The Duchess War

by Courtney Milan

  Chapter Three

  It was almost unfair, Minnie thought as the Duke of Clermont entered his front parlor, how handsome he was. The morning sunlight streaming in through the windows bounced off light blond hair that would have been too long, had it not had a bit of an unruly curl to it. He stopped on the threshold and rubbed his hand through his hair as he contemplated her, mussing it even further. But whatever softness the disarray of his hair might have imparted to his appearance was countered by his eyes. They were sharp and cold, a piercing blue, like a creek flooded with icy spring waters. Those eyes landed on her and rested for a few seconds, and then darted to Lydia, who stood by her side.

  Lydia had giggled when she heard that Minnie intended to call on the Duke of Clermont—and she hadn’t batted an eyelash when Minnie had explained that she needed to talk to him privately.

  It was only in Minnie’s imagination that the duke’s gaze sliced through the façade that she presented to the rest of the world. He only looked as if he knew everything.

  He couldn’t have known anything, because as he looked at her, he smiled in something like pleasure. Just a little curl to his mouth, but there was also a subtle change to his eyes—a shift from the pale blue of ice-water to the slightly-less-pale blue of a light summer sky.

  There was something boyish about his good looks: a hint of shyness in his smile, a leanness to his frame. Or maybe it was the way that he looked away from her so quickly and then glanced back.

  If she hadn’t heard Packerly, the MP, talking last night, extolling the young duke’s efforts in Parliament, she’d have believed him a fraud. Handsome, young, and unassuming? Far too good to be true. Dukes in reality were paunchy, old, and demanding.

  “Miss Pursling,” he said. “This is an unexpected pleasure.”

  Unexpected, she believed. Pleasure…well, he’d recant that before they were done.

  “Your Grace,” Minnie said.

  He briefly took her hand in his—through their gloves, she had a sensation of warmth—and inclined his head to her.

  “Miss Charingford.” Clermont bowed over her friend’s hand as if she were the grandest lady. As he did, Lydia cast a sidelong look at Minnie and pressed her lips together as if suppressing the urge to giggle.

  “What brings you ladies here?” he asked.

  Lydia cast a speaking glance at Minnie, waiting to have all revealed.

  “If anyone asks,” Minnie said, “we’ve come to solicit donations for the Workers’ Hygiene Commission.” She held her breath, wondering how astute he was.

  The duke pondered this for a few moments. “I consider myself solicited,” he said. “I’ll be sure to make an appropriate donation, if you’ll leave the particulars. As for the rest… If this is about last night, you can rest assured that I am the soul of discretion.”

  Astute enough.

  Lydia raised an eyebrow at the implication that they’d talked before and Minnie shook her head. “No, Your Grace. There’s something else I must discuss with you. I’m afraid that Miss Charingford has come along as chaperone, but what I must say is not for her ears.”

  “True,” Lydia said cheerfully. “I have no idea what any of this is about.”

  “I see.” His smile faded to guarded coolness. No doubt he was imagining something lurid and scandalous—some plot to entrap him into marriage. He was a good-looking duke with a reasonable fortune; he likely encountered such plots on a regular basis. But he didn’t throw her out. Instead, he rubbed his chin and looked about the room.

  “Well. If you’re capable of conversing quietly, Miss Charingford can sit here.” He gestured to a chair by the door. “We’ll leave the door open, and we can arrange ourselves by the window. She’ll be able to see everything, ensure propriety, and hear nothing.”

  He held out the chair for Lydia. He acted the perfect gentleman, his manners so uncontrived that she almost doubted her own instincts. He rang a bell—tea on two trays, he said, when a servant ducked her head in. While they were waiting, he set one hand in the small of Minnie’s back and walked her to the window. It was the tiniest point of contact—just the warmth of his hand against her spine, muted by layers of fabric—yet still she felt it all the way to the pulse that jumped at her throat.

  It was so unfair she could scream. He was rich, handsome, and able to set her heart beating with a mere tap of his finger. She was here to blackmail the man, not to flirt with him. Out the front window, she could see the square outside.

  Squares were less common in Leicester than London. This one was badly kept. There was one tree, so spindly it was scarcely fit to be called by the name. The grass had long since perished, giving way to gray gravel. But then, this was one of the few neighborhoods in Leicester where there were squares.

  The most successful tradesmen made their homes a short ways down the London road in Stoneygate. The gentry lived on great tracts of land on estates in the surrounding countryside. Everyone with real wealth and position made their homes outside the town.

  But the duke had not. Minnie fingered the paper in her pocket and added that to the list of strange things about the man. When dukes came to the region, they situated themselves in Quorn or Melton-Mowbray for the fox hunts. He, however, had leased a residence that stood mere blocks from the factories.

  “How may I be of assistance?” he asked.

  There was too much that didn’t fit. He was lying. He had to be. She just didn’t know why. A chessboard was set up on the side table. She tried not to look at it, tried not to feel the inevitable tug. But…

  White was winning. It was six moves to checkmate, maybe only three. She could see the end, the pincer made by rook and bishop, the line of three white pawns slicing the board in two.

  “You play chess?” she asked.

  “No.” He waved a hand. “I lose at chess. Badly. But my—that is to say, one of the men here with me plays chess by correspondence with his father. This is where he keeps the board. You’re not going to challenge me to a game, are you?” He smiled at that.

  Minnie shook her head. “No. An idle question.”

  The maids came with the tea. Minnie waited until they left. Then she reached into her skirt pocket and removed the handbill that Stevens had shoved at her on the previous evening. The edges, wetted by last night’s rain, had curled and yellowed as they dried, but she held it out to him anyway.

  He didn’t take it. He glanced at the paper curiously—long enough to read the block-letter title that took up the first quarter of the page—and then looked back at her. “Am I supposed to take an interest in radical handbills?”

  “No, Your Grace.” She could scarcely believe her audacity. “You don’t take an interest in radical handbills. You write them.”

  He looked at the paper. Slowly, he looked at her and arched his eyebrow. Minnie looked away, her innards twisting under his intense perusal. Finally, he picked up a bun and broke it in half. Steam rose, but the heat didn’t seem to bother his hands.

  He didn’t even need to respond. Her accusation was laughably absurd. He sat in his comfortable chair surrounded by furniture that was waxed and polished on a daily basis by servants who had nothing to do but leap on motes of dust as soon as they dared to appear. The Duke of Clermont had taken a house and hired twelve servants for the space of two months. He had estates scattered across England, and a fortune that the gossip papers could only breathlessly speak of as tens, if not hundreds, of thousands. A man like him had no reason to publish radical political circulars.

  But then, she already knew he wasn’t what he seemed.

  As if to underscore all that, he casually ate a bite of bun and gestured to her to do the same.

  No chance of that. Her stomach cramped when she even thought of sipping tea. Just when she thought he was simply going to freeze her accusation into oblivion by refusing to address it, he reached out and adjusted the paper.

  “Workers,” he read. “Organize, organize, organize, followed by a great many exclamation points.” He
made a dismissive noise. “I abhor exclamation points, for one thing. Why do you suppose I have anything to do with this?”

  She had no real proof to offer, only the feel of the way the pieces fit together. But still she was sure of it. The worst case was that she was wrong. Then she would embarrass herself in front of a man she would never see again. She folded her hands in her lap and waited. If he could make her uncomfortable with silence, she could do the same.

  And indeed, he spoke first.

  “Is it because I’ve just arrived in town, and you don’t want any of your friends blamed?”

  She held her tongue.

  “Because I look like a rabble-rouser?” There was a wry tone to his voice. He looked—and sounded—like anything but. His voice was smooth and fluid, drawling out syllables in the queen’s best English. He had a faint smile on his face, a condescending expression that said he was humoring her.

  “Or is it because you’ve heard stories of my radical proclivities?”

  There were no such stories. His reputation was that of a statesman, a man who was both shrewd and soft-spoken.

  “Why are you here?” Minnie asked instead. “I’ve heard what’s said, but a man of your stature who was thinking of investing in Leicester industry would send a man of business, instead of arriving himself and overawing everyone.”

  “I have friends in the vicinity.”

  “If they were such good friends as to necessitate a visit, you would be staying with them.”

  He shrugged. “I hate imposing on others.”

  “You’re a duke. You’re always imposing.”

  He grimaced, looking faintly embarrassed. “That, Miss Pursling, is why I hate doing it. Have you any substance to your accusations?”

  She picked up the paper. “If you must know, there are two paragraphs in this circular that convince me it was written by you.”

  “By all means.” He held out his hand, palm up. “Read them, and expose me.”

  Minnie took her spectacles from her pocket and found the right place. “‘What do the masters do to earn the lion’s share of the pay? They supervise. They own. And for that task—one that takes no thought, no labor—they are paid sums so large that they need not even lift a finger to dress themselves. Their daughters, instead of toiling from the age of fourteen, are free to do as they wish; their sons need worry only about the degree of their dissipation.’”

  No reaction whatsoever from the duke. He simply sat in his chair and looked at her with those ice-blue eyes, tapping his fingers lightly against the arm. “You think a duke wrote that?” he finally asked, a note of humor in his voice.

  “It wasn’t a worker.”

  “You’d be surprised at the literacy that many—”

  “I am involved in the Workers’ Hygiene Commission,” Minnie interrupted. “I don’t underestimate any of them. There’s a fellow with a memory like an encyclopedia, who reads the latest Dickens serial by night and recites it back to the others during the day. It’s not merely the first paragraph that gives you away. It’s the first taken in concert with the second.”

  “Oh,” he said, still smiling. “There’s a second, much more damning paragraph. Of course, the flyer is only two paragraphs long. So by all means, read away.”

  “I can’t do that.” Minnie set the paper down and removed her spectacles. “The second paragraph, Your Grace, is the one you failed to write. You wrote all about what the masters didn’t do. You never once mentioned what the workers did do. A laborer would have been focused on how he spends his day—what he did, who it benefited—not how someone else spends his. This was written by someone who, whatever his intentions, was thinking like a master.”

  Clermont paused and tilted his head. Then he reached out, picked up the paper, and read it through. When he started, his lips were set in a frown. He read quickly, his eyes scanning down the page. But she could watch his expression alter—running from disbelief, to the quirk of an eyebrow in surprise. Slowly, his mouth curled in a smile. When he looked up, his eyes—so stark and cold before—were sparkling.

  “Well,” he finally said. “I’ll be damned. You’re right.”

  “Knowing that, it’s a matter of simple logic.” Minnie folded her hands. “A master wouldn’t write that—he has too much at stake. And once I subtract the workers and the masters, my choices are few. You were hiding behind the curtain last night. You’re not what you seem. You are the only possibility that makes sense of the available evidence.”

  She expected him to deny authorship once more. What she presented was the feeblest pretense of proof.

  But he didn’t argue with her. He glanced across the room at Lydia—who was sipping her tea and casting glances laden with curiosity in their direction. Then he lowered his voice even further. “If you intended to denounce me publicly, you would have told the magistrate, who would have come here with a handful of angry masters in tow, all demanding that I stop riling the workers. You didn’t. In fact”—he inclined his head toward Lydia—“you’ve taken pains to hide the true purpose of your visit from everyone. What is it you want from me?” His hand rested over his waistcoat pocket, where a man might keep a coin purse.

  “I want you to stop.”

  His eyes bored into her.

  “Please.” She swallowed. “You see, these sheets put everyone at each others’ throats. Everyone is watching each other. And I am involved with distributing handbills for the workers’ charity—there’s nothing radical about those; they’re all about cholera. Still, suspicion might fall on me.”

  “Surely, even if you came under scrutiny, you would be quickly vindicated.” He paused. “Unless you have something else to hide. Perhaps you don’t want anyone asking why a young lady on the verge of matrimony leaps behind a davenport when her suitor appears.” He raised an eyebrow.

  Minnie couldn’t meet his eyes any longer. “That’s the way of it,” she whispered, looking into her teacup.

  “What a surprise,” he said, his voice low and teasing. “Never say that you have something in your past you wish to hide.”

  She stared into the brown liquid in her cup. “Easy for you to find this all so amusing. But my future is no game. I have worked hard to get where I am, and I will fight to keep what little comfort I’ve earned, small though it may be. I don’t wish to have my actions examined too closely. Neither, I suspect, do you. If you stop, we’ll both be safe.”

  “Safe.” He drew out the syllable, as if savoring the word. “I don’t much care for safe, myself. And I’d be doing you a favor if I separated you from your suitor.”

  She could hardly argue with that. But she shook her head. “It’s no favor if you make it impossible for me to find another. I live on fate, Your Grace. When my great-aunt passes away, the farm will go to her cousin. My Great-Aunt Elizabeth and I will have nowhere to go. I must marry.” She lifted her head now, and looked him full in the eyes. “I haven’t any choice.”

  His gaze softened. “Your past… It’s so bad that you’re worrying that someone might poke into it because of a handbill?”

  For one mad moment, she considered laying the whole story at his feet. He looked so open, with his head tilted in that welcome, beguiling manner. Surely, she could…

  Even the thought of confession brought a chill to the air, a cramp to her lungs.

  She looked back at her tea. “Do you know what it is like to be a woman in these modern times? Gentlemen marry less and less these days. I read that thirty-four percent of genteel young ladies reach the age of twenty-seven without marrying. I don’t need anything shameful in my past. Anything outside the ordinary, no matter how harmless it might seem, is a catastrophe.”

  He sat back in his chair and considered this. “Then I see an alternate solution to our mutual problem. I, apparently, need a more believable reason to stay in town. If you didn’t believe what I said, others won’t either. You need to be in the top sixty-six percent of marriageable women, such as it is.” He shrugged. “So I’ll set up a
flirtation with you while I’m here. You can reject me; I’ll moon about morosely. The whole thing will do wonders for your reputation. I keep writing; you get your husband.”

  He said it so matter-of-factly, but the image that brought up—of him dancing attendance on her, of his hand resting over hers in a waltz—made her stomach flutter uncertainly. She gave her head a fierce shake. “That’s a terrible idea. Nobody would ever believe that you had any interest in me.”

  “I could make them believe. Not one in ten thousand would have figured out what you just did. Not one. I could make everyone believe in the woman who saw that—quiet, yes, and perhaps a little shy in company—”

  Minnie made a rude noise, but he waved her quiet.

  “You have steel for your backbone and a rare talent for seeing what is plainly in front of your face. I could make everyone see that.” His eyes were intense, boring into her. There was no escaping him, it seemed. He dropped his voice. “I could make everyone see you.”

  Was it just her stomach fluttering? No. Her whole body seemed on the verge of trembling. It had been years since anyone pretended to have an interest in her. To have his attention fall upon her in such concentrated fashion… It was too much.

  But he wasn’t finished. “Then there’s your hair. Hair shouldn’t change color, just by curling, but the edges seem to catch the light, and I can’t be sure if it’s brown or blond or even red when it does. I could watch that for hours, to try and figure it out.”

  Her heart was thudding in her chest. It wasn’t beating any faster; just more heavily, as if her blood required more work to move.

  But this was an exercise in hypotheticals, and Minnie was too desperate to be anything other than practical.

  “Go on with you.” She’d intended the words to be dismissive, but her voice trembled. “What would you say when it was just men about? When they were asking you what the devil you saw in that mousy Miss Pursling? I daresay you’d never tell them that you were entranced by the curl of my hair. That’s the sort of thing a man says to convince a woman, but men don’t talk that way amongst themselves.”

  He’d obviously expected her to swallow that codswallop about her hair, because he paused, slightly taken aback. And then, he gave her a shake of his head and a grin. “Come, Miss Pursling,” he said. “Men wouldn’t ask any such thing. They’d already know what caught my eye.” He leaned forward and whispered in conspiratorial fashion. “It’s your tits.”

  Her mouth dropped open. She was suddenly very aware of said tits—warm and tingling in anticipation, even though he wasn’t anywhere near them.

  He murmured, “They’re magnificent.”

  He wasn’t even looking at them, but Minnie’s hands itched to cover herself—not to block out his sight, but to explore her own curves. To see if, perhaps, her bosom was magnificent—if it had been magnificent all these years, and she had simply never noticed.

  If another man had said that her tits were magnificent, it might have been in a leering, lustful way—one that would have made her skin crawl. But the Duke of Clermont was smiling and cheerful, and he’d thrown it out there as if it were merely one more fact to be recounted. The weather is lovely. The streets are paved with cobblestone. Your tits are magnificent.

  “Don’t protest,” he said. “You did ask, and after furthering our acquaintance over a spot of blackmail, we’ve no need to encumber ourselves with false modesty.”

  Minnie squared her shoulders, all too aware that the act of doing so brought her bosom up a notch.

  “Look in a mirror sometime,” he suggested. “Look beyond this.” He touched his cheekbone, mirroring the spot on her face where her scar spread. “Look at yourself sometime the way you are now, all fire and anger, ready to do battle with me. If you’d ever once looked at yourself that way, you wouldn’t question whether I’d want a flirtation with you. You’d know I would.”

  Her whole body felt on fire—a cold, shimmering, sparking flame. She’d never been so aware of her own flesh—every inch of it, from the tips of her breasts, which might or might not have been magnificent, to the heels of her feet. His eyes were boring into her.

  She swallowed. “It’s not well done of you, to try to turn my head before I’ve agreed to your plan.” And if she’d contemplated it at all, that little display decided it. A man who could flirt like that had no business flirting with her.

  He frowned, and then scrubbed his forehead. “Come, Miss Pursling.” He gave her a little grin. “You’re the most interesting person I’ve met since I arrived. It would be a pleasure to spend more time in your company.”

  For him, that would mean that he could waltz off to other cities. For her… For her it would mean a short spell of having this man dance attendance on her. A month of his compliments, a few weeks of melting smiles. It would mean day after blissful day where she might fall under his spell. And just look what he’d done to her in ten minutes.

  Minnie shook her head, clearing away the cobwebs that he’d so artfully strewn about. It would mean everyone looking at her at every assembly. She couldn’t stand for that kind of scrutiny.

  “There’s no benefit for me in that plan, Your Grace. If I help you and we are discovered, you’ll be excused as wealthy and eccentric and powerful. I’ll be the woman—the traitor!—who gave up everything for you. And if you’ve set me up as a flirt, everyone will believe I’ve been your lover. I’ll be ruined. And when—” A wave of sadness passed through her; she couldn’t finish that sentence. She didn’t want to think of Great-Aunt Caroline gone. Instead, she took a deep breath. “At the end of it all, I’ll be destitute, and you’ll be a duke.”

  “I treat my lovers better than that. Even my pretend ones.”

  She raised her chin and gave him a flat look. “My future is not a joke, Your Grace.”

  He winced. “I’m going about this all wrong. Look, Miss Pursling.” He sighed. “I’m not trying to make light of your situation. But I’m not here to dabble in Leicester on a whim. I’m here because of a promise I made. My father put some things wrong, and I must set them right. I don’t wish to cause you any harm, but I won’t cease simply because you ask it. There’s no need for us to be at odds.”

  “I don’t wish to have to slowly drop hints and build up a store of proof that would inevitably point you out as the culprit,” she said. “But I will if I have to. If I do it my way, when it’s all said and done, people will say, ‘Well, Minnie really kept her head, even when a duke was about.’”

  “And men will marry you because of that?” he asked dubiously.

  “I only need one man to do so,” Minnie shot back. “More would be illegal.”

  The smile popped back on his face. “You don’t miss much, do you? I can’t believe Gardley called you a rodent. You’re the most formidable mouse I’ve ever met.”

  He placed his index finger atop her hand. It wasn’t a caress. It couldn’t be a caress. Still, her entire being seemed to freeze in place, fixed by that solitary point of contact. “My dear,” he said. “I give you my word that you’ll have an offer of marriage before I leave. Even if I have to do the job myself.”

  She jumped to her feet, pushing away from him. “That’s not funny,” she said, not even bothering to moderate her tone. “It’s not a joke, no matter what you might think, and I’ll thank you to stop treating it as one.”

  She’d knocked her teacup off the table and onto her foot in her attempt to escape from him and his horrible proposition. She could feel the wet liquid seeping into her stockings. But he made no comment; he simply straightened the tray on the table. Behind them, Lydia’s brows had drawn down; she watched them uneasily.

  “Well, then,” he said, keeping his voice low. “I’ll do it my way, and you try it yours—and we’ll see who wins out.”

  “That’s impossible,” she said flatly. “You can’t flirt with me. I’m going to be at war with you.”

  “No, you won’t,” he said politely. “Try going to war with an unwilling combatant. I
don’t think even you can manage that.”

  “You don’t know what I can manage.”

  “No.” He gave her a broad grin, one that started sparks flying in her belly.

  And then he stood up and took her hand. This time, he bowed over it—bowed so low that his lips brushed the curve of her palm. She’d removed her gloves, and she felt the light kiss he brushed against her hand from head to toe.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But I’m looking forward to finding out.”