandal, but a clump of stunted pines hid the track from Dorchester so she could not see what the fuss was about. At last she heard a horse on the old pack road and wished she had worn the stark white cap after all. And why the devil had she been crying over the bittersweet memory of how much she and Ash once thought they were going to love each other for the rest of their lives?

      She pulled her hood up to hide her face and hoped the rider would pass by with a brief Good day. The horse’s hooves were so close now she could actually feel the vibration of its coming through the lightly grassed-over chalk under her feet. The animal snorted as it came alongside and tried to jib at something about her it decided not to like. It was swiftly controlled and she risked a hurried sideways glance. A fine grey gelding—good, his wealthy owner would have no time for shabby countrywomen. She got ready to bob a curtsy and walk stoically on, as if she was only intent on getting home before the early dark of a winter afternoon cut her off up here with only ghosts and creatures of the night for company.

      ‘Is this the way to Livesey Village?’ Ash asked and Rosalind felt the earth shift under her feet as his deep voice echoed around in her reeling head and she looked up at him like a simpleton.

      Had her silly dreams conjured him up then?

      Idiot! she accused herself as she stood staring at him as if turned to stone. You could have said no and hidden your face.

      Then she would be free to run home on paths a stranger could not know about and escape before he got there.

      Aye, and pigs will grow wings and fly, a mocking inner voice argued.

      She numbly added up the time it would take her to whisk Jenny into hiding and let Joan know she had been forced to run away without even a toothbrush.

      ‘Ah, I see it is. Well met, Wife,’ said the Sixth Duke of Cherwell, with a harsh parody of his old smile that made her heart ache.

      She had to peer up at him through the black spots dancing in front of her eyes and she could hardly hear his mocking words past the thunder of her frantically pounding heart. Maybe she was still leaning on the ancient stone inside its eerie circle, dreaming impossible things. Yes, that was it; she had fallen under a malevolent spell. Local legend promised terror to anyone silly enough to dally there and her Ash had been lean and self-conscious about his height, whereas this man sat his horse like a Roman emperor posing for a triumphal statue. She had taken great pains to hide her tracks when they came here as well and had never contacted anyone from her former life, except the Hartfield family solicitor by the most devious route she could think of, so nobody could have betrayed her to him, therefore he could not really be here.

      ‘Go back to hell,’ she ordered the spectre and crossed her fingers under her cloak to ward off evil.

      ‘Only if you come with me,’ it said coolly. ‘Cat got your tongue?’ he added in a darker version of the voice she remembered so well her hopes he was an illusion were beginning to waver.

      ‘I have nothing to say to you.’

      ‘Not even “Where have you been all these years?”’

      ‘No.’

      ‘Yet I am very curious about you, Mrs Meadows. My lawyer tells me you live alone except for a maid and teach music and dancing to aspiring young ladies. Is your latest lover a wanderer, too, then? Does he have a different lovebird in every parish as a reason for not keeping you in style?’

      ‘You never knew me at all,’ she said distantly, silently blessing her close-mouthed neighbours for not being at all helpful to any official-looking strangers asking questions along a coast where smuggling was rife.

      ‘I know everything there is to know.’

      Ha! her inner rebel argued. ‘You know nothing,’ she said out loud.

      ‘I know enough,’ he said icily. ‘And as I need a duchess rather badly now you are damnably in the way.’

      ‘Have you come to kill me and bury my body up here where nobody will ever find it?’ her inner idiot challenged, but somehow she still trusted him not to physically hurt her. Disconcerting, she decided, as she met his eyes without a single shudder for her safety. He was shaking her world to its core yet again and she could not bring herself to hate him wholeheartedly even now. Still, if she irritated him enough, maybe he would ride away and never get any closer to Livesey and find out she had borne him a child.

      ‘And wait another seven years before I can have you declared dead?’ he said with a cynical smile. ‘Even I am not that stupid.’

      ‘Do you have your next Duchess picked out and waiting, then?’ she asked just as cynically back, in order to mask the fact it had hurt her that he seemed to think disposing of her merely stupid, instead of unthinkable after what they had been to one another, once upon a time.

      ‘No, but I should be able to find a gentle and biddable young lady with no illusions about love and a practical mind easily enough once I am free to wed her, what with me being a duke and under the age of thirty.’

      Arrogant of him to think it would be that easy even if he was right. He was also formidably handsome and obviously rich and should have no trouble finding a suitable candidate among the debutantes, even if they were secretly terrified of such an awe-inspiring aristocrat. He meant his next wife to be her very opposite. Good again—a romantic fool like Rosalind Feldon would have her heart broken and no man should be able to do that to two wives in a lifetime.

      ‘I wish you joy of one another,’ she said coolly, thinking it sounded as empty and joyless a union as he deserved. When she considered how deeply they had meant to love one another the day they married over the anvil, his new version of marriage sounded as frozen as an Arctic waste. She shivered at the thought of all the dash and promise he had at one and twenty turning into this cold man with a cold heart, aiming for an even colder marriage. What a relief he meant to divorce her if that was what he wanted from a wife. He might look like Ash, but this man was very different under the skin. There were still glimpses of young Ash in his smoky gaze and tawny hair and she eyed him sideways and longed for things she didn’t understand. She recognised the Ash of eight years ago under the hard shell and she wanted him, not this hard cold man he had become. That was the only reason for this thrill of attraction still so annoyingly alive under her armour against him.

       Chapter Two

      Ash СКАЧАТЬ