She deserved more than a little scolding. But she thought it was just subtle enough that she could feign innocence, and she was going to bask in the champagne bubbles of her cleverness. She’d had so few wins, recently. She felt positively fulsome with triumph.
“I suspect you have a wonderful singing voice, Your Grace,” Mrs. Pariseau said, emboldened and aglow with the happiness of good music. “You ought to sing a tune. We’d be so honored.”
“Yes, why don’t you join in the singing, Your Grace?” Mariana felt emboldened, too. “I’m certain Mrs. Pariseau is right. You excel at so many things, it would doubtless be yet another triumph to add to the chapter called ‘Triumphs’ in your memoirs.”
He didn’t reply. He regarded her with something very like genuine interest. In fact, speculatively.
“Most operas are performed in Italian, are they not, Miss Wylde?” He was very polite.
Unusually polite.
Almost deferential.
“It is my opinion that the best of them are, indeed, Your Grace.” It was lovely to know something definitively that he seemed not to know. The evening was getting better and better.
“Such a lyrical language. So expressive and vibrant.”
“Oh, yes,” she agreed. A little more cautiously now. She wasn’t used to hearing two relatively pleasant sentences in a row from the duke.
“There’s a beautiful Italian expression . . . it’s a favorite of mine. Perhaps you know it? I should be pleased indeed if you could turn it into a little tune, with perhaps a poignant melody.”
“It would be my honor, Your Grace.” Perhaps, the general that he was, he’d decided to call a truce, knowing the battle would go on and that she could, in fact, draw blood.
“It’s this . . .” he said, slowly and beautifully. “‘Non smetto mai di strillare come un orribile pappagallo.’ Isn’t that beautiful and profound?”
“‘Non smetto mai di strillare come un orribile pappagallo.’” She flawlessly, slowly, imitated the way he’d savored the words. She hadn’t the faintest idea what they meant.
Mrs. Pariseau cleared her throat. “Miss Wylde . . . ?” she said quietly.
But Mariana didn’t hear her. She only knew she could not hesitate for long without looking like an absolute fool in front of him. So she nodded.
Later she was to remember the duke’s immediate little smile.
A snippet of an aria she loved possessed a similar rhythm to those words. With a tweak or two, she could adapt the duke’s phrase to it.
The room was utterly silent as she lowered her head and took a breath.
And then she slowly lifted her head, closed her eyes, and soulfully released the words with full power, trilling the L’s for all she was worth, hands over her heart.
“Non smetto mai di strillare come un orribile pappagalllllllo!”
A resounding silence ensued.
She frankly thought it was a creditable, if not tour de force, performance.
There ought to have been applause, or at least a sigh or two.
Something was terribly wrong.
Mr. Delacorte did pat his hands together tentatively. But he tapered off at the sight of Mrs. Pariseau with her hands over her mouth, her eyes wide and fixed on Mariana with what looked like shock and—more horrifying—sympathy.
A cold dread traced Mariana’s spine.
Mrs. Hardy and Mrs. Durand were similarly wide-eyed and very still.
That bastard had walked her into a trap. That much was suddenly horrifyingly clear.
Dot and Mr. Delacorte had picked up the mood of the room and were somber, if confused.
“Thank you, Miss Wylde,” the duke said, sounding bored. But his eyes glinted dangerously. “That was even better than I expected.”
She saw then how he’d done it. He’d used her flaws against her. He thought her an ignorant peasant, all instinct and nerve, and he’d extrapolated from there. He had trapped her neatly with her own pride, and he’d played a hunch that she wouldn’t be able to resist lying about it.
She knew at once there was no winning against this man. Ever. She would not ever signify.
She supposed she was glad he’d been the one standing between the English and the French. But she was also glad there was bird shite all over his statue in Hyde Park.
She stood in the middle of the room, her palms damp, a cold knot in her stomach, and wished this was in fact an opera stage and that a trapdoor would open beneath her and she would topple in and perhaps die.
She wondered who would be brave enough to tell her what it meant.
It turned out to be Mrs. Durand.
She cleared her throat and said, with an exaggerated sort of politeness, “‘I never stop squawking like a hideous parrot’ is indeed an unusual expression, Your Grace.”
“And now it’s also a song,” the duke said placidly, and lifted the newspaper again to read.
Chapter Five
“We can’t let this stand. We need to have a word with the duke.”
“You mean . . . reprimand him?” Delilah whispered.
Angelique hesitated. Then nodded slowly, with deep regret.
Neither of them knew why they were whispering. They were in the sitting room at the top of the stairs; everyone else had gone to sleep. It seemed that a crime terrible and magnificent in its subtlety had been committed. Miss Wylde had retreated to her rooms immediately thereafter and had not returned for the rest of the evening.
It had been devastating.
The bawdy little song she’d delivered earlier had been veiled enough that it could be explained away, and yet they both knew what—and who—it had been about. And so did the duke.
He’d been provoked.
Nevertheless.
Delilah considered this. “It will be a shame to celebrate my first wedding anniversary with a divorce.”
Angelique stifled a laugh. “In all seriousness, do you think Tristan would ever forgive you if we evicted Valkirk? Not that we’re going to take it quite that far,” she added hurriedly. “Although . . . imagine the publicity. It could go either way, really. People love exclusivity, and would be awfully curious to learn that not even Valkirk could meet our standards.”
“That might be an amusing exercise to imagine once we settle this little problem. It’s just . . . do you suppose he’ll take kindly to it?”
Angelique had no answer for her. “No matter. We must do it. And we must do it tomorrow. The air was positively humid with reproach in the sitting room, and I shouldn’t like Mr. Delacorte or Mrs. Pariseau or Dot to think we’d allow them—or anyone—to be treated that way. And I shouldn’t like them to feel free to behave that way.”
And so, an hour later, in their cozy bedroom, Delilah broke the news of their intentions to her husband.
She’d gotten into her night rail. She brushed her hair a hundred strokes then plaited it.
She waited for him to be half-undressed before she told him, in case, she thought mordantly, it was the last time she was able to feast her eyes on that view of his stunning torso. When he twisted slightly, there was a slight gap between his taut waist and his trousers, and it made her head go light. She always wanted to slip her hand into it. She could now, anytime she pleased. One of the millions of benefits of being a wife.