Ralph said nothing to Chloe about having seen them.
He said nothing at all of any significance to Chloe, in fact, during the few weeks following their visit to Hitching. They conversed—there were never awkward or strained silences between them. But they talked to each other more like polite strangers than anything else.
Oh, it was true that he had held her briefly to comfort her the night she broke the news to him that she was not with child. He had assured her that of course he was not annoyed with her.
“Annoyed?” he had said, setting her a little away from him and frowning down at her. “But why would I be? It takes two, you know. I assume you did know.”
She had smiled wanly at his weak attempt at a joke.
“I was so hoping I would be,” she had said.
“Well, let us not be too disappointed,” he had told her. “Now I have an excuse to keep on visiting you here nightly.”
He had intended that too as a kind of joke. But as he spoke the words, he had realized that they were true. He might have felt obliged to keep his distance from her if he had impregnated her. He did not want to keep his distance. And it was not just the sex, though that was admittedly a large part of it. He liked sex with Chloe. It was also, however, about being in bed with her all night, about being close to her even if they did not touch, about feeling her warmth, hearing her breathing, smelling her soap and the essence of her. On the whole he had been sleeping better since his marriage.
He had, however, felt obliged to quit her bed and her room for the five nights of her courses. He had hated it. His bed had felt as big as a small country. He had found it difficult to get warm despite the fact that spring was turning to summer. He had kept waking up and reaching out one arm—or reaching out one arm and waking up. He was not sure which provoked which. He did know that he had not slept well during those nights and had returned to his wife’s bed with an almost embarrassing eagerness when the five days were over.
But during those five days he had withdrawn into himself a little further. If he had wanted to tell her the night he held her that he would miss her for the next little while, that she meant more to him than he had expected, that she was crucial to his comfort and well-being, he was very glad afterward that he had held his tongue and not made such an ass of himself.
He was not really worthy of Chloe. She was his superior. And he had certainly not expected that. He had thought her a nondescript, shadowy mouse of a woman when he first met her. Good God, he had not even noticed that she was in the drawing room that evening when he and his grandmother talked about the need for him to find a bride as soon as possible.
He was not worthy of her—or of anyone.
Sometimes he almost hated her. And he had started to hate himself again, something he had worked hard at Penderris to stop doing. Perhaps he never had stopped anything except feeling. He had been tempted to feel again since his marriage. He had even given in to that temptation a time or two. But allowing himself to feel meant allowing excruciating pain back into his life, and that was merely self-destructive.
Sometimes he wished he had chosen one of those girls from the ballrooms of London as his wife. And sometimes the thought of not having Chloe in his life brought him to the edge of tears before he froze the thought and turned his mind elsewhere.
He kept busy. He escorted Chloe to the very best social events each evening. Introducing her to the ton as his duchess was one of the main reasons for this stay in London, after all. He kept up his usual activities during the day and helped his wife and Lloyd plan the ball, which was already being talked about and was expected to be the grandest squeeze of the Season. He wrote a long letter to Imogen, Lady Barclay, the one woman member of the Survivors’ Club, after she wrote from Cornwall to congratulate him on his marriage and newly acquired title and to commiserate with him over the death of his grandfather. He wrote another to Ben—Sir Benedict Harper—who had written a far briefer letter from Wales on the same themes. He wrote his regular biweekly letters to his maternal grandmother. He called a few times on his mother.
He went with George to attend one of the king’s formal levees and accepted His Majesty’s condolences and congratulations.
“I understand, Worthingham,” the king said, “that there is to be a celebratory ball at Stockwood House in the next week or two.”
“There is, indeed, Your Majesty,” Ralph said. Good Lord, did the whole world know, though the invitations had not even gone out yet?
“I shall think of honoring it with my presence,” the king informed him. “Provided neither you nor the duchess is of a modern turn of mind and likes to keep windows open on the assumption that night air is good for the constitution?” His eyebrows were raised. He was awaiting an answer.
The king’s own entertainments were famous for their fainting ladies and stiflingly hot and stuffy rooms.
“All windows will remain tightly closed, Your Majesty,” Ralph assured the great mountain of a man before him.
“And so,” he told George in the carriage a short time later, “we will all boil in the heat that evening on the faint chance that Prinny will take it into his head to show his face at the ball for all of five minutes.”
“Not Prinny any longer,” George reminded him. “The king—George the Fourth. And yes, we all will, Ralph. But if he comes, you know, even for five minutes, yours will indeed be pronounced the entertainment of the Season. That will be gratifying for your wife.”
Ralph laughed. “She will die of terror when I tell her,” he said. “No. No, she will not. She will carry it off with cool dignity even if her knees are knocking.”