Carla Kelly (10 page)

“Anything is possible, lad. I was curious.”

“The answer is no.”

The doctor opened his mouth to speak, but the duke waved him to silence. “No, no, and let me guess? Your next question: do I want a drink? God, yes, I do. There have been moments in this past week when I think I would have killed for one lick of a cork.” He let that bit of intelligence sink in and shrugged. “Then the moment passes, until the next one, and then I deal with that. And so my day goes, Dr. Cook.”

“An honest appraisal, Mr. Duke,” the doctor said. “I suppose there is nothing to prevent you from taking up with the bottle again when we finally spring you from this place.”

“Nothing, Dr. Cook, not a thing in the world.”

“Do you want to leave?”

The question was blunt and, unlike the doctor somehow, totally professional and cold, almost. It was bracing in the extreme and somehow unwelcome. Did he want to leave? No, he didn’t. What he wanted more than anything was to take a stroll in the orchard with Libby Ames.

“Not yet.”

Dr. Cook grinned at him then, the formal spell broken. “Then don’t. I don’t know how well your chocolate business will fare if you linger in Kent, but it can only rebound to your advantage, I am sure.”

“Yes, likely you are right.” The duke hesitated. “Dr. Cook, she promised me a stroll in the orchard tomorrow, if you think it advisable.”

Before he answered, Dr. Cook pulled back the bedclothes and examined the duke’s legs. “You’re already up and about to the necessary, aren’t you, lad?” he asked as his fingers probed the deeper lacerations.

“Yes, of course.”

“Then I can’t see how a stroll about the orchard can do you any possible danger, particularly as the orchard does not intersect at any angle with a public house or a wine cellar.”

The two men laughed.

“You don’t really think that Lib—Miss Ames— would permit me within a league of a pub, now, do you?” the duke asked.

“No, I do not,” the doctor agreed. “You’ve already observed that she doesn’t object to ordering people about.”

“Bossy little baggage,” murmured the duke.

“She does tend to make her opinions known.” The doctor patted his coat, brushing off imaginary lint. “Please observe that I have arrived here unwrinkled for once, strictly to impress her.”

“She is rather a nag about your sleeping and dressing habits, Doctor,” the duke replied. “I wonder that you tolerate her.”

“I wonder, too. Do you think she will notice my new suit?”

The duke doubted that Libby took much notice of the doctor. “I am certain she will,” he prevaricated.

Once the subject of Libby Ames had been introduced, words failed both men. The doctor twiddled with his spectacles as the duke collected his thoughts and finally recalled one pressing concern.

“I will relish this stroll about the orchard, Doctor, but until Candlow recovers from amnesia, I am afraid that I cannot oblige either you or Miss Ames.”

“What’s that?” the doctor asked, caught off-balance. He dropped his glasses and fumbled after them on the floor.

“Candlow seems to have forgotten where he stowed my traveling case, after you, uh, jettisoned it from that very window.”

“Is that a fact?” the doctor asked, when, red-faced, he finished foraging for his glasses and put them on again. “I predict he will undergo a remarkable cure in only a matter of minutes, Mr. Duke.”

“What a relief for him,” said the duke.

There was a knock at the door, a familiar knock. Both men turned toward the door expectantly. Libby flung the door open, her eyes on the doctor. She was out of breath, as if she had taken the stairs two at a time. “Dr. Cook, Jimmy Wentworth waits below and he says his mama needs you right now.”

The doctor nodded absently. “I can’t imagine why, really. This will be her seventh, Mr. Duke,” he explained. “I think she could find the resource to weed her garden, play a game of whist, and still have the time and energy to tell me how to go about my business. Thank you, my dear.”

Libby came into the room, standing well back from the doctor, as if wondering what piece of furniture would be in jeopardy as he made his ponderous way across the room. The duke grinned in appreciation as her eyes widened and she clapped her hands.

“Dr. Cook, that is a magnificent suit,” she declared. “I didn’t know you were a Bond Street beau!”

Touché
, thought the duke. Miss Ames, you are more observant of the good doctor than I would have thought possible, or do I flatter myself?

Dr. Cook blushed, turned aside, and would have stumbled into a potted plant if Libby had not darted in front of him and borne it to safety. She hurried to the window with the rescued plant. “Needs sunlight,” she said, still breathless.

The doctor nodded, his face pink. He bowed with a flourish that impressed the duke, who would have thought such an exercise beyond the doctor’s talents. “Miss Ames, the inmate in this room needs sunlight, too. You have my permission to take him on a stroll about the grounds tomorrow. He may exert himself only to the extent of picking up your handkerchief, should you drop one.”

“You know I never do that, Doctor,” Libby teased. “I am not a flirt.”

“Miss Ames, you are a managing female with no scruples about wrapping both of us around your little finger,” the doctor said, while the duke stared at him.

Libby merely laughed at both of them. “Dr. Cook, you know I never have anything like that in mind,” she protested.

The doctor bowed again and waved his hand to the duke. “She is incorrigible, but not without heart. Good luck to you both.” He sighed, remembering the task before him. “
Adieu
. Mrs. Wentworth is probably even now waiting to make a mockery of my obstetrical skills.” He shook his head. “Delivering babies for these farm women is rather like having someone behind you telling you how to steer your gig.” He closed the door behind him.

The duke look at Libby, who had gone delightfully pink at the doctor’s words. “A most interesting man, Miss Ames.” He looked at her a moment until he was sure he had her attention. “He’s in love with you, of course.”

His heart went out to her, so adorably confused did she look at his statement. “Mr. Duke, that is absurd!” Libby pulled some dead leaves from the plant that balanced so precariously on the window ledge. Her agitated motions piqued his own interest.

“It’s not so absurd, Miss Ames,” he argued.

Libby grabbed the plant from the window and plunked it back down on the floor. “The doctor and I would never suit, sir,” she said properly, and then ruined the effect by making a face, “Besides, sir, Squire Cook is looking for a much better match for his only child, and so the squire told me so himself only last week.”

The duke lay back against the pillows, finding it difficult to imagine what possible defect an alliance with Libby Ames presented. Good God, he thought, Eustace tells me the Ames are as heavily laden as Croesus. This squire must be high in the instep indeed.

“This is a strange place, Miss Ames,” he said finally, at a loss. “I cannot understand the squire, then.”

Libby’s face grew serious. “Perhaps you do not know everything about us, sir.”

“Perhaps I do not, Miss Ames,” he was forced to agree.

His words must have put a crimp in her nose, because she did not visit him after dinner as she usually did, laughing and making fun of the clumsy way he played solitaire, or reading to him from one book or another, it didn’t matter which. That he had embarrassed her was obvious. He had thought she would make light of his words. Instead, it was as though his words about the squire, lightly spoken, had reminded Libby Ames of . . . what? He did not know.

I wonder, Libby Ames, do you really love that buffoon of a doctor, he thought as he lay in restful peace in the silent room. The idea was so absurd that he laughed out loud, rolled over, and composed himself for sleep.

He was dozing off at last when there came a timid knock at the door. He knew at once that it was not Libby, but he raised up on his elbow, curious.

“Come,” he said.

Joseph entered the room, and he carried Copley’s missing sample case.

As a sample case, it was almost unrecognizable. The shining leather box with its cunning drawers lined with watered silk was dull from mud and rain, and what looked like as thorough an encounter with the road’s gravel as his own accident. The drawers were all smashed to one side, as if the case had been struck at full speed by an army of carts. Some drawers sagged out, some sank in, and the rest were gone.

The duke sat up as Joseph came closer. “It appears that my sample case has fallen on hard times,” he said at last when Joseph did not seem disposed to fill the silence with words of his own. “Ah, well. So it goes.”

Joseph blinked in surprise at his flippant words. To the duke’s horror, tears welled in the young man’s eyes and he began to cry silently. Nez flung back his bedclothes and stood up, taking Joseph by the arm and guiding him to a chair.

“See here, lad, it’s not so bad,” he said in a rallying tone. “Honestly, Joseph,” he said, his voice less reassuring, when Joseph continued to sob, clutching the sample case to him and caressing its battered sides.

The duke’s feeling of helplessness subsided as quickly as it had come, and it was replaced by a new emotion—or at least, one that he had not felt for so long that it seemed new. He felt sorry for someone besides himself.

In another moment, his arm went around Joseph’s shoulders. “It doesn’t matter, lad, truly it doesn’t.”

Joseph stopped crying and wiped his eyes with his sleeve. “But how will you earn a living?” he asked at last. “I am worried for you.”

It was the duke’s turn to struggle with himself as he tried to remember the last time anyone had worried about him to the point of tears. He couldn’t recall such a moment, if there had ever been one, and here was this young man, practically a stranger, this moonling, worried about how he, the Duke of Knaresborough, would find bread for his table, now that his means of livelihood was gone. Benedict Nesbitt was touched to the quick.

In silence he rubbed the boy’s neck until the tears stopped, and then he offered the handkerchief from his night table. “Blow, lad,” he ordered.

Joseph did as he said, and then looked away in embarrassment. “Libby said I was not to trouble you with this, but I know you are concerned about your sample case.”

Benedict Nesbitt had not given it a thought since he had heaved it in the gig and beat a hasty retreat from London, but the duke would have allowed the Grand Inquisitor himself to yank out his tongue and use it for bait before he would have ever admitted this fact to Joseph, who cared very much.

“Well, yes, indeed, I was worried about it and wondered where . . . what . . . had become of it. How good of you to find it, Joseph.”

The boy smiled then and relaxed. He allowed the duke to take the case off his lap and set it on the floor.

“I knew you would be wanting it, especially after Libby said you were a merchant and that you surely had a sample case about somewhere. I looked and looked until I found it.”

Again the duke had to turn away for a moment to examine the intricacies of the carpet pattern until his own vision cleared. “Is that what you have been doing? I have not seen you in several days,” he said, his voice husky.

Joseph nodded, his eyes shining, his voice eager. “It took me a week, sir, but I found it this afternoon, just as the light was growing dim. I think it must have fallen off when your gig turned over the first time, and then bounced on down the hill. It was under a bramble bush. I got scratched up, but Libby said she was proud of me.”

His face pokered up then, and Nez feared Joseph was going to cry again. With an effort that raised the sweat on his forehead, the boy mastered his emotions. “I’m truly sorry it is in such wretched shape, sir. I don’t suppose there is any hope for it.”

Nez clapped his hand on the boy’s shoulder and gave him a rallying shake. “But I can get another, easy as pie, now that you have restored this one to me,” he said, perjuring his soul with no remorse whatsoever. “Copley would have cut up stiff if I had come back empty-handed. Thanks to you, Joseph, I can turn this one in and receive another just like it.” He leaned closer. “There is probably a reward in it for you, too.”

Joseph shook his head. “I couldn’t accept anything, but . . . Well, I do like chocolate. We all do, sir.”

“Chocolate it will be, then,” said the duke, “as soon as I return to London.”

Joseph grinned. “I’m glad, sir,” he said softly, and then added, “Do you know I wish I had employment like you. Libby and Mama tell me that I am not a burden to them, but I know I am.” His cheeks burned with sudden color. “I wish I could support myself, as you are doing. It must be a very satisfying feeling, Mr. Duke.”

Benedict Nesbitt, whose only exertion—after Waterloo—consisted of betting on the horses at Newmarket, nodded in perfect understanding. “Yes, there’s nothing as satisfying as earning a living. No feeling quite like it. I really can’t even describe it.”

“I thought that was how it would be,” Joseph said simply. “I would like more than anything to lift the worries from Mama’s shoulders, and Libby’s too.”

What possible worry can you have with thousands in the funds? the duke thought, remembering Eustace’s breathless admiration of the Ames fortune. What earthly difference can it possibly make if you never earn a farthing of your own? He nearly asked the question out loud and then realized it would be pointless. Obviously some little corner of Joseph’s mind harbored the absurdity that the Ames household teetered on the brink of financial disaster.

He returned some inanity that seemed to satisfy Joseph, who bid him good night and retired, leaving behind the ruined sample case.

“And now I suppose that dratted sample case will just stay there as a reproach to me,” he said out loud. “Well, you deserve it, Nez.” He flopped back in bed and stared at the ceiling. “Nez, old boy, I wonder if any of your tenants at Knaresborough and wherever-the-hell-else have any idea what a lazy chufflehead you are?”

It was a good question, and one that he had never bothered to ask himself before. Whenever he had been troubled by matters weightier than which waistcoat to wear, or what horse to buy, he had reached for the bottle. Now he lay in bed thinking about himself and wondering where the Benedict Nesbitt he vaguely remembered had really gone after Waterloo.