by Emily Larkin
Ironic, that. He trod in the footsteps of the seventh and eighth dukes every day, drank from the same glasses they’d drunk from, slept in the same great four-poster bed, even pissed in the same chamber pot, and yet he’d never met them when they’d been alive.
Not that he repined.
Oliver didn’t need to have met his grandfather to know he’d been a coldhearted bastard—how else could you describe a man who cut off a son for daring to refuse an arranged marriage? And Uncle Reginald had been a coldhearted bastard, too, for obeying the parental injunction to sever ties with his brother.
Uncle Algy hadn’t obeyed the parental injunction. Oliver had childhood memories of his uncle’s brief, secretive visits—the rumble of voices in the parlor, the laughter, the pipe smoke, his uncle winking at him when he arrived and slipping him a guinea when he left.
Strange to think that Uncle Algy was now Oliver’s heir.
He would have stayed talking to his uncle if he could, but the musicians were picking up their instruments again and the next aspiring duchess awaited him. Regretfully, Oliver bade his uncle goodbye. A dozen more steps and he hove to in front of Miss Buxton.
Miss Buxton’s main ploy for hunting dukes was a simper. Oliver didn’t like simpers. Every time Miss Buxton simpered, he deducted one point. Her score rapidly sank below zero. By the time the musicians played the final notes, she had reached minus eighty. Tonight’s lowest score.
One more dance to go and he could call it a night.
It was while he was heading towards his final partner that Oliver encountered the second of his two surviving relatives: Uncle Algernon’s son.
“Ninian.” Oliver looked his cousin up and down. “You look very, uh . . .” Pretty was the word that sprang to mind.
Their Uncle Reginald, the eighth duke, had been in his grave for more than a year. The time for mourning was long past, but Ninian was lingering in shades of lilac and lavender.
Lilac and lavender were colors Oliver would never willingly wear, but there was no denying that they suited Ninian’s golden hair and blue eyes. He looked beautiful. But Ninian always looked beautiful.
“Do you like it?” Ninian said. His gaze was bright and hopeful, and he might be a fribble and a fop, but he was also Uncle Algy’s son and Oliver’s only cousin.
Oliver strove for a compliment. “Very pretty coat. What color do you call it?”
“Periwinkle,” Ninian said, beaming.
“Suits you,” Oliver said, and then, “Excuse me, Ninian; I’m claimed for the next dance.”
* * *
His last partner for the night achieved a respectable one hundred and twenty-eight points, not because of her bosom, but because she had a very pretty pair of dimples. Oliver liked dimples, and in another time and place he might have tried to coax a kiss from Miss Norton. But he was no longer a devil-may-care dragoon captain, he was a prudent duke, and so he escorted Miss Norton back to her mother, unkissed.
Oliver was aware of young ladies hopefully eyeing him. He made for the door, not pausing long enough for anyone to catch him.
A flight of stairs beckoned him downwards. He breathed a sigh of relief and descended to the vestibule. A footman fetched his hat for him. Oliver stepped outside. It wasn’t completely dark under the portico—flambeaux burned, keeping the night at bay—but it was blessedly cool and quiet after the ballroom.
A dozen marble steps led down to the street, gleaming in the light from the flaming torches. Oliver stood for a moment on the topmost step. Funny that one could feel lonely in a city as large as London, but he did feel lonely at this moment, had in fact felt lonely rather often in the month he’d been back on English soil.
If this were India, he’d have Ned Lovelock at one shoulder and Tubby Hedgecomb at the other, and they’d be laughing together, enjoying being young and alive.
But this wasn’t India.
Oliver put his hat on, tilted the brim until it sat just right, and promised himself that he’d call on Rhodes Garland tomorrow. A few hours in Rhodes’s company would make him feel less alone.
His ears caught the faint scuff of a shoe behind him—and then someone shoved him violently between the shoulder blades.
Chapter Three
Oliver tumbled down the sharp, pale marble steps to the street. If he hadn’t had so much practice falling off horses, he might have broken his neck. But he’d spent eight years in the cavalry and he’d come off horses more times than he could remember, so he managed not to break any bones. It did hurt, though.
He lay sprawled on the paving stones for a moment, his own cry of alarm ringing in his ears, while the night spun jerkily around him—shadows and torchlight—and then he caught his breath and cautiously pushed up to sitting. Ouch.
“Sir?” someone called out. “Are you all right, sir?”
Footsteps pattered down the marble stairs. Someone crouched alongside him. One of the footmen from the vestibule, his expression turning to horrified dismay when he recognized Oliver. “Your Grace! Are you all right?”
“Perfectly.” He climbed to his feet, while the footman fluttered solicitously around him.
Oliver rolled his shoulders and rubbed the back of his neck. He looked up the steps to the portico. The flambeaux flared and the shadows writhed, but the portico appeared to be empty.
Oliver rubbed the back of his neck again. He distinctly remembered someone shoving him. “Did you see anyone under the portico with me?”
The footman picked up his hat and brushed it off. “With you, sir? No.”
Had he imagined it? No. He could still feel the pressure of a hand between his shoulder blades. “Did anyone leave the ball immediately after I did?”
“No, sir.” The footman handed Oliver his hat.
“Did anyone leave just before me?”
The man’s brow wrinkled. “I don’t think so, Your Grace. But people have been coming and going all night.”
Yes, of course they had.
Oliver turned the hat over in his hands. Who on earth had pushed him down those stairs? A stranger? Someone he knew? And why?
Oliver glanced at the footman. The footman gazed anxiously back at him. Was he anxious because he’d pushed Oliver and didn’t wish to be found out? Or anxious because a duke had almost died on his employer’s doorstep?
“Would you like to come inside, sir? Perhaps sit down?”
“No,” Oliver said.
“Shall I fetch a carriage for you, Your Grace?”
“No,” Oliver said again, and then: “How did you know I’d fallen? Did you see it?”
“No, sir. I heard a cry.”
He’d called out as he fell, he remembered that. And he remembered hearing the scuff of a shoe behind him. And he remembered a hand between his shoulder blades. It wasn’t his imagination. Someone had pushed him. But most likely not the footman.
Oliver put on his hat. “Thank you,” he told the man. “Good night.”
“Are you certain I can’t fetch you a carriage?” the footman said.
“I’m certain.” Oliver fished in his pocket and pulled out a guinea. “Thank you for your help.”
He walked down the street, not striding as briskly as he usually did; he was going to be sporting some bruises tomorrow. But he was used to bruises. Bruises didn’t bother him, nor did broken bones. What did bother him was that someone had pushed him down those stairs.
At the corner, Oliver paused and glanced back at that tall townhouse, that portico, those stairs.
Who had shoved him? And why?
* * *
He went to sleep feeling rather perturbed, and woke eight hours later feeling much more the thing. No one had been trying to kill him. It had been a mean-spirited prank, that was all, perpetrated by someone who’d had too much to drink and was perhaps a little jealous of Oliver’s good fortune. He’d been foolish to imagine it could be anything more than that.
He felt rather less cheerful when he climbed out of bed. Damn it, he hadn’t had this many
bruises for quite some time.
A warm bath helped with the stiffness, and a hearty breakfast and a ride in Hyde Park restored Oliver to good spirits. He spent several hours learning to be a duke, reading reports from his bailiffs that made little sense now, but would once he’d toured his estates—then strolled across town to visit Rhodes Garland.
Rhodes was staying at his father’s townhouse on St. James’s Square, as he always did when in London—although “townhouse” was a misnomer given that the building was the size of a mansion. Sevenash House was its name, because Rhodes’s father was the Duke of Sevenash, and one day Rhodes would be Duke of Sevenash himself.
But hopefully not for a long time.
Rhodes’s father wasn’t the sort of duke Oliver’s grandfather had been. Sevenash was cut from entirely different cloth. He’d stood by Oliver’s father when he was cut off, and he’d stood by Oliver when his father had died, and stood by him again ten years later when his mother had died. It was Sevenash who’d paid for Oliver’s education at Winchester and Cambridge, Sevenash who’d purchased his commission into the dragoons.
Oliver had been too young and too bewildered to protest about Winchester, but he’d protested about Cambridge, and about the dragoons, too, and Sevenash had merely smiled at him and said, “Nonsense. You’re my godson. Of course I’m paying for it.”
What Sevenash hadn’t said—but that Oliver had known—was that Sevenash loved Oliver almost as much as he’d loved his own children. And what Oliver had never said—but hoped that Sevenash knew—was that he loved Sevenash almost as much as he’d loved his own father.
Sevenash had been there when Oliver had needed him, and Oliver had repaid Sevenash in the only way possible: by being the best student he could and the best soldier he could. In all honesty, he hadn’t been a very good student—he’d had no aptitude for conjugating Latin and Greek verbs—but he’d been a damned good soldier. He was proud of how good a soldier he’d been, and he hoped Sevenash had been proud, too.
For a moment, standing there in St. James’s Square, Oliver felt a pang of regret—he had wanted to make colonel by the time he was forty, damn it—and then he shook his head and laughed. He’d inherited a dukedom and a fortune and he was feeling sorry for himself? “Dasenby, you addle-pate, you don’t know how lucky you are,” he said under his breath, and then he ran up the marble steps to Sevenash House.
A footman opened the huge front door.
Oliver stepped into the entrance hall and handed over his hat and gloves. His most visceral wrench of recognition since returning to England had occurred right here in this entrance hall—a wrench so strong that it had actually brought tears to his eyes.
He didn’t feel that wrench today, just a sense of coming home. Here was the vast black-white-and-gray marble floor where he and Rhodes had played their own version of hopscotch—the white squares boiling seas, the black squares bottomless pits, peril in every jump; there was the imposing double staircase with the banisters they’d slid down. In fact, the first time he’d broken his arm had been on this marble floor after sliding down those sleek banisters.
Sevenash House was enormous by anyone’s standard. Usually it was brimming with bustle and noise, footsteps, voices, laughter, but the duke and his duchess had departed for Gloucestershire two days ago, taking Rhodes’s three young children with them and a great many servants, and the house felt much emptier than Oliver was used to, even though it wasn’t empty. Rhodes was still here, and his sisters.
The butler, Forbes—who’d been Edward the footman when Oliver was a boy—welcomed him with an un-butler-ish smile, calling him Your Grace in exactly the same tone in which he’d called him Master Oliver all those years ago.
“Afternoon, Forbes,” Oliver said cheerfully. “Is his lordship at home?”
“Yes, sir.”
Rhodes Garland, Marquis of Thayne and heir to the dukedom of Sevenash, was in the library reading the Gazette. Or rather pretending to. The newspaper was in his lap, and he was staring at it, but if he’d actually been reading it, Oliver would have eaten his neckcloth. Rhodes had a sad, faraway look on his face, a look that Oliver guessed he’d worn a lot since his wife, Evelyn’s, death last year—not that Oliver knew that for certain, since he’d been in India when Evelyn had died, but he knew he’d seen that look on Rhodes’s face quite a few times in the past four weeks.
“Hello, old fellow,” he said.
The unhappy, distant look vanished. “Ollie.” Rhodes put aside the Gazette. “What are you doing here?”
“Came to visit you.” Oliver strolled across to the sofa and sat, stretching out his legs. Damn it, his knee hurt from tumbling down those stairs. “Didn’t see you at the Cunninghams’ ball last night.”
“Balls,” Rhodes said, in a tone that implied that he classed balls only slightly above going to the dentist to have a tooth drawn. Then he made what was obviously a determined effort to smile. “Would you like something to drink? Madeira? Sherry? Brandy?”
“Brandy,” Oliver said.
Rhodes poured them both a glass and they sipped and talked, and talked and sipped, and finally Oliver got Rhodes to laugh. The first laugh was the hardest, but once he got Rhodes past that hurdle, each laugh came more easily, and by the time the clock on the mantelpiece struck half past four, Rhodes was slouching in his armchair, looking cheerful and relaxed. The door swung open and Primrose entered, dressed in a very handsome riding habit. “Rhodes, please say you’ll come with us to Hyde Park.” And then she saw Oliver, and halted. She looked momentarily disconcerted. Color rose in her cheeks. “I beg your pardon. I didn’t realize you were here.” She bit her lip for a brief second, and then said brightly, “Would you like to come with us to Hyde Park, Oliver?”
“Us?”
“Aster, Violet, and me. We always ride in Hyde Park at this hour.”
Oliver glanced at Rhodes. “Want to join the Grand Strut, old fellow?”
Rhodes hesitated, and Oliver could clearly see his reluctance. Primrose must have seen it, too, because she said, “Not if you don’t want to.”
“I’ll come with you tomorrow,” Rhodes said, and something in Primrose’s expression made Oliver think that Rhodes had said the exact same thing yesterday.
“Of course.” Primrose smiled again, much less brightly, nodded to Oliver, and left the library.
There was a moment of silence, then Rhodes said, “More brandy?”
“A little.” He surrendered his glass and watched Rhodes pour. A bust of Cicero presided over the crystal decanters. “That’s not the same Cicero whose nose we broke off, is it?”
“No.”
Oliver accepted his glass back. “Lord, can you remember how panicked we were?”
“I remember that you tried to stick it back on with paste from the schoolroom. Your expression, when it fell off again . . .” Rhodes uttered a crack of laughter.
They talked and laughed and sipped their brandy, and it felt so much like old times that Oliver almost couldn’t believe that he’d been away from England for eight years. But that was the mark of the very best friendships: that you could pick up where you’d left off, however long you’d been apart.
Come to think of it, he’d picked up with Primrose in much the same way.
At seven o’clock, Primrose poked her head into the library again. “Rhodes, are you coming to the Turvingtons’ ball tonight?”
Rhodes seemed to tense slightly. “Do you need an escort?” he asked, in a very neutral tone.
Primrose hesitated. Oliver could tell that she was as aware of her brother’s reluctance as he was. “No,” she said. “Aunt Rosemary has said she’ll take us.”
Rhodes relaxed fractionally. “Then I shan’t come.”
Primrose bit her lip, and then said, “We’re dining with our cousins first. Will you at least join us for that?”
“Not tonight,” Rhodes said.
Primrose nodded, and glanced at Oliver. She seemed to be trying to impart a silent message.
Oliver wasn’t entirely certain what that message might be, but he thought he could guess. Primrose was worried about her brother, worried that he didn’t appear to want to leave the house. “I’m dining at my club tonight,” he said. “Care to join me, Rhodes?”
“You’re not going to the Turvingtons’ ball?”
Not with his knee this sore. Oliver shook his head. “I don’t feel like dancing tonight. Dinner and a bottle of good claret, maybe a game of cards. What do you say?”
Rhodes considered this invitation for a moment, turned his glass around in his hands, once, twice, a third time, and then said, “Well . . . all right.”
* * *
At eight o’clock Rhodes went upstairs to put on a fresh neckcloth. Oliver strolled out to the entrance hall to wait for him. Primrose came down the staircase in a soft rustle of blue silk. She crossed to Oliver. “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For making him laugh. For making him go out.” She looked down at the floor, traced a pattern on the marble with the toe of one dancing slipper, glanced back up at him. “He’s been . . . not himself since the children left.”
“Why didn’t he go with them?”
“It’s family tradition. Mother and Father take the children into the country in June and the rest of us stay in London. Evelyn and Rhodes used to call it their furlough month—when they could dance until dawn and be giddy and irresponsible.” She looked down at the floor again, traced another pattern with her toe. “When Rhodes decided to stay in London, I thought maybe . . . but I was wrong. He doesn’t want to dance. He doesn’t even want to go outside.”
