The Duchess War (The Brothers Sinister) (8 page)

After a full minute ticked by in silence, Robert realized she wasn’t going to say anything.

He leaned back in the chair. “I see how it’s going to be. Leave all the work of moving the conversation along to Robert—he’s a duke, so he must be good at it.”

“Oh, no.” The corner of her mouth twitched. “I wouldn’t assume you had any particular talent in that direction.”

It was the first hint that she’d given that there was anything to her but an excess of shyness. He’d begun to actually doubt his own memory. Surely this woman hadn’t come to his house and attempted blackmail. Had she?

“Tell me,” he persisted, “how does one get
Minnie
from Wilhelmina?
Minnie
makes me think of miniature—and nothing about you seems diminutive.”

She examined her gloves closely. “It comes from the third syllable, Your Grace.”

Back to being a cipher once more.
Had
he imagined the conversation? Maybe he was going mad.

“What’s wrong with the first syllable?” he tried. “Or the second?”

She glanced up. For the first time all evening, she looked in his eyes. He would have sworn there would have to be some kind of spark in her—some indication of the intelligence that had blazed at their last meeting. But if eyes were windows to the soul, hers had been bricked up to avoid taxation. He could see nothing in them at all.

“Surely,” she said pleasantly, “you can ascertain the problems for yourself.
Willy
wouldn’t do. It’s too masculine.”

“There is that,” he murmured.

“As for the second syllable…” She looked over his shoulder again, avoiding his gaze. Her eyes were a mask, but her mouth twitched once more. “Just think of it, Your Grace. What am I to say? ‘My name is Wilhelmina Pursling, but you can call me Hell.’”

He laughed, almost in sheer amazement. She
still
looked like a lump, shyly twiddling her fingers, refusing to meet his eyes. But there was that voice. Her voice made him think of woodsmoke on an autumn evening, of silks laid out atop lush bedding. Of her hair, rid of those confining pins and spread over a pillow, the honey-colored ends spilling over her breasts.

He swallowed and cleared his throat. “This isn’t what I expected when you said you’d go to war with me.”

“Let me guess.” She fingered her glove carefully, and he noticed that she was worrying at a tiny hole in the tip. “You thought I would simper if you smiled at me. You supposed that when I said I would prove what you were doing to everyone, that I planned to engage in a bumbling, graceless investigation into your surface activities.”

“I—no. Of course not.” But Robert felt his cheeks heat. Because that was precisely what he had thought.

She bit her lip, the picture of shyness. But her words were the opposite of shy. “Now,” she whispered, “you’re surprised to find that I overmatch you.”

“I am?” he echoed, looking at her. “You do?”

Her eyes were fixed over his shoulder, no hint in her posture of what she said so quietly.

“Of course I overmatch you,” she said. She spoke as if the matter were beyond question. “You’re a well-educated duke—one of the most powerful men in England. Your staff likely numbers in the hundreds across your many estates. If needed, you could draw on resources in the tens of thousands of pounds.”

The corner of her mouth lifted now, dispelling the illusion of a simple, quiet girl. A dimple emerged on her cheek. She glanced up at him—once—and he almost couldn’t breathe.

This,
this
was the woman who had threatened him.

“You have all those things,” she said. “But then, I have one thing you do not.”

He leaned in, not wanting to miss a word.

“I,” she said, “have a sense of tactics.”

He had just that one glimmer of a smile from her, a small moment when he caught his breath—and then it all disappeared. Her face smoothed; she looked down once more, and Miss Pursling looked utterly plain.

Another man might have been surprised into compliance. But Robert couldn’t imagine backing down now—not when she ducked her head and stared at the floor. No; he wanted to bring her out again.

“You haven’t done anything,” he said.

Her expression didn’t change.

“I’m winning,” he announced. “You can’t bore me into a surrender.”

“You probably think battles are won with cannons and brave speeches and fearless charges.” She smoothed her skirts as she spoke. “They’re not. Wars are won by dint of having adequate shoe leather. They’re won by boys who make shells in munitions factories, by supply trains shielded from enemy eyes. Wars are won by careful attendance to boring detail. If you wait to see the cavalry charge, Your Grace, you’ll have already lost.”

He blinked. “You’re trying to make me back down. It won’t work.”

“That’s the beauty of strategy. Everything I do contains a double threat. If you don’t back down from spoken words, you reveal your character. Everything you say, everything you do, every charming smile and sweet protestation—the most you can hope for is to change the manner of my victory. The fact of it, though, is a foregone conclusion.”

She looked so small sitting in her chair, so fragile. It was only when he shut his eyes and erased that jarring image of a diffident spinster that he could comprehend the evidence of his ears. Miss Pursling wouldn’t even look him in the eyes. But her voice seemed indomitable.

“So,” he said, “you think that I’m charming. You didn’t list that among my assets before.”

“Of course you’re charming.” She didn’t look up. “I’m charmed. I’m charmed to my teeth.”

There was a note in her voice that sounded so bitter that it almost tasted sweet.

“You’re a force of nature, Your Grace,” she said. “But so am I. So am I.”

She hadn’t said that
she
was charming…and, in point of fact, she wasn’t. Not in the usual sense. But there was something utterly compelling about her. He had no idea who she was any longer. He’d thought at first that she was a high-spirited, clever woman. He’d wondered next if she were a wallflower. But at the moment, she seemed beyond any category, larger and far more complex than anyone he’d encountered thus far.

“If you want me to back down,” he said softly, “you shouldn’t be so interesting.”

Her lips compressed.

But before she could answer, a noise sounded on the other side of the room. Robert turned his head in time to see a woman—Miss Charingford, the daughter of the house, and if he recalled correctly, the friend that Miss Pursling had brought with her the other day—standing so abruptly that her seat overturned.

“Come now, Lydia,” the man who had been sitting next to her said. “You can’t really mean—”

“I do,” Miss Charingford snapped. So saying, she took a glass of punch from the table next to her. Before anyone could intervene, she dashed it into the fellow’s face. Red dripped down his nose, his chin, staining his cravat. Gasps arose around them.

“You can’t do this!” he said, standing from his chair.

The man was George Stevens. Robert had spoken with him twice now, enough to remember that he had charge over the militia. An important man, as things were judged in these parts.

“I can’t?” Miss Charingford snapped. “Just watch.”

She snatched a second glass of punch from her neighbor’s fingers and threw this one in his face as well. “You see? Apparently, I
can.”

So saying, she put her nose in the air and stormed out the door.

Robert turned back to Miss Pursling.

“Is she—”

But Miss Pursling was no longer there. She was already halfway across the room. She hadn’t apologized to him or made her excuses. She had simply left, dashing after her friend. The door closed on her moments later.

He’d been amazed that her posture, the expression on her face, had remained so smooth throughout their conversation. But she had been hiding from him, too. She’d gestured him to the chair that would allow him to talk with her while she could still keep one eye on her friend. He had thought she had looked away from him to feign shyness. Instead, she’d been watching Stevens.

Everything I do contains a double threat
. That had been no braggadocio, there. She’d been fending off his attempts at conversation with half her attention, lecturing him on strategy, and pretending to be a shy lump for anyone who was watching. And while she’d done that, she’d also been tracking her friend’s escalating drama from across the room.

My God. His head hurt just thinking about all the threads she must have been keeping straight in her mind.

“Your Grace.”

Robert turned from his reverie to see a man beside him. It was George Stevens, standing with a grim look on his face and a disapproving set to his jaw. He’d wiped most of the punch off, but his cravat was still stained pink, and his forehead had a sheen to it that sent Robert’s own skin itching in sticky sympathy.

“Captain Stevens,” Robert said.

“If I might intrude a moment?”

Robert glanced once again at the door through which Miss Pursling had vanished. “Of course.”

Stevens gave him a stiff bow, and then just as stiffly took the seat that Miss Pursling had so recently vacated. “It is admirable,” he said, “in every way admirable, for a man in your position to condescend to speak to everyone deserving at a gathering such as this.” He rubbed his hands together. “But…ah, how do I say this?” He lowered his voice. “Not all women are equally deserving. And Miss Pursling is not what she seems.”

“Oh?” Robert was still too taken aback to do more than take this in. “In what way does the reality of Miss Pursling differ from her appearance?”

Stevens seemed to relax at that. “I have reason to believe she is not who she claims to be.”

“Reason? What reason?”

The other man blinked, as if unused to having such questions asked. “Well. I, uh, I talked to someone who was intimately familiar with her great-aunt. That woman had no knowledge of Miss Pursling’s existence.”

“
Was
intimately familiar, you say?” Robert kept his tone mild. “How long ago did this individual know her great-aunt?”

Stevens was beginning to squirm like a schoolboy caught out in a lie. “Technically, she knew her before she moved to Leicester. That is to say—”

“Techinically?” Robert raised an eyebrow. “Forgive me if I do not know the families in the area as well as you do. But did not Miss Pursling’s great-aunt move to the area fifty years ago?”

“Yes.” Stevens hunkered down in his seat. “But she knew the whole family, da—ah, dash it.” Stevens stopped, took a deep breath. “She would have known if the young Miss Elvira Pursling had married—the woman who is purported to be Miss Wilhelmina’s mother. People talk, Your Grace, particularly about happy events. But there is no such record. I have reason to believe that Miss Pursling may not be legitimate.”

It might be true. If so, it would explain her insistence that she didn’t want anyone looking into her past.
A little different,
indeed.

If there were any truth to Stevens’s claim at all, Robert could settle this for good. One little threat, when she’d already put blackmail in play…

But no. He was a gentleman and one of the most powerful men in the country. Powerful men who used their prerogatives to hurt women—they were scum.

Robert let his expression freeze to ice. He didn’t glower. He simply watched the other man, unblinking, until the captain of the militia dropped his gaze and winced.

“Stevens,” Robert said, not bothering with the honorific, “is there perhaps something you have heard about me that made you think I would want to hear such aspersions?”

“But, Your Grace. Miss Pursling is an unknown to you. I only wished—”

“You thought I would be amenable to baseless gossip simply because it was not aimed at someone I knew?”

Stevens’s jaw worked. “I only meant—”

“I’m done with your speculation. If I hear you’ve indulged it any further, I’ll see that Leicester receives another captain of the militia.”

Stevens turned white. “You couldn’t.”

But the man no doubt knew all too well that Robert
could.
Not directly, no, but he only needed to drop a word in the right ear… Robert wouldn’t use that influence without good reason, and given what he expected to find here, he needed to conserve that power as best as he could. Still, threats were free.

The man bowed his head. “Forgive me, Your Grace. The woman is nothing. I erred. I never thought you would take an interest in one so much beneath you.”

“What’s the point in being a duke if I
don’t?”
The query was out of his mouth before he could call it back—but he wouldn’t have, even if he could.

Stevens blinked in confusion and Robert shook his head. It was madness to give a man so much power and to have no expectations as to how he’d use it. He could crush Miss Pursling with one sentence. He might have crushed her with silence. But that would have been wrong.

“Your Grace,” Stevens finally said, “your concern does you justice.”

The man’s toad-eating did him none.

Robert met Stevens’s eyes. “No, it doesn’t. It’s called basic human decency, and I deserve no credit for doing what every man should.”

Stevens flinched again, and set his hand to his forehead—his sticky forehead, if the fingerprints he left were any guide.

“Now,” Robert said, standing, “if you’ll excuse me, I have other people I must speak with.”

He was aware of the man’s eyes boring into his back as he crossed the room. Robert made a note: This man bore watching.

Chapter Five