Now she thought about it, she hadn’t seen much of Thaddeus in the last two years, ever since Viola chose Devin. He had gracefully bowed out of that courtship when Viola married, of course.
In the last two years?
There was the ball when he finally asked her to dance after ignoring her for a month. She’d been too irritated by his neglect to dance with him.
Which led to the foolishness with Anthony Froude: not one of her finest moments, she had to admit.
“What have you been doing the last two years?” she asked, licking her fingers. “I’ve only seen you occasionally at balls and the like. You haven’t been courting anyone, as far as I know?” She turned her head, raising an eyebrow.
“No.”
“Here, is that your fourth jam tart?” she asked, sitting up. “I’d like another one, you greedy piglet.”
He laughed, a sound that was deep and relaxed. She liked it.
Joan held a finger up in the air. “Stroke one on the calendar: future duke laughs. Or is that stroke two?”
“Three,” he confirmed, handing her two tarts.
“In a week,” Joan said. “Likely a record.”
His mouth twisted in a wry smile that had nothing to do with humor.
Something was wrong. Thaddeus was so self-contained that she had the idea none of her brothers would know the problem, nor her brother-in-law Jeremy either, for all they’d been friends at Eton. Thaddeus wouldn’t share problems with his mother, because he was instinctively protective. He adored the duchess, that was clear. He would never worry her.
Joan finished one of her tarts, thinking hard. He wouldn’t respond to a simple question. There was a cloak of self-possession around him that seemed to be part of his character. Maybe future dukes were taught to be prudent in that respect.
But no, her father had once told her that he assessed a man’s strength by whether he was confident enough to admit he needed help. “Never choose a man who thinks he can rule the world,” the duke had told her, years ago now. “Your marriage won’t be a partnership.”
Not that she had any intention of marrying Thaddeus, of course.
For one thing, it wasn’t up to her.
He had cheerfully accepted her statement that he had no interest in marrying her. When she offered to kiss him, he promptly removed himself to the other side of the cloth.
The idea pinched, somehow. But what could she expect? He was so honorable that if they behaved improperly, he would feel obligated to marry her. Nothing to do with her father, and everything to do with honor.
He didn’t want to marry her, of course.
He didn’t want to.
It was odd how much she disliked that thought.
“So, the last two years?” she prompted, pushing away a train of thought that was likely to make her unhappy.
“I’ve engaged myself in the activities of a gentleman: nothing more, nothing less.”
His voice was flat. Joan was more and more certain that something was wrong. But she had to be careful. Thaddeus would never answer a straightforward question.
“I’ve often wondered what gentlemen do all day,” she said, changing the subject. She pointed at his chest. “You seem to have grown several inches around since I debuted, and not in the waist area. Since your coat is off, Lady Bumtrinket is wrong about your valet padding your garments. Have you been working with horses? My brother North complains that it’s made him burly.”
He glanced down. “Burly, I take it, is not a positive attribute.”
Joan decided not to answer that. As far as she could see, Thaddeus’s life had been a parade of one compliment after another. He didn’t need any shoring up about his looks. He generally looked so immaculate and handsome that he could be mistaken for a porcelain statue of a duke.
Not at the moment, though. She stole another look at his legs. There was nothing soft about him. Burly was a definite compliment, not that she had any intention of telling him that.
“Gentlemen are by definition willowy,” she said, instead. “Delicacy advertises high rank: white gloves, silken stockings prone to snags, towering wigs, cucumber diets even as others struggle to buy bread. A member of the nobility is a person who needn’t work with his or her hands and advertises that fact.”
“You would work as a stage actress, if life had dealt you a different hand of cards?”
“Yes. Even though being an actress is apparently brutally difficult work. Mrs. Wooty hopes for better for Madeline.”
“What would that be?”
“Marriage to a man of business, perhaps.” She looked at him over the rim of her cup. “Or to Otis. Did you notice how he brightened when she offered to help him learn his lines?”
“I did.”
“I suppose you would consider it a terrible mésalliance. A diluting of noble blood. Or gentry blood, in this case.”
“I have long believed that it is my responsibility to marry a woman from the nobility,” Thaddeus responded, dodging the question. “Marriages should never be enacted on the basis of rash emotion. Marriage is a contract entered into for the betterment of an estate.”
“That’s cold,” Joan said, thinking that she had to squash any weakness she felt for him now. Thaddeus truly was a bloodless fellow. The woman who married him would wither, given his general perfection, combined with lack of affection.
She got to her knees and began latching the wooden boxes that had held their lunch.
He immediately started helping her, and they closed the boxes in silence. “Napkin,” Joan asked briskly, holding out her hand.
Thaddeus neatly folded his.
Awkward silences didn’t happen often in Lindow Castle. There were too many people with big opinions, Joan among them. She had to accept Thaddeus’s fencing lesson and then go home.
His hand brushed hers, and she caught a scent of him: citrus with a touch of starch. It was pure stupidity on her part that her knees went boneless.
Go home, perform Hamlet twice, keep away from Thaddeus thereafter.
Once they returned to the castle, she could cling to Otis, who tended to control all conversation. Thaddeus was his opposite.
Yet the sight of him did something to her equilibrium, so she looked away, fast, before he could notice. Thaddeus was fitting the boxes into the picnic basket as if that were a new kind of puzzle. She opened her mouth, about to say something cheerful about pulling out their rapiers—without the slightest sensual innuendo—when he abruptly spoke.
“My father fell in love when he was eighteen.”
Her hands stilled.
She knew, of course. They all knew, all of England knew, that the Duke of Eversley had rebelled a month or two after producing an heir, and moved away to live with his “true love.”
Some people called it the greatest romance of the era. Others said His Grace was a degenerate beast.
Joan had never met the Duke of Eversley. He eschewed London and polite society, and lived in retirement with the woman he had chosen.
Thaddeus seemed to have lost track of where he was going.
“I actually know that,” Joan prompted.
“Everyone knows,” he said unemotionally. “A stationer once told me that prints of His Grace with the ‘family of his heart’ outsell every image but those of the Wildes and the royal family.”