Jilting the Duke

by Rachael Miles

  “Then you don’t deserve half the credit for observation I’ve given you. Ian will be fine, but Sophia shouldn’t be left alone.”

  “Then perhaps Sophia should accompany us.” A splendid idea. He wondered why he hadn’t thought of it before. A summer in his country home, the two of them—and Ian of course. Little possibility of interference. One hundred possibilities for seduction.

  Phee finally sat on the couch beside him. “Actually, Aidan, that’s not a bad idea. It might even be brilliant. I’ve often suggested Sophia take a week at Tom’s country place. But she refuses. Leaving London might offer the recuperation she needs. Of course you would have to host a house party. She couldn’t come alone with only Ian.”

  “It’s a big house. She’s a widow. He’s my ward.” Aidan patted Ophelia’s hand as if to console her.

  “That won’t matter if someone in the ton objects.” Ophelia pulled her hand away in refusal. “Her reputation may be spotless, but yours isn’t.”

  “I could have the dower house prepared for her and Ian,” he suggested.

  Ophelia considered his words. “Actually, that might work. Of course Kate and Ariel and I could make a trip to the country as well.”

  “You are always welcome at Greenwood Hall.” Aidan offered the expected invitation.

  “Oh, I feel so much better.” Phee leaned over and kissed Aidan’s cheek. “Now we must convince Sophia. She’s wary of you. Apparently tourist gossip in Italy did not stand you in good stead.”

  “I’m yours to advise, Phee. What would you have me do?” Aidan knew that by appearing to follow Ophelia’s guidance, he gained the chance to allay any later suspicions she might have.

  “I want you to be charming and solicitous, but more subtle. None of those hungry looks that make women run after you. And I want you to escort her to my house for a family dinner tomorrow night. I won’t tolerate excuses. It’s been far too long since you dined with us.”

  “Then I will offer none. If Sophia agrees, I will play coachman. A charming, solicitous, subtle coachman.”

  Ophelia smiled broadly. “Then it’s settled. Of course, you must promise that once you are ensconced in the country, you won’t grow bored and seduce her for entertainment.”

  “Phee, I’m crushed. You think I would seduce the wife of my childhood friend and the mother of my ward?” Aidan pretended to be wounded.

  “Well, to be perfectly honest, neither of you is married. If you were discreet . . . well, I would offer no recriminations. She’s not the sort of woman you typically prefer, but perhaps you could find her attractive. It might even bring some life back into her. . . .”

  Aidan sat back in his chair, laughing, and stretched out his long limbs. “Phee, I’ve never known you to encourage me in an affair, so I’m unsure what to say. I will promise you this however: if I were to seduce Sophia, it wouldn’t be from boredom.”

  * * *

  Ian was lively and animated at dinner, hardly able to contain himself.

  “He knew the battle as well as Papa.” He pulled his leg up to sit on it in his chair.

  Sophia pretended not to notice. Ian rarely forgot his table manners, and she didn’t wish to interrupt his excitement. “It was kind of Forster to stay so long.”

  “He said he would come back tomorrow. I’ve planned another battle, a harder one this time. I wonder if he’ll know it.” Ian bounced back and forth on his bent leg.

  “Which battle, darling?”

  “Bosworth Field, though I have to put little pieces of paper on the men to show which side they fight on. When Papa lost—he always played Richard—he used to run around the room, and call out, ‘a horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse.’ Then he’d let me stab him. Papa said I made a fine Henry Tudor. Do you think Forster knows about Richard III?—he was a hunchback and murdered his nephews. Or will I need to tell him?”

  “The Duke was very well-read when your father knew him. But if he doesn’t know, I’m sure he wouldn’t mind your telling him. He always liked to learn new things.” It was dangerous to think of Aidan as he had been as a young man, but his kindness to Ian had made Sophia remember his unusual patience with his own younger brothers, patience she’d always believed he’d cultivated to make up for Aaron’s many cruelties.

  “I’d like him to know. It would be fun for him to say the line—Papa said it was from Shakespeare. Do you think Forster would read me the part? I’d like to hear it from the play. Papa never read me the play because I was too young. But I’m not too young now, am I?”

  “No, darling, you’re not too young.”

  There was almost no need to answer. Ian’s pleasure ran faster than his words. Forster was well on his way to becoming her son’s hero.

  Sophia listened as Ian detailed each step of the battle to come, how Henry Tudor’s troops would be outnumbered, how Richard would divide his army into three groups, how Richard’s noble allies would fail him.

  She asked questions about which generals led which troops and how they positioned themselves on the battlefield. Ian had not been so excited since before his father died. Perhaps she and Aidan could share a mutual affection for her son, and if there was nothing else between them, that mutual affection could stand for friendship.

  * * *

  Sophia kissed Ian good night, entrusting him to Sally’s care. She watched as the pair, laughing, ascended the stairs to the nursery, before she turned to her own room.

  At the door’s opening, Artemisia ran from the open balcony doors, not to greet her, but to escape into the hall and down to the kitchen, where she would spend the night hunting mice and being disappointed. Even mice were afraid to intrude on Cook’s domain. “At least,” Sophia said, more to herself than the cat, “you have the good grace to rub against my ankles before you abandon me.”

  Her voice stilled on the word abandon. She knew—and had known long before she realized that Tom would die—that she held so tightly to Ian because she had suffered so many losses of her own. Before she’d turned fifteen, she’d lost all the people she’d loved: her parents, her beloved aunt Clara, then her adored governess Mrs. Lesley. Perhaps that was why Sophia had acquiesced when Aidan had told her he was going to the wars. Everyone else she’d ever loved had left; why not Aidan as well?

  Sophia blinked her tears away. To distract herself from sad thoughts, she curled up on the chaise longue to read, long, round pillows behind her back, and an oil lamp at her side for when the evening light waned.

  Perhaps a book would quiet her restless mind.

  She first opened Burney’s novel, but the plight of the heroine—nameless, alone, reliant on the kindness of strangers—only made her more sad. So, she turned to Don Juan, an anonymous satire on literature and society that everyone attributed to the exiled Lord Byron. The poem recounted the love affair between a hapless Don JOO-un (as the rhyme told her to pronounce it) and the older, beautiful, and married Donna Julia. Throughout, Byron offered clever digressions on the work of other English poets. Sophia found much of the first canto amusing. But at Donna Julia’s defense of women trapped in unfulfilling arranged marriages, Sophia grew pensive. Donna Julia’s farewell to her lover reminded Sophia of herself and Aidan.

  Closing the book on her finger, she leaned her head back against the arm of the chaise. Tears welled in her eyes, but did not fall.

  She had believed their passion would connect them across the years, that they could not meet without emotion, even if it were hate. She had been wrong. And like Donna Julia, she was left with a heart still his, remembering every caress as if it were burned into her skin.

  Yet, she consoled herself, the meeting she had dreaded for a decade had come and passed. And she had survived.

  Tomorrow she would set her love for him behind, knowing that no spark was left. But for what was left of tonight, she would mourn.

  She opened the book to the place marked by her finger. She read again Julia’s parting lines to Juan, this time adapting them as a farewell to her passion for
Aidan:

  “You will proceed in pleasure, and in pride,

  Beloved and loving many; . . . but I cannot cast aside

  The passion which still rages as before,

  And so farewell—forgive me, love me—No,

  That word is idle now—but let it go.”

  That night Sophia dreamt of Tom. He was handing her the papers. “Are you sure you want the responsibility of these? I could send them to Aldine with instructions to keep them sealed. When it was time, you could instruct him how to proceed.”

  She’d refused. “The risk is too great. They could go astray. Someone could read them. They will be safer with me.”

  He’d covered her hands with his hands and pressed a kiss to her forehead. “You are remarkable, Sophia. Few women would agree to this.”

  It had been the last time they had touched.

  * * *

  For a decade, Aidan’s dream had begun the same. Sophia slipped into his room, smiling, her long dark hair loose around her shoulders, a white shift sheer against her limbs. Locking the door behind her, she would run soundlessly into his arms, kiss his neck, his face, his lips. Her hands would caress his chest and back. She would thread his hair through her fingers, as she held him tightly, passionately. She would lead him to the edge of the bed, holding her finger to her lips for silence. He would watch, silent, as her clothes dropped to the floor around her feet. In bed, he would be entranced by the sight of her, naked above him, beneath him, caught in the embrace of her long, slender arms. He would revel in her caresses, then sate his desire in the softness of her body, as she called his name in ecstasy.

  If Aidan could have awoken at the moment of their shared climax, he might have found the dream a pleasant residual of youthful passion—a strange quirk of memory that allowed him to enjoy her body over and over. But the dream never ended there. It always shifted to any of a series of endings, all betrayals. Sometimes she would simply disappear from his arms to the sound of mocking laughter. Sometimes he would search for her, calling her name in the darkened halls of his family home, but finding only the echo of his own voice. Other times she would run away from him, and no matter how hard he ran he could never catch her. Frequently he would find her in a lighted ballroom, dancing, being swept away by partner after partner, always out of reach. Often, she ran into the arms of another man, a man he trusted and called friend, and that man would lead her into a waiting carriage. Aidan would stand on the porch steps, helpless to stop the carriage, watching it disappear into the night, her name unvoiced on his lips.

  He always awoke shaking with frustration and anger, his heart racing and his body covered with sweat. The dream had visited him less frequently over the years, the benefit of brandy or an intoxicating woman. But its intensity never lessened. For days after, he would revisit the dream while waking, playing the scenes over in his mind. He allowed himself the torment. He never wanted to forget the dream’s message: that he was a fool. And each time, he renewed his pledge that no woman would make him a fool again. And for nine years, no woman had, his heart protected by Sophia’s betrayal.

  But a year ago, the dream had changed. Sophia came to him in joy as always, and they made love passionately, but when she disappeared from his bed, he found himself in the churchyard of an English village, following her through the gravestones. Suddenly she was gone, and Aidan stood at an open grave, watching a wooden casket be lowered into the ground.

  At the side of the grave stood Tom, dressed in black mourning clothes, thinner, older, with a red flush on his cheeks and leaning on a cane. Tom held out his hand, saying, “I have never had greater need of a friend or brother.” Aidan, moved by the sorrow in Tom’s eyes, took a step toward him, but he disappeared before Aidan reached the other side of the open grave.

  This night, Aidan awoke to his name being called by a male voice he would have known despite the separation of many years: Tom’s voice. He threw himself from the bed, listening as the voice came from the garden below his open window. As he pulled open the long glass doors onto the balcony, Aidan was struck suddenly by memories of childhood, of climbing down the balcony at his father’s house to meet Tom for nighttime adventures, of patrolling the woods at the edge of the estate, playing Arthur’s knights or Norse marauders, and of circling their rowboats in the pond to fight as Nelson’s armada. Aidan felt the loss of his friendship with Tom slip past his defenses and settle as an ache in his memory.

  The garden was lit by a full moon, with mists passing below on the grounds, shrouding the familiar shapes of the hedges and walkways into new unfamiliar ones. The ridges of the old flower beds, now unkempt, appeared like so many graves. A dark figure stood beside one of the beds, and, as in Aidan’s dream, held out his hand to Aidan, then disappeared.

  Aidan caught himself as he was about to climb down the balcony. Moved with sudden and surprising emotion, he stretched his hand out to the garden where he was certain Tom had stood, but where now there was only fog and darkness.

  Chapter Ten

  Charters pushed hard against the garden door, pressing his shoulder against the crack of rotten wood. The door fell open, broken against the latch.

  The house had few servants. An old butler too deaf to hear the groan of the wood as it collapsed. The cook, his wife, too arthritic to move quickly, if at all. Charters left the broken door as a payment for the sweet lemonade and savory cakes the cook had always saved for his visits when he was young. Perhaps it would be enough to save the staff from suspicion. The house was characteristic of the aged: careful locks at the front, rotting doors on the back, as if a burglar always entered through the main door rather than hopping the wall at the mews.

  The late Lord Montcrief’s study opened directly off the back, still carrying the faint smell of death. The glass-fronted cabinet of curiosities sat prominently before the desk, the key in the lock. Charters shook his head: Montcrief would not have been pleased to see his treasures so unattended.

  Charters pulled the key from the lock and dropped it on the floor, to suggest haste. The piece he wanted was wrapped in soft flannel, pushed to the back of the drawer beneath the cabinet. Montcrief had always thought it a copy, but Charters knew different. He unwrapped the antique Damascus blade reverently, felt the knife’s heft and balance, then slipped it into the empty scabbard at his waist. From the cabinet itself, he gathered half a dozen of Montcrief’s smaller objet d’art and put them in a bag. He slipped back out of the house into the night.

  At the wall closest to the mews, Charters poured the items from the bag on the ground. A burglary gone awry; the pieces recovered. That’s how the newspapers would tell it. Then, he let himself out the garden gate, locking it behind him, his hand caressing the hilt of the knife.

  As he walked away from the wall, Charters wondered wryly if he should thank Aldine for all his help. Most of the documents Aldine gave him to deliver appeared mundane: a death notice, a house being let, an investments report. But others contained information some would pay to keep confidential, and still others would pay to learn. Without Aldine’s deliveries, Charters wouldn’t have known that Montcrief’s treasures still remained in his old home. Nor would he have known that Lady Wilmot still employed Luca Bruni, one of Tom’s confederates in the spy game. A member of the Carbonari in the household of a British peer. Charters could make much of that.

  He rubbed his thumb on the smooth hilt as he walked. Had both Forster and Lady Wilmot signed the same set of papers? If so, what business connected the two? Charters would have to find the papers later on his own. But where? He’d already searched all of Aldine’s files related to Lady Wilmot and found nothing. And Aldine never carried papers home. It was a complication.

  Forster was a complication as well. At Harrow, they had been in the same form, well-matched rivals, both in their studies and at chess. Both third sons, they had no guaranteed sinecure. Instead, each was forced to be reliant on his wits and skills to advance. During the wars, Charters had listened for Forster’s name, lear
ning the young officer had been with Wellington at Badajoz and Salamanca. After that, Forster had been nowhere for several years, though rumor had placed him in clandestine circles.

  Charters had been imagining a pretty game of cat and mouse with the lovely Lady Wilmot, ending—as they so often did—with her apparent suicide or accidental death. But Forster was one of the few men in London who could fit the pieces together. Was Forster involved somehow with Lady Wilmot? If so, Charters had less time than he’d imagined. But complications often made the game a more worthy challenge.

  Chapter Eleven

  Working all morning in the garden with Perkins, Sophia didn’t realize until well past noon that Forster had never sent round a note about visiting Ian. She should have been angry, but she was only surprised and disappointed. She had almost convinced herself that Aidan would care about Ian’s feelings, but this was exactly the sort of behavior she had predicted to Tom. Perhaps it was for the best. If Forster couldn’t play with a child for an hour or so when he had himself suggested it, then she had little to fear from him as an interfering guardian. But she was unexpectedly sorry to have been right.

  Ian, however, would be hurt and out of sorts. Though his father’s illness and death had made Ian mature, he was still young. She would need to soothe his disappointment. Perhaps a visit with Nate or a trip to the Royal Menagerie as a treat. Surely Dodsley would know where a boy might like to go in London.

  She dusted her hands on her gardening apron, cursed under her breath, and went to comfort her son.

  As she approached the nursery, she heard Ian’s laugh, boisterous and excited. Thank God, she thought, for Luca. But in the nursery she found Forster, sitting on the floor, surrounded by soldiers, and Ian, animated with delight.

  Ian saw her immediately. “Mama, Mama, I won. I beat him. And look . . .” He grabbed up some soldiers and ran to her, putting them in her hands. “Forster brought me the set he and Papa used to play with. See . . .” He ran back to the pile of soldiers and picked out the banner-bearer. “See how he matches some of the men. This set has four armies, so that I can have bigger battles.” Ian threw his arms around her waist. “Isn’t it tremendous? Forster says I may keep them. May I? May I?”