Abigail rose, unable to sit calmly while she recited the terms by which her heart would finish breaking. A rustling in the bushes suggested Hercules would soon return to the terrace.
“Above all things,” she said, “Stephen is haunted by the possibility that he will live down to Jack Wentworth’s standards, as a human being and most especially as a father. Jack was a vile, bullying, selfish reptile. I suspect Stephen is selling off his munitions factories because he grasps the difference between a defensive war and one waged purely out of greed. Jack Wentworth would approve of the latter, while even I can grasp the need for the former.”
The duke was watching her closely, and not with any particular expression of dismay. “Stephen has a son?”
“A beautiful, healthy, smart, and charming little boy. As it happens, the child’s mother is widowed and of suitable rank to marry a ducal heir.”
For the privilege of raising the son who should never have been hidden from him, Stephen would make that union cordial and successful.
“A son.” His Grace rose easily. “You’re sure?”
“I saw the boy with my own eyes, Lady Champlain confirmed his patrimony. Surely you can see—”
The duke approached and did not stop a cordial distance away. He instead wrapped Abigail in a gentle hug.
“Dukes lead the way into battle, Abigail. Stephen will be a duke one day.”
Quinn Wentworth’s embrace was different from Stephen’s. Abigail did not have to think of anybody’s balance or where a cane could rest without being knocked over. There was no escaping Quinn’s hug, and for the space of several breaths, Abigail let him simply hold her.
“Stephen will be a very f-fine duke, but I cannot be—”
Quinn patted her back. “A wise duchess once told me that dukes ride into battle at the head of armies, Abigail, not alone. Only a fool rides into life’s battles alone when good comrades are on hand to share the challenges. Do you know why a duke is willing to take on the fights that need fighting, even the hard, thankless fights?”
Stephen would do that. He had arranged for his brother’s mining bill to become law and asked nothing for himself.
“I know I must be on that stagecoach tonight,” Abigail said, “and that I detest weepy women.” Which she was very soon to become, if the duke did not give her immediate privacy. She burrowed closer and tried for a steadying breath.
“A duke rides into battle because he must be worthy of the lady riding at his side. Harmonia hasn’t the heart to be Stephen’s duchess, and you do. You are his choice. Let him be yours.”
He kissed her forehead, tucked a monogrammed handkerchief into her hand, and sauntered back into the house. Then and only then did Abigail descend into the garden and call for Hercules.
When the beast trotted out of the rhododendrons, she sank down, wrapped her arms around him, and let the tears come.
“He’s your son.” Harmonia tossed the words at Stephen as if she were calling out the paces at a duel, not presiding over a tea tray.
“Well, that explains it,” Stephen said, setting down his teacup slowly. The meaning of Harmonia’s revelation was plain enough, but for some reason, Stephen’s heart felt trapped in the pause between thunder and lightning.
“Explains what?” Harmonia asked.
“Why Miss Abbott insisted I call on you. Did she know of this?”
Harmonia sat back without pouring herself a cup of tea. “She took one look at him. One look. I didn’t want that woman in my nursery out of, I don’t know, maternal instinct, but I never dreamed she’d see a resemblance between you and your son that easily.”
“Miss Abbott has keen powers of observation. Why didn’t you tell me?” And why wasn’t Stephen angrier? More surprised? Pleased? Something?
“I didn’t want him to be yours,” Harmonia said, “but he is yours. I cannot deny that. When you and I were dallying, Champlain was off in France fiddling with some violinist, or more likely a whole quartet. Champlain congratulated me on conceiving—congratulated me!—and I think he was honestly relieved.”
Still, Stephen could not grasp how he was supposed to feel about this development. “Champlain knew he’d been cuckolded?”
Harmonia poured herself a cup of tea, the hot liquid nearly missing the cup. “He once said that the reason I wasn’t conceiving might be that we didn’t suit in that regard. I could carry another man’s child, he could impregnate other women—and what wife wants to hear that casual admission?—but we were not a mating pair. I hate that term.”
“Doesn’t sit well with me either.” He’s your son. He’s your son. He’s your son. “Does Stapleton realize who the boy’s father is?”
“The marquess will doubtless guess, particularly as Nicky matures. He cocks his head as you do, and he is much cleverer than Champlain or I could hope to be. You have every right to be wroth with me.”
“Do I?” What would Abigail make of this development? More to the point, what had she made of it? What had the most glorious week of lovemaking in Stephen’s generally self-indulgent life been about?
“These things happen in the best families,” Harmonia said primly, as if some venerable uncle had grown a bit vague. “You still had a right to know.”
“We were dallying, Harmonia, each out to prove something by taking our clothes off and falling into the same bed. We were foolish.” Maybe pathetic was the better word. “We need not be foolish now.”
She took a sip of her tea, the cup rattling as she returned it to the saucer. “What were you trying to prove?”
A fair question. “Perhaps that I could swagger around like all the real courtesy lords who hadn’t been born in the gutter? Perhaps that my knee was useless, but my pizzle was entirely in working order? Nothing of any moment.”
Harmonia set her teacup back on the tray. “I wanted Champlain to notice me. To pay some blasted attention to the wife who loved him. I was so angry, and he was so focused on his next debauch. I might as well have been an aging lapdog for all he recalled where he’d last put me.”
“Take some shortbread,” Stephen said, holding out the plate. “You’ve had a trying time of it.”
She took a piece, had a small nibble, and set it on her plate. That sequence, of following a polite order, never questioning its appropriateness, struck Stephen as some sort of metaphor. Harmonia ought to be throwing the plate against the wall or at the very least delivering a few pointed opinions on the perfidy of her late husband.
Abigail would certainly not be sipping tea and nibbling shortbread simply because convention called for it.
“Andy says I must marry you.” Harmonia’s hands were fisted in her lap. “Stapleton will likely take up the same notion by this time next week. Nicky is your son, he needs a father, and I am a proven breeder.”
“Harmonia, the man who called you that will soon be far, far away. Put the term from your mind.”
“It’s the truth,” she said miserably. “And Her Grace of Walden was brought to bed with another daughter, and you are the heir, and Andy is right.”
“You’ve discussed this with de Beauharnais?”
She pulled an ornately embroidered handkerchief from a skirt pocket and dabbed at her eyes. “Andy isn’t like you lot. He’s not a lord, he’s not fascinated with ever-greater sprees of debauchery, and he’s good with Nicky. I like him and he likes me, and I have never had anybody simply like me before.”
I liked you. As soon as the thought popped into Stephen’s head it was followed by the admission that he’d barely known Harmonia, and the woman he’d slept with all those years ago had barely known him.
“I will not be parted from my son,” Harmonia said, sniffling. “If that means I must marry you and be your duchess, then I will marry you. We can be civil about it. Being a duchess can’t be any worse than being the widowed mother of a marquess.”
Of a marquess’s heir, strictly speaking. And of Stephen’s son.
“Andy was slightly debauched with me,” Stephen sa
id, apropos of nothing in the whole entire world. “I like him. You’re right. He doesn’t put on airs, and he’s a decent man.”
Harmonia peered at him over her handkerchief. “With you?”
“A passing fancy on my part. I’m not sure what motivated his interest in me. We have remained friends.” Why hadn’t Stephen remained friends with Harmonia? Oh, right. Because she’d been hiding his son from him, and he’d been too busy…playing with guns?
“But you’re…I shouldn’t be surprised. Champlain was indiscriminate with his favors. I hadn’t pegged you for that kind. I truly do not want to be married to another profligate rake, my lord.”
“That’s doing it a bit brown, Harmonia. I was never in the exalted league of rakes Champlain occupied.”
“You were dashing,” she said, with no little asperity. “You were charming, and you made more advances not dancing than most men can manage in an entire quadrille.”
“My apologies.” He’s your son. Though that wasn’t quite right. The boy was Harmonia’s son and Stephen’s son—our son. This fact floated in the same sea of unreality that Stephen had been swimming in for the past quarter hour.
“Harmonia, what do you want to do about this situation? You are the child’s mother, and you are clearly devoted to him.” Blindly so? But what small boy didn’t need a blindly devoted parent or two?
She rose to pace, which was surely a measure of considerable upset, for ladies did not pace—though they apparently dallied, stole letters, and cuckolded heirs to the peerage.
Some ladies did, and Abigail paced.
“I want to raise my son,” Harmonia said. “I want to be left in peace to raise Nicky and maybe find a fellow who doesn’t mind about me being so old, and not having much in the way of settlements or a bosom. I want my own house, a little manor somewhere in Kent and not in the freezing bedamned north because it’s convenient to the perishing, rubbishing grouse moors.”
She put a hand to her mouth. “I said bedamned. I am quite vexed. I do apologize. My mama will be overjoyed to have a duchess for a daughter.”
“To summarize, then,” Stephen said, taking up his cane and pushing to his feet, “you do not want me.”
Harmonia’s dread was written in her teary eyes. She dreaded to offend the man who could all but force her to the altar, and she dreaded equally to speak her vows with him.
“What matters,” Stephen said, “is the child. The situation must be resolved with his best interests in mind. I’d like to meet him.”
All the righteous wind dropped from Harmonia’s sails. “I was afraid of that. He’s in the nursery, and Andy is with him. Come along, and don’t think to introduce yourself as his father. This isn’t the time for that. Nicky won’t understand what it means.”
“My dear Harmonia, I barely understand it myself.”
Abigail chose to spend her last London afternoon in Hyde Park, watching the swans glide on the leaf-darkened water. Her ears warned her of Stephen’s approach, so attuned had she become to the cadence of his gait.
“You could not brood on a handy back terrace, could you?” he muttered. “You had to secret yourself in the wilds of the largest park in England and force a poor, lame fellow to track you down. Well, know this, Miss Abigail Abbott: You could disappear into the Scottish Highlands and I would yet find you if finding you were my objective, which it doubtless would be. What is this dreadful rumor I’ve heard about you boarding the Northern Flyer this evening?”
Abigail hadn’t expected him to hunt her down, but then, when had Stephen Wentworth done the expected?
“My errand in London is complete. I have a business to manage. I meant to bid you farewell before I departed.” And thank him. Thank him for so much.
Stephen lowered himself onto the bench two feet from her, and Abigail’s heart sank straight to the muddy bottom of the cold, dark waters of the Serpentine.
“This errand you speak of,” he said, laying his cane across his knees. “You are not yet murdered, and I distinctly recall you asking me to fulfill that office.”
She dared a glance at him, but could not read his mood. He was perfectly attired for social calls, the picture of sartorial elegance. He gazed upon the water, his expression calm. But for a slight tension in the way he clasped his walking stick, he might have been sitting for a portrait: Gentleman at His Autumnal Leisure.
“You arranged a happier outcome for me,” Abigail said. “Thank you for that. I want you to have the letters.”
“Abigail, I do not care bollocks or bedamned about the letters.”
His tone was mild, but Abigail would have bet the glass paperweight in her reticule that his lordship was peeved, perhaps even furious.
“The letters do not entirely establish your paternity, but they establish that the child is not Champlain’s issue. As the boy’s father, you should have that evidence to destroy or safeguard as you see fit.”
“You have this all sorted, do you? I am to keep the evidence, while you are off to York to resume peeking in windows and impersonating a man. Harmonia will be my duchess, and she and I will somehow contrive to produce more sons—on purpose this time and not out of heedless, rutting stupidity. So glad the itinerary is cast in stone, for I wasn’t likely to find the way on my own, avowed dullard that I am.”
This was the scene Abigail had dreaded, a parting in anger and sorrow, harsh words exchanged for no reason.
“You are that child’s father, and I will not stand between you and a chance to finish the raising of him. The boy has no stepfather, Stapleton sees him as some sort of hereditary prize, and Harmonia will reconcile herself to the terrible burden of being your duchess the moment you show her the Walden jewels. Besides, you would make a wonderful papa.”
Those last words cut like glass, but Abigail managed to speak them in civil tones. The vast, green preserve of Hyde Park wasn’t big enough for all the sadness her heart held, but she would not keep a child and his father apart. Not this father, and not that child.
“You are being noble,” Stephen said, “and unforgivably stupid. Harmonia and I took revenge with each other for mostly imagined slights. Our dalliance was of no moment to either of us. That’s the nature of a dalliance. You are too virtuous and stubborn to imagine such a thing, but seven years ago, I quite had the knack of the casual encounter. The Wentworth jewels, or at least my little portion of them, were on display in all manner of untoward locations.”
“Are you ashamed of that?” Abigail could not decipher his tone, suggesting perhaps he was in somewhat of a muddle himself.
“For God’s sake, Abigail. I have slept with both Harmonia and her current swain. He has slept with both the lady and myself. Champlain got you with child, but he could not impregnate his wife. I managed that feat handily enough, and now you and I…the situation is ludicrous.”
Well, yes, it rather was, when compressed into a few sentences. “The child is anything but. He’s a little boy, and the last thing you will do, Stephen, is turn your back on your own son.”
And for a time that was the final word. The breeze stirred the dead leaves and reminded Abigail that in York, the season would be more advanced and appreciably colder. She gathered up her reticule and parasol, and prepared to walk with Stephen back to Park Lane.
“Don’t you dare run off, Abigail. I am maneuvering my mental artillery into place.”
“I refuse to argue with you. I know how I felt about Winslow—how I still feel about him. I know how determined you are to put Jack Wentworth’s ghost to rest. I commend you for your integrity and wish you every joy.”
She shifted to the edge of the bench, rose, and readied herself to begin the process of leaving London, and leaving Stephen.
“Sit down, you dratted female. You know all manner of vital information, but you apparently don’t know the fact that matters most. I have not imposed the words upon you, thinking to wait for some cozy, private moment when I could ply you with spirits and tempt you with my manly charms, but to hell with
that. Spirits imperil my balance, and you’ve sampled my manly charms. I love you, and I don’t care if the whole rubbishing park knows it.”
Abigail sat back down.
Winter storms in Yorkshire could blow with such ferocity that wind, cold, and snow obliterated any sense of direction. Gravity alone remained constant in the face of such a gale, and Stephen had survived this tempest of a day by clinging to one equally steadfast constant: He loved Abigail Abbott.
Well, two constants: He loved Abigail, and he hoped to hell she loved him back. Otherwise…
Otherwise did not bear thinking about.
“I’m selling my gun manufactories,” he said, which wasn’t an announcement he’d planned to make.
“I hope you aren’t doing that for me. You love the intricacy and complication of a precisely made firearm.”
I love you more. How simple life became in light of that singular organizing principle. “Do you know what the most complicated, intricate creation in the whole universe is?”
“You?”
“Close, but not quite. A child—my child, to be precise. If the boy isn’t to grow up very confused and disappointed, the adults around him will have to manage an elaborate dance. His mother claims his brilliance is unprecedented in the annals of English boyhood, but all I see is a busy little fellow with a big imagination and a kind heart. He’s a person, Abigail. A dear, unique person.”
Abigail was looking at Stephen as if he’d taken leave of his senses. “I know that.”
“To Jack Wentworth, children were chattel, possessions. Little beasts of burden put on earth to fetch him gin, placate his temper, beg for him, and flatter his arrogance. He was pleased with himself for arranging the sale of his young daughters into a life of misery, brutality, and disease. Pleased with himself. He was the lowest parody of manhood, but to his children he was more awful than the Almighty. He could literally kill us with impunity and laugh while doing it, and he gloried in his power over us.”
How to Catch a Duke Page 27
