The Duke Read online

  But she understood so little about everything! She knew even less about plantations than she did about religion.

  One aspect of the story, however, she understood perfectly. For in her five weeks on the island, she had gained knowledge of the sort of temptation—the agony of longing—that could drive a woman to endanger her mortal soul. That she had been permitted to choose any husband she wished, yet now she ached for someone else, made her thoroughly sick.

  Shame coated her cheeks with heat.

  “Should I not have spoken so plainly, dear lady? You needn’t fear to displease me by saying so. Only allow me pride in a wife whose natural modesty causes her such discomfort.”

  Good Lord, he believed her embarrassed by the sensual details of the story! Even her horror and shame put on a false face.

  How could the longing be sinful when it felt like heaven?

  Flushed cheeks, be damned. She lifted her head.

  “You and I are alone together now,” she said. “Mrs. Jennings is not in the house. She went into the church. Are we not now in danger of sinning?”

  His hand twitched away from hers.

  “I am a man of God,” he said.

  “But you said that man, the member of your church, is God-loving too.”

  “I am a minister of Christ.”

  “You asked for my hand,” she pressed. “I believed then that you found me attractive, even appealing. Do you still?”

  “My lady—”

  “Do you?”

  “I consider myself the most fortunate of men to have such a lovely wife.”

  Not. Wife. Yet.

  “Since my arrival you have called on me thrice each week. Now I think that perhaps you are afraid to call on me, but that you will not admit that fear to me.” Just as she admitted nothing to the man who stirred such desperate desire in her. “Are you?”

  “My dearest lady, how weary you must be of waiting for your life here to begin! But how patient you are with me. You are a treasure.”

  In fact she was an immodest wanton. And the worst of it was, she did not feel as though she were still waiting for her life to begin—rather the opposite.

  But she could be better. She was no longer a child. Months ago, insisting to her father that she knew her own heart, she had made this choice. She must see it through. She would, no matter the temptation. In comparison to those who lived and died at the whim and will of others, she had nothing to complain about. Nothing to long for.

  “I do not deserve your praise,” she said.

  “This natural humility will only inspire more of my praise, of course. I ask of you only a sennight more. By then every member of my little community will be safely resettled.” He gazed at her through golden lashes. “And, consider, my lady: you cannot wish to speak the most important words of your life in a church without walls.”

  He left her with promises to return tomorrow for longer. Yet each time he called, his visits were brief.

  Another sennight became a fortnight as his church repairs continued, while each morning she awoke even fresher and more eager for her day than the day before.

  It frightened her.

  “Allow me to work with you at the church.” She needed to be away from where the captain might find her. A church seemed the safest spot. “You must be able to find some task for me there.”

  “Mr. Meriwether says he cannot spare you,” Paul said, patting her hand. “I’m sure your lovely smiles cheer the patients enormously.”

  “You spoke to Mr. Meriwether?” she said in surprise, not bothering to mention that she spent her days at the hospital doing far more than smiling.

  “Have you already forgotten our conversation at the house? I have waited months to have you at my side.”

  At his side. Not in his arms. While every hour she dreamed of having the muscular arms of a bronzed naval captain around her.

  “This delay pains me more than it does you,” Paul said.

  She doubted it. Her selfless fiancé could not possibly now be experiencing the confusion that she endured each day as her pulse sped awaiting the captain at the hospital, or when she would encounter him on the street or in the market, or—God forgive her—when she volunteered to do errands that would take her near the Theia’s berth.

  Each day she clamped down on her contrary feelings, hiding them from all. The shame she would bring to her betrothed if anyone suspected—the hurt she would cause him—were unthinkable.

  Newly determined, she began to avoid the captain when he came to the hospital, inventing tasks that would keep her close to the other volunteers. Then he would do something wonderful—like take a child onto his shoulders and stroll to the docks for a tour of the Theia while the child’s mother went under Dr. Meriwether’s scalpel, or sit with a dying sailor for hours until the man breathed his last, or simply lift his gaze to her and smile the smile that he reserved for her alone—and she would forget her noble goals and tumble back into confusion. And the agony of pretending that she was actually what everyone believed her to be grew.

  Chapter 6

  Awaken as the Beloved

  When the Duke and Duchess of Manchester invited Amarantha and her betrothed to attend a supper gathering, she accepted eagerly. Praying that the company of people like her parents’ friends would jolt her out of the insanity her thoughts and feelings had become, she dressed in her prettiest gown, allowed Mrs. Jennings to arrange her hair, and with new hope climbed into the carriage.

  On the ride to the governor’s mansion Paul fidgeted.

  “You seem unhappy,” she said. Perhaps Mrs. Jennings had told him of the time she spent with the captain. If so, she would admit to her mistake in becoming friends with such a man and she would not return to the hospital. It would be over. Over.

  “I am.”

  Fear and relief and a thick, painful sadness mingled in her throat.

  “With me?”

  “No, dear lady.” He squeezed her hand. “But I cannot like socializing in this manner with those who are still ignorant of the message of grace that I am bringing to this island—I and my colleagues.”

  Slowly she released her pent breath, and it struck her that his manner was now so different from the bright-eyed enthusiasm of those days in Shropshire.

  “But the duke and duchess are Christians,” she said. “They cannot wish to withhold salvation from anyone, can they?”

  “When we first met, you knew little of the labor to be done in God’s vineyard,” he said, his eyes full of benevolence for her. “Yet now, less than a year later, you speak as though born to this life.”

  “If I am to be the wife of a missionary, I must speak thus.” For the first time the if seemed to taunt her.

  “Amarantha, these fashionable people,” he said, “they do not wish slaves to become Christians. They fear that if enslaved people taste spiritual freedom, they will want to eat at the table as well.”

  “‘To eat at the table’?”

  He offered a patient smile. “That they will demand emancipation. Since Parliament ended the trade, rumors are rife on plantations of the imminent arrival of full abolition. With all the upset to order in the parishes since the storm, planters’ fears are even greater. It is the reason for the new curfew on slaves, which of course has made the repairs on my church such slow going.”

  She had heard the other volunteers at the hospital speaking of these matters, and she recalled Emily and their father occasionally discussing abolition. Now it seemed reasonable. If all souls were equal in God’s reckoning, why shouldn’t they be equal in man’s reckoning too?

  “Won’t they demand emancipation?” she asked.

  “Possibly. Only last year in Barbados a large number of them claimed freedom from their masters. It could happen here too. But just as in Barbados, they will not be granted it, and that is for the best.”

  “For the best?”

  “Dearest, the negroes’ souls must and will be saved. It is my greatest hope. But they will never rule the
mselves.”

  “Why not?”

  “They are incapable. Like children and women, they lack the full capacity for reason and therefore the ability to govern themselves rationally. It is our mission to lead them to God. After that, God alone will determine their fate.”

  Like women.

  Every day at the hospital that she awaited a man who made her heartbeats skip, but who by all accounts was a libertine and who was not her betrothed, she proved that she easily allowed her weakest instincts to overcome her rational mind.

  Yet she knew women of reason. Emily adored museums and lecture halls. Their father, a man of rank, wealth, and education, respected his eldest daughter’s intelligence immensely. From the time they were tiny girls, he had read to them stories about the female warriors and stateswomen of history—Cleopatra, Boudica, Queen Elizabeth—later encouraging them to read everything in his library. Granted, it was Emily who had enjoyed actually reading the pages. Amarantha had liked to listen to her sister read aloud, but the hills and pastures always called so powerfully that attending closely had sometimes been difficult. Even so, she had learned that not all women lacked reason, not even all women in her family.

  And since she had arrived in Jamaica, Emily had sent her excerpts of writings by abolitionists that made it clear the issues surrounding emancipation were hardly simple. Yet her fiancé’s ideas were so stark, as though they had nothing to do with actual people. With the human heart.

  What’s more, Eliza, who was both a woman and black, managed the busy sick-house so capably—patients, their families, volunteers, and industrious sailors—that Mr. Meriwether was able to devote himself entirely to surgery.

  Amarantha descended from the carriage bemusedly.

  Although not as large as Willows Hall, the governor’s house with its magnificent white columns and elegant twin doors was impressive. Lights blazed from windows and the music of a quartet filled the humid night with magic. Amarantha enjoyed the jaunty tunes that the fiddlers and pipers on the docks played each evening as the sun set and the melancholy airs the sailors sang while working. But with her mind so unquiet, the cultivated familiarity of the duke and duchess’s mansion dressed up for a party felt customary, warm, and delightfully gay. It felt safe. Shrugging off her musings, she entered the drawing room with a smile.

  And came face-to-face with Gabriel Hume.

  She lost her breath. She lost her senses. She had not anticipated this—him—in her world. She hardly knew what she did or said. Perhaps she nodded or curtsied when her hostess introduced her to the other guests.

  “Lady Amarantha, I believe you are acquainted with Captain Hume from your work at the sick-house,” the duchess said.

  Acquainted seemed such a wrongfully innocent word to describe the feelings he created in her like wind created a maelstrom. His uniform was sharp white over his muscular legs and rich blue across the expanse of his shoulders, the medals on his chest gleamed, his rather long black hair was neatly combed, with a single satiny lock curving over his brow, and his stance was the erect posture about which she had first teased him. At least half a head taller than every other man in the room, he was the model of military strength and virtue. Only his eyes revealed him: dark, glittering with candlelight, and replete with hunger as they swept her from the bejeweled combs fixed in her hair to the toes of her satin slippers.

  “How generous you have been, Captain,” the duchess said, “to lend your crewmen and surgeon to the paupers’ sick-house when the refitting of the Theia must have your first attention.”

  “’Tis no’ generosity, ma’am,” he said. “I saw a need that required attention.”

  He was not speaking of the hospital’s needs. He was speaking of her, as he had done that first day.

  She did not enjoy the party. She endured it. Throughout the evening her heart did not cease its quick, uneven tempo. To avoid being obliged to even look at him, she threw herself into conversation with other guests. Yet she knew where he was at every moment, as though her flesh sought his across the space. And she heard only him, as though her senses were attuned to the frequency of his voice alone. She felt brittle and too hot, like heat lightning crackling above a parched field.

  Finally the hours of torture ended. Head aching, she tumbled into the carriage.

  Paul patted her hand and rested his golden curls back against the squabs.

  She twisted her kerchief between her fingers. “Do you despise those socialites even more thoroughly now?”

  “I admit myself pleasantly surprised. And I have secured potential patrons for the mission school I wish to establish at the docks for freedmen sailors. It was not entirely the hardship I had anticipated.”

  Guilt weighed on her. What a great man he was to always be sacrificing his own happiness for others. And how wretchedly weak she was to desire another man so much that it hurt.

  Later, on her bed in the room she shared with her companion, she could not sleep, replaying each moment of torment during the party in which she feared she would reveal herself—to Paul or to him—either would be horrible.

  For she was certain of one thing: he was playing with her.

  He knew she was betrothed. A man of honor would respect that. He would not look at her as though he would consume her. He would not seek her out and make her wild with wanting him. She was a game to him, only a momentary amusement for a careless hedonist.

  She must clear her head of him now.

  Rising as first light turned the blackness to hesitant gray, she dressed silently and went out of the hotel. No one yet stirred on the high street. Soon it would be bustling with activity; repairs from the damage the storm had wrought were slowly restoring the port town to its former beauty.

  The damage the storm had wrought in her heart, however, was only worsening.

  Crossing the street, she headed for the docks to walk away her fidgets, to exhaust herself so that she could return to her bed and a few hours of sleep before she was expected at the hospital.

  When the captain appeared from the shadows she did not start or stumble. She knew it was he before she could even see him clearly in the darkness. She thought perhaps she would be able to recognize him anywhere, in her sleep, certainly in her dreams. Some part of her had known he would be waiting for her.

  He stood entirely still as she passed him by. A narrow corridor between wagons stacked with barrels to be loaded onto a ship beckoned. She went into it and he followed.

  He did not seize her or embrace her or do any of the lascivious acts that she had heard scoundrels were likely to do to maidens. Instead he halted at the other end of the wagon, yards away. Through the murky predawn she saw him rake his hand through his hair.

  “That is the man you’re to wed?” he said.

  Her tongue crimped into a useless knot.

  “That?” he repeated. “That pale, pompous, falsely pious excuse for a—That man?”

  She hardly knew how to respond. He waited for her to speak into the silence cushioned only by lapping water and the familiar squeaking of ships’ riggings.

  “He is none of those,” she finally managed to utter, and wondered that this was happening, that she was standing in the darkness alone with a young man who was a stranger to her family, and aching so deeply inside that she could hardly breathe. “How dare you—”

  “You canna marry him, Amarantha.” He said her name for the first time. The syllables in his rough brogue sent sublime pleasure through her.

  “I will marry him. As soon as the church is rebuilt.” Her fiancé’s reason for postponing their wedding sounded ridiculous now. “I will be his wife,” she said because she needed to hear it.

  He came to her. Yet still he did not touch her. She looked up into the shadows of his eyes; they swam with the same confusion that swirled in her.

  “Marriage to him will kill you.” His gaze covered her face, one feature at a time.

  “You must have seen him before this,” she said.

  “Aye.”


  “Then why are you saying this to me only now? Did you speak with him last night?”

  “I didna speak. I listened.”

  “To what?”

  “To the music o’ your voice as you told them all about the hospital an’ about the people you’ve come to know there. With every syllable, your pleasure was as bright as the light o’ the candles burning around you. You spoke with affection an’ with your heart.”

  Amarantha felt dizzy.

  “An’ you spoke like a man.”

  Her cloud of bliss burst.

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “You spoke your mind, lass.”

  “Oh.” Oh, no. She had been so agitated, she hardly recalled what she had said.

  “You spoke with intelligence an’ knowledge,” he said with an almost-smile. “An’ fearlessness. As always.”

  Upon a painful leap, Amarantha’s heart pounded back to life.

  “Always?”

  “Aye.” His eyes narrowed. “An’ I listened to him interrupt you an’ speak over you an’ belittle what you’ve done.” He swung away and his fingers scraped through his hair again, disarranging it further. He had thick, gloriously black locks, and she did not wonder that women eagerly gave their favors to him, despite his many ports. To be allowed to run her hands through his hair as he was doing now might convince her to wait for him months on end too.

  “That prim, superior son o’ a—I nearly throttled him. I’d like to take his lily-white neck between my hands an’—”

  “Stop!” Her hand was at her own throat, her other palm over her mouth. In all of the hours, all of the weeks that he had made her laugh and long for him, she had never expected he could be this. It frightened her.

  It thrilled her.

  He pivoted to face her. “He doesna deserve you.”

  “But you do? A man who could wish to harm another man in such a manner?”

  Alarm flashed on his face. And abruptly, in the eyes that had seen war, she saw vulnerability.

  He came to her again, swiftly this time.

  “No,” he said. “Never if it would displease you.”