The Duke's Disaster (R) (22 page)

Noah glared at the vast facade of his smallest country house. “Hell if I know. Raising Cain somewhere in there. You might ask the girls when you make your bow to them. They tend to keep watch over us all. But, Harlan?”

His brother stopped mid-charge for the back terrace. “Noah?”

“Whatever burr is under your saddle, I’d as soon you have it out with me now. Thea is struggling, and I’d spare her the family dramatics if I could.”

Or perhaps Thea was practicing with her knife, which seemed to soothe her nerves.

“Dramatics.” Harlan’s dark brows, so like their father’s, went crashing down. He looked like he wanted to say—or possibly bellow—a few unrefined sentiments, but he instead extracted a folded piece of foolscap from his waistcoat pocket.

“Perhaps this is dramatic enough for you.” Harlan passed the paper to Noah and half turned, gaze on the distant paddocks.

You
are
a
harlot
, Noah read.
Your
uncle
is
a
harlot, and your brother married a harlot—or was that your father who married the harlot?

Noah turned the note over and saw no identifying marks. He wanted to tear the paper into a thousand tiny pieces before setting fire to it and stuffing the ashes up somebody’s…

“You received this while at Greymoor’s?”

“One of the grooms said a fellow at the local posting inn asked him to pass it along to Greymoor’s guest,” Harlan said. His voice bore the studied casualness of the violently furious. “The note was folded and sealed, but had no franking, no address, and the groom didn’t recognize the man who gave it to him.”

Harlan’s gaze remained on the far paddocks, a muscle twitching along his jaw.

“Could he describe that man?” Noah asked.

They were in a knot garden, a tidy arrangement of symmetrical green hedges and raked white stones, all of which Noah wanted to rip into permanent disarray.

“A town swell on a big bay horse,” Harlan said. “This happened late in the evening, and I gather my postboy was in his cups.”

“Probably chosen for being in his cups. How long ago did you receive this?”

“Three days. And, no, I did not mention it to Greymoor. He was my host, but this is…personal.”

“Viciously so.”

“You aren’t asking why I’m referred to as a whore.”

“You aren’t a whore,” Noah said, shoving the note into Harlan’s outstretched hand.

“At school—”

Noah took a turn studying the peaceful acres beyond the garden. “Do you think I care what you did in the dormitories when the candles were doused and the door locked? There’s a reason you had tutors until you were big enough to hold your own in a fight.”

“It was my nickname, Noah,” Harlan said, shoving him hard in the chest. “I was called Harlot.”

Harlan’s voice, which had changed more than a year ago, held a hint of youthful tremolo. Anger could do that to a young man, or heartbreak.

Despair dealt Noah a hard blow, for this was the Winters legacy. Foul names, anger, innuendo, and drama. He shook the despair away and applied his mind to the situation.

“Is that why you resembled the losing half of a prize fight for most of your first Michaelmas term?”

Harlan nodded, folding the note with shaking fingers.

Between Noah and the house lay the rose garden, most of which was past its prime and blown to thorny stems. Thea would see it all trimmed to tidiness before the first guest arrived.

“Christ in a boat, Harlan, I’m sorry.”

“You dealt with it,” Harlan said. “You came up to school, nosed about, and it stopped.”

“Nobody told me,” Noah said, though something had prompted him to look in on his brother. “My nickname was Flood, and I couldn’t be seen around livestock without somebody making a lewd comment regarding long sea voyages and procreation.”

Harlan gestured with the note. “What about the rest of it?”

The fighting? The juvenile politics, the teachers who turned a blind eye because a ducal heir could always benefit from a gratuitous beating?

“What
rest
of
it
?”

“Are you…” Harlan paced off, shoulders hunched, the gesture reminiscent of a child’s defensiveness.

“Am I what? I am most assuredly not married to a harlot, and neither was our papa. Not at any point.” Though as for Papa himself…

“That note implies something else.”

Noah mentally revisited the words, a right proper rampage boiling up under his self-discipline.

“The note implies somebody wants to breathe their last facedown in grass and sheep shit one morning here directly,” Noah said. “You feel this as an attack on you, Harlan, but it’s an attack on the family—you, Meech, Thea, me, on all of us—and thus it’s mine to resolve.”

Preferably with violence, because this was a sneak attack on a woman who’d been defenseless prior to her marriage, and a boy not yet come into his majority.

“You can’t blame somebody for commenting on the truth.” Harlan’s fists were clenched at his side, and his expression was…tormented. Purely, simply, tormented.

“What do you think this says?” Noah asked, snatching the note back. “It’s malicious tripe, Harlan. A little fact mixed with a liberal portion of rumor and a greater portion of spite.”

A very great portion of spite.

“Are you my father?”

“Your—
what
?”

“It says, ‘or was it your father who married the harlot?’ As if you might be my brother, or you might be my father. Which is it, Noah, and so help me, if you say you don’t know…”

Harlan’s expression said he’d cry or beat Noah half to death.

“I am your brother,” Noah said calmly. “I am not your father. I could not be your father. Think, Harlan. You were born the twenty-third day of August. I would have been off at university the previous autumn, and not on hand for your conception.”

“Mother might have visited you.”

Harlan had apparently been tormenting himself with this possibility for days. Working out the details, lashing at his dignity, his sanity, his concept of himself. His mood now resembled the spent rose garden, all thorns and rotting blooms.

“Your mother was the last woman to bestir herself to travel,” Noah replied. “Once Papa died, she’d barely leave the house, and received only family, the minister, her physician, or the solicitors. She did not hare up to Oxford to call on her stepson, for she was already several months gone with child.”

Thus did a woman grieve the loss of her opportunity to become a duchess.

“So is Meech my father? Is that why it says Papa married a whore? Uncle is a whore?”

Harlan wasn’t stupid, and he had more courage than Noah had given him credit for. “Why do you think that?”

“How many other fellows were visited at school by their uncle, almost every term?”

“I was,” Noah said. “The same questions were asked, Meech gave the same wiggle of his eyebrows, and I felt the same urge to kill him slowly and painfully.”

Noah had tried to forget those memories, but like briars, they’d dug into his mind all the deeper for his efforts to reject them. Was Thea haunted by similar memories, of events she’d been powerless to influence?

“He bothered you too?” Harlan asked.

“He and Pemmie sang the same idiot songs and flirted with the barmaids, and all I wanted to do was get back to my studies.” Horticulture had appealed to Noah most strongly, and now he was doomed to revisit familiar history amid the peaceful back gardens on his favorite estate.

“Why is our family like this, Noah?” Harlan’s question conveyed a wealth of pained bewilderment.

“I don’t know.” Noah moved along at Harlan’s side when the boy began to walk toward the terrace, though Noah was torn between the desire to enfold his brother in a protective embrace and the temptation to get him drunk. “
My
family is not like this. Our father was, and Meech is, but you and I, Thea and the girls, we’re not.”

“What is the insult to Thea, then, that’s she’s a harlot too?”

“For God’s perishing sake…” Noah kicked a loose pebble down the path, watching it skitter and bounce before coming to a stop against a pot of geraniums. “I can’t quite promise you Meech isn’t your father, but I will cheerfully kill him if he’s allowed you to wonder about it all these years for no good reason.”

“But Thea?”

Tenacity was a Winters trait Noah had prided himself on, more fool he. Gravel crunched beneath their boots, while out of some window or other, the little girls were likely watching this tormented progress toward the house.

“Thea has not confided details to me”—Noah hadn’t
earned
her confidences, more like—“and I have not pried them from her. A single unfortunate incident colors her past. It apparently occurred where the meaner element of Polite Society was on hand to draw the inevitable conclusions. I tell you this in strictest familial confidence, and you are not to ask Meech about it, or James, or anybody.”

How was it the house seemed miles, not yards, away?

“You didn’t know this before you married her, Noah?”

Noah hadn’t wanted to know it. “This happened years ago, Harlan, and I gather Thea’s ignorance and innocence meant some charming bounder could take advantage of her.”

Harlan looked puzzled, but Noah couldn’t say more, because he didn’t know any more himself. He’d hoped Thea might confide in him, for he’d been loath to raise the topic when it upset her so.

“Thea would be devastated by the contents of that note,” Noah said, “for your sake and mine, but also on her own behalf. No hint of scandal has found her to this point, but somebody apparently resents her rise in the world bitterly.”

“She won’t learn of this note from me,” Harlan said. “You’d call this fellow out, whoever he is?”

“In a bloody heartbeat. When this silly house party is over, we’re going into Town and buying my duchess a handsome little pistol to carry in her reticule, and we’re showing her how to use it. Then we’ll explain bullwhips to her, and get her an archery set as well.”

Harlan took the terrace steps two at a time. “Noah, what are you going on about?”

“Marital bliss, Harlan, wooing my duchess, and the kind of family we are now.”

Twenty-one

“Come, Thea.” Patience patted the cushion beside her. “Trust your people to do their jobs for twenty consecutive minutes, and let us interrogate you.”

Patience traded a smile with her sisters that boded miserably for Thea’s composure. This was exactly what Thea had wanted to avoid: the polite wielding of feminine daggers behind closed parlor doors, the condescending innuendo, the verbal elbow to the ribs over the tea service.

The thought of a dagger fortified Thea, reminding her of the blade strapped at her knee.

“Noah has kindly distracted the menfolk before dinner,” Prudence pointed out, “so they might shriek and whoop and dunk each other and start on their libation, and we have civilized privacy for a cozy chat. Patience, shall you pour, or shall I?”

“Let me.” Patience picked up the teapot when Thea would have reached for it. “Thea has talking to do. So tell us, Duchess, how is Noah coming along?”

“Noah?”

“You know him,” Penelope said as she started arranging tea cakes on plates. “Tall, dark, grouchy, unless you’re his horse or a small child? You seem to have made some progress with that part of it.”

“James said Noah reached for your hand when you greeted your first guest.” Patience calmly poured the tea as she fired that Congreve rocket into a curious silence.

“I didn’t notice,” Thea said. “Noah’s affectionate by nature, and one grows used to it.” Except one didn’t.
One
treasured each and every gesture, each manly insecurity and minor incident of doting.

“Heath is the same way,” Penelope said. “Lately he’s worse.”

“Pats your tummy?” Prudence asked, her smile feline and knowing.

“Pats everywhere,” Penelope said, putting a chocolate cake on each of four plates, “but perhaps we embarrass our hostess? Some husbands limit their affections to several nights a month, behind closed doors, with the candles out.”

Patience passed Thea a cup of tea. “If Noah’s being a dunderhead, we’ll thrash him for you—gently, of course.”

“Of course,” Pen and Pru chorused and looked a little too happy, anticipating this
gentle
thrashing.

“Noah is…” Thea glanced from one face to another, seeing only sororal concern—for
her
. “Noah is patient, kind, and good-humored, and he steals my breakfast, and accuses me of felonies, and lends me his cat, and prays a lot, and I just d-don’t know what to d-do…”

Patience shook her head, Prudence offered her handkerchief, and Penelope wrapped an arm around Thea’s shoulders.

“He’s being a dunderhead,” Penelope surmised. “Heath was no better, but he eventually found his way. Noah will too.”

“What if
I’m
the one who can’t find my way?” Thea wailed into her borrowed handkerchief. “What if I can’t become the duchess Noah needs?”

The duchess he could trust and respect, the one he could ask anything and not cringe to hear the answer?

The sisters exchanged another look, this one more thoughtful. Penelope put three more chocolate cakes on Thea’s plate, and the ladies settled in for a long listen. When Thea’s eyes were finally dry, and nothing had been resolved except that Noah wasn’t a dunderhead and he had lovely sisters, she suggested they look in on the little girls.

They found their quarry with Erikson, because the windows in his laboratory overlooked the driveway and stable yard. He’d scheduled a dissection of fragrant orchid to compete with the great excitement of company coming up the drive, and was succeeding modestly now that most of the guests were accounted for.

When the ladies joined him, he put down his knife.

“My laboratory is overrun with beauties.” He greeted each sister with a kiss on the cheek, then had to kiss the little girls and Thea for good measure.

“We have to bury the flower,” Nini announced. “Mr. Erikson says science should always be respectful.”

“Then come.” Thea held out a hand. “We were going for a walk among the flowers anyway. We can bury the orchid with its cousins in the back gardens.”

“Evvie, c’mon!”

“We have to tell Maryanne and Davies where we’re going,” Evvie said, scrambling off her stool.

“I will tell the nursery maids,” Erikson volunteered. “Here.” He wrapped the flower’s remains in a handkerchief, and passed it to Thea. “My thanks.”

Prudence linked arms with Penelope when the ladies reached the back terrace, the little girls having already run ahead.

“Do you ever regret that you let him get away?” Prudence asked her younger sister.

“Erikson? Not now I don’t.” Penelope’s look became wistful. “When it comes to kissing, he’s a virtuoso, but as a husband? You’d always be competing with his beauties, and he’d talk longingly about protracted trips to faraway jungles and not even realize he was breaking your heart.”

Thea was fascinated with these confidences, and kept her mouth shut accordingly.

“I suspect he knew,” Penelope went on. “I think he gallantly indulged me in my first
tendresse
, kissed the hell out of me for a few weeks, and then said the very things necessary to let me get over him. He’s a true gentleman.”

Erikson had kissed the hell out of Penelope?
For
weeks?

“Or he truly respects the business end of Noah’s bullwhip,” Patience suggested. “Don’t look so horrified, Thea. Noah likely knew of the entire business.”

“Noah said Erikson gets lonely,” Thea ventured. Did Noah grow lonely?

“I was stuck at home while Patience and Pru went larking about Bath with a cousin of our mother,” Penelope said. “I was growing lonely, which is probably why Noah started inviting his friends’ business associates out here for weekends, and so forth. Girls! You have to pick a spot with a bench nearby for when we pay our respects.”

Penelope strode ahead, reminding Thea of Noah in both the authority of her voice and the way she moved.

“She’ll make a wonderful mother,” Thea said. “You all will make wonderful mothers.”

“So will you,” Patience replied. “You’re bringing Noah along nicely, and these things tend to follow shortly in the ordinary course.”

“With Noah, there’s absolutely nothing short or ordinary about it.”

The admission was out of Thea’s mouth before she could stop the words, and a beat of silence followed, during which she wanted to disappear beneath the earth with the departed flower.

Patience started snickering, Prudence snorted, and before long, all three ladies were shrieking and whooping.

* * *

“Our guests are in great good spirits,” Noah said, passing Thea a cut-glass tumbler. “Your first dinner al fresco on the terrace was a rousing success, and Grantley was nearly delirious to provide Marliss an escort back to Town.”

“Marliss is engaged,” Thea said, taking a tiny sip of hazelnut liqueur, then getting to work on the pins in her hair.

“Thankfully not to me,” Noah said, hanging up his jacket on the privacy screen. “I thought she’d be married by now.”

The relief in his voice sounded genuine, as did the fatigue.

“The mothers-in-law are having too much fun planning the wedding, or so Marliss says. I think she’s having second thoughts. She’ll return for the ball next week. Perhaps she and Cowper will have set a date by then.”

Earlier that day, Marliss had been very clear that she and the overly serious duke would never have suited. Noah
was
overly serious, when he wasn’t teasing his cat, tickling the little girls, or thinking up insults for their ponies.

“Do you think Marliss regrets her rejection of me?” Noah’s cravat followed his coat. “Too damned bad, my duchess has me in hand now.”

Noah sounded pleased to be in his duchess’s hands. Thea watched in the mirror as he moved around her room, grateful for his response, and for his presence.

“You don’t wish even for a moment for a sweet young thing who waits patiently for your attentions?” Thea asked because the Duke of Anselm could have had any woman he wanted, and he’d chosen a lady fallen on hard times, without a fortune, without cachet, one far less virginal than he’d thought.

Noah paused with his cuffs undone and hanging over his wrists.

“I am content with my choice, madam,” he said, stalking over to the vanity. “Are you content with yours?”

Noah had not left Thea’s side for more than the requisite intervals with the fellows, and every member of the family was on their best behavior. He’d personally inspected every bouquet for Thea when she’d been too busy. He’d ordered her to take a nap and then carried her up to bed when she’d realized she was exhausted.

“I’m exceedingly
pleased
with my choice, Anselm.”

His frown evaporated, replaced by a piratical smile. “Exceedingly, Wife? You will give me airs.”

Thea’s braid came slipping down over her shoulder. “To replace your manly vapors.”

“Insecurities.” Noah pulled his shirt off over his head. “Not vapors, for God’s sake. Have you seen my cat? I fear the shameless baggage is getting ready to present us with more mouths to feed.”

Thea loved how Noah could express abiding fondness for even a cat.

“She likely is, tomcats having insecurities too. I think Marliss does regret the loss of you in a way.”

“Why?” Noah stepped behind the privacy screen, and Thea would have bet one of Sheba’s kittens he’d emerge naked simply to afford his duchess the pleasure of beholding him unclothed.

Thea worked at the ribbon tied at the bottom of her braid. “Marliss knew you would be too much for her, but her young baron is likely by contrast not enough.”

“Boredom is a terrible thing in a marriage.” Noah was naked, his dressing gown in his hands. “Boredom fueled a lot of the nonsense in my parents’ marriages. Meech said he was ready to howl at the end of the first month of his.”

Meech, the lone family member to cry off the gathering.

The dratted knot in Thea’s hair ribbon would not give. “We do not take your uncle Meech’s standard as our guide.”

“We’ve been married more than a month.” Noah slid into his robe. “I howl occasionally, but not with boredom.”

Such a naughty, lovely man. “Why haven’t you exercised your conjugal rights lately, Husband?”

Noah looked up sharply. Thea caught the movement in the mirror as she slid the knotted ribbon off the end of her braid.

“Being around my sisters has made you forthright,” Noah said, coming over to take the brush from Thea’s hand.

“You don’t sound surprised.”

“My brothers-in-law are surpassingly, disgustingly happy in their marriages. I am beginning to sense why this might be.”

Thea let Noah brush her hair—she’d missed having him do this for her, but hadn’t thought to ask him. He was busy, and lately he came to bed later and later.

“They had the good sense to marry your sisters,” Thea suggested, closing her eyes.

“Who are very forthright women. Do you want me in your bed, Thea? I come to you each night, and we cuddle up and talk a bit, but you never say what you want.”

Thea opened her eyes, wondering what Noah was really asking.

“You never ask me to your bed,” she said, because she could tell her husband
almost
anything. “We’ve been married nearly two months, and I’ve never slept with my husband in his bed.”

The brush stopped midstroke, and Thea was certain she’d offended him. That great expanse in the other room was the duke’s bed, not their bed, and it wasn’t as if Noah neglected—

He scooped Thea against his chest before her thought could complete itself.

“Get the doors,” Noah said, pausing before Thea’s dressing-room door. She lifted the latch, and the next, and the next, until she was flung—yes, flung—onto Noah’s enormous raised four-poster.

He unbelted his robe and covered Thea with his naked body. “Wife, would you be so kind as to join me in my bed tonight?”

Thea didn’t get to answer with words, only with her kisses, her body, her hands, her eager responses, and the way she fell directly asleep on Noah’s chest after the lovemaking. She heard him get up in the middle of the night, thinking he was off to heed nature’s call, but when he came back to bed, he pushed his hand under Thea’s pillow, then wrapped her in his embrace.

Thea went exploring under the pillow, felt her little dagger there, and knew she’d fallen absolutely and irrevocably in love with her husband.

* * *

“Corbett, you do not look at all well,” Marliss observed, whisking her serviette onto her lap.

Corbett Hallowell crossed the breakfast parlor to the sideboard and gestured at the serving maid to pour him a cup of a coffee. His bad luck, to have a sister who rose early, though at least his parents remained abed.

“Use that tone on your husband and see how well he tolerates it,” Corbett said, though Marliss wasn’t married yet, and perhaps never would be. The notion pleased him, for the expense of Marliss’s damned Season was partly to blame for his troubles.

“Use that tone on your wife,” Marliss shot back, “if a wife you can catch, and see what luck you have securing the succession. At least eat something, Corbett.”

For that comment alone, Corbett would see that his sister did not speak her vows with Cowper. The baron was a fastidious sort, and none too bright, after all.

Corbett took a swallow of hot, strong coffee and nearly retched when it hit his empty belly.

“Corbett, do sit down. You’re pale as a corpse, you look as if you haven’t eaten for days, and I’ll lose my own appetite if you loom over me much longer.”

Corbett would lose any breakfast he attempted to ingest, though Marliss was right—he ought to eat something to help with the shakes.

He took a seat at the head of the table. “How was your visit with your friend, the new Duchess of Anselm?” Another swallow of coffee burned its way down his gullet, though it at least helped clear his head.

“Thea is quite happy with her duke,” Marliss said, sipping her tea with the smug contentment of a woman whose schemes have come to fruition. “I believe Anselm is very happy with her as well.”

Anselm wouldn’t be very happy for long; nor would Thea Collins know much more contentment.