Forbidden to Love the Duke (3 page)

I
t was no secret to the staff of Ellsworth Park that the duke had returned home to indulge in a liaison. He had written a fortnight earlier to alert his estate manager of his impending arrival. The letter was a mere formality. His servants kept abreast of the master's affairs as reported in the gossip papers. His housekeeper followed the details of his intimate life with embarrassing pride.

It was almost twilight when his heavy carriage rolled to a stop in the drive. The estate looked as elegant as ever. Yet without his family it stirred in him a sense of loneliness and loss.

Still, he wouldn't be alone for long. He might not have appreciated the park's seclusion in the year since he had inherited it and lost his father. But in another week he would spend his days entertaining Elora and allowing her to return the favor at night. He only hoped there were delights in store once she arrived, rather than disappointments.

He had known her for years. But in the last few months she'd begun ambushing him at parties for
unplanned trysts that he soon realized were part of a plot to tantalize him. These private affairs left him largely unfulfilled and, as Elora surely intended, prepared to outbid any competitor for the privilege of making her his mistress.

She was beautiful, amoral, and practiced in the carnal arts. He wasn't sure whether their longtime friendship would benefit them in the bedroom. Yet they had nothing to lose by trying.

He stirred. The scar tissue around his upper right arm ached from the bullet he had taken at Albuera. His fruitless pursuit after that lithe woman today had aggravated his mood. At least he could laugh at himself now, remembering the other lady's shocked voice at the door.
I have a sword, you half-wit.

Half-wit?

A sword? What manner of spinsters resembled young deities and resorted to swordplay to ward off unwelcome gentlemen? James might deserve their suspicion for his display of aggression—he really had no excuse. Still, he had to wonder if an apology, a small gift, would be returned by an invitation inside the manor.

“His Grace is home!” the porter at the gates shouted to the servants assembling. James frowned, staring out the window of his carriage.

Where
were
the servants? Had they misunderstood his letter? Were they hiding from him in fear that he had brought Elora home with him? Had something happened?

The estate looked peaceful. His footman opened the door, his face also puzzled. James stepped down. A lark's melody drifted from the shadows.

He strode toward the house.

He had not been home since his father had died six months earlier. Their reunion had not been pleasant. He hadn't even known his father was ill.

At the time James had been drinking too much, infuriated that a single wound had ended his military career. His father had shown him no mercy. But then, James would have refused any suggestion of sympathy. What man wanted to be thought weak?

Their final conversation still stung when he thought back on it. “You are my heir. You will inherit Ellsworth Park and the tenants who depend on you. I know you hoped to rise in the army, but that is for your brother now. Are we agreed?”

“Do you honestly expect me to pretend I have the least desire to lord it over acres of apple orchards?”

“I don't give a damn about your desires. Keep them to yourself. Hundreds of men and women depend on our orchards. The cider we produce is famous the world over. You had more pride in your birthright when you were a child than you do now. What happened?”

“The apples can wait. Battling in foreign fields can't.”

James looked around again. Where was everyone? Had he forgotten a festival day? His tenants
did
work hard and brewed a heady cider that brought a good income to innumerable families. Apples mattered. They had mattered in Tudor times.

He thought of that alluring woman from the garden again, when he should be thinking of Elora and her reputation for bedsport. Soon enough he would accept his responsibilities and respect his father's wishes.

“I shall make you stop moping, James,” she'd teased,
using her body to promise a forgetfulness he realized would be fleeting at best. He could only chase pleasure for a time.

“An Englishman does not mope. He dodges life's slings and arrows to battle on.”

“Well, you could smile once a week. Your face is always so forbidding. It gives me the shivers.”

But he
had
smiled this afternoon, and all because he'd pursued a woman who found him even more forbidding than did Elora.

“Your Grace! Your Grace!”

The illusion of peace dissolved. Although only two servants appeared to greet the duke, the greyhounds had been released from their kennels and bounded across the lawn in howling welcome. Mr. Carstairs, his estate steward, detached himself from one of the crouching stone lions that flanked the drive. The urgency of his pace suggested that, unlike the hounds, he would not be satisfied with a romp in the park and a juicy bone.

“Your Grace. Thank goodness you have arrived.” Carstairs bowed between gasps of breath. “I did not attempt to contact you about the trouble while you were traveling. I thought you would prefer to be told in person.”

A shriek drifted from one of the upstairs windows in the wing reserved for visitors. James lifted his head in alarm, aware of the questioning expression that must have shown on his face.

“It might be better if you come inside and have a taste of brandy while I explain, Your Grace.”

“That is not a child, is it, Carstairs? A paramour from my wilder days is not bringing a paternity suit because I
have become a duke? I have never been a man-whore. My indiscretions were few and sincere.”

“It is not your child. Children. Well, they are, in one sense, but—”

James stepped around the smaller man. “I'll take that drink in my study. And I hope your explanation will not be of a nature that interferes with my plans.”

No. That burden apparently fell to Mrs. Halliday, his housekeeper, who startled the wits out of him when she ran up the side of the house wailing, “Thank heavens Your Grace is home.” Her red-rimmed eyes meant she had been weeping. But then the woman sobbed over scorched muffins and the obituaries of people she had never met.

He stilled. “There has been a death in the family?”

“Nothing is as bad as all that,” Carstairs said, giving the woman a look.

But clearly upsetting news loomed on the horizon. James considered jumping back inside his carriage and taking a ride to the village pub.

But no one had died.

The news could not be anything to run from. He would face it like a man.

O
n most evenings, after a supper made from whatever the hidden gardens of Fenwick Manor had produced, Rosemary beckoned her sisters to her bedchamber to read from her latest work. Ivy had come to adore the tradition, but since this had once been her mother's secret retreat and Mama had allowed her girls to play with her jewels and perfume, Ivy felt both her absence and her presence keenly whenever she entered this room.

“Anne Boleyn slept in this very bed for two nights when she was young,” Rosemary used to inform everyone who would listen when she was younger. “Imagine how the course of history would have changed had she lived.”

Ivy took pride in
their
history and their house. But this was the true heart of the house, where secrets were shared, children and stories conceived over the years.

Rosemary had claimed this chamber as her own the year she turned twelve and her mother had moved into a larger room. She found out from the servants the
identity of its most notorious guest. On the first night that Rosemary had slept there, her sisters had gathered solemnly in the doorway and predicted that she wouldn't survive to see the sunrise.

Not only had she survived, she soon lured the other girls to abandon their rooms to stay with her. Night after night they'd fall asleep in her bed, lulled by her early attempts at storytelling. It took their mother an entire summer before she caught her three other daughters sneaking down the hall one September dawn.

“So it is Anne Boleyn I have to thank for those circles under your eyes and nodding heads at supper.”

“No, it's Rosemary,” Lilac said innocently.

“It's Henry VIII,” Rue said with a yawn, and her mother, who might have punished them at any other time, seemed to take that under consideration and forgave the girls their conspiracy.

Where had those pleasurable years gone?

“I feel safer in here than anywhere,” Lilac admitted as they huddled together on the bed. Rosemary sat at her desk, writing with her quill, a smile of contentment on her face.

Whether the incident earlier in the day and the realization that they might lose their home provoked Lilac's confession, her fear seemed reflected by Rue, who added, “So do I.”

“It has history,” murmured Rosemary, who for all practical purposes might as well be on another continent. “Don't you remember who we are descended from?”

“Yes,” Ivy said, smothering a laugh. “You wouldn't let us forget if we wanted to.” She cleared her throat. “The
first notable personage in the family rose to prominence as a faithful bodyguard to Harri Tudur, who rewarded his English retainer with an earldom in Wales.”

“This gift,” Lilac continued, “included a castle on a seaside cliff that was pounded every winter by violent gales.”

“Then one December morn,” Ivy said, flapping her arms, “the birds took wing. The dovecote disappeared in the rock-strewn waves below.”

It was Rue's turn. “The earl declared the castle uninhabitable. To mollify his loyal guard, Harri Tudur bestowed on him a charming manor house in Kent.”

“In exchange for which,” Lilac said, “the earl turned a blind eye when Harri took the earl's wife to bed and a set of twins, one boy, one girl, was born of this clandestine affair.”

Rue finished with a grin. “The first Earl of Arthur might not have liked this bargain, but as it happened, his two natural children died in battle, and he and his wife were richly compensated for their discretion and devotion to the Tudur line. The end.”

Rosemary closed her book, put down her pen, and rose to stretch her arms. Her long braid swung between her shoulder blades like a pendulum.

Ivy sat up straighter on the bed, looking at Rosemary. “You aren't about to launch into one of your
‘Horresco referens'
—‘I shudder in relating stories'—are you?”

“One about my three disrespectful sisters and what became of them?”

“What are we to do, Ivy?” Lilac dropped from the bed to play with the three puppies whining at her on the floor.

Ivy sighed. Unless a gentleman with a heart or purse
of gold could overlook Lilac's awkward gait and dreamy nature, Lilac, for all her fair looks, was liable to end up on the shelf for the rest of her life.

Perhaps it was Rue, with her sultry eyes and ink black hair, who would suffer the most heartbreak. Rue was a young lady of extremes. Hadn't she threatened to take a sword to that intruder in the garden? Sometimes Ivy couldn't decide which characteristic was Rue's fatal flaw—her heritage, her deep passion, or her beauty.

“We can't hide in this house forever,” Ivy said. “Someone will take it from us as the debts mount. We need a source of income other than Rosemary's writing.”

Rue rolled across the bed. “Why don't we sell off the rest of the paintings?”

“Because Foxx rehung them to cover the water damage that the Flemish tapestries we sold were hiding,” Ivy said. “And now the paintings are damaged.”

“I'm starving,” Rue said. It hadn't escaped Ivy's notice that she had gone slim and whiter than melting snow lately. But then everyone in the house had been forced to take in their clothes with the exception of Lilac, who thrived on apricot syllabubs in cream given them by a local farmer whose wife remembered their mother's past kind deeds.

Ivy stood up. “I feel a little faint-headed with hunger and desperation myself. We've spent the last of our money settling Father's debts and legal disputes. We've sold off heirloom by precious heirloom. Mother's pearls are the only valuable possession left to us.”

“No,” Lilac said. “It's a rule. Nothing goes that carries her warmth. She wore them against her skin.”

“The pearls will only see us to the end of autumn, if
then,” Ivy said. “I'll have to go to London, and after that, there is only one sacrifice left to make. I'll find a position.”

Rosemary pulled her braid loose and shook her head. “You can't. It's too humiliating.”

“It's not as humiliating as going hungry,” Lilac said. “If we can't feed ourselves, we won't be able to support the staff. We'll be beggars.”

“Are you willing to let out the house to strangers?” Ivy asked, a lawyer negotiating at an empty table.

Rue wrinkled her nose. “No one would want to stay here. I wouldn't mind acting as a maidservant, but I'd lose my temper at the first guest who complained about the service. I would give it a try to save the manor, though.”

“What sort of position do you have in mind?” Rosemary asked in a pinched voice.

“A governess. In a house nearby, if possible. I don't want to be far from home.”

“No,” Rosemary said as if Ivy had announced she would become a professional chimney sweep or vampire. “I'd as soon sacrifice my head. Can you imagine working in a house of someone we once knew? What if one of our old friends hires you? They'll laugh at you behind your back. An earl's daughter.”

Rue sent Ivy an encouraging smile. “There must be other ways to earn money, Ivy. But I'll be at your back and your front. No one will ever marry us. Do what you need to do. We will follow your lead.”

Rue had a point, of course. The four of them might once have soared in society, eligible daughters of a nobleman with pristine names and plump dowers. But several witnesses swore that Lord Arthur had been cheating
at cards during the masquerade ball. The last thing he told Ivy was that he'd been desperate to win back enough money to pay back the “few” debts he'd kept secret from the girls.

In fact, Ivy had heard the servants whispering that he'd been cheating for months, and not one gentleman stood up for him before or after the duel. His family was tainted by association.

His daughters loved him, of course, despite the damage he'd done to the family name. After his funeral Ivy and Rosemary reviewed his account books and had charted his decline from the time of Mama's death. They soon learned he'd wagered away their dowries as well as his other estates and mortgages in Sussex.

The only hint the sisters had prior to his death of any financial troubles was the sudden disappearance of the rare book collection from the library. A third of it had been saved due to Rosemary's penchant for “borrowing” books and hiding them in her room.

The earl died without a will or male heir, leaving his daughters an old manor house and a sea of debts. The four sisters, who had been invited to more social affairs in a month than one could cram into a year, received curt notices of cancellation. After all, no one expected them to attend a party while in mourning.

Unpaid bills replaced cards from admirers. It was something of a blessing, Ivy came to realize, when they could no longer afford newspapers and read the libelous stories published about their family. One reporter claimed that each of the four daughters had been born of a different sire.

In the year following the earl's death, the family's infamy grew until it subsided into a fairy tale. The sisters,
who struggled to exist on their own, were glad to be forgotten by society. In all the rumors written about them the only truth was that their father's scandal had ruined their reputations overnight.

But at least they still had one another.