“My lord.” She curtsied without either looking at him or smiling, and he bowed and murmured her name.
His grandmother did not actually ignore her. Neither did she draw her any more to Ralph’s attention, however, and he relaxed. Obviously she was of no particular account. Some sort of companion, he supposed, an aging, impecunious spinster upon whom Her Grace had taken pity.
“Now, tell me, Ralph,” his grandmother said, patting the seat of the chair beside her, “who is in town this year for the Season? And who is new?”
Ralph sat and prepared to be interrogated.
2
The Earl of Berwick was really quite different from what Chloe had expected.
There were his looks, for one thing. He was not the handsome boy she had always imagined, frozen in time, arrogant and magnetically attractive, riding roughshod over the feelings of others. Well, of course he was no longer that boy. It had been eight years since he and Graham left school, and during those years he had been to war, lost his three friends, been desperately wounded himself, and made a slow recovery—perhaps. Perhaps he had recovered, that was. She had never really wondered what war did to a man apart from killing him or wounding him or allowing him to return home when it was over, mercifully unscathed. She had considered only the physical effects, in fact.
Lord Berwick fell into the second category—wounded and recovered. That should have been the end of it. He had been left with scars, however. One of them was horribly visible on his face, a nasty cut that slashed from his left temple, past the outer corner of his eye, across his cheek and the corner of his mouth to his jaw, and pulled both eye and mouth slightly out of shape. It must have been a very deep cut. Bone deep. The old scar was slightly ridged and dark in color and made Chloe wince at the thought of what his face must have looked like when it was first incurred. That it had missed taking out his eye was nothing short of a miracle. There must have been some permanent nerve damage, though. That side of his face was not as mobile as the other when he talked.
And if there was that one visible scar, there were surely others hidden beneath his clothes.
It was not just his scarred face, though, and the possibly scarred body that made him very different from the person she had expected and made her wonder more than she had before about what war did to a man. There were his eyes and his whole demeanor. There was something about his eyes, attractively blue though they were in a face that was somehow handsome despite the scar. Something . . . dead. Oh, no, not quite that. She could not explain to herself quite what she saw in their depths, unless it was that she saw no depths. They were chilly, empty eyes. And his manner, though perfectly correct and courteous, even affectionate toward his grandparents, seemed somehow . . . detached. As though his words and his behavior were a veneer behind which lived a man who was not feeling anything at all.
Chloe had gained this chilly impression of her brother’s former schoolmate at their first meeting and realized how foolish she had been to expect him to be exactly as Graham had described him all those years ago. He was not that boy any longer, and had probably never been exactly as she had imagined him anyway. She had only ever seen him, after all, through the biased eyes of her brother, who was very different from him and had always both envied and resented him.
Chloe found this man, this stranger, disturbing, a cold, brooding, detached, controlled man it would surely be impossible to know. And a man who seemed largely unaware of her existence despite the fact that they had been introduced. Although he did not pointedly ignore her during dinner, neither did he initiate any conversation with her or show any particular interest in anything she had to say, though truth to tell she did not say a great deal. She was just a little bit intimidated by him.
She wished he were the man she had expected him to be. She could have felt open scorn at his arrogant assumption that he was God’s gift to the human race instead of allowing him to make her feel somehow . . . diminished. Oh, dear, did she feel diminished? Again? If she allowed herself to feel any more so, she would surely disappear altogether and become just an easily forgotten memory to those who had known her. She almost chuckled aloud at the thought.
The duchess was a knitter. She made blankets and bonnets and booties and mittens for the babies born on the vast ducal estates scattered about England. She loved doing the actual knitting, she had once explained to Chloe. She found it soothing. But she hated the accompanying tasks of rolling the skeins of wool into balls before she started and sewing together the little garments when she was finished.
Chloe, of course, had immediately volunteered to perform both tasks.
After they had all drunk tea in the drawing room following dinner, the duke as usual got to his feet to bid the ladies good night and withdraw to the book room, his own domain. He invited his grandson to accompany him, but the earl glanced at the duchess, whose head was bent over her knitting, and professed his intention of remaining to keep her company for a while longer.
As though she had no one else to do that.
The duke made his way from the room with the aid of his cane while his grandson held the door open for him. Chloe moved away from the fireplace, where the coals had been piled high against the chill of the evening, so that she could use the conveniently spaced knobs of the sideboard cupboards over which to stretch a skein of the pale blue wool the duchess was currently using while she rolled it over her fingers into a soft ball. She sat down to the task, her back to the room, thankful that she had something to do while Her Grace settled into a conversation with the earl.