Disciplining the Duchess

You are always sorry. It won’t be enough anymore.

The dowager’s words recalled painful memories, thoughts of punishment and remorse, and the tension in her marriage. During today’s jaunt to the St. Alphage ruins, Court had tried to re-connect to her, but to be her was to be a bad, inappropriate person. To be the calm lady he wanted—like Lady Wembley—she must be something outside herself. If she wasn’t… Oh, she couldn’t bear to be taken to that awful study again.

Of course, he did not seem to understand this. He thought she could magically remain herself and still be refined and well-mannered. He was making impossible demands, expecting her to fulfill them. Did he believe he could kiss her and give her a little shake and bring everything wrong in their relationship back to rights?

But she liked the kisses. Frustrated as she was, she still desired her husband. He could capture her so easily with his touch and intent gaze. She had tried to steel herself against him. She’d tried to hide herself away to give both of them peace, but now the cursed man didn’t want that. He was as impossible to please as his mother.

Harmony scanned the other letters on the dowager’s desk. Her gaze caught on one of the envelopes, on spidery handwriting she knew well. She would recognize her papa’s peculiar left-handed writing anywhere, not least because it was similar to hers and because she received her own letters of him on a regular basis, calm, fatherly letters that made her heart ache for their modest but comfortable home. She was about to reach for it when the dowager’s sharp voice stopped her.

“Do not poke among my things. What else does the letter say?”

Harmony swallowed back a retort about the fact that the dowager should very well know what it said since she had moments before dictated it. “The duke and duchess are well, although she is mopish as always.” Harmony stopped, biting her lip.

“Go on.”

“I do wonder if she is breeding,” Harmony said. She felt herself go red as the dowager watched her expectantly.

“Well? Are you?”

She stole a look at the dowager from beneath her lids, hoping her agitation didn’t show, but the woman regarded her with far too much acuity. She shook her head. “No, ma’am. Not yet.”

“Does he still visit you?”

She would not, absolutely not answer that question.

“Answer my question, girl,” said the dowager in a sharp voice. “What is going on between the two of you? You’re like a flower without petals these days, and it doesn’t suit you. You can’t keep him from your bed. No wife does.”

Harmony felt tragically, traumatically humiliated. “He wouldn’t come,” she said to the floor. She didn’t say that he was supposed to come tonight, that she was beside herself to think about it.

“Stop chewing your lip,” said the dowager. “Surely you understand your duties. You must make an heir. Several, it is to be hoped.”

“I will try.”

“Does he hurt you?”

The old woman’s abrupt question resounded in the quiet room. Harmony picked at the edge of the letter.

“I don’t know what type of hurt you mean, ma’am.”

She rapped on her tea tray. “Answer the question.”

“He doesn’t break my wrist,” Harmony said. “Nor any of my bones, so he is not as bad a person as me. He is still angry with me for what I did to you. For embarrassing him. He tolerates my company but I don’t believe...” I don’t believe he loves me. She swallowed back the words, expecting another sharp reprimand, but when the dowager spoke her voice was sad.

“It is an awful thing to only be tolerated, is it not?”

There was quiet, tragic pain in the old woman’s words. Harmony stared down at her blurring fingers. “Please, ma’am, I had better go.”

“No. Cry if you must, but we will talk together about your disaster of a marriage. You think I do not understand you, but I tell you I cried many tears in my day. I remember what you are feeling, how heavy it sets in your heart to be disapproved of. To be despised. My husband—”

The dowager’s voice cut off and for a moment Harmony feared she would begin to cry too. She didn’t know what she would do if that came to pass, but the old woman marshaled her control and lifted her chin. “In truth, my husband despised me. He told me so daily. He showed me hourly with his cutting glances and sneers. You believe that Courtland is cruel to you, but you don’t know what cruelty is.”

Harmony shook her head, staring at the dowager’s trembling mouth. “No. I don’t— I don’t think he’s cruel,” Harmony said. “Only...”

“Only what? Rigid, unfeeling, inflexible? He was raised to be that way.” The lady pushed out her lower lip. “Thank God I had a son. Otherwise I believe my husband would have divorced me. Or saved the trouble and arranged me a quick and tidy death.”

Harmony gasped. “Oh, no. Surely it wasn’t as bad as all that.”

“It was.” Her words burst out in a croak of agony that propelled Harmony to her feet. She stood beside the dowager’s bed and touched her hand.

“I am so sorry, ma’am.”

The woman swallowed hard. Harmony almost wished she’d release her tears. “So you see,” the dowager choked out, “you are not the first one to suffer in marriage.”

“No, of course not.”

For a brief moment the dowager took her hand and squeezed it. Coming from her, it felt as intimate and shocking as a hug. Just as quickly, she released her hand and jutted out her chin again.

“You do not realize your good fortune, Harmony. My son does not hate you. You are better off than half the women of the ton.”

Harmony studied the dowager, feeling as old and tired as the wrinkled woman before her. “Yes, I know he does not hate me. But he married me because he had to. Because you raised him to believe in duty.”

“Foolish girl. Duty is all we have, though you scoff at it.”

Harmony shook her head. “Duty is not all we have, ma’am. People can love. I love your son even though it hurts me. Even though I’m very afraid he will come to—to—” She stopped and traced a rose on the dowager’s bed quilt. “That he will come to despise me in the way your husband did. I’m so afraid of that.” She wiped away a tear and stared into the dowager’s steely gaze. “I’m sure you think I’m an utter ninny. I know you have set your heart against me, with good cause.”

“I have not set my heart against you. But I am a practical woman and you are not. I think you have to let go of this ‘love’ foolishness. It is not the way of our world.”

Harmony touched the dowager’s hand again, and took a very great risk in stating the obvious. “You loved your husband though, didn’t you?”

The old woman took in a sharp breath, as if Harmony had slapped her. A gate came crashing down between them, and any bond Harmony had come to feel with her in the last few moments evaporated in the hardness of her glare. “You may take your leave.”

Harmony stepped back at the ice in her voice. She had heard Court use the exact same tone when he was furiously angry. “I’m sorry. Please—”

“Get out. Leave me,” she said. “Mrs. Lyndon is a less provoking companion. I will have her co

me and help with my other letters after my nap.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I shall let you know if I require your company tomorrow. I doubt I will.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Harmony curtsied and backed away from her, repelled by the severity in her gaze. Not severity. Misery. The fearful woman was plagued with a broken heart. How sad, for all that heartbreak to be trapped beneath her cold and cutting manners. How sad that she was a widow now, with no hope of reconciliation with her husband, no hope of ever being loved as she ought to have been.

As Harmony left, she caught a last glimpse of her papa’s letter on the desk. Why on earth was the dowager corresponding with her papa? Why would he write to the dowager, and why wouldn’t he have told Harmony he was?

But the least likely people corresponded over the most benign things. She herself had begun an avid correspondence with Mr. Michael Thomas Burgermeister, an author and scholar of ancient history. He too had visited the old Roman wall at Newcastle, and numerous other grand sites in England, Scotland, and Wales. His letters painted vivid pictures of the various locales, and detailed a level of historical knowledge that astonished her. She enjoyed his letters immensely, enjoyed everything about them except that she had to keep them a secret from her husband.

She wasn’t sure she had to, but somehow, from the start, she did. Now that they’d exchanged so very many letters she came to realize it was perhaps improper. Not that the man wrote anything impolite. He was a gentleman of advanced years, and starchy as anything. He was working on a new book, a companion to his last work The Culture of Ancient Greece During the Bronze Age, and he had asked her, as the Duchess of Courtland, to be a patron of his studies. Or rather, to help finance a research expedition to several ancient Greek sites. At some point she would have to ask Court about it, for the sum of money Mr. Burgermeister asked for, while reasonable, was not one she could disburse without someone noticing.