Seductive Starts

by Courtney Milan

  There was a long pause behind her. “Are you always this chatty with your employers? I should imagine the Dalrymples—and no, Miss Lowell, I would not describe your employer’s poisonous offspring as either ‘children’ or ‘innocent’—would have stamped that trait right out of you.”

  Margaret closed her eyes. Poisonous, was she? She wondered what she had done to deserve that particular epithet from a man she had met only this day. “I served the duchess when she was ill.” True; she’d spent her waking hours in her mother’s sickroom. “She was never well, these last years, but when you announced to the world that her husband was a bigamist—that she herself had been nothing more than an adulteress for the last thirty years, you destroyed her. She simply lost her will to continue. She was dead a few months later. To hear you talk about the circumstances that led to her death in so easy a fashion is utterly repellant.”

  He didn’t answer her, and she turned to look at him. He was watching her seriously, his lips pressed together. He looked as if he were actually listening to her, as if she had something important to say. Maybe that was why she continued.

  “You weren’t the one who had to urge her to eat. You didn’t watch the light in her eyes wink out and die. You men never see the consequences of what you do. All you care about is that in the end, you collect the title and the estates. That’s not honorable.”

  Another longer pause. “You’re perfectly right,” he finally said. “It wasn’t honorable. It was revenge. I doubt you understand the complexity of the family relationship. But, at least, I didn’t intend to cause the duchess’s death. Parford, on the other hand…” His fingers clenched at his side. “I doubt Parford could say the same of my sister, were you to query him on the matter. As for the worthless boys he called sons? Quite frankly, after what they did to my brothers at Eton, I’d have wished far worse upon him.”

  “Richard and his friends must have been quite the terror, to justify having his title stripped.”

  “Richard? You’re calling the former Marquess of Winchester Richard?”

  Rather than answer that, Margaret swung the door open and pushed it inward. “His Grace is waiting.”

  Mr. Turner gave her one last long, searching look. Her heart thumped as he perused her face. Surely he would know what her little slip of the tongue had meant. But he just shook his head and entered the room. She followed behind.

  Over the past few months, Margaret had learned to hide how completely aghast the sight of her father left her. She knew, rationally, that he was ill. But between her visits—even if no more than an hour elapsed—this image of him, thin as a fence rail and swathed in bedclothes, never managed to lodge in her memory. She remembered him healthy and robust, larger and more incomprehensible than the sky itself. That memory had riveted itself in her imagination, unable to be dislodged by something so trivial as the passage of time. In her heart, he couldn’t change. Her father was bigger than her, stronger than her, more frightening than her.

  Reality had been cruel. He’d shrunk into a glazed shell of a man, holding on to life with the same tenacity that held him upright in this perfect seated posture. He ought to have been lying down.

  “Parford,” Mr. Turner said. He put his hands in his pockets and stood there, glowering, all his chatty conversation evaporated. He was as still as a tombstone, looking forward. That rigid stance seemed entirely at odds with his easy manner to a servant.

  Her father rolled his head lazily to regard him. “Turner.”

  Mr. Turner stared at him for one long instant before swiveling away. He turned to a basin on a nearby table, and when that could not hold his interest any longer, his gaze moved to a jumble of medicines in brown apothecary’s bottles.

  He picked up one and turned it over. “Well. My finely honed speech, saved all these years, seems too big for this room after all.”

  “Oh, pull up your trousers and be a man. What in God’s wide world are you waiting for?” That whiplash crack of authority in her father’s voice set Margaret’s teeth on edge. “Just get it over with, Turner. Say your piece, and then let me sleep.”

  “It seems unsporting to crow about my triumph to a linen-clad scarecrow.” Mr. Turner set down the laudanum and looked over. “But I suppose you wouldn’t have it any other way, would you?”

  Her father let out another exasperated sigh. “Get on with it, Turner. I’m dying. I have no wish to spend my last days enduring your endless hand-wringing and shilly-shallying. We both know how this is supposed to go—eyes for eyes, and all that. Am I supposed to beg you, as you once begged me?”

  Margaret had no idea what her father was speaking about.

  But Turner must have, because he scowled. “You’re making a mockery of this.”

  “That’s not your line,” Parford snapped. “You’re supposed to throw my own words back at me. What did I say to that smelly, bedraggled child who visited me? Oh, yes: ‘We have as much blood in common as the queen has with a pig farmer.’ I did say pig farmer, didn’t I?”

  “Coal miner, actually. And at the time, George was king.”

  “Damn. My memory is full of holes. Still, you’ve deviated from the script. Here you are, heir to the Duchy of Parford, despite everything I did. Aren’t you going to grind my nose in it? Will that satisfy your vengeance? Or would you prefer to drive a dagger through my chest and drink my blood?”

  Mr. Turner set his jaw and reached sharply for a small sack at his waist. At that sudden movement, Margaret felt a small shock of fear go through her, and she darted forward, her hand reaching out to stop him—

  “Relax, girl,” her father grumbled. “What do you suppose he’s secreted in that tiny little pouch? The world’s smallest rapier?”

  Mr. Turner merely glanced at her and pulled something from the pouch and threw it forward. “Here. This is yours.”

  It landed on the Duke of Parford’s lap, and for once, that harsh stream of words dried up. He stared at it and then closed his hand about it. “A sixpence? Oh, no! I’m feeling revenged upon.”

  The entire conversation was opaque to Margaret. “The sixpence,” Mr. Turner said grimly. “When I came to you and begged for your intercession, you threw it in my face and told me the only thing you wanted me to get was a bath. My sister died, my brothers—” He shook his head. “I told you I would make you sorry. And now here I am.”

  “Yes. Congratulations. You’ve stolen a dukedom. Am I supposed to care?”

  “You stole it yourself. I didn’t make your children bastards. I didn’t steal their inheritance. It was you who did it, so certain your first wife would never come to light. And now you’re reaping your own punishment.”

  Her father leaned back against the cushions. “Me? Punished? Hardly. I’m the duke—and I will be until I die, which hopefully will be soon.” He yawned widely. “Once I have passed on to the next world, I can hardly care what becomes of my pitiful bastard offspring in this one.” He leaned back.

  Margaret’s spine felt tight with tension. Her hands flattened against the plasterwork behind her. Her father had never been demonstrative or affectionate. Still, she’d always believed that he cared for her, even if only in his high-handed fashion. At his words, she wanted to melt into the wall and simply disappear. The hair on her head, scraped into that awful bun, pulled against her scalp.

  But her father didn’t glance her way. “You seem to be under the impression that I give a damn about those whelps I sired on that whey-faced chit I was forced to pretend was my bride. You’re wrong.”

  That “whey-faced chit” was Margaret’s mother—sweet and soft-spoken, warm and gentle and loving. She was barely six months in the grave. Margaret stared straight ahead, her hands clenching.

  “Now, if you’ve finished berating me, go away. I’m bored.” Her father leaned his head against the wall and closed his eyes.

  Mr. Turner stared at him for a few moments, his jaw working. Finally, with one last look at Margaret, he left. Margaret closed the door behind him and turned
to her father. He lay on the bed, his eyes shut as if he were sleeping. She doubted he was. She watched the ragged rise and fall of his chest, unsure what to think.

  What on earth had Mr. Turner been alluding to? This was clearly not the first time her father had spoken with him. There was more to Mr. Turner than just a voided marriage and a grab for a dukedom, but if so, this was the first Margaret had heard of it. More important, had her father’s unkind words been an act, put on to convince Mr. Turner her father didn’t care about his children, and to thus shield them from revenge? Or had he spoken the simple truth?

  As if sensing her questions, he opened his eyes. He must have seen the hurt on her face, because he expelled his breath in disgust. “Oh, Christ, Anna. You’re already a girl and a bastard. Don’t make yourself triply useless by crying.”

  Margaret was beyond tears. She’d shed them all months ago, for all the good they’d done. But shame settled against her skin like a fine burning net. Over the past months, she’d had everything stripped from her: her name, when it was discovered that Lady Anna Margaret Dalrymple was a bastard. Her dowry, when Chancery decided that as illegitimate offspring, she wasn’t entitled to the funds settled upon her mother.

  Margaret took a deep breath. She had been scoured clean of everything except the hard truth of herself. It coiled deep inside her, like a spiked little ball.

  “Would you like a glass of barley water?” she asked calmly.

  Perhaps her father took that smooth inquiry as meekness, because his lip curled. He didn’t understand. It took every ounce of strength she had not to simply turn on her heel and walk out of the room. Because Mr. Turner had been right about one thing. It had been selfishness on her father’s part—pure, utter selfishness—to lie to her mother, to pretend to marry her, to beget offspring he’d known were legally unable to inherit.

  “None of that tepid stuff, now,” he warned her.

  The water was room temperature against her wrist, but she had no desire to send down to the icehouse. In fact, in her current guise as lowly nurse, she might have to go herself. She poured the liquid as it was, a tiny act of defiance, proof that inside she was still Lady Anna Margaret. She wasn’t some nameless bastard servant in a great house, to be ordered about at whim.

  She leaned over the Duke of Parford and held the glass to his lips.

  “Pfaw,” he protested, and water dribbled down his chin.

  But he drank, and she raised a handkerchief to his face and dabbed away the excess moisture.

  If some unknowing artist had glanced at this tableau, he might have titled it Father and Daughter. He might have captured the fine weave of the linen she used to dab excess moisture away, the comforting touch of her hand on his shoulder. Every perfunctory detail he might see, and render on his emotional palette as a gesture of love.

  It wasn’t, not anymore. Margaret had loved her father once. Perhaps she still did. But at the moment, she could not find any trace of that emotion. What was left?

  Duty. Honor. Obligation. Maybe just a perverse desire to demonstrate to her father: See? This is how you go about not betraying your family. She would show him. She didn’t need to be received as nobility to be noble.

  If everything else had been stolen away, that much of her, at least, remained.

  ASH EXITED PARFORD’S SICKROOM only to discover a procession lying in wait for him. The housekeeper, a Mrs. Benedict, introduced herself. She was accompanied by Smith, the majordomo, and a Mr. Dunridge, who was apparently the land steward. In the finest of old traditions, he was going to be Shown About and made to appreciate what he stood to inherit.

  It wasn’t hard to show suitable enthusiasm. Parford Manor was a beautifully maintained house. It seemed lived in without being ragged. Even the parquet floors had an understated beauty, the sort of luminous glow that came from years of beeswax and care.

  The manor was even older than that long-ago split between the Turners and the Dalrymples, he mused as he was led outside into the formal gardens. The grass was green and springy beneath his feet. No lawn a mere decade old could ever achieve that complacent health. It seemed not just a bit of turf, but an entire organism, spread before him.

  His many times great-grandfather had once been lord here. The man had perhaps once walked upon this very path. He might have turned this selfsame corner, around the long, low holly, and seen the slow roll of the river beyond.

  A bit daunting, that history. When he was a boy, his father had taught him about his noble relations, as if that ancient history somehow made him special, more interesting than other mill owners’ children. But that happy accident, that divergence from nobility all those great-grandfathers ago, hadn’t done any of the Turners much good. It hadn’t fed them or clothed them. Fortunes had come, and fortunes had been given away in mindless acts of insane charity.

  Now, Ash stood on the cusp of the dukedom. He’d vowed he would care for his dependents—every one of them, from Mrs. Benedict, who continually stopped to reaffix her cap with pins that kept sliding from her gray hair, down to the last maid toiling over a copper kettle in the scullery.

  Parford had, of course, got the matter completely backward.

  Yes, he’d thought of revenge. But thoughts of cold vengeance had given way to stark reality. There was no use trading eyes for eyes, when he’d been able to provide for his brothers by trading rubies instead.

  Ancient history, indeed. The families had split, probably around the same time that the solid row of elms had been planted along the western drive. Ash’s forebearer, a younger son, had married a manufacturer’s daughter for wealth. He’d taken the name of Turner in exchange for a fortune—much to the fury of the rest of the Dalrymple family, who’d viewed the act as a mercenary betrayal. Time had passed. The elms reached halfway to the heavens now. The old Turner money had dwindled and disappeared before Ash had resurrected it. And yet the remnants of that bitter dispute still festered.

  No; Ash didn’t just want revenge. He also wanted to take care of his own. Until this morning, however, he’d thought only of his brothers and his business. He hadn’t comprehended precisely how many responsibilities he was inheriting.

  His responsibilities were not all unpleasant, though. There was, after all, Miss Lowell.

  Miss Lowell was a surprising, delectable contradiction of a woman. She was intelligent, fierce and loyal. She looked soft in all the right places, but when it came to the ones she cared for, she was hard as flint. She seemed formidable, and Ash appreciated formidable women.

  She was a mystery, and Ash was going to enjoy unraveling every delicious clue, until he’d stripped every last inch of her naked. In every sense of the word.

  Their group made its way back to the manor by way of a path that hugged the river. When they reached the house once more, the steward and the majordomo took their leave. Mrs. Benedict opened the outside door to the glassed-in conservatory. It was littered with buckets of rose cuttings and potted plants, awaiting permanent placement. From there, she led him down a hall and into another parlor. Windows looked out over the gray river in the distance.

  “There’s one last thing,” Mrs. Benedict said, coming to a halt. “I have standards for the conditions under which my girls must work.”

  “In my London townhouse, I grant my servants a half day every week and a pair of full days each month.”

  She let out a puff of air. “That’s not what I meant.” She squared her shoulders fiercely and then looked up. “I insist on this, Mr. Turner, as a condition of my employment. You and your brother are young, healthy males. I’ll not have you imposing on my girls. They’re from decent families. It’s not right to put them in a position where they can’t truly say no.”

  Ah. Those sorts of working conditions. Ash had a feeling he was going to like Mrs. Benedict.

  “You won’t have to worry about my brother,” Ash said. Unfortunately. “As for myself, I didn’t get where I was by indulging my wants indiscriminately. Besides, I had a sister, too. I couldn’t u
se any woman so cavalierly without her memory intruding.”

  What he had planned for Miss Lowell could hardly be considered cavalier. He considered it more along the lines of a regular campaign.

  But Mrs. Benedict must not have heard that unspoken caveat. She gave him a sharp nod. “You’re not what I expected, sir.”

  “I’m not what I expected, either.”

  She let loose a sharp chortle and reached into the pocket of her apron. With a metallic clink, she withdrew a chatelaine, heavy with keys, and unfastened the clasp of the ring. “I believe you.” She fished around and removed one. “Here.”

  He held out his hand.

  “It’s the master key.” She placed it into his waiting palm. “If you misuse it, I’ll have your ears, duke’s heir or no.”

  The key she put into his hand was heavy iron, the bow fashioned into wrought curlicues. Interwoven amongst those was the stylized sword that was so prominent on the Parford coat of arms. Ash stared at it in bemusement before shoving it into a pocket. Mrs. Benedict, however, was already opening the door onto a long hallway, her interview of him concluded. She marched away as if she were the commanding general. Ash shrugged and followed after.

  “Now,” she said as he came abreast of her once more, “tell me of your dining arrangements. Shall I manage the menus, or do you need to be consulted?”

  “I trust you. But speaking of dining, it occurs to me that my brother and I make dreadfully uneven numbers. Once the rest of my men arrive from London, there will be no remedying that, not with any influx of women. But for this evening…” He trailed off invitingly.

  Mrs. Benedict frowned as she walked. “Well, there’s the Misses Duprey, Amelia and Catherine, over north of Yeovil. They’d be delighted with an invitation. Further afield, we might think of Lady Harcourt’s daughters—a bit on the young side, fourteen and sixteen. Though Lady Harcourt wouldn’t mind in the least—she’s eager to marry them off.”