The Desperate Duke

by Sheri Cobb South

  If Daphne had known what awaited her at church that day, however, it is quite possible that she would not have been so obliging; she had expressed a hope that she and Theo might be friends, and it soon transpired that she would need all the friends she could get. For among those present at divine services that morning was a rather dashing young matron rejoicing in the title of Lady Dandridge. Daphne had known this young woman as Kitty Morecombe; in fact, they were to have been presented in London during the same Season, had not the death of Daphne’s father caused an abrupt and irrevocable change of plans.

  “Daphne!” cried Lady Dandridge as soon as services were over and the final “amen” was said. “Daphne Drinkard, as I live and breathe!”

  Squeezing past her husband in an attempt to exit her family’s pew ahead of the departing worshippers, she hurried up to Daphne and seized her hands.

  “How good it is to see you again! Dandridge!” she called, blonde ringlets bouncing as she turned to address her husband over her shoulder. “Dandridge, you must come and let me make you known to one of my oldest and dearest friends!”

  They were joined at once by Lord Dandridge, a ruddy-faced and somewhat stocky gentleman of about thirty who had the look of a sportsman, and who would almost certainly grow stout in later years. “Eh? What’s that, Kit?”

  “Dandridge, my dear, this is Daphne Drinkard,” said his fond spouse, blithely disregarding the unspoken rule decreeing that a gentleman should always be presented to a lady, rather than the other way ’round. “She and I were to have made our come-outs together, you know, but then her father died only weeks before we were to have gone to London. And how lucky for me that he did, for she always cast me quite into the shade at all the local assemblies, you know, and I daresay she would have done so in London as well. Why, you might have offered for her instead of for me!”

  She pouted prettily at the very idea, and Lord Dandridge was quick to demur. “Not at all, Kit, my dear. Not that Miss Drinkard ain’t a deuced pretty girl,” he added quickly and with some alarm, as if he were unsure how to reassure one lady without insulting the other.

  “But how well you look!” continued Kitty Dandridge, subjecting Daphne to an admiring scrutiny that somehow had the effect of making her all the more conscious of her three-year-old walking dress and the signs of wear on her kid gloves. “You know I’ve always thought that dress was particularly becoming on you. But you simply must add more flounces ’round the hem, you know! No one is wearing less than two these days, and very likely more. Why, I’m sure all my own gowns are trimmed from knee to ankle!”

  As if in proof of this statement, she thrust out one small foot, pointing her toe in such a way as to call attention not only to her heavily ornamented hem, but also to the shapely, silk-clad ankle it concealed.

  Daphne, still smarting over the assertion that her father’s death might be considered a stroke of great good fortune, found herself quite incapable of admiring her old friend’s fashionable clothing as Lady Dandridge obviously expected. Daphne had always marveled at, and perhaps secretly admired, her friend’s ability to say the most outrageous things with so much vivacity and good humor that it was impossible to take offense. Now, for the first time, it occurred to her that Kitty’s artless conversation was perhaps not so artless after all. Indeed, to lavish compliments that served only to demean their recipient was surely its own brand of cruelty.

  “I’m—I’m glad things have worked out so well for you, Kitty,” she said, and tried her best to mean it.

  “But what of you? Surely you don’t mean to remain here and become a dried-up old maid!”

  I don’t see that I have a great deal of choice in the matter, Daphne thought bitterly, but would never have admitted as much aloud, even had she been given the opportunity.

  “You’ll never meet any eligible gentlemen here,” continued Lady Dandridge, casting a disdainful eye toward the door, beyond which a handful of locals could be seen lingering about the churchyard.

  “On the contrary,” Daphne protested, forcing a laugh she did not feel. “We’ve had a possible Member of Parliament visiting in the area, and—and there is a very handsome young man staying at the board—at the house—” She could not bring herself to call her family home a boardinghouse out loud, and within the hearing of one who might not be such a dear friend as Daphne had always believed. But she need not have worried, as Lady Dandridge would very likely have failed to notice in any case.

  “A Member of Parliament? Oh Daphne, how wonderful if he should conceive a tendre for you!”

  “You sound just like Mama! But he isn’t a Member of Parliament yet, you know. He has to win a seat first.”

  “I shall have Dandridge make a donation to his campaign,” Kitty announced with the air of the Lady Bountiful. “Dandridge, you will see to it, won’t you?”

  It occurred to Daphne that Lord Dandridge might know something about the mysterious Mr. Tisdale. “But about this young man staying at the house,” she began, turning to address his lordship, “I wonder, my lord, if you are acquainted with a gentleman by the name of—”

  “Got a sudden notion,” Lord Dandridge exclaimed, displaying a lack of attentiveness equal to anything his wife could offer. “No need for Miss Drinkard to remain here at all.”

  “What’s that, my dear?” asked Kitty, lines of displeasure tightening about her mouth.

  “Take her back to London with us. You’d like a companion, wouldn’t you? She needs to see something of the world. There it is, then!” He rocked on the toes of his feet, clearly quite pleased with his own cleverness.

  “Oh, my lord,” breathed Daphne, overcome at the prospect opening up before her, “how very, very kind of you—”

  “Dandridge, my dear, you cannot have thought,” Kitty protested with a titter of laughter that held very little of humor. “Daphne doesn’t have the right clothes for such a visit. We wouldn’t want to embarrass her by having her come to us looking like a dowd!”

  Even Lord Dandridge appeared somewhat taken aback by his wife’s lack of tact. “Nonsense! What I mean is, no such thing. Couldn’t look like a dowd if you tried,” he assured Daphne with perhaps more diplomacy than truth.

  “It’s very kind of you to say so,” Daphne told him warmly, even as her hopes and dreams plummeted abruptly back down to earth. “And of course I should love to come and visit, but I’m afraid I can’t leave my mother just at present.”

  “Yes, how is your poor mother?” Kitty asked, all eager sympathy now that she was no longer faced with the prospect of playing hostess to a shabby-genteel friend who might still contrive to cast her into the shade. “Pray excuse me, Daphne. I simply must say something to dear Mrs. Drinkard, for Dandridge and I return to London first thing in the morning, you know.”

  With these words, she flitted away, leaving Daphne alone with Lord Dandridge, who shuffled his feet awkwardly.

  “Pay no heed to the things Kitty says. She don’t mean half of ’em, you know.”

  “While as for the other half, she never stops to consider how they must sound to those on the receiving end,” she concurred, nodding in understanding. “I assure you, my lord, I have known Kitty for a very long time—far too long to let her disconcerting remarks upset me.”

  And it was true, she told herself a short time later, as she accompanied her mother on the walk from the church to the boardinghouse. She had certainly known Kitty Morecombe too long, and too well, to be distressed by her verbal jabs. Furthermore, if Kitty had told the truth when she’d claimed to have been cast into the shade by Daphne (and whatever else might be said of her, Kitty was nothing if not brutally frank), well, perhaps one could not blame her for taking a certain satisfaction in the knowledge that she had made an advantageous marriage while the friend who had once outshone her was left to languish on the shelf.

  Still, it was only with difficulty that Daphne held up her end of the conversation at nuncheon, most of which centered on praising Mr. Nutley for the excellence of his ser
mon. As soon as she could, she excused herself from the table, pausing only long enough to exchange her good Sunday walking dress for her faded blue muslin round gown before making her way down the neglected garden behind the house to the river that flowed some little distance away. She walked across the stone footbridge spanning the water until she reached the apex at its center, then braced her arms against the parapet and leaned over, gazing down at the waters rushing beneath her.

  It was here, a short time later, that Theo found her. “Miss Drinkard? May I join you?”

  She summoned a smile that was perhaps not quite so feeble as it might have been only a few minutes earlier. “Please do.”

  He stepped up onto the bridge and crossed it in half a dozen long, easy strides, pausing next to her at its highest point. “Forgive me, Miss Drinkard, but is anything wrong? I couldn’t help noticing at nuncheon that you seemed to be troubled.”

  She looked up at him in some alarm. “You—you don’t think Mama noticed, do you?”

  He shook his head. “I doubt it. She, along with everyone else at the table, seemed far more interested in congratulating Mr. Nutley on his sermon.” Thinking that she might be more inclined to confide in him if he could engage her first in some other topic of conversation, he asked, “Does it not seem to you that Mr. Nutley is rather old for a curate? I should have thought he would have a church of his own by this time.”

  “And so he might have had, were it not for a”—she lowered her voice, although there was no one else in sight—“an unfortunate incident in his youth.”

  “An ‘unfortunate incident’?” echoed Theo, grinning broadly. “I can’t imagine Mr. Nutley committing any indiscretion worthy of blighting a clerical career.”

  “Nor can I,” Daphne confessed solemnly. “That’s what makes it so sad.”

  Theo’s smile faded in the face of her disinclination to laugh. “What happened, then?”

  She hesitated for a moment, then said, “You must not let on that I told you, or that you know about it at all.” Upon his agreeing to these conditions, she began. “As I said, he was very young at the time. He had just taken holy orders, and was invited to a dinner party at which the Archbishop of Canterbury was present, along with several other church leaders, any one of whom might have had the power to make his career.”

  “I should have thought that was a piece of rare good fortune,” Theo observed.

  “So it might have been, but I believe he used to be painfully shy when he was young, and was quite intimidated by the company in which he found himself. Dinner in those days was always served à la française, but poor Mr. Nutley was so afraid of saying something wrong that he dared not ask for any of the dishes farther up the table to be passed to him, and so terrified of dropping the heavy platter in front of him that he resolved not to pass it around the table unless he absolutely had to. Instead, he limited himself exclusively to the dish immediately before him.”

  “A dull meal,” Theo remarked. “I hope he at least impressed the archbishop with his Christian humility.”

  “He might have done so,” she conceded, “had the dish in question not been a platter of ruffs and reeves.”

  Theo let out a long, low whistle.

  “Oh, you know what they are, then? I did not, until Mama told me.”

  “They’re shore birds—male and female of the same species. I believe they are considered a delicacy.”

  “Yes, so Mama said. They were also,” she said pointedly, “a particular favorite of the archbishop.”

  “Of course they were,” Theo said in a flat voice.

  “You can guess the result. A young man’s very natural reluctance to put himself forward in such company was taken instead for gluttony, and selfishness, and pride, and just about every other vice one can imagine.” She shrugged. “And that was the end of Mr. Nutley’s clerical career. A family connection—an uncle, I believe, or some such relation—managed to procure for him a position as a curate, but from there he could rise no further. No letter of recommendation, whatever its source, had the power to overcome that disastrous first impression.”

  “But—but no one should have to suffer forever just because they did something stupid when they were young!” protested Theo, recalling with shame more than a few stupid actions of his own, committed not so very long ago and with far less cause.

  “No,” Daphne agreed sadly. “But what can one do?”

  Theo, remembering several letters endorsing various curates for a vacant living which was within the Duke of Reddington’s gift, thought that, however powerless Daphne and the other residents of the boardinghouse might be, he was in a position to do quite a bit. Aloud, he merely said, “I see I shall have to express my regrets to Mr. Nutley for having missed his sermon. I did so at nuncheon, of course, but it appears something more is in order. Should I say I’d heard it was—what? Comforting? Challenging? What the deuce does one say about a sermon, anyway?”

  Daphne considered the matter. “Tell him you heard it was very thought-provoking,” she suggested at last. In fact, she had not been able to concentrate on the sermon as the middle-aged curate deserved; she had been too aware of her old friend Kitty, now Lady Dandridge, seated in the box pew across the aisle with her fashionable new clothes and her aristocratic husband.

  “I shall do so,” Theo promised. “Now, having taken care of Mr. Nutley, let us turn our attention to you. I know your concern for Mr. Nutley is sincere, but I don’t think that’s what drove you from the house as soon as nuncheon was over.”

  “Oh, that,” said Daphne, affecting a careless little laugh that didn’t deceive Theo for a moment. “It is the stupidest thing, really. An old friend of mine was at church this morning, one whom I hadn’t seen in several years. I knew her as Kitty Morecombe, only she is Lady Dandridge now, for she is married, and—oh, bother!” She broke off abruptly as hot tears blurred her vision.

  “And you—you had hoped to marry Lord Dandridge yourself?” Theo asked, feeling suddenly as if someone had punched him in the stomach. He was a little acquainted with Lord Dandridge—a good enough sort, in his way, and an excellent fellow in the hunt. But not at all a proper husband for Daphne, although he could not have said exactly why this was so.

  “No, of course not! That is, he seemed like a very amiable man—he even suggested that I might come to London and stay with them awhile.”

  “Well then, I think—I think you should go,” Theo said, all the while selfishly hoping the proposed visit would not take place until after he was free to leave the boardinghouse.

  “So I might have done, but Kitty pointed out that I haven’t any proper clothes for such a visit, and—and would only look like a dowd.”

  “Well, I’m dashed!” Theo exclaimed indignantly. “Of all the rag-mannered—”

  “She was quite right,” Daphne put in quickly. “I don’t have any proper clothes, and I would not want to embarrass them. I know they couldn’t have sponsored me for the Season or anything of that nature, but it would have been rather nice to see St. Paul’s, or go to the theatre, or watch the equestrian performers at Astley’s Amphitheatre.”

  “You wouldn’t have liked Astley’s at all,” Theo assured her with, perhaps, less than perfect truth. “You’d no doubt have found yourself rubbing shoulders with a bunch of mushrooms.”

  She regarded him with some amusement. “It may have escaped your notice, Mr. Tisdale, but I am a mushroom.”

  He could only stare at her. Was she serious? Any fool with eyes in his head could see that Miss Drinkard was a lady! And yet, he remembered his first night at the boardinghouse, and his sentiments upon sitting down to dinner with, as he had thought of them, a bunch of shabby-genteel mushrooms. “I—I like mushrooms,” he found himself saying.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I like mushrooms,” he said again, with more conviction in his voice. “Especially if they’re cooked in a wine sauce and served over chicken. Without them, it’s just a bird, but with the mushrooms—w
ell, let’s just say that if they’d been an option at Mr. Nutley’s dinner party, the archbishop would have forgotten all about those deuced ruffs and reeves.”

  This won a reluctant smile from Daphne, and so Theo was inspired to enlarge upon this theme. She did not believe him for one minute, of course. Still, she was glad he had not attempted to placate her with false assurances that she was not a mushroom. No, I like mushrooms, he’d said, and suddenly a mushroom had seemed a very excellent thing to be.

  That night, alone in her tiny bedchamber, she took out the writing pad she kept tucked away beneath her mattress and began to write:

  I know a lad with golden hair,

  And leaf-green eyes, and courtly air . . .

  The meter was simplistic, and the imagery was far from profound. Still, it contained a joy and an optimism that her poetry had not possessed for a very long time.

  10

  The tenderest love requires to be renewed by intervals of absence.

  SAMUEL JOHNSON, The Idler

  A COLD AUTUMN RAIN fell in sheets as the cumbersome traveling chaise containing Lady Helen Brundy and the younger of her twin sons lurched to a stop before the Grosvenor Square town house. The footman, who had been stationed in the foyer for the past two hours so as to be prepared for this vehicle’s arrival, now stepped out onto the portico, unfurled his umbrella, and approached the carriage. He would have opened the door upon the two passengers, but his master, who had been awaiting the arrival of the chaise (or, rather, its occupants) far more impatiently, ran past him, heedless of his own lack of umbrella, hat, or any other protection from the inclement weather save for a caped greatcoat of dark twill. Sir Ethan wrenched the door open and beheld, for the first time in more than two weeks, his wife and child.