Anne O'Brien - The Scandalous Duchess

‘So you pre-empt me,’ I replied evenly.

‘Why not? You would not be the first virtuous woman to find lechery too painful to contemplate,’ he replied, his voice harsh, his observation grating against my senses. ‘Perhaps you have not the courage to seize what you desire.’

Here was a man who never questioned his own courage, but he would question mine. I lifted my palm and stepped back. Did he think it would not take courage to refuse him?

‘I am here to give you my reply,’ I said with a calmness that belied by leaping heart. ‘Whether I have courage, it is for you to judge.’

Standing, stretching to his full height, quite carefully the Duke placed the pen beside the document, and turned. I remained motionless. I did not say a word: I did not have to. I watched as a smile began, slowly at first, then growing to illuminate his face, enhancing his beauty as he saw what I had done. Fisting his hands on his hips, he tilted his head in contemplation, making me smile again for it was as if he was appreciating some new object in his collection. I remained perfectly still and let him look.

‘What have you got behind your back?’ he asked softly when, as I knew he would, he had taken in every aspect of my appearance.

With one hand I produced the book I had borrowed, like a wise-woman revealing some mystical source of magic. ‘I have this to return.’ I placed it on the table next to the map.

‘The missal you borrowed to direct your actions into righteous pathways.’

‘No missal,’ I replied solemnly, for it was not a book of prayer that I had sought for my night of contemplation, with the Duke’s kiss still hot on my lips.

The Duke opened the cover page, and looked up quizzically. ‘I would not have expected this.’

‘Why not?’ Its depictions of Love in all its forms in the Roman de la Rose had occupied my hours, while the sensuous illustrations had seduced my senses.

‘Did it help?’ The Duke closed the page, his gaze holding mine. ‘Did it persuade you that Divine Love was your ultimate goal in this life?’

‘No, my lord.’

‘Platonic love, then. Is that what you seek between us?’

‘No, my lord.’

He knew I did not. His eyes glittered with a sense of victory, as if he had just overcome an enemy of great power. How could he not know? He knew my answer, as I had intended, without a word being exchanged between us, as he had taken in my appearance from the little round buckram hat that fixed my gold-edged veil, to my gilded slippers. For what had I done? Rejecting the respectable widow for ever, I was dressed as if for a bridal in green and gold, my bodice gleamingly patterned, my oversleeves trimmed with a full meadow of embroidered flowers. As far from my mourning robes as I could make them. And at my belt hung the coral and gold beads of the Duke’s gift.

This was no penitential garb.

The Duke gestured with his chin. ‘And in your other hand?’

‘This is for you.’

Discovered in The Savoy garden almost before dawn, it was a poor apology, frost-bitten and withered, showing the merest tinge of colour within its grey of decomposition.

‘One should never plan to express the state of one’s heart with a rose in winter,’ I said. ‘It will shed its petals within the hour.’

‘I will not hold its imperfections against you.’ He took the sad corpse from me. And in taking it his fingers, at last, closed over mine.

‘I read Jean de Meun’s poem,’ I said, struggling to keep my voice even, for his handclasp stirred my blood to a shiver of delight. ‘How the Lover battled to win the heart of his Beloved. I recognised the enemies he faced. Jealousy. Danger. Shame and fear. I recognised all of those. Do I not see them in my own choices? I see the dangers in what you ask of me, for I am afraid of the shame that others would heap on me. Am I not jealous of every moment you spend with Constanza, away from me?’

His hand wrapped even more strongly round mine, as if to give comfort and strength when my voice caught a little on the emotion of the moment. But I did not need his courage. I had enough of my own. My night had been well spent.

‘But you see,’ I went on to explain, ‘the Lover won his battle, and his tormenters fled. He gained entrance to the walled garden and plucked the precious rosebud for his Love. As I have plucked this for you, from your own garden. My doubts too have fled.’

And they had. I had made my decision for good or ill.

‘So I am here. To say yes to you.’

‘I think it was supremely difficult for you.’ The timbre of his voice was like velvet, to stroke my senses.

‘To find a rose? Well nigh impossible. This was the only one…’ I smiled when he used his free hand to silence me, his fingers gentle on my lips.

‘To make the decision, my dearest girl! My very dear Katherine.’

‘Yes. It was,’ I admitted, but still I smiled against his fingers for my heart was leaping with joy. ‘Do you remember who it was who helped the Lover in his battle?’ I knew that he would.

‘Oh, yes. All-powerful, all-conquering Venus. The goddess of carnal desire, of all physical delights.’ His hand tightening around mine and the suffering rosebud, he drew me closer. ‘So, Madame de Swynford, you will give yourself up to me and all the pleasures I can bring to you?’

‘I will.’

‘For ever?’

‘For all time.’

‘Then we will be together for all time. And I will extract a promise from you.’

‘Only one?’

‘One will do for now.’ He stroked his knuckles over my embroidered bodice, over the swell of my breasts, in a possessive movement that made me hold my breath. ‘Will you promise me that you will never wear black again?’

‘I promise.’

He kissed me on the lips, as light and insubstantial as that first kiss, as a butterfly’s wing, although I felt the rigid tension of the muscles in his forearms as he tucked the sad rose into the bodice of my gown. It was like feeling the explosive force of a warhorse, held on a tight rein until released into the heat of battle. I was in no doubt of his desire for me. My fingers trembled as I smoothed them over the knap of his sleeve. I needed him to take the next step, for it was beyond me.

Abandoning the map and the forthcoming expedition, he led me to the door.

‘Does Lady Alice expect you?’

‘No, my lord. I am in your employ.’

‘Then I have need of an hour of your time.’ For a moment he hesitated, his eyes studying my face, smoothing my lower lip with the pad of his thumb, a more poignant gesture than any other. ‘Or a month, a year. Even a lifetime…’

‘You must make do with an hour, my lord,’ I remarked practically, even as my heart throbbed. ‘Lady Alice will ask after me.’

‘An hour it shall be,’ he agreed, ‘for I too, unfortunately, have demands on my time.’

And in that moment of perception I knew that this would always be so. The Duke’s duty was to England. Any woman in his life must accept that she would never be pre-eminent, no matter how strong his desire to be with her. I knew that this driving force in him to be pre-eminent, to wield power, would colour all our days together, however long or short our liaison might be. And in that moment, I witnessed the path of my life stretched out before me, with all its shadows, its moments of brilliance.

You can still step back , my conscience whispered in my mind. Are you indeed brave enough? Do you have the fortitude to take what you want, what you have always dreamed of taking? Or will you step back and preserve the moral high ground? If you take this step, there will never be any moral high ground, ever again, for you .

There is no marriage in this for you .