by Julia Quinn
Dedication
For Abi, and her year of grit, determination, and resilience.
And also for Paul. It is lovely to have a doctor in the family, but not as lovely as it is just to have you.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Epilogue
About the Author
Praise for Julia Quinn
By Julia Quinn
Copyright
About the Publisher
Chapter 1
Kent, England
1791
At least no one had died.
Beyond that, Nicholas Rokesby had not a clue why he’d been summoned home to Kent.
If someone had died, he reasoned, his father would have said as much in the message he’d dispatched to Nicholas in Edinburgh. He’d sent it by swift rider, so it was obviously a matter of some urgency, but if someone had died, surely Lord Manston would have written more than:
Please return to Crake with all possible haste. It is critical that your mother and I speak with you as soon as possible.
My regrets for interrupting your studies.
Your loving father,
Manston
Nicholas glanced up at the familiar canopy of trees as he embarked upon the final leg of his journey. He’d already traveled from Edinburgh to London by mail coach, London to Maidstone by stagecoach, and was now completing the last fifteen miles on horseback.
The rain had finally stopped—thank the good Lord—but his mount was kicking up a bloody ridiculous amount of mud, and between that and the pollen, Nicholas had a feeling that by the time he made it home to Crake he’d look like he had impetigo.
Crake. Less than a mile to go.
Hot bath, warm meal, and then he’d find out just what had his father in such a lather.
It had better be something serious. Not death, of course, but if he found out that he’d been called across two countries merely because one of his brothers was getting an award from the king, he was going to take someone’s bloody arm off.
He knew how to do it too. All of the medical students were required to observe surgeries when the opportunity arose. It was not Nicholas’s favorite part of the program; he much preferred the more cerebral aspects of medicine—assessing symptoms and solving the ever-changing puzzles that led to a diagnosis. But in this day and age it was important to know how to amputate a limb. It was often the doctor’s only defense against infection. What could not be cured could be stopped in its tracks.
Better to cure, though.
No, better to prevent. Stop problems before they started.
Nicholas gave a mental eye-roll as Crake finally came into view. He had a feeling that whatever problem had brought him down to Kent on this rainy spring day, it was well underway.
Also, his brothers weren’t getting awards from the king. They were stand-up gentlemen, all three of them, but really.
He slowed his horse to a trot as they rounded the final corner of the drive. The trees slipped from his peripheral vision and suddenly there was his home, stately and solid, all two-and-a-half centuries of it rising from the earth like a limestone goddess. Nicholas had always marveled at how such a large and ornate building could be so well hidden until the final moment of approach. He supposed there was something poetic about it, that he could continually be surprised by something that had always been a part of him.
His mother’s roses were in full bloom, red and pink and riotous, just the way they all liked them, and as Nicholas drew close, he felt their scent in the damp air, drifting lightly over his clothes and under his nose. He’d never been particularly fond of the smell of roses—he preferred his flowers less fussy—but when everything came together in moments like this: the roses and the mist, the damp of the earth . . .
It was home.
It didn’t seem to matter that he hadn’t meant to be here, at least not for another few weeks. This was home, and he was home, and it set him at peace, even as his brain pricked with unease, wondering what manner of disaster had called him back.
The staff must have been alerted to his impending arrival because a groom was waiting in the drive to see to his mount, and Wheelock had the door open before Nicholas even took the front step.
“Mr. Nicholas,” the butler said. “Your father would like to see you immediately.”
Nicholas motioned to his mud-spattered attire. “Surely he will want me to—”
“He did say immediately, sir.” Wheelock’s chin dipped, almost imperceptibly, just enough to indicate the back of the house. “He is with your mother in the gold-and-green.”
Nicholas felt his brow draw down in confusion. His family was less formal than most, especially when they were here in the country, but a greatcoat streaked with mud was never acceptable attire in his mother’s favorite drawing room.
“I’ll take that,” Wheelock said, reaching for the coat. The man always had been a freakishly good mind reader.
Nicholas glanced down at his boots.
“I would just go,” Wheelock said.
Good God, maybe someone had died.
“Do you know what this is about?” he asked, turning so that Wheelock could take the coat from his shoulders.
“It is not for me to say.”
Nicholas glanced back over his shoulder. “So you do know.”
“Sir.” Wheelock looked pained.
“I would have been down in less than a month.”
Wheelock avoided Nicholas’s gaze as he made a show of brushing dried bits of mud off the coat. “I believe time is of some essence.”
Nicholas rubbed his eye. Good God, he was tired. “Do you enjoy being cryptic?”
“Not particularly.”
Which was an utter lie. Wheelock loved the special brand of understatement that was available only to butlers who were very secure in their positions. But Nicholas could tell that Wheelock was not finding anything to love in this particular conversation.
“I’m sorry,” Nicholas said. “It is badly done of me to put you in such a position. No need to announce me. I’ll take my muddy boots and find my parents.”
“Gold-and-green,” Wheelock reminded him.
“Of course,” Nicholas murmured. As if he’d forget.
The entrance to the gold and green drawing room was at the end of the hall, and Nicholas had spent enough time making that short journey to know that his parents had to have heard him enter the house. The floors were marble, always polished to perfection. Stockinged feet slid like skates on ice and shoes clicked with enough volume to percuss a small orchestra.
But when he reached the open doorway and peered inside, neither of his parents were so much as glancing in his direction. His father was by the window, staring out over the verdant lawn, and his mother was curled in her favorite spot on the mint green sofa.
She’d always said the left side was more comfortable than the right. All five of her children had tested this hypothesis, scooting from one side to the other, and no one had managed to reach the same conclusion. To be fair, no one had reached any verifiable conclusion. Mary had declared that both sid
es felt the same, Edward pointed out that the only way to be truly comfortable was to put one’s feet up, which was not generally permitted, and Andrew had hopped back and forth so many times he’d busted the seam on one of the cushions. George had declared the entire exercise ridiculous, but not before making his own perfunctory test, and as for Nicholas . . .
He had been but five during this family experiment. But he’d sat himself down in every spot before rising back to his feet and declaring, “Well, we can’t prove her wrong.”
That seemed to cover a lot of life, he’d come to realize.
Proving something right wasn’t the same as proving the opposite wrong.
And if the left side of the sofa made his mother happy, who was he to say otherwise?
He hesitated for a moment in the doorway, waiting for one of his parents to notice his presence. They didn’t, so he stepped inside, pausing at the edge of the rug. He’d already left a trail of mud in the hall.
He cleared his throat, and finally they both turned.
His mother spoke first. “Nicholas,” she said, stretching her arm in his direction. “Thank God you’re here.”
He looked warily from parent to parent. “Is something wrong?”
It was the stupidest of questions. Of course something was wrong. But no one was wearing black, so . . .
“Sit down,” his father said, motioning to the sofa.
Nicholas took a seat next to his mother, taking her hand in his. It seemed the right thing to do. But she surprised him by tugging it away and rising to her feet.
“I will leave the two of you to your discussion,” she said. She laid her hand on Nicholas’s shoulder, signaling that he did not need to rise. “It will be easier if I am not here.”
What the devil? There was a problem that needed sorting and his mother was not just not taking charge, she was voluntarily exiting the scene?
This was not normal.
“Thank you for coming down so quickly,” she murmured, bending to kiss him on the cheek. “It comforts me more than I could ever say.” She looked back at her husband. “I will be at my writing desk, should you need me to . . .”
She seemed not to know what to say. Nicholas had never seen her so uncomposed.
“Should you need me,” she finally finished.
Nicholas watched as his mother departed, silent and likely slack-jawed until she shut the door behind her. He turned back to his father. “What is going on?”
His father sighed, and a long, heavy moment passed before he said, “There has been an incident.”
His father always had been a master of polite understatement.
“You should have a drink.”
“Sir.” Nicholas didn’t want a drink. He wanted an explanation. But this was his father, so he took the drink.
“It concerns Georgiana.”
“Bridgerton?” Nicholas asked in disbelief, as if there was another Georgiana to whom his father could possibly be referring.
Lord Manston nodded grimly. “You haven’t heard, then.”
“I’ve been in Edinburgh,” Nicholas reminded him.
His father took a sip of his brandy. A rather larger sip than was normal this early in the morning. Or any time of the day, for that matter. “Well, that’s a relief.”
“Respectfully, sir, I would ask you to be less opaque.”
“There was an incident.”
“Still opaque,” Nicholas muttered.
If his father heard him—and to be honest, Nicholas rather thought he had—he made no reaction. Instead he cleared his throat and said, “She was kidnapped.”
“What?” Nicholas sprang to his feet, his own glass of brandy sliding from his fingers to the priceless carpet below. “You didn’t think to begin the conversation with that? Good God, has anyone—”
“Calm yourself,” his father said sharply. “She has been recovered. She is safe.”
“Was she . . .”
“She was not violated.”
Nicholas felt something unfamiliar slide through his veins. Relief, he supposed, but something else along with it. Something acrid and sour.
He’d met women who’d been forced into sexual congress against their will. It did things to them. To their bodies, which he thought he might understand a little, and then to their souls, which he knew he could not understand at all.
This feeling inside . . . it was sharper than relief. It had teeth, and it came with a slow thrum of rage.
Georgiana Bridgerton was like a sister to him. No, not quite a sister. Not exactly. But her brother Edmund was like a brother to him, closer than his own, to be honest.
Lord and Lady Manston had thought they were finished having children when Nicholas happened along. He was a full eight years younger than his next closest sibling; by the time he was old enough to do more than toddle about in nappies, they were all off at school.
But Edmund Bridgerton had been around, just a few miles away at Aubrey Hall. They were almost precisely the same age, born just two months apart.
They’d been inseparable.
“What happened?” Nicholas asked his father.
“Bloody fortune hunter went after her,” his father bit off. “Nithercott’s son.”
“Freddie Oakes?” Nicholas said, with no small amount of surprise. They’d gone to school together. For a few years, at least. Freddie hadn’t finished. He was popular, personable, and insanely good at cricket, but it turned out that the only thing worse than failing one’s exams was cheating on them, and he’d been booted from Eton at the age of sixteen.
“That’s right,” Lord Manston murmured. “You know him.”
“Not well. We were never friends.”
“No?”
“Never not friends,” Nicholas clarified. “Everyone got on with Freddie Oakes.”
Lord Manston gave him a sharp look. “You defend him?”
“No,” Nicholas said quickly, although without any facts, he had no idea what had truly happened. Still, it was difficult to imagine a scenario that involved Georgiana being at fault. “I’m just saying that he was always very popular. He wasn’t mean, but you didn’t really want to cross him.”
“So he was a bully.”
“No.” Nicholas rubbed his eyes. Damn, he was tired. And it was near impossible to explain the intricacies of school social hierarchy to someone who hadn’t been there. “Just . . . I don’t know. As I said, we weren’t really friends. He was . . . shallow, I suppose.”
His father gave him a curious look.
“Or maybe he wasn’t. I honestly could not say. I never really spoke with him about anything more than what was for breakfast or who was going home for half term.” Nicholas thought for a moment, sifting through his memories of school. “He played a lot of cricket.”
“You played cricket.”
“Not well.”
It was a sign of his father’s distress that he did not immediately leap to correct him on this. In the Earl of Manston’s mind, all four of his sons had been made in his image—splendid athletes who dominated the sporting fields of Eton College.
He was only twenty-five percent wrong.
Nicholas was not an incompetent athlete. To the contrary, he was a rather fine fencer, and he could outshoot any of his brothers with either rifle or bow. But put him on a field with a ball (of any sort) and a few other men and he was hopeless. There was a skill to knowing where one was in a crowd. Or maybe it was an instinct. Regardless, he did not have it. Cricket, the Field Game, the Wall Game . . .
He was terrible at them all. All of his worst memories of school took place on the playing fields. That sense of being watched and found wanting . . . the only thing worse was waiting while teams were chosen. It did not take boys long to figure out who could kick a ball or throw a googly.
And who could not.
He supposed it was the same in academics. He’d only been at Eton a few months before everyone knew he was the one with the perfect marks in the sciences. Even Freddie Oakes had
come to him for help from time to time.
Nicholas knelt to finally retrieve the glass tumbler he’d dropped. He regarded it for a few seconds, trying to decide if the moment required a clear head or a softening around the edges.
Probably something in between.
He looked at his father. “Perhaps you had better tell me what has happened,” he said, crossing the room to refill his glass. He could decide later if he wanted to drink it.
“Very well.” His father set his own glass down with a heavy clunk. “I’m not sure when they met, but Oakes had made his intentions clear. He was courting her. Your mother seemed to think that he was likely to propose.”
Nicholas could not imagine why his mother thought she could read the mind of Freddie Oakes of all people, but this was clearly not the time to point this out.
“I don’t know if Georgiana would have said yes,” Lord Manston continued. “Oakes gambles too much—we all know that—but he’ll eventually have the barony, and Georgie’s not getting any younger.”
At twenty-six, Georgie was precisely one year younger than Nicholas, but he was well aware that women did not age at the same rate as men, at least not as pertained to the customs and mores of English marriage.
“Anyway,” his father continued, “Lady Bridgerton and your mother were up in London—shopping, I suppose; I didn’t ask—and Georgiana went with them.”
“But not for the Season,” Nicholas murmured. As far as he knew, Georgie had never had a proper London Season. She’d said she hadn’t wanted one. He’d never inquired further. A Season in London sounded as appealing to him as having his teeth pulled, so who was he to question her?
“Just a visit,” his father confirmed. “I’m sure they went to some event or another. But nothing official. Season’s almost over, anyway. But Oakes called several times, and he took Georgiana out.”
Nicholas splashed a bit of brandy into his glass and turned back around to face his father. “With Lady Bridgerton’s permission?”
Lord Manston nodded grimly and took a long swallow of his drink. “It was all as it should be. Her maid accompanied them. They went to a bookstore.”
“That sounds like Georgie.”
