The Duchess War

by Courtney Milan

  Chapter Four

  Rain dotted the windowpanes of Robert’s upstairs study, dissolving the world outside into murky swirls. The two women on the street below appeared as receding blobs of fluttering skirts under dark umbrellas. Pale blue—that was Miss Charingford—and dark brown—that was the inimitable Miss Pursling. From above, nothing set Miss Pursling apart from any other umbrella on the street. If he hadn’t seen her gown just a few minutes ago, he’d not even have realized who it was.

  He felt as if he’d woken up, weak and confused, only to be told that he’d spent the last three weeks in bed with a fever—and that during his illness, Queen Victoria had abdicated the throne and run off with a lion-tamer from Birmingham. The world seemed an entirely different place. And yet there stood Miss Pursling, pausing to stand under an awning on the corner, turning to her friend and twirling her umbrella as if nothing had happened.

  As if she hadn’t just upended his every expectation.

  The door opened quietly behind him and footsteps approached. He didn’t need to look to see who was coming; the servants in this household were still too much in awe of him to approach without begging for permission. That left only one possibility—Mr. Oliver Marshall.

  “So,” Oliver said from behind him. “Was it as bad as you feared?”

  Robert drummed his fingers against the windowsill and pondered how to respond. “Two young ladies came to solicit a contribution for the Workers’… Oh, Devil take it. I can’t remember—oh yes. The Workers’ Hygiene Commission.”

  There were very few secrets that Robert kept from Oliver. He’d not mentioned Miss Pursling last night. For one, it hadn’t seemed important, and for another, if there was a secret there, it belonged to her, not him. This, though… This touched on one of the few secrets he had no choice but to keep from Oliver.

  “I see. They came to gawk at you.” There was a hint of humor in the other man’s voice, and he came to stand next to him. He peered out the window too, frowning when he saw nothing of interest.

  “No, actually.” Across the way, Miss Pursling and her friend passed under the awning, heads tilted toward one another, shoulders touching. The rain spilled off the metal overhang that shielded them, splashing to the ground in dirty waves of dishwater. Oliver thought they were only here to talk to the residents of town about the prospect of voting reform. Miss Pursling had threatened to reveal the truth about Robert’s other activities here, and that was substantially more annoying than gawking. On the other hand…

  Robert turned to the man standing beside him. “Oliver,” he said, “how did you ever come to the conclusion that I was a worthwhile human being?”

  Oliver took off his glasses and cleaned them with a handkerchief. “What makes you think I did?”

  “I’m being serious. Until I met you, nobody who looked at me saw an actual person. Just a duke’s son.” Nobody since Oliver had seen an actual person, either. They’d seen a vote in the House of Lords, a fortune inherited from his grandfather. They’d seen the possibilities he represented.

  Miss Pursling disappeared around the corner, and Robert shook his head. She was a problem—and a pleasure—to be dealt with on some other occasion.

  Oliver gave his spectacles one last swipe and then looked over at him. “Well,” he said. “Perhaps it was because I knew precisely how much it is worth to be a duke’s son. You weren’t the only one.”

  “But when I met you, I was a complete ass.”

  “True,” Oliver said.

  Their friendship—or whatever it was they shared—hadn’t come easily. When he’d first met Oliver, he’d made an enemy of him, encouraging the other boys to rile him up. Not as if Oliver had needed much encouragement on that score.

  One day, Oliver had told him—quietly, matter-of-factly—that they were brothers. And Robert’s entire world had turned upside down.

  “Why all this introspection?” Oliver asked. “It was simple. We fought; brothers often do. We took a little time to get to know one another. Then…” A shrug.

  “Your memory is terrible. We didn’t ‘take a little time to get to know one another,’” Robert said. “I egged the other boys on, encouraging them to pick on you. And even once we declared peace, I had the devil of a time coming to terms with what you told me.”

  He’d spent months pondering the inevitable, awful arithmetic—one that subtracted nine months from his brother’s age and came up with a date two months after Robert’s parents’ had married. His mind kept trying to manufacture some perfectly good reason why his father had sired a son out of wedlock and then abandoned him with no financial support. Robert built elaborate explanations based on messages that went astray, lies that were told, servants who happened to go on leave…

  “I only stopped making excuses for my father’s behavior because I asked him what happened.”

  I don’t care what she says, his father had growled. She wanted it. They always do.

  This reflexive denial of a crime he’d not been accused of had made everything painfully clear. Robert had found Oliver directly after the holidays.

  I’m not my father, he’d said, his voice shaking. I’m not my father, no matter what anyone says.

  And Oliver had simply grinned at him. I know that, he’d replied cheekily. I’ve been waiting for you to figure it out.

  I know you’re not your father. Over the years, those words had meant more to him than any of the flattery that so often came his way. A don at Cambridge had looked him in the eyes, and said, “My God, you’re the spitting image of him.” When he reached his majority, men slapped him on the back and told him how much he looked like the old Duke of Clermont. Every time they complimented him on his heritage, he heard his father’s plaintive lament. She wanted it. They always do.

  Robert was taller than his brother by two inches. He was the elder by three months. And—the only thing that really counted—he was the legitimate child, the one who’d inherited a dukedom from his father and a vast fortune by way of his mother. Nobody would have blinked if he had put his brother in his place—somewhere far, far behind him.

  Which was why Robert never would. I won the first toss, therefore I win everything from here on out did not make a satisfying battle cry. Especially when he’d only won that first round because his father had cheated.

  Since that day, every reminder of his privilege—of his father’s wealth, his father’s station—had rankled. It reminded him of the moment when he’d discovered what it meant that his father was a duke. It meant that nobody questioned him, no matter how wrong his actions were. It meant that he would not be held to account for his crimes, no matter who paid the price. It meant that if Robert followed in his father’s footsteps, nobody would blink an eye.

  Men, after all, had their needs. And women wanted it. They always did.

  In all his life, only one person had ever looked at him and said, “You don’t have to be your father.”

  One, and… Robert’s gaze slid out the window once more. One and a half.

  Because Miss Pursling had just walked into his home, given him that handbill, and told him that he’d written it. It had taken all of his power not to glow with pride and ask her what she thought. Was it persuasive? Did you like it?

  Instead, he simply wrinkled his nose. “Our father was an ass.”

  Oliver grimaced. “Your father,” he said sharply. “The Duke of Clermont didn’t raise me. He didn’t take me fishing. He’s my sire, not my father. He was never my father.”

  By that standard, Robert had been raised by teaspoons and blades of grass.

  “I wasn’t speaking as a matter of history,” Robert said stiffly. “Just biology.”

  Oliver shook his head. “Family isn’t a matter of history. Or biology,” he said softly. “It’s a matter of choice. And don’t look so grim. You know what I meant. Just because I refuse to let that man be my father doesn’t mean you can’t be my brother.”

  “If only everything were that easy.” Robert put his hands
in his pockets and looked away. “I had a message from my mother this morning.”

  “Ah.” Oliver reached over and touched his shoulder. “Indeed.”

  “I know,” Robert said, with a hint of what he hoped came out as wry amusement. “And I saw her in London only two months past.”

  His brother glanced over at that—a swift look out of the corner of his eye, one that had rather too much pity in it. Robert waved him away.

  “Don’t,” he muttered brusquely. “She’s coming here.”

  Clermont, she had written. I will be taking rooms in Leicester’s Three Crowns Hotel for a space of time. As I believe you are in the vicinity, we shall dine together on the nineteenth of November.

  “She didn’t say why, and I can’t think what would draw her.” Robert carefully avoided looking at his brother. “If family is a matter of choice, she chose everyone other than me a long time ago. Why she’d bother with me now, when she’s never noticed me in the past…”

  “Maybe,” Oliver said, “maybe she wants…”

  “She doesn’t want,” Robert snapped. “She never does.”

  Oliver and Robert had known each other more than half their lives. They’d attended Eton together, followed by Cambridge. During that time, Oliver had been showered with constant letters from his family. He couldn’t have helped but notice that Robert received almost no correspondence from his parents.

  Oliver’s eyes moved up and to the right, as if he were choosing his next words carefully. “So what are you going to do?”

  “I already wrote back and told her I’d be gone on that date—that I’d promised to accompany Sebastian up.”

  “Ah,” Oliver said blankly.

  “And then I wrote to Sebastian and begged him to come,” Robert admitted. “Whatever she wants can’t be of much importance. Besides, the three of us haven’t been in one spot together for almost a year. If the Brothers Sinister in all our villainy isn’t enough to drive her away…”

  Oliver smiled. “They only called us that at Eton because we’re all left-handed. I’m practically respectable these days. You’re a duke. And Sebastian is…” He frowned. “Well thought of, among intelligent people. Some of them.”

  Robert laughed. “A valiant attempt, but it won’t wash. My mother thinks that your existence is a personal insult. She is certain that Sebastian is an apostate—and ever since he flirted with her last year, a lecher.”

  Oliver sputtered. “He what?”

  “I asked him to save me at a gathering. He did.” Robert shook his head. “His way.”

  Oliver winced.

  “He didn’t mean anything by it,” Robert said. “But it all comes down to the same thing. If she insists on seeing me despite the change in date and the presence of two people she hates, the situation is dire.”

  At one time, Robert might have lost himself in a daydream, one in which his mother fled to his side in tears, desperate for his help. He’d save her through a combination of wit and good sense. And she would tearfully apologize for having avoided him.

  In his youth, when he’d imagined her heartfelt regrets, he’d always told her not to cry.

  “Don’t worry,” he’d imagined himself saying. “We have years left ahead of us.”

  He hadn’t run out of time, but hopes could be dashed only so many times before one gave up out of weariness. It had been more than a decade since he let himself dream of a world in which his mother gave a single solitary damn about him, and he wasn’t about to start up again now. As unlikely as it seemed, she probably had business in Leicester—business that would take her away before he arrived. They’d both be happier if they didn’t try.

  “And what will you do,” Oliver said, “if the situation is dire?”

  Robert shook his head. “I’ll do what I’ve always done. Whatever I must, Oliver. Whatever I must.”

  The question of what to do about Miss Pursling naturally waited until Robert saw her again. That happened three days later, at the Charingford residence where Robert and Oliver had been invited for dinner.

  He’d thought about her in those intervening days, of course. Something about her caught his fancy. Her quick wit, her intrepid style—they appealed to him. He woke one night from a dream in which she was gratifyingly brazen.

  But nighttime fantasies rarely translated into reality. He doubted that she intended to bring him pleasure of any sort. In reality, he suspected that he was about to be subjected to a barrage of amateur sleuthing. Bad disguises, ham-handed questions, attempts to go through his rubbish in search of clues… Miss Pursling was undoubtedly the sort of hotheaded young lady who would throw herself into the chase with abandon.

  So he wasn’t surprised to see her at the dinner. She’d already made herself comfortable when he arrived, but it was only a matter of time until she sought him out. He watched her out of the corner of his eye before they sat down to the meal, waiting for her to listen in on his conversation.

  Instead, she ignored him.

  She ignored him so well that just before they were called in for the meal, he found himself angling to overhear her discussion with three other young ladies. He was sure that she’d be asking about him.

  She wasn’t.

  She scarcely spoke at all. And when she did, her voice was so quiet that he had to strain to overhear her words.

  He remembered a sensual lilt to her speech, a martial light that had brightened her features, rendering her pretty. Now, there was no hint of that.

  She wore a high-necked gown of stiff brown, adorned only with a plain, military braid along her cuffs and neckline. Her spectacles must have been hidden away in the plain bag she wore at her wrist. She kept her distance from him, and she didn’t say anything clever. She scarcely said anything at all.

  He had almost pointed her out to Oliver as a wit; when they sat down to dine, she was seated just down the table from his brother. She engaged Oliver in no conversation. She didn’t even raise her eyes from her dinner plate, except to glance occasionally at the level of watered wine in her glass. She did murmur something to Oliver once—but as he responded by passing her the saltcellar, Robert suspected it was entirely innocuous.

  This woman had threatened to prove him responsible for the handbills? Unbelievable.

  Oliver directed a few inquiries at her over the course of the meal. In response, she mumbled something unintelligible in the direction of her meat. Gradually, his brother gave up his attempts at conversation.

  All trace of the woman he had seen had vanished, leaving behind a shadow with perfect posture and no conversation. She was right. Everyone would wonder if he flirted with her. He wouldn’t even know how to manage it. One couldn’t flirt with a lump.

  Still, after the gentlemen rejoined the ladies, he did his duty—pausing to talk to everyone present, learning their names, asking after their health. He would have done it no matter what—no point being a duke if you couldn’t use your station to make people smile—but this time he had an added incentive. He made his circuitous way about the room, winding inevitably to her. She was seated on a chair at the side of the room, gazing out at the other speakers. If she looked at any particular person overlong, he couldn’t detect it.

  “Miss Pursling. How good to see you again.”

  She looked up, but not at him. Instead, she looked just beyond his shoulder. “Your Grace,” she said.

  Her voice was quiet, but it was still as he remembered it, a low, husky velvet. At least he hadn’t imagined that.

  “May I sit next to you for a spell?”

  She still didn’t look at him. She glanced down at the carpet and then, with a twitch of her hand, indicated a chair to her side. Robert lowered himself into it and waited for her to speak.

  After a full minute ticked by in silence, Robert realized she wasn’t going to say anything.

  He leaned back in the chair. “I see how it’s going to be. Leave all the work of moving the conversation along to Robert—he’s a duke, so he must be good at it.”


  “Oh, no.” The corner of her mouth twitched. “I wouldn’t assume you had any particular talent in that direction.”

  It was the first hint that she’d given that there was anything to her but an excess of shyness. He’d begun to actually doubt his own memory. Surely this woman hadn’t come to his house and attempted blackmail. Had she?

  “Tell me,” he persisted, “how does one get Minnie from Wilhelmina? Minnie makes me think of miniature—and nothing about you seems diminutive.”

  She examined her gloves closely. “It comes from the third syllable, Your Grace.”

  Back to being a cipher once more. Had he imagined the conversation? Maybe he was going mad.

  “What’s wrong with the first syllable?” he tried. “Or the second?”

  She glanced up. For the first time all evening, she looked in his eyes. He would have sworn there would have to be some kind of spark in her—some indication of the intelligence that had blazed at their last meeting. But if eyes were windows to the soul, hers had been bricked up to avoid taxation. He could see nothing in them at all.

  “Surely,” she said pleasantly, “you can ascertain the problems for yourself. Willy wouldn’t do. It’s too masculine.”

  “There is that,” he murmured.

  “As for the second syllable…” She looked over his shoulder again, avoiding his gaze. Her eyes were a mask, but her mouth twitched once more. “Just think of it, Your Grace. What am I to say? ‘My name is Wilhelmina Pursling, but you can call me Hell.’”

  He laughed, almost in sheer amazement. She still looked like a lump, shyly twiddling her fingers, refusing to meet his eyes. But there was that voice. Her voice made him think of woodsmoke on an autumn evening, of silks laid out atop lush bedding. Of her hair, rid of those confining pins and spread over a pillow, the honey-colored ends spilling over her breasts.

  He swallowed and cleared his throat. “This isn’t what I expected when you said you’d go to war with me.”

  “Let me guess.” She fingered her glove carefully, and he noticed that she was worrying at a tiny hole in the tip. “You thought I would simper if you smiled at me. You supposed that when I said I would prove what you were doing to everyone, that I planned to engage in a bumbling, graceless investigation into your surface activities.”

  “I—no. Of course not.” But Robert felt his cheeks heat. Because that was precisely what he had thought.

  She bit her lip, the picture of shyness. But her words were the opposite of shy. “Now,” she whispered, “you’re surprised to find that I overmatch you.”

  “I am?” he echoed, looking at her. “You do?”

  Her eyes were fixed over his shoulder, no hint in her posture of what she said so quietly.

  “Of course I overmatch you,” she said. She spoke as if the matter were beyond question. “You’re a well-educated duke—one of the most powerful men in England. Your staff likely numbers in the hundreds across your many estates. If needed, you could draw on resources in the tens of thousands of pounds.”

  The corner of her mouth lifted now, dispelling the illusion of a simple, quiet girl. A dimple emerged on her cheek. She glanced up at him—once—and he almost couldn’t breathe.

  This, this was the woman who had threatened him.

  “You have all those things,” she said. “But then, I have one thing you do not.”

  He leaned in, not wanting to miss a word.

  “I,” she said, “have a sense of tactics.”

  He had just that one glimmer of a smile from her, a small moment when he caught his breath—and then it all disappeared. Her face smoothed; she looked down once more, and Miss Pursling looked utterly plain.

  Another man might have been surprised into compliance. But Robert couldn’t imagine backing down now—not when she ducked her head and stared at the floor. No; he wanted to bring her out again.

  “You haven’t done anything,” he said.

  Her expression didn’t change.

  “I’m winning,” he announced. “You can’t bore me into a surrender.”

  “You probably think battles are won with cannons and brave speeches and fearless charges.” She smoothed her skirts as she spoke. “They’re not. Wars are won by dint of having adequate shoe leather. They’re won by boys who make shells in munitions factories, by supply trains shielded from enemy eyes. Wars are won by careful attendance to boring detail. If you wait to see the cavalry charge, Your Grace, you’ll have already lost.”

  He blinked. “You’re trying to make me back down. It won’t work.”

  “That’s the beauty of strategy. Everything I do contains a double threat. If you don’t back down from spoken words, you reveal your character. Everything you say, everything you do, every charming smile and sweet protestation—the most you can hope for is to change the manner of my victory. The fact of it, though, is a foregone conclusion.”

  She looked so small sitting in her chair, so fragile. It was only when he shut his eyes and erased that jarring image of a diffident spinster that he could comprehend the evidence of his ears. Miss Pursling wouldn’t even look him in the eyes. But her voice seemed indomitable.

  “So,” he said, “you think that I’m charming. You didn’t list that among my assets before.”

  “Of course you’re charming.” She didn’t look up. “I’m charmed. I’m charmed to my teeth.”

  There was a note in her voice that sounded so bitter that it almost tasted sweet.

  “You’re a force of nature, Your Grace,” she said. “But so am I. So am I.”

  She hadn’t said that she was charming…and, in point of fact, she wasn’t. Not in the usual sense. But there was something utterly compelling about her. He had no idea who she was any longer. He’d thought at first that she was a high-spirited, clever woman. He’d wondered next if she were a wallflower. But at the moment, she seemed beyond any category, larger and far more complex than anyone he’d encountered thus far.

  “If you want me to back down,” he said softly, “you shouldn’t be so interesting.”

  Her lips compressed.

  But before she could answer, a noise sounded on the other side of the room. Robert turned his head in time to see a woman—Miss Charingford, the daughter of the house, and if he recalled correctly, the friend that Miss Pursling had brought with her the other day—standing so abruptly that her seat overturned.

  “Come now, Lydia,” the man who had been sitting next to her said. “You can’t really mean—”

  “I do,” Miss Charingford snapped. So saying, she took a glass of punch from the table next to her. Before anyone could intervene, she dashed it into the fellow’s face. Red dripped down his nose, his chin, staining his cravat. Gasps arose around them.

  “You can’t do this!” he said, standing from his chair.

  The man was George Stevens. Robert had spoken with him twice now, enough to remember that he had charge over the militia. An important man, as things were judged in these parts.

  “I can’t?” Miss Charingford snapped. “Just watch.”

  She snatched a second glass of punch from her neighbor’s fingers and threw this one in his face as well. “You see? Apparently, I can.”

  So saying, she put her nose in the air and stormed out the door.

  Robert turned back to Miss Pursling.

  “Is she—”

  But Miss Pursling was no longer there. She was already halfway across the room. She hadn’t apologized to him or made her excuses. She had simply left, dashing after her friend. The door closed on her moments later.

  He’d been amazed that her posture, the expression on her face, had remained so smooth throughout their conversation. But she had been hiding from him, too. She’d gestured him to the chair that would allow him to talk with her while she could still keep one eye on her friend. He had thought she had looked away from him to feign shyness. Instead, she’d been watching Stevens.

  Everything I do contains a double threat. That had been no braggadocio, th
ere. She’d been fending off his attempts at conversation with half her attention, lecturing him on strategy, and pretending to be a shy lump for anyone who was watching. And while she’d done that, she’d also been tracking her friend’s escalating drama from across the room.

  My God. His head hurt just thinking about all the threads she must have been keeping straight in her mind.

  “Your Grace.”

  Robert turned from his reverie to see a man beside him. It was George Stevens, standing with a grim look on his face and a disapproving set to his jaw. He’d wiped most of the punch off, but his cravat was still stained pink, and his forehead had a sheen to it that sent Robert’s own skin itching in sticky sympathy.

  “Captain Stevens,” Robert said.

  “If I might intrude a moment?”

  Robert glanced once again at the door through which Miss Pursling had vanished. “Of course.”

  Stevens gave him a stiff bow, and then just as stiffly took the seat that Miss Pursling had so recently vacated. “It is admirable,” he said, “in every way admirable, for a man in your position to condescend to speak to everyone deserving at a gathering such as this.” He rubbed his hands together. “But…ah, how do I say this?” He lowered his voice. “Not all women are equally deserving. And Miss Pursling is not what she seems.”

  “Oh?” Robert was still too taken aback to do more than take this in. “In what way does the reality of Miss Pursling differ from her appearance?”

  Stevens seemed to relax at that. “I have reason to believe she is not who she claims to be.”

  “Reason? What reason?”

  The other man blinked, as if unused to having such questions asked. “Well. I, uh, I talked to someone who was intimately familiar with her great-aunt. That woman had no knowledge of Miss Pursling’s existence.”

  “Was intimately familiar, you say?” Robert kept his tone mild. “How long ago did this individual know her great-aunt?”

  Stevens was beginning to squirm like a schoolboy caught out in a lie. “Technically, she knew her before she moved to Leicester. That is to say—”

  “Technically?” Robert raised an eyebrow. “Forgive me if I do not know the families in the area as well as you do. But did not Miss Pursling’s great-aunt move to the area fifty years ago?”

  “Yes.” Stevens hunkered down in his seat. “But she knew the whole family, da—ah, dash it.” Stevens stopped, took a deep breath. “She would have known if the young Miss Elvira Pursling had married—the woman who is purported to be Miss Wilhelmina’s mother. People talk, Your Grace, particularly about happy events. But there is no such record. I have reason to believe that Miss Pursling may not be legitimate.”

  It might be true. If so, it would explain her insistence that she didn’t want anyone looking into her past. A little different, indeed.

  If there were any truth to Stevens’s claim at all, Robert could settle this for good. One little threat, when she’d already put blackmail in play…

  But no. He was a gentleman and one of the most powerful men in the country. Powerful men who used their prerogatives to hurt women—they were scum.

  Robert let his expression freeze to ice. He didn’t glower. He simply watched the other man, unblinking, until the captain of the militia dropped his gaze and winced.

  “Stevens,” Robert said, not bothering with the honorific, “is there perhaps something you have heard about me that made you think I would want to hear such aspersions?”

  “But, Your Grace. Miss Pursling is an unknown to you. I only wished—”

  “You thought I would be amenable to baseless gossip simply because it was not aimed at someone I knew?”

  Stevens’s jaw worked. “I only meant—”

  “I’m done with your speculation. If I hear you’ve indulged it any further, I’ll see that Leicester receives another captain of the militia.”

  Stevens turned white. “You couldn’t.”

  But the man no doubt knew all too well that Robert could. Not directly, no, but he only needed to drop a word in the right ear… Robert wouldn’t use that influence without good reason, and given what he expected to find here, he needed to conserve that power as best as he could. Still, threats were free.

  The man bowed his head. “Forgive me, Your Grace. The woman is nothing. I erred. I never thought you would take an interest in one so much beneath you.”

  “What’s the point in being a duke if I don’t?” The query was out of his mouth before he could call it back—but he wouldn’t have, even if he could.

  Stevens blinked in confusion and Robert shook his head. It was madness to give a man so much power and to have no expectations as to how he’d use it. He could crush Miss Pursling with one sentence. He might have crushed her with silence. But that would have been wrong.

  “Your Grace,” Stevens finally said, “your concern does you justice.”

  The man’s toad-eating did him none.

  Robert met Stevens’s eyes. “No, it doesn’t. It’s called basic human decency, and I deserve no credit for doing what every man should.”

  Stevens flinched again, and set his hand to his forehead—his sticky forehead, if the fingerprints he left were any guide.

  “Now,” Robert said, standing, “if you’ll excuse me, I have other people I must speak with.”

  He was aware of the man’s eyes boring into his back as he crossed the room. Robert made a note: This man bore watching.