by Juliana Gray
“Have you not? Have you never contemplated the peculiar difficulties of his life?”
“His life as your bastard son, do you mean?” Wallingford said.
Again, the silence echoed about the room; again, Wallingford wished his words back. Phineas Burke was an excellent fellow, after all: a bit tall and ginger haired and taciturn for some, but a genuine scientific genius, an inventor of the highest order, building electric batteries and horseless carriages and whatnot the way other men tinkered with watches. A colossus, really. Moreover, he had none of the usual tempers and thin-skinned resentments, the vain strivings and artificial manners so common in well-bred bastards. Burke simply went about his business and did not give a damn, and as a result he was received everywhere. In his heart, Wallingford counted Burke as his closest friend, though of course one could never publicly admit such a thing of one’s natural uncle.
Really, Burke was so steadfast and clever, so stalwart in any crisis, Wallingford could almost forgive him for being the apple of Olympia’s eye.
“You see,” Olympia said softly, “I know how it is. You’ve always been a duke, or else in daily expectation of a dukedom. You have been blessed with a handsome face and a sturdy figure. You take these things for granted. You think that you have earned all this around you”—his arm, at a wave, took in the splendid furnishings, the army of servants moving soundlessly behind the walls, the rarefied pavement of Belgrave Square outside the windows—“instead of having it dropped in your lap like an overripe peach. You think you deserve to enjoy sexual congress with some mere acquaintance, against the wall of your own mistress’s conservatory, simply because you can. Simply because you are His Grace, the Duke of Wallingford.”
“I recognize my good fortune. I see no reason not to enjoy its fruits.”
“Its fruits? This woman, this lady of good family, with a mind and soul of her own—she is reduced to a mere vegetable, in your calculus?”
Wallingford turned his attention to the sleek cashmere sleeve of his dressing gown, searching for a piece of lint at which he might brush, laconically, to show his disinterest. But Shelmerstone was far too efficient a valet to allow any flaws to disturb the impeccable line of the ducal sleeve, and Wallingford was reduced to brushing phantom lint into the dustless air. “I seem to recall,” he said, “that the lady in question was enjoying herself.”
“Really?” Olympia’s voice was cold. “I rather doubt you would have noticed either way. In any case, I’ve decided that all this nonsense has gone far enough. You are nine-and-twenty, and a duke. With regret, I must demand you not to accept this proposal of Burke’s, however edifying, and turn your attention instead to marriage.”
Wallingford looked up, certain he’d misheard the old man. “Marriage?” he asked, as he might say the word castration. “Did you say marriage?”
“I did.”
“Are you mad?”
Olympia spread his hands. “Surely you recognize the necessity.”
“Not at all. We still have Penhallow, who would make an extraordinarily decorative duke, should I have the misfortune to choke on a chicken bone at dinner this evening.”
“Your brother has no interest in your title.”
Like a pitcher turned upside down, Wallingford found his patience had run abruptly out. He rose from the chair in a bolt of movement. “Have we come to the point at last? Is this why you came to see me this morning? I am to be a stud? My ability to breed another duke constitutes the sum total of my usefulness to you, does it?”
“My dear boy,” Olympia said, “has the entire conduct of your adult life ever suggested your usefulness for anything else?”
Wallingford turned to the tray of coffee and poured himself a cup. No cream, no sugar. He wanted the drink as black as his mood. Marriage, indeed. “I have many talents, Grandfather, if you ever bothered to count them.”
Olympia waved that away. “Don’t be a child, Wallingford. In any case, you need not concern yourself with the tiresome matter of choosing a wife. I’ve done all the work for you. I have, in my deep and abiding regard for you, found you the perfect bride already.”
Wallingford, in the very act of lifting the cup to his lips, let it slip instead with a thump to the rug below. Such was his astonishment, he did not bother to retrieve it. “You have found me a bride?” he repeated, in shocked tones, clutching the saucer as if it were a life buoy.
“I have. Charming girl. You’ll adore her, I assure you.”
“I beg your pardon. Have I gone to sleep and woken up two hundred years ago?”
Olympia patted his coat pocket and withdrew a slim leather diary. “No,” he said, examining a few pages. “No, it remains February of 1890. Thank goodness, as I’ve an immense number of appointments to make today, and I should hate to have to wait so long to complete them. If this is all agreeable to you, Wallingford, I shall invite the girl and her family around at the end of March, when they return to town. A private dinner would be best, I think. Allow the two of you to get to know each other.” He turned a few more pages in his diary. “A wedding around midsummer would be ideal, don’t you think? Roses in bloom and all that?”
“Are you mad?”
“Sound as a nut. I must be off, however. I’ll send in Shelmerstone on my way out. No doubt he stands ready at the keyhole. And Wallingford?”
“Yes?” He was too stunned to say anything else.
“Do contrive not to embroil yourself in any further scandal before then, eh? The Queen don’t like it, not a bit. Oh yes! And orchids.”
“Orchids?”
“Orchids to Madame de la Fontaine. It seems they’re her favored blooms.”
Olympia left in a flash of tweed coat and silver hair, and Wallingford stared at the door as if it were the gate to hell itself.
What the devil had come over the old man? He’d never so much as mentioned the word marriage before, and all at once it was brides this and weddings that and bloody roses, if you will! He looked down at his hand, holding the blue and white porcelain saucer, and saw it was shaking.
The door slid open in a faint rush of well-oiled hinges. “Your shave is ready, sir,” said Shelmerstone, and then the slightest intake of breath at the sight of the pool of coffee settling into the priceless rug, surrounded by long, ambitious streaks of brown and, at their tips, the final tiny droplets, still winking atop the rug’s tight woolen weave. Without a pause, he snatched the linen napkin from the coffee tray and fell to his knees, blotting, going so far as to murmur a reproachful Sir! in the depths of his distress.
Wallingford set down the saucer. “I beg your pardon, Shelmerstone. His Grace has delivered me the devil of a shock.”
“What was that, sir?” Shelmerstone asked, covering a sob.
“Marriage,” Wallingford said. He added, for clarification, “Mine.”
A dreadful pause. “Sir.”
“Yes. Most distressing. He’s picked out the bride, the date, the damned flowers. I daresay he’s chosen her a dress already, and embroidered the pearls himself, God rot him.”
Shelmerstone cleared his throat. His face was white, either from the coffee or the bride or some combination of the two. A funereal gravity darkened his voice. “Her name, sir?”
Wallingford squinted his eyes. “It was . . . something like . . . By God. Do you know, Shelmerstone, I don’t think he even saw fit to tell me.”
“Sir.”
“Not that it matters, of course. I shan’t do it. I shall tell my grandfather exactly where he can stash his arranged brides.” His words sounded hollow in the great cavern of a bedroom, and he knew it. He could hear Shelmerstone’s thoughts, as the valet bent over the coffee stain.
Ha. Like to see him try. No going against His Damned Bloody Grace Olympia, when he has one of them ideas in his noggin.
“I believe I shall fetch the bicarbonate,” Shelmerstone said faintly, and rose to his feet.
Wallingford fell into the armchair, staring blankly at the room around him. His familiar
room, grand and yet with a certain worn comfort, bare of unnecessary decoration, not a flower in sight, his favorite books piled on the nightstand, his aged single-malt Scotch whiskey at the ready. The very notion of a woman inhabiting this sanctum made his mind vibrate with dissonance.
No. No, of course not. Not even the Duke of Olympia would dare such a thing.
True, he’d hand-selected more than one prime minister in the last half century. And the Queen herself had been known to change one or two of her notoriously firm opinions after an hour of private conversation with His Grace.
And there was that time he had traveled to Russia aboard his private steam yacht and told the Tsar in no uncertain terms . . .
Good God.
Wallingford leaned forward, put his elbows on his knees, and covered his face with his hands.
There had to be a way out.
He spread his fingers and peered through them. The scent of last night’s tossed champagne still hung in his hair, pressing against his nostrils, making him feel slightly queasy. Champagne. Orchids. His brain sloshed about with the memories of last night: the impulsive coupling, banal and sordid, the work of a mere minute or two, and then the sour distaste as he had wiped himself with his handkerchief and looked at the lady’s flushed face and perspiring bosom and tried to recall her name.
He needed more coffee. He needed . . .
Something caught his eye, in the stack of books atop his bedside table, next to the coffee tray. Something that was not a book at all.
A tickle began at the base of Wallingford’s brain, as if a pair of fingers were nudging him. It felt . . . it felt . . . almost like . . .
An idea.
He rose, paced to the table, and lifted the three topmost volumes.
There it was, beneath the Dickens, atop the Carlyle. A folded newspaper, given to him a month ago, the edges already beginning to yellow under the inexorable poison of oxygen.
Wallingford picked it up and smoothed the page. There, circled in thick black ink, the print as crisp as it had been when Phineas Burke had handed it to him in the breakfast room downstairs, read an advertisement:
English lords and ladies, and gentlemen of discerning taste, may take note of a singular opportunity to lease a most magnificent Castle and Surrounding Estate in the idyllic hills of Tuscany, the Land of Unending Sunshine. The Owner, a man of impeccable lineage, whose ancestors have kept the Castle safe against intrusion since the days of the Medici princes, is called away by urgent business, and offers a year’s lease of this unmatched Property at rates extremely favorable for the discerning traveler. Applicants should enquire through the Owner’s London agent . . .
A year, Burke had proposed. A year of study and contemplation, free from the distractions of modern life and the female sex. Four weeks ago, Wallingford had laughed at the idea, once he had overcome his initial shock that such a notion should even occur to a sane and able-bodied man, in full possession of his youthful animal spirits.
A year, free of the interference of the Duke of Olympia, and his brides and his June weddings. A year—it must be said—free of recriminations from Cecile de la Fontaine and her vindictive French temper.
A year free of temptation, free of ducal trappings. In a remote Italian castle, where nobody knew him, where nobody had even heard of the Duke of Wallingford.
Wallingford slapped the newspaper back down on the books, causing the topmost volumes to tumble to the floor in surprise. He poured himself a cup of coffee, drank it in a single burning gulp, and stretched his arms to the ceiling.
Why, it was just the thing. A change of scene from gray and changeless London. He could use a change. He’d been dogged with a sense of dissatisfaction, of restlessness, long before his outrageous indiscretion last night, long before Olympia’s unwelcome visit this morning.
A year with his brother and his closest friend, both decent chaps who minded their own business. Tuscany, the land of unending sunshine. Wine in abundance, and decent food, and surely a discreet village girl or two if absolutely necessary.
What could possibly go wrong?
ONE
Thirty miles southeast of Florence
March 1890
At the age of fifteen, Miss Abigail Harewood had buried her mother and gone to live in London with her older sister, the dazzling young Marchioness of Morley, and her decrepit old husband the marquis.
Within a week, Abigail had decided she would never marry.
“I shall never marry,” she told the stable hand, as she helped him rub down the wet horses with blankets, “but I should like to take a lover. I have just turned twenty-three, after all, and it’s high time, don’t you think?”
The stable hand, who spoke only a rustic Tuscan dialect, shrugged and smiled.
“The trouble is, I can’t find a suitable prospect. You have no idea how difficult it is for an unmarried girl of my station to find a lover. That is, a lover one actually wishes to go to bed with. I daresay Harry Stubbs down the pub would be delighted; but you see, he has no teeth. Real ones, I mean.”
The stable hand smiled again. His own teeth glinted an expectedly bright white in the lantern light.
Abigail cocked her head. “Very nice,” she said, “but I don’t think we should suit. I should like the sort of lover I could keep for at least a month or two, since it’s such trouble to find one, and my sister and I shall depart this fine inn of yours tomorrow, as soon as the rain lets up.”
The stable hand gave the horse a last pat and reached up to hang the blanket to dry on a rafter. She could have spoken to him in Italian, of course, though his dialect did not quite match the classical version in which she was fluent, but then it was so much easier to speak to people when they couldn’t understand one.
The man settled the blanket on the rafter, arms flexing beneath his woolen shirt. Rather a strapping fellow, in fact. And his hair: such a shining extravagant coal black, a little too long and curling just so. Exactly what one wished for in a rustic Italian chap. Abigail’s hands stilled on her own blanket, considering.
“I beg your pardon,” she said, “may I trouble you for a kiss?”
He dropped his arms and blinked at her. “Che cosa, signorina?”
“You see, when I made the decision, on my twenty-third birthday, that I would find myself a lover before the end of the year, I determined to make the search as scientific as possible. One can’t be too selective for one’s first lover, after all.” Abigail gave him an affectionate smile, a smile of shared understanding. “I canvassed the maids and the housekeeper—only the women, you see, for obvious reasons—and they were quite unanimous that the kiss should be the determining factor.”
The stable hand’s brow furrowed like a field under the plow. “Che cosa?” he asked again.
“The kiss, you understand, as a sort of test of each prospect’s skill. Tenderness, patience, subtlety, sensitivity to one’s partner: All these things, according to my friends, can be divined from the very first kiss. And do you know?” She leaned forward.
“Signorina?”
“They were right!” Abigail slid the blanket down the horse’s hindquarters and handed it to him. “I kissed two of the footmen, and young Patrick in the stables, and the differences in style and technique were astonishing! Moreover, the manner of kiss, in every case, exactly matched what I might have guessed, judging from their characters.”
The stable hand took the blanket from her with a bemused air.
“So you see, I thought perhaps you might be so obliging as to kiss me as well, in order to round out my experience more thoroughly. Would you mind terribly?”
“Signorina?” He stood there, with the blanket in his hand, looking wary. A lantern swung near his head, making his thick black hair glint alluringly. Next to her, the horse gave an impatient stamp and snorted profoundly.
“A kiss,” she said. “Un bacio.”
His face cleared. “Un bacio! Si, si, signorina.”
He tossed Abigail’s blanket over
the rafter, next to his own, and took her by the shoulders and kissed her.
A tremendous kiss, really. Full of raw enthusiasm, a thorough sort of embrace, his thick lips devouring hers as if he hadn’t kissed a girl in months. He smelled of straw and horseflesh, lovely warm stable smells, and his breath tasted surprisingly of sweet bread.
What luck.
Abigail felt his tongue brush hers and, as if it were a signal, she pulled away. His eyes shone down on hers, dark with urgency.
“Thank you,” Abigail said. “That was very nice indeed. I suspect you’re the ravishing sort, aren’t you?”
“Che cosa?”
She slipped out of his arms and gave his elbow an affectionate pat. “What a darling fellow you are,” she said. “I assure you, I shall remember this forever. Every time I recall our year in Italy, I shall think of you, and this enchanting, er, stableyard. Such a splendid start to an adventure, if rather a wet one.”
“Signorina . . .”
Abigail switched into Italian. “Now, the other horse, named Angelica, she is a fine mare, but you must watch her for the biting, and make sure she has enough of the oats.”
“Oats?” He seemed relieved by the appearance of Abigail’s Italian, however flawed.
Abigail picked up her shawl and placed it back over her shoulders. The rain drummed loudly against the roof of the stable, nearly overcoming her words. “I can stay no longer, what desolation. My sister and cousin have been waiting for half an hour, and Alexandra makes objection when I smell too strongly of the stables. She is a very fine lady, my sister.”
“That one . . . the great lady . . . she is your sister?”
“Yes. I, too, am astonished. She is a marchioness, though her husband the marquis died two years ago, God forever rest his soul. And you have perhaps seen my cousin Lilibet, who is a countess, very beautiful and virtuous, traveling with her little boy. She wouldn’t kiss a gentleman in a stable; no, never. But I must be away.”
“Signorina . . . I will not see you again?” His voice wavered.
