“Do not worry, Isobel,” assured Samantha, “you can rely on me. And of course the topic of weaponry will not come up, not at the stately home of a duke.”
“Thank you,” said Isobel, barely listening. What if they turned her away? What if he answered the door? What if—?
“Even so,” continued Samantha, “you mustn’t be so afraid of learning to defend yourself, Isobel. If you would but explore the training as I have—”
“Oh my God,” said Isobel, turning from the window. She pressed a gloved hand to her mouth.
The view unfolding outside was unlike anything she’d seen in all of her travels. An ancient stone gate marked the end of a long, crushed-gravel drive. Sprawling parkland unfurled, foggy and dotted with red and gold trees, on either side. At the end of the drive stood a Palladian-style manor house so grand it looked like a small city. The yellow stone glowed in the sunlight like a wall of gold.
As the carriage drew closer, the parkland gave way to smoothly manicured estate grounds: rounded hedgerows, sandstone walkways, immaculately weeded flower beds of autumnal vegetation. Swans paddled a slow circle in a fountain.
Syon Hall was nothing short of a palace. Versailles had been no grander.
“Just to the front door, miss?” the driver called.
“Ah—yes, thank you,” said Isobel.
To Samantha, she said, “Pay him. When we alight, pay him with the money I gave you and send him on.”
“Just as I predicted,” sang Samantha, “I am the maid.”
“Samantha!” hissed Isobel. “Please cooperate.”
“I am cooperating,” insisted Samantha defensively. “It’s simply not clear to me what we are doing.”
Isobel turned away from the grandeur outside and blinked at the dusty black interior of the carriage. She sucked in air with short, shallow gasps.
“I’m sorry,” breathed Isobel.
She turned to her friend and clutched her hand. “When I was in Iceland with the duke, I fell in love with him—or perhaps I was in love before we left, it doesn’t matter—and he claimed to have fallen in love with me. He proposed marriage while we were there, but I bade him return and settle into . . . into—”
She stole another look out the window. “To settle at this palace before we made the betrothal public. The agreement was, he would send for me afterward. If he still believed in our—well, in a future. Together. With me. As you may have noticed, he has not turned up. However, I learned this morning from Baron Peyton’s daughters that the duke is rumored to be somehow . . . incapacitated, or consumed with ennui or—or something has gone wrong. I don’t know exactly what the problem may be. I . . . I probably shouldn’t have come. I had no call to come. His family doesn’t know me; he doesn’t want me. But I love him too much to think of him struggling alone.” A deep breath. “I love him more than my pride and more than my own self-preservation. And that is why we are here. Unmarried women cannot turn up alone on the doorstep of bachelor men. I took advantage of you, I know, by dragging you along, and I’m sorry to use you this way, but I am frantic with worry.”
Isobel looked at her with an expression that was half smile, half cringe. “You are too good to me,” she finished.
Samantha’s eyes grew large, understanding dawning on her face. She craned to study the manor house rising before them, now just yards away.
She turned back to Isobel. “This is a very important errand indeed,” she said. “I am happy to help. Do not worry, Isobel. You were right to come. I liked the duke from the beginning, and you know how I feel about tall men.”
Isobel let out a breath that was half laugh, half sob. She squeezed her friend’s hand, closed her eyes, and braced for the carriage to lurch to a stop. Before he opened the door, she took three quick breaths.
When the driver opened the door, she bounded out, propelled by her desire simply to see the duke. The gravel of the circle drive crunched beneath her boots, a deafening sound. A chirping bird in the distance sounded as if it perched on her shoulder. Every sense was heightened; fear hounded every step.
Isobel mounted the cascade of steps, certain that servants or guards would stop her and demand their business. Clipping up, she waited to be called out. Surely hired carriages couldn’t simply drive up to this imposing home and expel strange women to knock on the door.
No one came, and Isobel knocked. Four firm raps on the giant oak planks of a door strong enough to resist a battering ram. The sound barely registered, swallowed by the sheer magnitude of the structure. Calmness, Isobel ordered herself. Hold the satchel rather than squeeze it in a death grip. Breathe as if you are on dry land.
After an eternity, the giant door swung slowly open. Isobel’s heart stopped thudding and ran away inside her chest.
A stout butler, his expression as inscrutable as a sandstone pillar, stared down at them.
“May I help you?”
Isobel swallowed. “How do you do? My name is Miss Isobel Tinker. I am a colleague of His Grace, the duke . . .” she spit out the next bit, “. . . having served as his cultural attaché on his most recent mission. To Iceland. I have business with the duke, if you please.”
The butler stared at her, saying nothing. Behind him Isobel could see a flurry of activity. Servants rushing to and fro. Someone pushed a potted fern on a cart. A man with a length of rope chased after a dog.
Oh Lord, Isobel thought, there is some palace-related crisis. I’ve come in the exact moment of Bedlam.
She said, “If this is an inconvenient time, I can—”
“And who else may I say is calling?” intoned the butler. He stared at Samantha.
“Oh,” said Isobel, “I am accompanied by my assistant. Miss Samantha Smee.”
The butler narrowed his eyes, considering this. He said nothing more and made no move to admit them. Time stretched in excruciating silence. Isobel wondered if, in her extreme anxiety, she’d actually said the words rather than simply thinking them. Had she spoken English? Had her request so shocked the man he’d entered a trancelike state?
Isobel was just about to turn and tiptoe down the steps and search for perhaps a servants’ entrance when a young woman strode past the door. She paused, squinted out at the steps, and then joined the butler at the door.
“What is it, Norris?” asked the young woman. She was eating a stalk of celery.
The butler leaned in to whisper in her ear.
The girl’s eyebrows rose, she cocked her head, and extended the stalk of celery, tapping the air accusingly. “But you’re the girl who rescued Reggie! On the boat, with Jason. Thank God! Perhaps you can reason with him—and just in time. Come in, come in. Norris, don’t just stand there, fetch Mama!”
Chapter Twenty-Five
The Dowager Duchess of Northumberland had a gentle face. Grief had hollowed her beauty, age had creased it, but her smile was genuine.
“He’s not allowed staff to tidy the library,” Lady Northumberland said, leading Isobel down a wide corridor. Servants passed swiftly around them like salmon swimming upstream. “Even I have not been allowed inside. There’s no hope for it tonight; the door will have to be locked to hide the mess.”
“Tonight?” asked Isobel.
“Oh yes, the ball,” said the dowager dismissively. “My daughters insisted. I put it off as long as I could, hoping the duke could get on his feet. But it’s been a month. The girls believe some social interaction may help matters.”
A ball, thought Isobel. The palace-related crisis was not a crisis at all, it was a party.
If the duke was as bad as gossip suggested, a crisis was still highly likely.
Isobel ventured, “It has come to my attention that the duke is . . . at an impasse.”
“Yes, well,” tsked the dowager, “there’s nothing for it, is there? He is who he is. The girls and I have not been able to rouse him. I blame the unresolved deaths of his brothers. He never reckoned with the loss. Here at home, we were forced to carry on, but he was always working, doing his
duty for the country, running about—always running. Since he was a boy, the notion of rest or stillness tortured him. And now here we are. There is nowhere else to run. There is quite a bit of stillness, I’m afraid, when one is a duke.”
They came to a stop before a closed door.
“Quite,” said Isobel. “I . . . I am grateful that you have allowed me to look in on him.”
“I’ve kept his uncles away; they are circling like vultures naturally. But he’s spoken so fondly of you. And to have returned poor Reggie to his parents? My brother was overwhelmed with gratitude and relief. But how can I make your visit more pleasant?” She made a scoffing noise. “When you see him, you’ll acknowledge the futility of this question. There is nothing pleasant about his current . . . state. We are grasping at straws, I’m afraid. But tea never hurt. Perhaps you can coax him to eat. What do you think?”
Isobel had no idea what to think. Her theory that he was being tortured by an unfeeling family was entirely wrong obviously. The notion that the estate was in penury or ruin had been, if true, very well disguised.
She smiled at the dowager. “Thank you, Your Grace. If you could be so kind as to see my assistant settled somewhere that will not disrupt the household?”
“Do not give it another thought,” she said. “I’ve put the two of you in a suite of rooms on the third floor, dear. I’ll send up tea. It is our great hope that you will stay with us a day or so, if you believe there’s any good for it.”
“Thank you,” was all Isobel could say.
“Lovely,” said the dowager. “And the ball tonight—of course you must attend. Reggie and his parents have traveled from Lincolnshire, and they’ll wish to thank you. I know we must keep the nasty business of the smuggling and the pirates a secret, but a handful of family members are aware of what happened and how very brave you were.”
“Ah,” began Isobel.
“Think on it,” she urged, reaching for the knob of a giant door.
“Yes, Your Grace,” said Isobel, staring at the door as if it opened to the edge of a sharp cliff.
“Very well, I will leave you to it,” said the duchess.
She turned the knob and pushed the heavy door open. “Northumberland?” she called.
Silence.
“You’ve a visitor . . .”
The dowager rolled her eyes and gave her head a shake. “He’s in there,” she whispered, backing away. “Good luck.”
Isobel nodded her thanks and leaned to peer inside the dim interior of the library. For a long moment, she hovered. She listened. She sniffed.
The feeling of almost seeing him, of knowing he was just beyond the open door, was burning her up from the outside in. Her skin tingled, her chest felt molten. She wiggled her fingers, trying to release nervous energy.
Oh for God’s sake, she thought, pushing the door open. She was anxious, but she was not a coward. She’d come all this way for a reason.
To her great shock, the scene inside the Syon Hall library was almost exactly as the baron’s daughters had described.
The duke, dressed only in a linen shirt, buckskins and boots, lay facedown on a vibrant Persian rug. The opulent library was in shambles. A giant desk was awash with papers, open books were scattered on the floor, a globe had been turned on its side. Furniture was strewn with discarded coats and unfurled cravats. Hats had been lined up in a row, brim-up. Balls of wadded-up paper surrounded them as if they’d been thrown. Some wads filled the upturned hats, but most had missed their mark.
While Isobel took it all in, a gust of wind from an open window swept through, launching papers into the air, blowing cravats. A cat leapt inside the window from the garden and picked his way over the inert duke to the desk. Leaping, he made himself at home on the blotter and began grooming, one white paw pointed to the ceiling.
Isobel looked again to the prone duke. Her first instinct was to go to him, to crouch and gently prod and ascertain, but something held her back.
Instead, she crossed her arms over her chest.
“Get up,” she said, her voice brisk.
She watched the familiar lines of his broad shoulders for any sign of life.
Nothing.
“Northumberland,” she said sharply.
Unless she was mistaken, she discerned the tiniest twitch, a tensing about the bicep.
Her heart skipped like a stone on the surface of a pond. She said it again. “Northumberland. Get up.”
He turned his head, keeping his face averted. He had not shaved. His hair was long. He pressed his cheek to the rug.
“You,” he said. His voice was level—not loud, not soft, not hoarse. He did not sound ill. He did not sound mad.
“Yes,” she continued carefully, leaning a hip against the desk. “It is me. Get up. This library is a disgrace. Your family is beside themselves with worry. Gossip is rampant in London about what has become of you. Get up and tell me what has happened.”
She waited, holding her breath. Finally, the duke rolled his body from back to front.
And there he was. His glorious body sprawled on the floor, blinking at the ceiling.
He looked . . . not unwell, but certainly not happy. He had a full beard, and he was pale. His clothes and hair were disheveled.
Well, she thought, if nothing else, his handsomeness had endured. It took all of her willpower not to go to him. In her mind’s eye, she saw her spreading herself on top of him, taking his face into her hands. She imagined the feel of his mouth.
But she didn’t dare.
She shoved off the desk and crossed to the window, closing it with a slam. The cat meowed and slunk from the room.
“You’re scaring the animals,” he said.
“Why are you on the floor?” she asked. She began to pick up papers, one by one, stacking them in the crook of her arm.
“I’m resting.”
“What of your bedroom?”
“My bedroom is where I sleep. This is where I rest.”
“What of all of these papers?”
“God only knows,” he groaned, rolling to sit. He leaned against a towering bookshelf and propped one leg on his knee. “Ledgers, accounts, deeds to property, taxes, taxes, taxes, regulations, correspondence.”
He ran his hands down his face like he was rubbing his features away. “I cannot make sense of it. I’ve tried, and I cannot.”
“No,” she corrected, “you don’t want to.”
“And I don’t want to.”
One piece of paper led to the next, and the next, and the next. She moved without thinking, grateful for the task. He had not even said hello.
“It’s as bad as you thought?” she asked.
“It is so much worse, Isobel,” he said. “So much worse.”
“You must determine some way to manage it, North, you must.”
“North?” he repeated, a challenge.
Isobel missed a step. The familiar rain of shimmers set her insides alight. She glanced at him.
He looked back. Ever so slowly, he cocked an eyebrow. Handsomeness and boyish charm rolled from him in waves. He was attractive and commanding despite being unshaven, despite his . . . his . . .
She looked at the mess around her.
Despite whatever had happened in his life.
She glanced to him again. She couldn’t resist. He gazed back, and they locked eyes. Unless she was mistaken, he gave her the smallest quirk of a one-sided smile.
The shimmers exploded again, and Isobel looked away, trying to catch her breath.
“Come to your desk,” she said, “and help me sort these papers.”
“What will you give me if I do?” he asked.
“What will I give you?” She was confused. Did he tease her?
“If I come to the desk . . . if I sort the papers?”
“I’ll give you the first very small step toward a functioning dukedom?” she tried.
He laughed and rolled to his feet.
Isobel unearthed a stool from beneath cast-
off clothing and dragged it beside the desk. The duke collapsed into the leather wingback and ran a hand through his hair.
“Lovely,” she said with forced brightness. The inside-out burning had gone from a sizzle to licking, jumping flames. She was jittery and twitchy. The shimmers inside her chest flew about like his paperwork.
Through sheer force of will, she blocked out his gaze, his smell, his leg, which touched her skirts. She bit off her gloves. With trembling fingers, she held up the first piece of paper.
She read the title at the top of the page. “ ‘Tenant-Lodging Repairs before Winter.’ Very good. Now, we shall make stacks. You’ll want files for each of these. I’ll keep a tally here of divisions we’ll need. Make a space, that’s it. Down it goes. My God, Northumberland, there’s cat hair everywhere. Alright, on to the next.”
She picked up the next sheet. She read the title. He mumbled some explanation about what it might mean and she created a new stack.
She took up the next recovered paper, and the next. As interactions went, it was strange, a bit mechanical, but not difficult. It was nothing like she’d imagined, but perhaps it was what he needed.
One small step toward solvency. Progress by force.
Because she loved him. She loved him more than she loved her own need to be with him.
She loved him too much to allow him to fail.
She would set him to rights, help him hire stewards and foremen and overseers, and then she would go.
That was how much she loved him.
After ten minutes, Jason began to wager with himself.
Could he continue in this manner for an hour? For two? How long would he slouch beside her, not a foot away, and not touch her?
How long would she resist touching so that instead she could organize his files?
When You Wish Upon a Duke Page 28
