Chapter Three
The duke stared down at Jane, clearly not pleased to find her standing at the door to his bedchamber in the middle of the night.
‘Miss Wood,’ he said again, sleepily rubbing his palm over his jaw, ‘why are you here? I thought we’d agreed that in the morning—’
‘Forgive me, your Grace, but this could not wait,’ Jane said, speaking to him more firmly than she’d ever thought she’d dare. ‘It is most important, you see.’
‘But it can’t be more than two hours past midnight,’ he protested. He was looking downwards, not at her face, and his scowl had become less perplexed, more thoughtful. Belatedly she realised that if she’d noticed he wore nothing beyond his nightclothes, then he was likely noticing the same of her. Yet instead of being mortified or shamed, she felt her irritation with him grow. How could he let himself be distracted in this idle fashion when so much—so very much!—was in question?
‘Forgive me for disturbing you, your Grace.’ She raised her chin, and impatiently shook her hair back from her eyes. ‘But your daughters and the gentlemen they wed deserve that much from me, your Grace, and I would never forgive myself if I didn’t speak on their behalf.’
His frown deepened, his thick, dark brows drawing sternly together. ‘No gentlemen would steal another man’s daughters. They are rogues and rascals, and I will deal with them accordingly.’
‘Your daughters would not agree with your judgement, your Grace.’
‘My daughters are too young to realise their folly, mere girls who—’
‘Forgive me, your Grace,’ Jane interrupted, her voice rising with uncharacteristic passion, ‘but they are women grown, who know their own hearts.’
‘“Their hearts,” hah,’ he scoffed. ‘That is the sorriest excuse for mischief in this world, Miss Wood. When I consider all the sorrow that has come from—’
‘Such as your own marriage, your Grace?’ she demanded hotly. ‘That is what I have always been told, and by those who would know. Did you not follow your heart when you wed her Grace, and at the same age as your daughters are now?’
His face froze, his anger stopped as cold as if he’d been turned to chilly stone.
And at once Jane realised the magnitude of what she’d done and what she’d said. The late Duchess of Aston was often mentioned at Aston Hall, and always with great affection and respect, and sorrow that she’d died so young. Her beauty, her kindness, her gentleness, all were praised and remembered by those who’d known her, and over time in the telling the duchess had become a paragon of virtue, a veritable saint. By an order so long-standing that its origins had been forgotten, no one spoke of her Grace before the duke. It was terribly tragic and romantic, true, but it was also the one rule of the house that was never broken.
Yet this was Venice, not Aston Hall. Things were different here, or perhaps it was Jane herself who was different after having been away for so many months. Either way she likely wasn’t a member of the duke’s household any longer, and certainly not after this.
‘Forgive me for speaking plainly, your Grace,’ she said. The words could not be taken back now, nor, truly, did Jane wish them unsaid, not in her present humour. ‘But how can you not wish the same contentment for your daughters that you found with—?’
‘You presume, Miss Wood,’ he said sharply. ‘You have no knowledge of these matters.’
‘I know the young ladies, your Grace,’ she insisted, ‘and what brings them joy and happiness.’
‘I know my own daughters!’
‘You may know them, your Grace, but you will never know the gentlemen they love, not so long as you remain so—so set against them.’
He drew back as abruptly as if she’d struck him. ‘Love,’ he said, practically spitting the word. ‘What do my daughters know of love? What can you know of it, Miss Wood?’
‘I know what I have read for myself in your daughters’ own words.’ She thrust the bundled letters into his arms, making him take them. ‘I know they are happy, and that they love the gentlemen they chose as their husbands. And that is what I know about love, your Grace.’
She curtsied briskly in her nightshift, then retreated without waiting to be properly dismissed. He did not try to stop her, nor did she look back.
She ran down the steps to her room, her shawl billowing out behind her shoulders. She closed the door to her bedchamber and took care to latch it. For what might be the last time, she sat at the gilded desk before the window, curling her feet beneath her and pressing her trembling palms to her cheeks.
She stared out at the mist rising from the canal and waited for her breathing to calm and her racing heart to slow. The night was still and quiet, with no sounds coming from his Grace’s rooms upstairs. By now he must have returned to his bed to sleep. By now, too, he would have made up his mind regarding her future. Which was just as well, for she’d decided it, too.
With a sigh, she reached for a clean sheet of paper and a pen, and began to write her letter giving notice to the Duke of Aston.
‘Your Grace!’ Bleary-eyed, Wilson hurried out from the shadows, his striped nightcap askew over one ear and his nightshirt stuffed haphazardly into his breeches. ‘Forgive me, your Grace, I did not hear you call.’
‘I didn’t.’ Richard still stood in the doorway to his rooms, scowling down the stairs where Miss Wood had vanished. She’d appeared like a wild-haired wraith, and disappeared like one, too, so fast that he wondered now if he’d dreamed the whole thing. ‘I answered the door myself.’
‘Oh, your Grace, you shouldn’t have done that, indeed you shouldn’t have,’ his manservant said, scandalised. ‘It’s not safe, not in a queer foreign place such as this.’
‘I’m safe enough, Wilson,’ Richard said. ‘Besides, it was hardly some brigand come to the rob me. It was Miss Wood.’
‘Miss Wood, your Grace?’ asked Wilson, clearly astonished. ‘Our Miss Wood? Come here, at this hour? Why, your Grace, I’d scarce believe it, not of Miss Wood.’
‘Nor I,’ Richard said. ‘Yet here she was, and in a righteous fury, too.’
He glanced down at the two bundles of letters she’d left with him, each tied neatly with ribbons. Of course they’d be neatly tied, just as he was certain they’d each be folded back into their seals and sorted in precedence of the date they’d been received. That was the way Miss Wood always did things, with brisk, predictable order. But there’d been nothing orderly or predictable about her outburst just now—not one thing.
‘She must’ve had a powerful strong reason, your Grace,’ Wilson said, hovering like the old nursemaid he very nearly was. ‘It don’t seem like her in the least.’
‘It didn’t, indeed.’ Earlier this day he’d barely noticed Miss Wood at all, except to register that she was in fact the same governess he’d trusted with his girls’ welfare. She’d simply been Miss Wood, the woman that had lived beneath his roof for nearly a decade, the same stern, plain Miss Wood that would have cowed him into obedience as
