The Dollar Prince's Wife

by Paula Marshall

  ‘Help you out? By marrying Cobie Grant? Whatever can you mean?’

  Impetuously she rose to her feet to defy them. ‘I shall go to Faa, I shall, and ask him to help me. You can’t stop me…you can’t.’

  ‘Oh, tell her.’ Violet was all impatience. ‘He told you to tell her the truth about his proposal, and he was right. Tell her why she must marry him, why she’s got no choice.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Dinah, staring at them both, at their desperate faces. ‘Why must I marry him? Why have I no choice?’

  ‘To save us,’ Rainey told her, his face twisting. ‘I owe him. Thousands upon thousands lost to him at play. Everything will go if I have to try to pay him, the Hall, the estate, everything. We shall be ruined, homeless. But if you agree to marry him, he’ll waive all my debts…’

  ‘Everything,’ said Dinah, stunned. ‘You’ve lost everything. However much?’

  ‘I said everything and I meant everything. I was already heavily in debt, virtually bankrupt, before I…wagered the Hall. Losing broke me…us. I only plunged so deeply because I hoped to win heavily and believed that my luck was sure to change for the better, and that if it did I should escape ending up in Queer Street.’

  ‘And that was his condition? That he would help you if you helped him to buy me? Why do you think that he has never approached me as a decent man would, to ask me to marry him? He knows that I wouldn’t say yes, that I loathe him. Did he do all this simply to get me to marry him? Did he? Yet, in the face of that, you insist that he’s not dangerous. Are you all mad to want to marry me to someone so despicable? Why he should want to marry me at all is beyond me…’

  ‘Oh, he’s not despicable—or not completely so. And he’s enormous fun in bed. You don’t know how lucky you are.’ This was Violet’s desperate contribution to Rainey’s attempt to ‘bring Dinah round’ as he had earlier described it to her. She had already guessed when Rainey had told her that one of Grant’s conditions was that she should be present when his proposal was made, that she was being indirectly punished for having made him be so unpleasant to Dinah.

  She was torn in two. On the one hand, she didn’t want to see Rainey, and the Frevilles, lose everything; on the other hand, the thought of Dinah marrying Apollo was gall and wormwood to her.

  Dinah said helplessly, ‘Lucky! I still think that you’ve all run mad. To make me give up everything to save you and Rainey and the estate. How soon before you gamble it away again, Rainey?’

  ‘I can’t,’ he muttered mournfully.

  Dinah was exasperated by her half-brother’s weakness, now so openly displayed. ‘What do you mean? You can’t?’

  Rainey was dejected. ‘If you agree to marry him, he’ll set up a Trust for the Hall and the Estate. He’ll give me an income, let me live there, and bring in his man to run the Trust. It will be as though I never lost it. Now, do you see why you must marry him?’

  ‘He’s a devil,’ said Dinah to this, her eyes brilliant with unshed tears. ‘It’s blackmail that he’s practising. Blackmail to get me to marry him. Why did he go to such lengths? Knowing him, I’m sure that in some way he cheated you.’

  ‘Who knows?’ This was Violet. ‘But he gains a lot, if you think about it: a peer’s daughter for a wife, respectability, position, a place in society. Of course he gains by marrying you.’

  ‘Respectability? But he is respectable. Sir Alan Dilhorne is his uncle. You can’t be more respectable than that.’

  ‘Not his real uncle,’ said Violet impatiently. ‘He’s an adopted nobody, they say, not even legitimate. If we accept him by allowing you to marry him, he’s socially made.’

  ‘And that’s why he’s doing this?’ asked Dinah sceptically. She thought of the brilliant face and the devious mind she knew lay behind it. ‘I don’t believe that for a moment. He doesn’t give a fig what anyone thinks of him. Society or anyone.’

  ‘So you have been thinking about him,’ said Violet shrewdly, while Rainey made impatient moaning noises at them both.

  ‘One could hardly not.’ Dinah was glacial now. ‘He’s so different from everyone else. Wanting me for a wife proves that! Is he mad, too? He could have had all the beauties of the year and all the heiresses sitting around London ballrooms if he had cared to raise so much as a finger. Why buy me? He’s a devil. He knows I can’t refuse him, that I won’t see Rainey ruined. He knows that if he’d asked me straight out, I would have said no.’

  She thought for a moment before saying sadly, ‘This way he wins. He makes me marry him. Rainey says that he’s rich. How did he make his fortune? Cheating people?’

  Dinah was remembering his odd conversation with Mr Van Deusen which she’d overheard the day that they had played chess. Mr Van Deusen had been twitting him with his duplicity, hadn’t he?

  ‘Oh, fudge to that,’ said Violet rudely. ‘What can it matter how he made his…pile. Merely that he made it—and wants you—us—to share it. I agree that he’s mad to want you of all people. But that’s his business.’

  ‘It appears that mine is marrying him,’ said Dinah, not knowing whether she felt happy or sad at the news.

  She rose to her feet, walked to the window and gazed unseeingly at the Kenilworths’ small lawn. She was to lose her freedom, her possible chance that Violet would tire of her and would, in the end, let her go to Faa. Instead she was to marry a man of whom she was more than a little afraid, to save her half-brother and sister who had never wanted her, and had never loved her.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘he leaves me no choice, no choice at all. He knew what I would say and do if he had proposed to me properly, and that is why he has arranged it this way.’

  She whirled towards Rainey.

  ‘Tell him that he may call on me.’

  Rainey’s face was transfigured. ‘You’ll do it?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Dinah. ‘I’ll marry him.’

  Bates entered the little cubbyhole at Scotland Yard which he shared with Walker, in a lather of excitement.

  ‘I think I’ve found our man, guv…sir.’

  Will Walker didn’t need telling which man Bates thought he’d run down. Ever since Mr Horne had kept his word, and had seen that payment had been promptly made after the raid on Madame Louise’s, Walker had burned to discover him—to do what? He didn’t know. Why had Mr Horne angered him so? That was another mystery.

  Even his fat share, and Bates’s, of the money which had been carefully portioned out according to the rank of the recipients hadn’t altered Walker’s determination to smoke out his quarry, whom he now thought of as ‘that man’. Who knew what other wickednesses he might get up to? Forewarned was forearmed.

  He sighed. Bates’s enthusiastic discoveries so often turned out to be mare’s nests. What spavined creature had he found this time?

  ‘Well?’ he said discouragingly, ‘Out with it, Bates.’

  ‘Last night I found out that Jem, my cousin the footman, recently took on a post with a rich Yankee new come to London. He has a little pad in Half Moon Street. Guess what his name is!’

  ‘I am not playing child’s games with you, Bates,’ Walker told him through his teeth. ‘Either you tell me, straight, or I throw you out, unheard. Which is it?’

  Gawd, that man had made Walker more of a beast than he usually was! Bates resignedly offered his superior what he wanted to hear. ‘His name’s Hendrick Van Deusen. He comes from Chicago—and we all know what goes on there. He’s been a bit of a bruiser once, Jem thinks. Not totally on the square, perhaps. Jem says that he’s no real evidence of that, but he’s a nose, has Jem. He’s given us good tips afore.’

  That was true enough. Before Walker could question him further Bates was roaring on. ‘There’s more, sir…guv… Seems this Van Deusen’s throwing some sort of do and asked Jem whether he knew of anyone who could act as a bodyguard, or bouncer like. He’s a hard man, Jem says, he trusts no one, not even the nobs. Jem thought I might like the job, bit of extra tin. I could suss Van Deusen out for you. See if he’s our man.r />
  ‘Natcherly I never said a word to Jem about him,’ he finished piously.

  Van Deusen, a Yankee and a bruiser, by way of being a gentleman! It all seemed too easy, but Will Walker was never one to refuse any tip, whether likely or unlikely.

  ‘Right, Bates. We’ll follow it up. But I’ll be this Van Deusen’s bit of muscle, not you. I saw him, you didn’t.’

  So here he was, standing glumly by a pair of big double doors, wearing some fancy uniform designed to show off his calves, which might have been all right if the whole thing hadn’t been a dead loss. He had been taken to see Mr Hendrick Van Deusen by Jem, having told him, untruthfully, Bates couldn’t come, ‘Otherwise engaged’ and he’d turned up in his place.

  It only took one look at him to decide that Mr Van Deusen, despite—or because of—his likely name, wasn’t his man. His eyes were a dirty brown-gold, not blazingly blue. He was strong and well built, but about four inches shorter than the elusive Mr Horne—and he wasn’t left-handed.

  Consequently he was doomed to stand about pretending to be a bodyguard who was pretending to be a flunkey, and the pay was hardly enough to compensate him for his disappointment and his boredom.

  He enlivened his time by taking note of Mr Van Deusen’s guests, and wondering whether any one of them was amusing himself by wandering round dirty hellholes like the Jolly Watermen and bribing honest policemen to raid night houses which exploited children.

  Mr Van Deusen was coming towards him, his hand on the shoulder of a man Walker had seen enter a few moments ago. Walker had blinked at the sight of him. He was exactly the sort of splendid gentleman he disliked most. Togged out to kill, bland, arrogant, weary looking, superior, with a face and body like something out of the British Museum’s antique gallery which his wife had once dragged him along to admire.

  Mr Van Deusen winked at him, then said loudly to his friend, ‘Looks to the manor born, don’t he? But he’s a sham. Bit of local muscle I fetched in to guard the silver.’

  ‘Don’t trust anyone, do you, Hendrick?’ drawled my fine gentleman in exactly the sort of cut-glass voice Walker disliked most, because it put him firmly in his place, somewhere near the bottom of the social heap, but doomed to look after the interests of such creatures as this.

  ‘Now, you, Cobie, lad, should know that better than anyone,’ and Mr Van Deusen, chuckling, waved his cigar at his friend.

  His handkerchief, precariously and unmodishly, tucked into his sleeve, fell out on to the superfine carpet when he did so. Firmly in character as copper, turned mercenary bodyguard, turned footman, Walker bent down to retrieve it, exactly at the moment when my fine gentleman did the same thing.

  For a second, raising their heads, they looked one another full in the face. Walker found himself gazing into a pair of blazing blue eyes, and some primitive instinct which had served him well in the past, and of which he had never spoken to anyone, told him that he had found The Man!

  He straightened up, and began to hand Mr Van Deusen his handkerchief, looking again at his friend, whose eyes were now hooded and who wore such an expression of bland disdain at Walker, life and everything that Walker thought, No, I’m mistaken. I’m so determined to find him that I’m seeing the swine everywhere.

  ‘Allow me,’ drawled my fine gentleman, taking Van Deusen’s handkerchief from Walker, and using his right hand to do so—which was a definite minus, Walker dismally admitted.

  ‘Put it in your breast pocket like the rest of us,’ he advised languidly. ‘Wearing it in your sleeve is a kind of brand.’

  ‘Oh, I’ll defer to you on all matters of etiquette,’ was Mr Van Deusen’s lazy reply and the pair of them drifted away, leaving Walker to try, frantically, to remember what Mr Horne had looked like. Height right, eyes right, body right, hand wrong, everything else wrong.

  He watched his man like a hawk. He noted that the ladies thought he was God’s gift come down on earth—and that men found him good company, too.

  A few moments later, Jem walked by. ‘Who the devil’s that?’ Walker hissed at him, pointing out the blond Apollo.

  ‘Him? He’s Van Deusen’s pal. Name of Grant, Cobie Grant. Another Yankee. Richer than Van Deusen, would you believe, rolling in it, they say.’

  A Yankee! And rich! It all fit. Only the hand was wrong. Well, one thing was certain, Walker would have Mr Cobie Grant followed and tracked until he was certain that either he was The Man, or he wasn’t. A good night’s work after all.

  Chapter Seven

  Cobie had never doubted that Dinah would agree to marry him. Rainey’s letter, delivered by a footman, telling him that Lady Dinah Freville would be happy to receive Mr Jacobus Grant at Kenilworth House on Wednesday afternoon at three of the clock, was no surprise to him.

  It was much less of a surprise than seeing the wary copper tricked out as a footman at the Professor’s home in Half Moon Street, and staring straight at him! Had he been recognised? He thought that he had, and the thought amused him. He had underestimated the man, and he thought again of the warnings he had been given about overreaching himself.

  Have I been so successful that I am growing careless? I was a fool to have antagonised him so much. Is Walker aware that Mr Horne is a Yankee, and if so, how? Who gave me away? If I were given away, that is. I shall have to be careful—and the thought excited him.

  He put Walker away for the time being in the box he kept at the back of his mind where he stored those matters which he could not attend to immediately, whilst he dealt with Dinah. He dressed himself with more than usual care, and thought hard of what he might say to her.

  It was going to be even more difficult than he had thought, because he must try not to hurt her. At the same time he could hardly pretend that he had been smitten mad with desire for her, and given that, if he had made a proposal to her without strings attached to it, she would most certainly have refused him, he couldn’t pretend that she madly wanted to marry him, either.

  He handed his hat and cane to the butler who told him that Lady Dinah was waiting for him in the drawing room at the back of the house, where he was duly led.

  She was seated on a sofa, and someone, Violet probably, had dressed her with a little more care than usual. She wore a rather dowdy gown, but it was a deep blue which matched her eyes, and it was cut rather more elegantly than the frocks which she usually wore. Her hair had escaped from its moorings, though, and she still possessed that slightly distrait expression which neglect and lack of loving care had written on her face.

  It would be his duty to remove it, and he must remember that.

  ‘Mr Grant.’ She rose, and offered him a seat opposite to her.

  ‘Thank you, Lady Dinah, but no. You should remain seated, I think, but under the circumstances, I would prefer to stand.’

  Dinah sat down again, puffing her skirts around her conscientiously—something which Violet had probably taught her to do that morning.

  ‘I think that you know why I am here, Lady Dinah.’

  Dinah inclined her head.

  ‘Yes, Mr Grant,’ she said coldly. ‘I am well aware of why you are here—to propose marriage. What I don’t understand is why you should want to marry me.’

  Her expression was now defiant. Cobie thought that she had been determined to make this declaration, to let him know that he wasn’t fooling her. That she knew that he had manoeuvred her into a corner.

  ‘I see that I am a little forestalled,’ he said, his eyes mocking her gently. ‘You will, I hope, allow me to make my proposal in proper form, all the same.’

  ‘No, Mr Grant, I won’t. You have not approached me properly, so why should I do you that honour? Be satisfied that I am accepting your proposal because you, by your actions, have left me powerless to refuse it. To pretend otherwise would be hypocritical in the extreme.’

  He bowed to her, keeping his face impassive because he admired the bravery which she was displaying by letting him know that what she was doing was being done through coercion—and for
her brother’s sake. He must do her the justice of being as honest with her as she was honest with him.

  ‘Because,’ he told her, ‘I would very much like to start our life together in as proper a manner as possible, after having, I admit, put you in the difficult position in which you find yourself this afternoon.’

  ‘So,’ she said, her eyes glowing, giving him a foretaste of the beauty which he thought would one day be hers. If she consented to marry him, he thought that that beauty might come sooner rather than later. ‘I take it that you are not about to repent a little, forgive Rainey his debts, and thus allow me not to sacrifice myself to you?’

  ‘Oh, I couldn’t do that,’ he said earnestly, shaking his head. ‘The sacrifice, so far as you are concerned, would be if I did any such thing. Marrying me, you see, frees you. That, Lady Dinah, is what I am offering you, freedom to be all that you might wish to be, instead of being held back by those who do not care for you. Please accept the humble offer of my hand, be my wife, and make four people, beside yourself, happy.

  ‘Myself being the first, the others being, of course, your brother who at one bound will gain wealth without responsibility, and your sister, who will be delighted to see you so well settled and no longer a charge on her family, and last of all, your true father, who has assured me that he gives my proposal to you his utmost support.’

  ‘My father!’ Now he had nonplussed her. ‘You have asked my father for my hand?’

  ‘Certainly. I approached him before I approached Lord Rainsborough. Your brother may be your legal guardian, but obeying the laws of nature, rather than those of man, I saw him because I wished to assure myself that your true father would place no obstacles in my way. On the contrary he sends us both his blessing—and you this letter.’

  He took the letter from his pocket and handed it to her. ‘You may read it when I have gone, but you will find that it is as I say.’

  He did not tell her that her father had been told of, and approved, the trick by which he had won her. Some truths, he and her father had thought, should not be revealed.