“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, there. 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 positi
on 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—”
“Techinically?” 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.
Chapter Five
“LYDIA,” MINNIE SAID, DASHING DOWN THE CORRIDOR. “Lydia, wait! What are you doing?”
Lydia stopped in the corridor, her arms held straight at her sides, terminating in tight fists. “Going upstairs.” She didn’t turn around. “What does it look like?”
Minnie came abreast of her. “It’s not too late. Go back in there and apologize—Stevens will forgive you. I know he will.”
“Well, I won’t forgive him,” Lydia said. “He related the most vile rumor about you—that you were not legitimate. The cad, saying such things to me!”
Minnie took hold of her shoulders. “Lydia, listen to me. Go back. Apologize. Say you’re sorry. Say you were mistaken. Say you were drunk on punch, and I’m sure he’ll take you back.”
“Well, I won’t have him.” Lydia stamped her foot. “I won’t. I won’t have a man who could talk about my dearest friend that way. I won’t marry someone who could laugh about it and expect me to nod my head. I won’t do it.”
“You know what will happen when your father dies. Your brother gets the mill, and you…”
“I’ll have my portion.” Lydia raised her chin.
Scarcely enough to live on, Minnie knew. And having severed her relationship with Stevens in so uncivil a fashion, Lydia would be unlikely to find anyone else. Besides…
“What if next time, the rumor is about you?” Minnie persisted.
She didn’t have to say that it might be. Too many people knew Lydia’s secret. The doctor who had diagnosed her. Anyone who had seen her in Cornwall during those dreadful months. Lydia lived with the possibility of public ruination every bit as much as Minnie did.
“What does it matter who knows?” Lydia said, looking away. “Apparently, truth is no bar to rumor. After all, Stevens is spreading that vile rumor about you.”
Explaining the source of the rumor would raise questions—questions that Minnie couldn’t answer. Questions like, why was there no record of the birth of one Wilhelmina Pursling? What had her name once been, and why was it necessary to change it?
Minnie shook her head. “My parents were married. I can assure you of that.” That, and nothing more. “But Lydia, you must not be so neglectful of your future. Throwing away a fiancé, simply because he said one thing you did not like? Nobody is perfect.”
Lydia simply wrapped her arms around herself and shook her head. “How can you ask? How could I stay silent?”
“But he was…” She stumbled. “You said…”
Lydia had said Stevens would make her happy. She’d said it over and over, as if trying to believe it herself. It was the way Lydia was. She believed the best. She wished everyone happy. She could have found the bright side of a solar eclipse.
Lydia turned to Minnie now. “Sometimes,” she said slowly, “one is faced with choices. When something seems inevitable—when, for instance, marriage to a man would do my father good—when he’s a decent man who likes me… Well, it didn’t seem that I would find a better match. It makes sense.” She frowned fiercely. “It made sense.”
“So go back and apologize.”
Lydia’s features hardened. “After what he said about you? He told me I should have nothing more to do with you. I cannot believe this world is so cruel as to require me to sacrifice my dearest friend in order to make a good marriage.”
Oh, Lydia. Minnie’s heart hurt for her. Even with all that had happened to her friend, she still believed that.
“It might be that cruel,” Minnie whispered. And then, because she knew how cruel it could be, she added: “It is.”
“It is not.” Lydia unfolded her arms, but onl
y long enough to put them around Minnie, to draw her close. “I won’t let it be.”
Minnie could almost let the warmth of that embrace fool her. Almost.
Someday…
Someday, Lydia would discover all that Minnie had withheld from her. Their friendship couldn’t survive it. It wasn’t the truth of what had happened that would destroy their intimacy, but the fact that she had held it back all those years. That she’d been the repository for her friend’s darkest secrets, while holding her own selfishly close to her chest.
It wasn’t a matter of if they would stop being friends. It was a question of when. And yet Minnie had been unable to give her up. Lydia was warm and hopeful and happy, and sometimes, despite Minnie’s logical bent, Lydia managed to infect her with sheer optimism.
Sometimes, she believed they would be happy. There would be no more fears for the future. It would all come out right, and they would be friends forever.
Of all the fool fantasies that Minnie could have indulged in, that was the one that hooked deep under her skin, the one that she could never let go. And so she simply held her friend and prayed that she would not be proven right too quickly.
“So,” Lydia said. “The Duke of Clermont spoke to you for a long while there. What did he say?”
“Nothing.” But Minnie smiled despite herself. “Nothing at all.”
THE DWELLING—IF YOU COULD CALL IT THAT, and Robert was uncertain it deserved the title—was the worst kind of slum. What plaster remained on the wall of the single room was cracked and streaked with soot. The single room smelt of sour vinegar and old cabbage. The chair he sat in was uncomfortably close to the ground, as if one leg had broken and they’d cut the rest down to match. If he leaned too far to either side, the chair squeaked and swayed. This squalid tenement represented everything that Robert’s father had put wrong in Leicester, and he’d come to fix it all.
It had taken Robert far too long to try to make amends. But in his defense, he’d only recently discovered what had gone wrong.
In front of him, the resident—a thin, coughing man by the name of Finney—pulled his coat around him.
The Duchess War (The Brothers Sinister) Page 6
