Duke of Misfortune

by Blake, Whitney

  Sometimes it bothered him, while other times he was just thankful that he had friends who did not mind that he had changed. The acceptance from familiar and resourceful faces somewhat eliminated his need to sound like an ordinary man.

  Right now, he was feeling both melancholic and thankful. He was trying to solve the problem of his dwindling maintenance.

  Lord Paul stared dolefully across the table at him. “Can you not just go to your brother? You were a soldier, not some reprobate who came home with your tail between your legs.” He paused and added, “Not that soldiers cannot be reprobates, of course. But you know what I mean. You were injured. You are still a member of your family—he cannot withhold anything from you. Or… he should not.”

  They both knew that wasn’t true in practice, and many men might withhold means from a relative, even a male one. But unless Lee did something egregious, there was no basis for Thomas to deny him anything.

  The idea of going to him for help simply rankled. Lee felt he should not have to ask, and Thomas should have been decent enough to extend the security. To go to him and ask for anything seemed very much like fawning. He said as much.

  “I played all manner of men,” he said. “I can pretend to grovel to great effect. But I don’t wish to do it in earnest.”

  Lee was too fond of Paul to point out that he and his older brother, the Duke of Bowland, had a far better, far more amicable relationship than he himself had with Thomas. While Paul could, and had, gotten away with much that his sibling had graciously turned a blind eye to, Thomas had a history of either belittling Lee or blaming him for all mishaps.

  “It wouldn’t be groveling, would it? He is your family. I’ve heard he got even worse with the gambling. ‘Duke of Misfortune’, some of the papers are calling him.” Paul rolled his eyes. “But I cannot imagine it is so out of hand that he is financially endangered. And he remains unmarried. No one can possibly be using his money but him.”

  “That is another reason why I don’t wish to go to him. He is certain to be just as bitter as he was when we were boys—if not more so.”

  The trouble was, the cost of living and renting in London was becoming unmanageable. Since his return from Salamanca, he mostly made his own way in the world, claiming not even the smallest pension from the army. Since he had never been an officer, he had no right to expect such a thing, really.

  But his brother had slivered his allowance until it was next to nothing. The lack of funds was becoming an issue. His work as a scenic painter and prop-master was barely just enough to secure him rooms in a little building in Covent Garden. Unlike many of his own station, Lee was not concerned about his accommodations’ lack of prestige. He enjoyed the freedoms of being an unknown person and his own man. Anyone who mattered to him did not judge his decision.

  Yet, there were still advantages that had to be given up. One of them was security. The money that Thomas was giving him as maintenance had started out as meager to begin with, and it had only declined.

  Lee thought it was rather a pointed gesture.

  “Please promise me you’ll go see him. I would help if I could.”

  Lee smiled. Paul was not exactly frugal, but neither was he as flush with money as he could have been. It took most of his funds to support the image he wished to project. “I know. You’re a good friend.” He wasn’t sure about going to see Thomas. But perhaps Paul was correct, and he was simply judging his brother too harshly.

  The man did gloat in front of me while I was being forcibly cut from a life I loved, though.

  Lee felt he had his reasons for feeling so bitter. There wasn’t a way for him to stop feeling he’d been hard done by, and Thomas had gloried in his hardship.

  Always Father’s favorite. Always the one groomed to do great things.

  Not that Thomas had done anything great.

  Paul was right; Thomas still had a gambling issue. It was entirely possible that his love for gaming was what kept him from finding a wife. Any lady of the ton was bound to be deterred if they heard how badly the Duke of Welburn’s addiction to winning—or losing—often curtailed him. Society was so full of hypocrisy that, naturally, a duke was forgiven much when it came to his vices. But Lee could surmise that all the good mamas had cautioned their daughters against Lord Valencourt.

  All it took was one little murmur, and if the jackals in the press had nicknamed him, well. There it was.

  “And as a good friend, I implore you to please, please go to your brother instead of letting yourself become impoverished.” Paul leaned across the table and searched his face.

  Lee glanced around their surroundings from the corners of his eyes. They could have been worse. His rooms were the size of one large room that he might have had in his family’s manor. Maybe even one in the London townhouse. They were not as shabby as any pamphlets or caricatures about the area might have claimed, but still grim for most members of the high set.

  These would have appeared, to their eyes, as the rooms of a working lady or some sad, lonely actor’s quarters.

  Lee kept them clean and his things were, on the whole, of better make and quality than his neighbors’, but they were all at least a few years old, not including the items he had requested be taken out of his childhood and boyhood rooms.

  There were no vermin. No mice or insects. There was no damp. No holes through which the elements could permeate.

  And Paul, though he was always a decent fellow, looked as out of place within them as a stag might have seemed in a mineshaft. He had the unique ability to be relaxed almost anywhere, and he did not look discomfited now. But the colors of his attire, stark white paired with a deep blue, stood out strongly against the drab, whitewashed walls.

  Lee was paying for little, yet he knew his landlady would be inquiring soon about the rent. He sighed.

  “Very well. I shall send word today. Perhaps he can meet sooner than I would expect.”

  He had no valet, no servants. No carriage. No cards. He’d relinquished some of those things willingly, and his father had seen to it he could not afford the rest. After his death, Thomas had not bothered to raise Lee’s maintenance, so Lee had learned to do without. He had not needed to correspond often with his brother, but when he did, there was a lad living opposite him who gladly trotted to the townhouse.

  If he’d needed to journey to the estate, Paul had been kind enough to allow him use of a Hareden conveyance. Lee hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

  Thomas should still be in town.

  *

  It turned out that Thomas would see him the following morning.

  Since Lee’s own schedule was often more nocturnal than a man’s should be, the thought of rising at the somewhat early hour made him flinch.

  But needs must.

  It had been too long, replied Thomas. And they had much to discuss.

  His words, not Lee’s, although Lee felt similarly.

  He hired a hack on the sunny morning and when they arrived at the townhouse, he was hit with an unexpected and unwelcome pang of homesickness. Not, he guessed, for the structure itself. It was unremarkable if fine, and the sort of fashionable thing that the well-off had purchased or built within the last decade or two. No, it did not inspire any sense of loyalty or nostalgia within him. He didn’t miss the finery. It was so different from the enthusiasm and tawdry glamor of the stage that it felt truly alien from his tastes and desires.

  He had grown up around it and in it. Yet even as a young boy, he had never felt like he belonged. But he missed the people. Specifically, the servants bustling about the place. Clements, the head footman, who had been in the longest stretch of employment with the Valencourts, opened the hack’s door and awarded Lee with a toothy grin that split a lined, tanned face.

  “My lord, it has been an age!”

  Lee could not help but grin back. He hadn’t seen Clements for months. But he’d always had a rapport with the man.

  Unlike Thomas, thought Lee with no small share of satisfaction,
who sees everyone as mere cogs in a machine. He probably shouldn’t look down on Thomas too much for that. After all, Lee knew that his own attitude was in the minority. Thomas was only acting as he’d been taught by all of those whom their father deemed worthy of friendship or esteem, echoing hundreds of years’ worth of men who looked down their noses at their supposed lessers.

  Maybe Lee had never had that luxury. Maybe he was insecure.

  Or maybe he’d simply worked among all manner of people for too long to have illusions that the accident of his birth meant he was entitled to more respect than anyone else.

  “Too long, Clements. Is His Grace within?” Lee stepped onto the graveled drive and nodded to the house.

  He forgot that Clements had not yet heard his new voice. The poor man looked stricken with pity, then recovered quickly. “Indeed, my lord. He was in the breakfast room, last.”

  “Very good. I shall see him directly. He knows I am coming.”

  Lee’s feet guided him automatically, as though he were in a dream. They knew the way even if his mind was hazy on the logical details. Another footman, a strapping lad he did not know, opened the front door for him. Clements might have had business outdoors, for he stayed behind.

  There was no valet or butler to greet Lee, which he thought was strange. But he did not care enough to examine it deeply. Without faltering and showing his nerves, Lee took a long breath and went to the breakfast room.

  But what confused him on his way was the state of the place. Furniture he’d recalled from years prior was no longer there, its presence only being marked by the memory of outlines on the carpets. Several paintings were gone, too, and their positions were marked by shadows on the wallpaper. The duchess, who was apparently fond of the spectrum of blues, had chosen it.

  The absent paintings were announced by the way their outlines had prevented swatches of the paper from being faded by sunlight.

  Beyond missing items, the place looked unconscionably dusty and gave off the sickly sweetness of neglect. Damp. What on earth was going on here?

  Thomas was bent over a plate of eggs, his posture woeful, shoveling the food into his mouth like it was the only food he’d seen for weeks. Lee tilted his head at the scene, the once glossy tabletop dull, the room missing less of its accoutrements than the corridor and the foyer, but still seeming bedraggled. Lee cleared his throat. If no servants were available to announce him, he would have to do it himself.

  Thomas glanced up and shrugged. Lee didn’t know if that meant he was meant to enter.

  “Your Grace?” he asked, a familiar ire starting to grow hot. Not enough time had passed for him to truly forgive his brother his appalling behavior. Though he was content to be left alone and not to be included in Thomas’ family life—such as his family was or wasn’t—he was suddenly awash with the urge to take everything that was due to him. Now.

  “Emilian.”

  “May I enter, Your Grace?”

  “You may as well,” Thomas said, without an ounce of humility or even civility. “I shan’t be able to hear you very well at all from the doorway.”

  Lee, luckily, was not self-conscious about his voice. He grieved the opportunities that he would have had if his voice remained as it once had been, but it was difficult to embarrass him about the low, quiet rumble that it now was. Thomas, though, most likely believed that making personal slights would cow him. Whereas their father was shrewd and almost clinical in his speech, Thomas was rancorous and sometimes uncouth. Both men were uncaring.

  Luckily, one had given Lee practice in dealing with the other.

  “Yes, I find that my projection is not what it once was, more’s the pity.” Lee strode into the room and took the seat nearest to the door. From this vantage point, he could see Thomas was more pallid than he recalled. There was not enough of a difference in age between them to account for the haggardness. But once, Thomas had looked more similar to him. Curling, deep brown hair and a defined jaw. Strong nose. But now, he looked like a strained, tired man who would go through life with few friends and no wife or children.

  Sadly, he looked much older than he was.

  And Lee did not always believe that a man needed the latter set of people, a blood family, to make him happy. But it probably could help him be less lonely.

  “Such a shame for a man who wished to make his own living shilling tales and pretending to seduce tarts on a stage.”

  Lee clenched his fists where they rested in his lap and endeavored to sound calm. “I’m actually here to talk about—”

  “Need money, do you?”

  Without flinching, Lee shrugged. “Father meant to set me straight by sending me into a soldier’s life. I wasn’t paid well. He knew that if I made it out alive, he hadn’t set me up to be an officer… and even they don’t—”

  “Look around you. Does the house look like the dwelling of a man with anything to give?” Thomas took a long, sloppy sip of his coffee.

  It was too much to hope that he would offer Lee anything to drink, and even if he did, he likely would not remember that Lee despised coffee. What Paul had mentioned about the Duke of Welburn having a problem might have held more weight than Lee originally believed. Debt could explain the missing furniture, the paintings that had left ghostly outlines on the wallpaper. But if things were at that point, they must be bad, indeed. Lee cast his brother a careful, sidelong glance.

  Truth be told, he hadn’t given much thought to how Thomas lived his life. Now that he was on the outside of the ton despite his lineage, it was no trouble to essentially ignore its gossip. Paul supplied him with enough to whet his appetite.

  Concerned in spite of his ire, Lee said, “Thomas—Your Grace—how have things progressed this far?” He did not mean it as censure or criticism.

  Thomas, however, inferred it as such. “You are lucky I’ve supplied you with anything at all for this long,” he said, almost barring his teeth in a snarl. But Lee was not easy to scare and even harder to bully. Thomas had never endured what he had—battlefields, violence, the loss of one’s livelihood.

  In short, Thomas was scared. It was also possible that he had only himself to blame for the circumstances. Father had died leaving behind a secure and wealthy estate. Now, his heir was evidently facing problems. That pointed to a deeper, more personal problem than a bad year for trade or the crops and cattle at Whitwell.

  “I apologize if I have slighted you. I mean only to suggest that perhaps Mr. Clyde could help set everything right?”

  Clyde was possibly the best steward in the country. He was a small man who looked like a weasel and said little, but Lee knew he was impeccable, and what was more, he had a heart. In childhood, Clyde had answered all of his questions about the estate that was never to be his. He’d asked them well before understanding the prestige and riches were Thomas’, not his own.

  Not every family with multiple sons treated the heir apparent with such a marked preference. Lee felt he’d always been the odd man out. Still, he did not have it in him to gloat over his brother’s predicament, and not just because it affected him, too. How much of a chance had Thomas ever had to develop into his own man?

  Very little, reasoned Lee. Watchfully, he decided to extend some kindness, however undeserved it might be.

  “There is nothing left to set right,” said Thomas, sneering. “There is enough for me to become solvent again, if I am careful. You always wanted to be gone from this family. Now you have your chance.”

  Lee thought through his own options as carefully as he could, speaking slowly. “I wouldn’t be gone. I’d still be Lord Emilian.”

  “As though you do anything under your own name.”

  “I didn’t create a new identity because I hated the name. I was never ashamed of what I was.”

  “You had a funny way of showing your pride, then.”

  That was the largest misunderstanding between Father and Lee. As ever, Thomas had sided with Father. But Lee had never taken his stage name or started perform
ing because he hated being a Valencourt. Father, though, had taken it personally and without any perspective. Lee was simply carving a niche in a world where he felt welcomed. Creating a second identity meant only an ease of use, not a disavowal of where he’d come from. No one from the theaters had cared much if they discovered his true self.

  They might tease him, but he’d already established that he was one of them.

  And what was more, none had ever mentioned a thing about blackmail or extortion. They easily could have.

  No, it was only the nobility who cared if they discovered what they considered his shocking deceit.

  “You’ll never understand it, Your Grace, so I shall not justify myself to you. But if you have any need for my perspective, you know where to send for me.”

  “In your romantic little hovel.”

  Sighing and praying for more tact than his brother had ever possessed, Lee said, “Quite so.” He was going to get nowhere in this discussion, and from the amount of bitterness Thomas was projecting, he believed things were as dire as Thomas said. “You could find an heiress, you know,” Lee added in an offhand way. He did not think it was ethical to undertake such a search. But if needs must, it wasn’t the worst thing a duke could do to save his estate. Plenty of women would be happy to marry a duke and wouldn’t be bothered if the marriage was not a love match.

  “Believe me, I have tried.”

  It must have been his winning personality that had failed him. Well, plenty of women would have been happy to marry most dukes. Lee shook his head. “Then forget I was ever going to broach the subject of my allowance at all.”

  “I would have sent a note explaining its absence. You would have found out.”

  When? Lee wanted to know. He did not ask. “Naturally.” He was too busy with considering what his next steps would be. He had not been to university. There was nothing he could fall back on, save the one profession that fate seemed to deny him. He would try to evade the melancholy that thought brought on for as long as he could. Some days were better than others.