Page 17

‘It’s not enough!’

‘Do you love me?’ he’d suddenly thought to ask. She hadn’t ever said so, he realised. She’d charged him with the failure a dozen times, a hundred, but never mentioned her own feelings when she did so.

She turned her face away. ‘That’s not the point. You can hardly expect me to tell you so now. I shall not do so and humiliate myself further. Even you in your monstrous selfishness cannot ask that of me.’

And then in the end she had fallen sick, and though she had never said explicitly that he was to blame, she had scarcely needed to, because he must be. If he’d loved her as she deserved, he’d have kept her alive; if he’d loved her as she deserved, she’d have stayed alive for him, surely, by the exercise of her will, because she had been a strong-willed woman despite her fragile beauty. Her parents certainly thought all that and more.

He’d been lost in depression and self-lacerating guilt, and after months had passed with no improvement, his servants must have written anxiously to his Aunt Deborah about him – his closest living relative by then apart from his entirely self-absorbed older brother. Nobody would ever think to ask him for any kind of help. She was his father’s younger sister, but had been his mother’s close friend and ally despite that, and emphatically not a supporter of the male Challenders’ scandalous and dissolute manner of living; Xan, on the other hand, the good son, had always been her favourite and he knew it.

One day she had arrived in Somerset without notice in a carriage piled high with trunks, bustled in, taken stock, and announced that she lived with Xan and Adrian now, as long as they should need her. (She was, of course, still with them, here in London, which had to say something.)

A short while later, against his feeble protests, a famously discreet doctor had been summoned from Town to see him, and a little while after that, without quite understanding how it had happened, he’d found himself, wrapped in flannel and smothered in blankets, as though he were a physical invalid, which he was not, on the packet boat from Dover to Calais. He proceeded in great state, as befitted his rank, complete with a travelling carriage and all its preposterously elaborate fittings, with the discreet Monsieur Beauregard as his – what? His keeper?

Travel was held by many to be a universal panacea for the relief of low spirits. But if a change of scene alone had been meant to rouse him from his lethargy, it hadn’t worked. The greater part of Europe had passed by in a blur, and he’d only awoken – because he had in the end awoken, though he might now wish he hadn’t – in Venice, when he’d met Bianca. Bianca Rossi, who he now knew was a figment of his imagination, a lovely creature made of lies.

He could not now separate Venice and Bianca, or think of one without the other. It was not possible to say which of them had torn the bandages from his eyes and made him see that the world was full of colour and light. Both, he must assume.

But it had been more than that, even. He’d come to realise in those few short months of gloriously unfettered desire and new-found, sharply felt emotion that he had lived as a frightened man all his life till that moment. A base coward. He’d been frightened to experience overmastering passion and deep feeling because he dreaded being like his father and his brother. Scared – it was a horrible thought to have at this late date – even to love his own wife immoderately in case he lost control of himself and became like them. So he and Louise had truly never had a chance.

Yet Venice and Bianca had broken apart all his cosy certainties and shown him that he was like his father and his brother, deep down, and he could no longer dodge the recognition or the resemblance. He was just as capable as they were of throwing all to hell – propriety, sense, family, decency, decorum, even perhaps sanity – in his obsession with a woman. He was not one whit superior, as he had always thought he was, and could not pretend to be so for a moment longer.

Such painful knowledge should have far-reaching consequences, and some of them at least might be good. He’d always had an uncomfortable relationship with Philip from childhood – they’d despised each other for their own quite separate reasons, since Philip had been a bully, their father’s favourite, in stark contrast to Xan, their mother’s darling and, he now realised, an insufferable little prig – and perhaps in truth that could never have been mended even if Xan had reached out, as he’d intended to. To say, I understand you better now, at least in part. Maybe we can forgive each other? Well, perhaps it was already too late for that. But at least he could have tried.

Yet he would never know now what might have happened, if reconciliation could have been possible, because a short while after Bianca deserted him, the news had found him – he’d been in southern Italy, far off the beaten track, seeking escape from thoughts of her and making his way home in an extremely circuitous manner and in circumstances of extreme and unnecessary discomfort – that his brother Philip was dead, found insensible and past all help in a low tavern, killed by self-indulgence, as everyone had predicted for so long. He was the Earl now, and Adrian was Viscount Dawbney.

He’d come back then as quickly as possible, by boat from Naples, shocked out of his self-absorbed misery, determined to do all that he must and should, determined to push the unwelcome insight into his own character back down in the darkness where it belonged. He might marry again or he might not – it was probably true that his duty to poor motherless Adrian and to the name required it of him – but the flaming, overwhelming passion he had so briefly experienced could not be expected of a such a match. He didn’t want to feel like that again, and risk being torn apart by it once more.

But he wasn’t going to think of taking a wife now, in any event, not this year – he had enough to do besides that. Fences to mend, both literally and metaphorically, and bridges to build. And he’d been confident he was succeeding, slowly and painfully – till she appeared in his own house and ruined it all.

He was in as bad a case now as he had been in those early days in Venice when the very sight of her had caused him almost to disgrace himself and her in public. Worse, because then he had been free, for a little space – was that not supposed to be the point of European travel for a gentleman? – and now he had his responsibilities close and tight: the estate, his position in life, his many dependants, and above all his son.

It had taken a great deal of effort to force himself to write to her, even so brief and so impersonal a note. He still did not know what her purpose in inserting herself into his home had been. She had said over and over that it was not to entrap him into marriage, but why should he believe a word she said? He simply could not afford to dwell on any of that.

But to leave the portrait unfinished would be to invite inevitable questions from his son and his aunt, and Adrian, he knew already, had inherited his own deplorable tendency to anxiety – to thinking disagreeable things that occurred must be his fault when they decidedly were not. An open breach with the artist he’d befriended would hurt the child, and that was the last thing Xan wanted. So it was best to carry on as normal, to get her to finish the damn painting and then leave their lives forever. Of course, seeing it every day hanging on his wall when it was done would be a perpetual torment to him; of course, Adrian must never suspect such a thing for a second. And he would have to find some fresh excuse to absent himself from the house each morning during her visits till he could be sure that she was safely gone. But he must do that. It would not have to be for so very long, and surely he had enough strength of character in him to endure for a little while. In that respect, if in no other, he could prove himself better than his father or brother had ever been. He clung to this thought like a drowning man to a spar.

25

What neither Lord Fairmount nor Miss Constantine had considered was that the other two persons involved in the affair of the portrait – Lady Deborah, its instigator, and Lord Dawbney, its proud subject – must have their own ideas about how it would be proper to mark the completion of this significant work of art. Miss Bianca might imagine that she would simply stop painting one day, declare the work done, and disappear from the square and the Challender family as unobtrusively as she had arrived; Lord Fairmount might be longing for that day with painful intensity. But these hopes were not destined to be fulfilled.

The first hint of this became apparent to Bianca when Lady Deborah appeared unexpectedly in the studio during a final painting session and said firmly that the picture was quite splendid, just as she had hoped. Bianca smiled weakly and Adrian beamed, nodding vigorously in agreement. ‘I am sure we will all miss your cheerful presence in the house, my dear,’ the Dowager swept on ruthlessly and inaccurately, ‘and I hope that in recognition of the occasion you will come to tea the day after tomorrow so that we can unveil the picture, as it were, and see it hung in the place I have looked out for it, which will be quite perfect. Do bring your sister, Mrs Da Costa – several of your sisters, if they happen to be available. I should be glad to know them all.’

Bianca could only agree, and thank her hostess. It would be egregiously rude to decline such a generous invitation, and perhaps cause the shrewdly perceptive Lady Deborah to wonder why she was so reluctant to come back here; that was the very last thing she wanted. Her consolation must be that tea was a feminine sort of an occasion, and that Lord Fairmount, even if bidden to come by his fearsome aunt, might very well find an excellent reason not to do so. He might make vague promises to attend and then simply not appear. Surely he would do that, as would she if she had any choice in the matter – she did not, but she must hope that he did, as the master (supposedly) of this house and the head (at least in theory) of this noble family. He had made it all too obvious that he had no desire to set eyes on her ever again, least of all as an intruder under his own roof.

But it was plain that she must attend or give grave offence, and if she told Sabrina – as she would be obliged to, since Mrs Da Costa had been invited by name, and Lady Deborah was perfectly capable of writing to her to confirm the appointment – Sabrina would tell Viola. The Duchess, knowing what she did about Bianca’s involvement with the Earl in Venice, would not be kept away from his home and his family by any means short of physical violence. So, the occasion would be awkward in the extreme, but it would hopefully be brief, and then she, Bianca, would be free to get on with her life and put Xan Challender entirely from her mind. She was aware even as she formulated this thought that she’d had it before more than once over the last months and it hadn’t worked; there he still was, looming large, even when she hadn’t set eyes on him for days. But when she had finished the painting and attended the damned unnecessary tea, it would all stop. She would make it stop, somehow.

She, Sabrina and Viola strolled across the square together at the appointed hour. She was on edge, naturally, and could only be grateful that Cecilia and Bea were safely in Suffolk, and Allegra had pleaded a prior engagement. Three Constantines were more than enough for anybody. Six would have been preposterous.

The first inkling that this was not to be the quiet tea party she’d anticipated was given when the ladies were shown by the stately butler, not into Lady Deborah’s sitting room upstairs, but into a far grander receiving chamber on the ground floor, to which Bianca had previously not penetrated. If she’d been left to herself, Miss Constantine would have feigned a sudden illness – possibly even the near approach of death – and made a hasty escape. But she had Viola and Sabrina at her back, urging her on, and she was trapped.

‘Her Grace the Duchess of Ventris, Mrs Da Costa, Miss Constantine,’ the butler was announcing formally as he ushered them into the impressive gilded room. Several persons, really quite a number of persons, most of them unknown to her, were glancing up in quick curiosity from where they stood conversing in small groups. Only one of them – Lord Fairmount – was looking both astonished and horrified.

26

Xan was most indignant. He had never agreed to hold a party in his townhouse to celebrate the completion of the damn portrait – who had ever heard of such a preposterous thing? His understanding was that it would be a quiet sort of a gathering, entirely informal and very small, just to see the picture hung in the Gold Saloon, where his aunt had decided it would go for now. Obviously the artist would be invited – he could hardly argue with this, or he’d look like a lunatic – and obviously it would be a highly uncomfortable event for him, but it would be brief, and then he would be free of her forever.

He had not anticipated seeing fancy cakes from Gunter’s, champagne, his best Venetian wine glasses, and a number of his aunt’s most grisly old dowager friends. He had also not expected several of his chattering idiots of cousins, who insisted on embracing him, smothering him in scented kisses, and telling him how well he was looking, which was a flagrant lie. And he had certainly not expected Bianca to bring her sisters, and one of those sisters to be a bloody duchess. There really was no end to the things Miss Constantine – it seemed that was really her name – hadn’t seen fit to tell him.

Lewis had not announced the ladies’ relationship to each other at the door, as this was not at all the done thing, but that could scarcely be considered necessary, since the women who entered together resembled each other so greatly. They were all three tall, dark, beautiful, and splendidly dressed in the height of fashion. His cousins were murmuring to each other with interest. His aunt was moving forward to greet the new arrivals, and Adrian was tugging at his hand, making it quite clear that he must also do so or show himself to be quite outrageously rude.