Duke of Desire (Maiden Lane #12)(21)

Iris inhaled. This was a beautiful room—warm and welcoming—and it was entirely unlike anything else she’d seen in Dyemore Abbey.

It was also obviously feminine.

Iris knit her brows. That meant that the room Dyemore slept in was the duchess’s bedroom, not the duke’s.

How strange. Why would he not sleep in his proper bedroom?

She turned to go back into the duchess’s bedroom again and saw the trunk.

Iris knelt and put down the candlestick before lifting the lid. Inside were piles of clothing.

She drew one out and saw that it was a dress in a style several decades old. The gown was quite ornate, with embroidery worked over the entire skirt, and a matching stomacher. This was no everyday gown. A woman would save it for very special occasions.

Iris gently laid the gown aside. Underneath it was a lovely primrose-yellow bodice and skirt. She held it up against herself. The skirt was inches too short for her, but the bodice might fit.

Excited now, she dug through the rest of the trunk. It was filled with a woman’s clothing, all of it for a lady shorter than Iris but with a fuller bust. At the bottom she found a chemise and stockings and nearly wept at the thought of clean clothes.

Except these must be Dyemore’s mother’s clothes. She bit her lip. Why else would the trunk be in the duchess’s sitting room? His mother was dead—she knew that much—but when or how the woman had died she’d never heard. He might be very angry at her for donning his mother’s clothing.

Iris shook her head. It was the dead of night and she wasn’t wearing her stays in any case. In the morning she’d decide whether or not to use the dress.

She closed the trunk and, taking the yellow skirt and bodice along with the stockings and chemise, retraced her steps. She placed the clothes on a chair before locking the sitting room again.

Then she looked across the room to the dressing room.

The duke’s room had to be on the other side.

With that thought she picked up the candle again and crossed to the dressing room. Inside, the copper bath had been removed. She held her candle higher and saw that another door was on the other side of the dressing room.

She went to it and tried the handle and was unsurprised to find it locked as well.

Outside she could hear faintly the wind whistling around a corner, but mostly it was quiet.

As if everything in this great house had died long ago.

She pushed aside the thought and concentrated on the lock.

On the third try she found the correct key.

The lock gave with a screech, as if reluctant to yield to her curiosity.

She pushed open the door and held up her candle.

The room was almost twice as large as the bedroom she shared with Dyemore. A massive bed on a raised dais stood in the center, and ebony pillars carved into twisted shapes held up drapes in a blood red so dark she at first mistook them for black.

She stepped in and glanced around. This had to be the ducal bedroom, but everything was layered in dust—as if it’d been locked up after the previous duke’s death.

Why hadn’t Dyemore opened it?

The fireplace across the room was enormous, shielded in black marble. A large painting hung above it. Iris raised her candle to get a better look. Saint Sebastian stood tied to a tree, nude and dying horrifically. He was impaled by numerous arrows, the blood painting his white, writhing body.

She shuddered and turned aside.

Her hip bumped against a small table, knocking it over along with the things that had been standing on it. A marble bowl thumped to the carpet, rolling in a circle, spilling its contents, and a book of some sort slid to the floor.

Iris bent to look at the bowl and what it had held. She could smell the scent even before the candlelight picked up the thin curls of wood: cedar. The subtle, balmy fragrance filled her nostrils. She must’ve inadvertently stepped on some of the chips as she bent down. Carefully she swept as much as she could back into the little bowl with her hand and set it on the table again.

Then she knelt to reach for the book.

It was quite large, but thin, as if it might contain maps or botanical prints. She opened it curiously, only to find that it wasn’t a printed book at all.

It was a sketchbook.

On the inside cover were the words Leonard, Duke of Dyemore. Across from the inscription, on the first page, was a drawing of a little boy, perhaps seven or eight, standing, one hip cocked. It was a beautiful sketch, innocent and ethereal.

She turned the page and found another little boy, this one sitting, his legs skewed to the side. On the opposite page was a girl, her hair brushing her shoulders.

Iris flipped through the book. There were dozens of delicate drawings in black pencil and red crayon, page after page, all of them exquisite, all of them drawn by a master hand.

All of nude children.

They stood or sat or lounged, their soft limbs not yet formed into the muscle of adulthood. Several were facing away from the viewer, and from that angle it was impossible to tell if the model had been a boy or a girl. The bodies were done in intimate detail, but the heads were hardly sketched in—or, in some cases, missing entirely—as if the artist wasn’t interested in his models’ faces.

As Iris turned the pages with fingers that had begun to tremble she noted that the children seemed to be just on the cusp of puberty. The girls with barely budding breasts, the boys with hands and feet that had begun to grow ahead of the rest of their bodies. The children trembled on the cusp of metamorphosis. It made the drawings horrid somehow. As if the artist had caught this special, almost mystical moment in these children’s lives and dissected it on the page.