Any Mayfair town house would have been at least as elegant and had far more personality. But that was the point: The Coventry was comfortably bland, not showy, not distracting. The focus of the patrons was to be on the play and on each other.
Ash’s focus was on Della Haddonfield, whom he had given up trying to forget months ago.
“Chastain drinks when he loses and he loses nearly every time he plays,” Tresham said, wandering between the tables. “Sooner or later, he’ll drink too much and start wittering on about that time he eloped with Lady Della Haddonfield. He spent half the god-damned night with her in that inn, Ash. I should kill him for that alone.”
“I know, Tresham,”—God, do I know—“but Della apparently went with him willingly. Bellefonte would tell you if that weren’t the case, I trust?”
“I have no bloody idea.” Tresham perched on a dealer’s stool and took up a deck of cards. “I am not one of them. Your brother Will married into the Haddonfield clan. What does he say?”
“Will and Susannah are ruralizing. I gather several litters of puppies are due any day, and thus Willow remains in the country.”
“I hate this,” Tresham said, shuffling the deck with casual expertise. “Bellefonte ought to challenge Chastain. Bellefonte’s a peer. Nobody would say a word if Chastain got the worse of the encounter.”
A peer could not honorably challenge a commoner. “Deal me in.” Ash took up a stool at the same table. “Has it occurred to you that Della might be smitten with Chastain? She might be heartbroken that Chastain’s father interrupted their elopement.”
“Theo’s theory is that Della chose Chastain because he’s nothing more than a handsome lackwit. Della could manage him without looking up from her embroidery hoop. She’s an earl’s daughter, so Papa Chastain would eventually reconcile himself to the match.” Tresham gathered up the cards and set the deck in the middle of the table. “I shall beat you at cribbage.”
Lady Theodosia, Tresham’s lovely wife, had apparently already had a turn trying to speak sense to him. Ash produced a cribbage board from the shelf under the table.
“You don’t think Della smitten, then?”
“I know she isn’t.” Tresham’s tone was gloomy. “She once mentioned Chastain to me when I drove out with her. Her tone was less than respectful.”
Ash cut for the crib and pulled the low card. “Feelings can change.”
“Not those feelings. Della expressed pity for his sire, and the opinion that Chastain will bankrupt the family within two years of gaining control of the Chastain fortune. She’s right.”
Play moved along, with the cards favoring Ash. His leading peg was halfway around the board when Sycamore sauntered in looking dashing and windblown in his riding attire.
“That is the good brandy at Tresham’s elbow, if I’m not mistaken,” Sycamore said, pausing to remove his spurs. “Since when do we give away the good stuff, brother mine?”
Ash picked up his cards to find another double run, his third of the game so far. “We are generous with poor Tresham because he needed a medicinal tot for his nerves.” As had Ash. “I’m beating him soundly.”
Sycamore peered over Tresham’s shoulder. “William Chastain needs a sound beating. Who’s with me?”
Tresham put down his cards. “What have you heard?”
Sycamore could be tactful—about once every five years—and then only out of a perverse impulse to keep his older siblings off balance.
“Chastain was apparently in his club last night, lamenting that his French bride refuses to cry off, despite the failed elopement with a certain Lady Delightful.”
Tresham was on his feet, so quickly he knocked his stool over. “I will kill him, slowly, after protracted torture. I will maim him, and cut the idiot tongue from his empty head. All of polite society knows that Della’s given name is Delilah, and Chastain apparently knows it too. By Jehovah’s thunder, I ought to ruin his father for siring such a walking pile of offal.”
“If you do ruin him,” Sycamore said, taking a sip of Tresham’s brandy, “please do it here, so the club gets a bit of the notoriety and ten percent of the kitty.”
“You cannot.” Ash said, getting to his feet. “You cannot in any way intimate that Chastain’s wild maunderings have any connection to reality or to Della, and you most assuredly cannot strut about all but proclaiming that her ladyship has an illegitimate connection to you.”
“But—”
Ash stepped closer. “No. Not if you care for you her, which you loudly claim to do. The Haddonfields have substantial consequence, they have weathered other scandals. You can be a friend of the family, a cordial acquaintance, but you cannot involve yourself in this in any manner that makes it worse than it already is.”
And neither could Ash.
Tresham finished his drink and set the glass down on the table with a thunk. “I’m supposed to be the sensible one. But then, I’m selling most of this club to you two. How sensible was that?”
“Very sensible,” Sycamore said. “We’re making you pots of money to go with the barrels and trout ponds worth you already have.”
“Della will be a spinster now,” Tresham said, and Ash sensed they’d reached the heart of the dilemma. “She’s the only Haddonfield yet unmarried. They’ve all been trying to fire her off—even Theo has tried to help—but to no avail. Now Chastain has botched an elopement, and Della will suffer the consequences. Nobody will marry her.”
“Perhaps she doesn’t want to be married,” Sycamore said.
“Then why elope with Witless Chastity?” Tresham snapped. “That was a desperate measure, indeed, and now she’s to be an old maid.”
Ash picked up the discarded brandy glass and set it on the sideboard. “She will not be an old maid. Della is lovely, charming, smart, kind, funny, and quite well connected. You are making too much of bad moment.”
Sycamore sent him a curious look. “This is more than a bad moment. She spent most of the night in the same room with Chastain at the inn in Alconbury. That news was quietly galloping up and down the bridle paths this morning in the park. I discredited the rumor with vigorous disbelief, but it’s as Tresh says: Lady Della has had no offers, and Chastain is not much of a prize. The appearances are dire.”
If Ash could have beaten himself soundly at that moment, he would have. Lady Della had quite possibly discouraged many offers while waiting for a proposal from Ash himself.
“This is not dire,” he said. “The necessary steps are simple. The Little Season is underway. We will treat Lady Della to a show of support, mustering a phalanx of eligibles to stand up with her. She will carry on as if the gossip is just that. Chastain will learn discretion in a violent school if need be, and come spring, some other scandal will have everyone’s attention.”
“It’s a plan,” Sycamore said, in tones that suggested it was a laughably stupid plan.
“And if this plan doesn’t work?” Tresham asked, “then may I part Chastain from his pizzle?”
“If the plan doesn’t work, then I will marry Della myself.”
Sycamore for once had nothing to say, while Tresham looked mightily relieved. Ash could make this offer because he was sure to a confirmed certainty that he was the last man Della Haddonfield would ever agree to marry.
* * *
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Excerpt — The Truth About Dukes
Robert, Duke of Rothhaven, is renewing an old acquaintance with Lady Constance Wentworth. His brother is marrying her sister, though Robert first met Constance years ago under trying circumstances. He’s delighted that she’s called upon him, though his circumstances are still, in a way, quite trying…
* * *
“Walk with me to the orchard.” Lady Constance did not offer Robert an invitation, she issued him an order—and in his own garden, no less.
“I have not been to the orchard in years.” Robert inventoried his reaction
to the prospect of leaving the walled garden, and found dread, anxiety, and resentment. Next to those predictable nuisances was a growing impatience with his own limitations. “I might well fail to complete journey.”
“This time you might not, but eventually, you will.” Lady Constance marched to the end of the garden where the door in the wall had once upon a time loomed in Robert’s mind like a portal to the edge of the world.
She kept right on going, and once again, he followed her. Months ago, on a foggy autumn morning, he’d begun experimenting with what lay beyond the garden door, navigating as far as the river. He left the garden only when the mist was so heavy as to obscure anything like a horizon. The thicker the fog, the better he liked it.
A world where he could see only a dozen feet ahead—and could not be seen himself beyond those dozen feet—had suited him splendidly. This sunny spring day, with damned birds chirping and an arrogant hare loping off toward the river, had no appeal at all.
“Come,” Lady Constance said, extending her hand. “We will speak of the project you invited me here to discuss.”
Robert winged his elbow at her—that was the conventional gesture offering escort, if memory served—but she instead took his hand in hers, her grip warm and firm.
“We have missed the cherry blossoms,” she said. “But the plums should be in their glory. Tell me of your project.”
Constance was humoring him, jollying him into taking the first few steps on the path to the walled orchard. Robert knew it, she knew it. He went with her anyway, because he had at least as much right to be on that path as the wretched hare did.
Make small talk. Distract yourself. “I would rather return to the garden. We can discuss the project there.”
“I would rather wear breeches. I often do, when I paint. Skirts get in the way.”
Picturing Constance Wentworth in breeches was, indeed, a distraction. “I have decided that if I’m to be the Duke of Rothhaven, I must behave as a duke. I must look like a duke, speak like a duke.”
“Quack like a duke?”
“Don’t be impertinent.” He failed utterly to suppress a smile. “I can no longer indulge my eccentricities, confident in the knowledge that my brother will carry on as head of the family in my stead. A duke sits for the occasional portrait.”
The path angled up slightly, which slowed Constance not one bit. “You’d like me to recommend a portraitist for you? Somebody who will mind his own business and not turn your nose purple?”
“No, thank you. I do not need a recommendation.”
“Then you’d like me to confirm the choice of portraitist you’ve already made. Offer reassurances that he—for only the male gender is suited to rendering portraits, of course—is passably competent.”
Constance picked up the pace as they climbed, and Robert had the sense she was annoyed. He did not turn loose of her hand, but rather, lengthened his stride to keep pace with her. She was by no means a tall woman.
“Passably competent will not do. This portrait must convey to the world that I am in every way appropriate to execute the duties of my station.” The traveling coach had been sent into York for a complete refurbishment for the same reason.
Appearances mattered.
“You are competent to execute the duties of your station,” her ladyship retorted. “Let us not belabor the obvious. That you have handsome features, a compelling gaze, and a fine masculine figure means any half-skilled apprentice could fashion a decent likeness of you.”
“Do you mean that?”
“Perhaps not an apprentice, but anybody half skilled. You’ll probably let him talk you into painting you wearing coronation robes, the usual castles and churning seas in the background. He’ll try to suggest you have blue eyes instead of green, but you must stand firm. Eye color is not a detail and your eyes are lovely.”
They had reached the orchard gate, which her ladyship yanked open and charged through.
Robert stood for a moment outside the walls.
“Well?” Constance said, holding the gate open. Her question, a single syllable, demanded something—an explanation or justification of some sort, for the human condition, for the evils of the day, for the imponderable mysteries of life itself.
Robert knew he ought to dash through the gate, slam it closed behind him, and refuse to budge until the comfort of darkness descended. Instead he marveled at the view of the Hall amid the fields below. The dread and resentment and whatnot were still lurking in his mind, but they slept like winded hounds, and let him look on his home—his home—from a distance for the first time since he’d been sent away.
“Rothhaven is not so dreadful when seen from this perspective.” The Hall looked peaceful, in fact, mellow old stone settled on a quilt of green. “Not so bleak.”
Constance re-joined him just outside the gate. “It’s a fine old place. Perhaps whoever does your portrait would be willing to paint a few landscapes. The portraitists are a snobby lot, generally, but we all pass through a landscape phase, once we leave the still lifes behind.”
He took her hand this time, a very bold overture on his part. She was not terrified of the out-of-doors, after all.
Though at the moment, neither was he. Uneasy, a bit anxious, possibly even agitated, but not terrified.
“I would like to leave my still-life phase behind,” he said. “What could I offer you that would induce you to paint my portrait?”
Constance studied him in that serious way of hers. “Do you mean that? You want me to paint your portrait?”
“I’m told as subjects go, I’m not hideous. I want no strangers under my roof strutting about and acting artistic. You are beyond half skilled, and I know you won’t turn my nose purple. I am offering you a commission to paint the portrait of the present Duke of Rothhaven.”
In Robert’s mind, until that moment, the Duke of Rothhaven had been his father, or a role inhabited by Nathaniel. He, himself, had been Robbie, or to old familiars, Master Robbie. Soames had called him Robert, for last names were discouraged at such an establishment.
Watching Constance inventory his features, her gaze roaming from his brow to his nose, to his mouth, to his hair, he felt himself becoming the Duke of Rothhaven. Standing a little taller, adopting a slight air of hauteur the better to withstand her perusal.
“Sitting for a portrait is boring,” she said, brushing his hair back from his temple. “You will grow testy.” She eased a finger under his cravat and ran it around his neck. “I will grow testy.” She gently steered his chin a half inch to the left, then a half inch to the right. “We will disagree.”
“I trust your judgment.” He would somehow trust himself to withstand her touch too.
She smoothed his lapels, fluffed his cravat, and made another adjustment to his hair. Her smile said she knew his compliment extended beyond her ability with paints and brushes.
“Let’s have a look at the trees,” she said, leading him through the gate. “I adore the scent of plum blossoms.”
She prattled on, about light and seasons, how many different types of green could shine forth from a single tree branch, and why coronation robes were too trite to be endured. Then she shook a branch and showered herself with petals, and Robert knew himself for a doomed duke.
She adored the scent of plum blossoms, and he adored her.
He simply, completely adored her.
* * *
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