How to Tame Your Duke (17 page)

“And a dashed fine dream at that. The memory has quite cheered me up.” Freddie used his toast to wipe the rest of his egg, shoved the lot gracelessly in his mouth, swabbed himself with a snowy napkin, and stood up. “I shall await you in the schoolroom, Mr. Grimsby. Don’t be late!” He tucked the newspaper under his arm, clicked his heels together, and swept from the room.

Emilie knew she should rise and follow him, but her limbs wouldn’t move. She stared at her toast, uncomfortably aware of Lionel the footman standing ten feet away, probably annoyed, probably impatient for the damned tutor to lift his bony arse out of his seat and leave the room to the poor sods who did the
real
work around the Abbey. She’d come to a much deeper understanding of what it meant to be a servant, these past several weeks.

The Duke of Ashland had left for London.

What did it mean? Trying his luck in the capital, as Freddie put it? Now that the ice had been broken. Now that he’d finally lain with another woman. The deed had been done. One sin might as well be a hundred.

Emilie clenched her fists in her lap.

Think logically.
Of course Ashland hadn’t gone to London to find more women. It wasn’t in his character at all. Emilie thought of his words last night, his disciplined arms pounding the leather bag downstairs. He was not a wastrel. He was not a rake. This trip to London must be some business affair, some urgent matter.

In any case, it shouldn’t bother her, even if he
were
after women. She should welcome his straying to other pastures. The sooner this tie between them was snapped off, the better. And since she didn’t seem to have the strength, Ashland might as well do the snapping himself. She would spend this week of his absence constructing a very high, very thick wall between them. By the time he returned, she would be quite indifferent.

Or at least able to greet the sight of his half-naked, gloriously glowing body with perfect composure.

Emilie finished her toast, finished her coffee in a gulp. She rose and nodded to Lionel, who returned—to her surprise—an almost imperceptible nod of his own.

Outside in the hallway, she nearly crashed into Simpson as he strode toward the breakfast room. “Oh! I beg your pardon, Mr. Simpson.”

“Not at all, Mr. Grimsby,” said Simpson, as he might say,
Take your arse to Greenland, Grimsby, on a fucking flat-bottomed rowboat.

Emilie was undeterred. “I understand His Grace departed for London this morning. When can his lordship and I expect his return?” She inserted Freddie’s name into it, just to ensure the butler’s attention.

Simpson looked as if he’d been handed a week-old pig’s bladder and asked to make a sausage with it. “His Grace did me the honor of informing me that he would be absent a week.”

“Seven full days?”

“So much I have always understood a week to contain.”

“How perceptive you are, Mr. Simpson. I am in your debt.” Emilie turned and marched down the hall to the staircase—the main staircase, used by the family—and went up three flights to the schoolroom, where the Marquess of Silverton stood in the center of the carpet, blue eyes globular, newspaper fluttering from his hand, staring at her with an expression of utmost shock.

“Good God, Grimsby!” he said. “You’re a bloody
princess
, aren’t you?”

A
shocked silence greeted the Duke of Ashland as he paused in the doorway of the dining room at his London club.

He expected nothing less. He hadn’t darkened this particular threshold in well over a decade, not since the eve of his departure with his regiment. A riotous evening, that one. He’d crawled back into his hotel room just as his old friend dawn, the rosy-fingered bitch, had broken the horizon in the east. An hour’s sleep, a bracing bath, a mug of coffee, and he’d been off to Victoria Station to join his regiment massing at Southampton. God, that rattling train. His head still ached in sympathy at the memory.

The mood at the club tonight was something less than riotous, and the stunned faces turned toward him were even less familiar. He remembered the smell, though—that exact blend of roasted meat and smoke, leather and spirits, wafted out to greet him as if he’d been away only a week or two.
Eau de club
, he supposed. He kept his gaze high, scanning over the tops of their befuddled gentlemanly heads, but he could feel them take him in: his white hair, his black leather half-mask, his ruined jaw protruding beneath. Perhaps even the empty space outside the cuff of his right sleeve, which he kept defiantly at his side, in full view.

At one time—indeed, for the last twelve years—he had dreaded this moment. Tonight, for some reason, he found he didn’t give a damn what everyone saw.

A chair scraped. “By God. Ashland, you old bastard. What brings you to London?”

Ashland adjusted his gaze and found his mouth breaking open in a genuine smile. “Penhallow! I’d no idea the club’s standards had sunk so low in my absence.” He reached out his arm, his right arm, and Lord Roland Penhallow grasped the stump in both hands without the smallest particle of self-consciousness.

“You’ve saved my life, old man,” Penhallow said heartily, a wide grin splitting his own impossibly handsome face. He shrugged one shoulder at the mass of curious manhood assembled behind him. “This sorry lot was boring me to tears. Join us?”

Ashland shot a quick glance at the table from which Penhallow had risen. Nobody he recognized, of course. A young fellow, Penhallow, still at Eton when Ashland had left for India, but as the grandson of the Duke of Olympia he’d traipsed across Ashland’s past a few times. He had even been among the few to visit at Ashland Abbey—
my grandsire asked me to pop in on you on my way to Edinburgh and try out this fantastical bathing pool of yours
—and Ashland had found himself rather enjoying the lad’s company. He had a way of neither staring at nor ignoring Ashland’s scars, simply carrying on as a matter of course. Rather like young Grimsby. Rather like Emily, too, and his heart cracked anew at the memory of her gentle kiss at the end of his arm.

“Tempting,” Ashland said, “but in fact I was hoping to find your grandfather doddering about. They informed me on Park Lane that he might be found here this evening.”

Penhallow lifted both eyebrows—he had never quite mastered the elegant art of raising just one—and said, “Why, no. Not that I’ve noticed.” He turned back to his table of friends and called out, “Don’t suppose you’ve seen my old grandsire dodder past this evening, Burke?”

At the table, a tall red-haired gentleman set down his wineglass and shrugged. “Not once, I’m afraid.”

“Ah well,” said Penhallow. “Mind you, the chap’s got a distinct habit of turning up when he’s least expected. Do join us, however. You must. Burke’s been trying to convince me to run off to Italy with him for a year of monastic seclusion, and I’m having the devil of a time explaining to him that it simply won’t do.”

Penhallow took him by the arm and led him inexorably forward between the tables. One by one, the occupants turned politely away, returning to their conversations, casting only the discreet glance or two his way. “Gentlemen,” said Penhallow, “I have the honor of presenting to you the legendary Duke of Ashland, who’s finally deigned to honor us rubbishy degenerates here in London with a visit, so you’d better mind your p’s and all that.”

At the words
Duke of Ashland
, the four men at the table shed their shared air of incurious somnolence and shot to their feet in a simultaneous volley. It was all
Your Grace! Didn’t know it was you
, and
Your Grace! Most honored, sir
, and in a moment Ashland was seated with a bottle of best claret flowing freely into his glass.

Which was, he reflected, taking the first swallow, exactly how his last evening at the club had begun.

Except for all the
Your Grace
s. That had begun upon his return.

*   *   *

I
’m afraid I don’t quite understand, Your Grace.” The solicitor fidgeted with his fountain pen, turning it this way and that, rolling it from finger to finger. His face was still the same mottled red it had turned when the Duke of Ashland was first announced into his chambers. “Do you wish to cut off the allowance entirely?”

Ashland stretched out one leg on the expensive Oriental rug and plucked a piece of lint from his trousers. Outside, the brown January fog had laid against his skin with a chill that went to his bones; here, the room was heated to tropical strength, coals sizzling hotly in the fireplace. It reminded him of India, of that suffocating and inescapable warmth, drenching him to the core. “Mr. Baneweather, since we made these arrangements twelve years ago, when Her Grace first left the protection of my roof, I have not seen her, nor made any effort to follow her movements. In return, I have heard nothing, either of her or from her. Having instructed you to inform me if her monthly allowance went uncollected, I have assumed her to be alive and well. At the moment, I simply wish to ascertain her whereabouts and mode of living, with a view to initiating a suit of divorce at the earliest opportunity.”

“I see.” Mr. Baneweather glanced down at the neat stack of papers before him. “May I ask what brought about this change of heart? I recall you were adamant,
most
adamant, that the marriage should be allowed to stand, despite my advice at the time.”

“Twelve years have passed, Mr. Baneweather. My son is nearly grown. In addition, I have recently formed an attachment to a most worthy young lady.” The words came out more easily than he expected. He had chosen them carefully; they sounded much more respectable than the bald truth:
I have debauched and deflowered an innocent young lady of unknown background, and it seems I cannot live without her.

“Ah. Of course. I confess, Your Grace, I had been hoping for something of this nature. Your case has always . . .”

“To that end, Mr. Baneweather,” Ashland went on, “I wish you to supply me with Her Grace’s current direction. I shall wish to make such a delicate interview in person. I expect she is abroad?” As if a runaway wife could be anywhere else.

Mr. Baneweather cleared his throat. “In fact, she is not. She lives—that is to say, the address at which she collects her allowance—that particular address is in London. Putney, to be precise.”

“Putney!” Ashland started forward in his chair. A sharp pulse shot through his blood: Isabelle in Putney, a mere few miles away. Doing what? Living with whom? He had always imagined her in Europe somewhere, some fashionable place by the sea, Nice or Portofino. He had allowed her a thousand pounds a year, enough to give her an independence, so she should not be obliged to find another protector when Somerton inevitably left her. A thousand pounds ought to give her a luxurious style of life abroad.

Putney. Fashionable, expensive Isabelle, living in the dreary London suburbs. What had happened?

“Yes, Putney. Five or six years, in fact.”

“And you did not inform me?”

“You asked not to be informed, Your Grace. With respect.” The flush was fading at last from Mr. Baneweather’s face.

So Isabelle had been within reach, all this time. Within reach to . . . what? Divorce her? Take her back? The Earl of Somerton had married some beautiful young debutante about five or six years ago; the papers had been full of the news. Was that why Isabelle had returned to England? Ashland pressed his forefinger into his leg to stop the whirl of thoughts in his head. Discipline. Focus. “Very good. So I did. You will please write down this Putney address for me, Mr. Baneweather, and await my further instructions in the matter. In the meantime, I have a contract of sorts for you to draft.” He reached into his coat pocket and withdrew a few folded sheets of paper. “I have written down the salient points. I shall need it drafted up properly within a week’s time. I can be reached at Brown’s hotel.”

Ashland rose from his chair and placed the papers at the edge of Mr. Baneweather’s endless and gleaming desk. The thin sheets wilted mournfully downward in the warmth.

Baneweather was scribbling furiously. “Here you are, Your Grace,” he said, rising. His mustache twitched eagerly. “Is there anything else I can do for you?”

Isabelle in Putney.

Ashland looked down at the paper before him. The familiar scent of fresh ink anchored him to reality as he read the impossible lines. “Nothing else at the moment, Mr. Baneweather.” He looked up. “But I expect I shall have further instructions for you shortly.”

*   *   *

T
he hackney deposited him at the end of the street, as he instructed. “Wait for me,” he said, tossing the driver a few shillings, and settled his hat snugly on his head.

The London fog was thick today, that grotesque and dank miasma of coal smoke and river damp. It burned his Yorkshire lungs and obscured the details of the houses as he passed: comfortable suburban villas, semi-detached, stained gray by years of fog, with neatly tended gardens and barren January window boxes.

Isabelle’s house lay near the end of the street, exactly like its neighbors. The left-hand house of the pair, with a neat number 4 painted above the door. He paused for an instant at the little gate outside the steps. He hadn’t the faintest idea what to say to her. An awkward interview, that was inevitable; and entirely unexpected on her part. What if a man lived there, too? What would he say? He drummed his gloved fingers on the cold wrought iron. Oddly enough, he felt not a hint of nervousness. No rattling heartbeat, no tingle of anticipation. Only curiosity, mingled with impatience: an eagerness to have this interview over, to snip off this dangling thread in his life.

He opened the gate, crunched up the gravel path, and let fall the knocker on the door.

A woman answered, dressed in a neat black uniform. She gave a start at the sight of his broad chest before her eyes, and looked up slowly to find his face. She started again. “Good morning, sir,” she squeaked.

“Good morning. I am here to see Her Grace, the Duchess of Ashland.”

The maid’s mouth rounded into an astonished O. “The . . . the duchess?” she said, in the same helpless squeak.

“The Duchess of Ashland. Or perhaps she no longer affects that name. The lady of the house, if you please.”

“I . . . I don’t . . . I . . .” She swallowed, evidently torn between Ashland’s intimidating appearance and her duty to protect her mistress from unwanted callers. “May I give her your name, sir?” she said at last, clutching the edge of the door.

“Certainly. I am her husband, the Duke of Ashland.”

“I . . . Oh!”

“May I come in?”

“Sir, I . . .”

Ashland stepped forward through the doorway, causing the maid to fall back a step or two. “I’ll wait in the parlor, if you’ll show me through,” he said.

“Yes, sir. Your Grace. Of course.” She scuttled ahead, showing him into the front room, an overstuffed parlor thick with photographs and mantel cloths and great potted palms. He spared not a glance for the photographs and went to the window, staring out at the foggy brown streetscape. A delivery van ambled by, pulled by a dark and elderly horse whose ears swung listlessly back and forth. Above Ashland’s head, footsteps rattled about, voices muffled through the plaster. Isabelle’s voice?

A light tread came down the staircase. Ashland turned to the doorway.

“Your Grace,” said the maid, humbly, as she held back the door.

A woman swept in with a loud rustle of blue and yellow silk. Her hair was dark, pulled back severely from her face into a cascade of impossible dark curls; her bustle was so high and proud that Ashland feared for her balance. She stretched out her hands. “Ashland!”

For an instant, he didn’t recognize her. And then, incredulous:
“Alice?”

His sister-in-law took another tottering step. “My dear brother. You ought to have warned me.”

Because it was the polite thing, he went to her. He took one of her outstretched hands and kissed the air above it, and he passed her gently into a chair.

“My dear Alice,” he said, standing awkwardly by the mantelpiece. “How are you?”

“I have called for tea. Do you like tea?”

“I haven’t much time, I’m afraid. I only came to ask after Isabelle. I thought she was here, or so my solicitor informed me.” He knew the words sounded stiff and bloodless. He lifted his arm and laid his elbow on the mantel, in a tiny nook of emptiness amongst the bric-a-brac.