“Right. Brandy.”
“A double measure, please.”
She was only too eager to put a safe distance between them. From the corner of her eye, she watched him close the window. Odd how the mundane act suddenly absorbed her attention. How many times had she seen the footmen at the same task? Not once had she admired the pudgy butler helping to hang pictures on the wall, either.
But then, none of them claimed good shoulders and a lean torso that tapered into parts one presumed were equally strong and nicely proportioned. The duke’s muslin shirt had gotten damp. So had his black hair. No doubt it was her fault for blowing soot all over him, but suddenly she thought he looked a little slovenly. Perhaps even decadent. Still, he was as fine-looking as any man ought to be without causing a riot in the streets.
She carried a brandy to him. “Is this enough?”
“For four or five sailors.” He took a few sips from the goblet, then set it on a low folding table. “Are fires a usual occurrence in the academy?”
“Absolutely not. But then, neither are dukes,” she added before she could stop herself.
His chiseled mouth curled at the corners. “One relates to the other in exactly what way?”
“Unpredictable elements of nature.”
“In that case, it’s fortunate you know your way around a shovel.”
“I’m sorry,” she said ruefully. “I’ve never greeted a duke before-not properly, I mean.”
“I can tell.” He sighed and let a moment elapse. “But we are human, you know.”
Harriet’s heart pounded in her throat. The sultry humor in his eyes suggested he was too human, indeed. She might have noticed if she hadn’t been trying so hard to please him.
“Well?” he said, clearly expecting a response.
She swallowed. “Well, what?”
“I think you were supposed to make a reassuring remark to soothe my wounded feelings.”
“Are your feelings wounded?” she asked in surprise. “An influential man like you? A man who has to hide from his hordes of admirers?”
He cleared his throat. “You see, that is exactly what I mean. No one has sympathy for a person of my position.”
“Your grace must suffer greatly.”
“You have no idea,” he said wryly.
He subsided into a thoughtful silence. Then, slowly, he lifted his hand. Harriet should have known he was up to something. Soft as night, he traced his thumb across the smudge that was emblazoned on her breast. She didn’t dare breathe. Demon. If she even flinched, he’d be touching improper territory.
“It is quite a mark,” he mused. “I am not a laundress, but I’d venture a guess that the dress is ruined for good. I suppose you can’t afford another. Ask my cousin Charlotte to have a new one billed to my account.”
Quite a mark.
Not as indelible as his touch. It was a good thing she had put down that shovel.
“I’m ruined,” she whispered. “If I knew how to cry, I’d be gushing like a fountain, not that it would help. It’s all ruined: the tea, my dress, my gloves-”
“If you’re going to prattle and expect my sympathy, you’ll have to speak so I can hear.”
“This is all your fault,” she said loudly, deciding that if he was even indirectly the cause of her dismissal, he should at least be named.
He put his hand to his neatly folded neckcloth. Which, upon closer inspection, Harriet realized was not meant to be a dirty shade of gray. “You’re the one who brought me into this smoking Hades.”
Funny, she’d have thought he would feel right at home. “Your grace is right, of course. It is all my fault: the fire, the smoke, the-”
“The fire was lit before we entered the room,” he said matter-of-factly. “If anyone is to blame, it should be the idiot who stuffed the grate with newspaper.”
Thunder. Lightning. Rain pummeling the roof. There were certain powers it was useless to resist.
Harriet took her soiled gloves and efficiently swept up the ashes that had fallen on the hearth. Everything else, disregarding her dress, looked in order. The duke had left the curtains parted to emit only a flattering glow into the room. The flocked chinoiserie wallpaper, the delicate armchairs, the Queen Anne clock, appeared to have survived the conflagration unscathed.
The duke reclined, his eyes half closed, on the red tufted couch. Except for the bitter tang of cinders in the air and a brand upon her breast, there was little evidence to raise suspicions when, a half minute later, Charlotte Boscastle escorted Lady Primrose Powlis, Lady Dalrymple, and the duke’s young niece into the room.
Chapter Four
I fear thy kisses, gentle maiden, Thou needest not fear mine; My spirit is too deeply laden Ever to borthen thine.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
To-. I Fear Thy Kisses
Griffin could barely remember the last time he’d felt like laughing. Certainly not in the fourteen months since his brother’s death.
Nor during the eternal journey to London with his meddlesome aunt and his morbid young niece, Edlyn, whose guardianship he had inherited along with a dukedom he did not want. It was assumed that his cousin’s academy would draw the girl out of her gloom and introduce her to a glittering world. He hoped for her sake that such a miracle would be wrought.
It was also assumed that he would take a wife. More than a miracle would be required to bring that momentous event to pass. Before Liam’s death, Griffin had led a charmed life. He’d served his obligatory stint in the cavalry and returned home to the family castle with the full intention of doing absolutely nothing. Liam would inherit the dukedom, and a damned good thing, too.
Griff had no aspirations to either a peerage or the responsibility that went with it. His brother, however, relished the role, riding day for night across his lands, playing the dutiful lord to those who for centuries had depended upon the duke’s largesse.
If a pretty lady crossed his path, Liam thought nothing of taking her to his bed. If a love child resulted from some forgotten affair, he would assume responsibility. What was another benefactor added to the list of a duke’s retainers? Yet as the years passed, the family elders, composed primarily of aging aunts, closed in to curb his reckless ways.
A boy could pursue wicked pleasures for only so long. Did he intend to fulfill his duty as the Duke of Glenmorgan or not? If so, the time had come to leave sporting to his younger siblings and settle down.
He resisted.
His factors had made an unofficial offer of marriage on Liam’s behalf to a young lady in London in the months that followed his father’s death. Liam had met her during a family holiday in Italy. Her beauty was the stuff of legends. So was her fortune. And yet after he came home, he ignored the stream of letters from her family solicitors that first invited and then insisted he step forth to announce his intentions.
Griffin thought it was all a game. Liam was playing everyone like a pack of cards. Why should either of them settle down? Why should he believe the rumors whispered in the village that another woman had captured Liam’s heart?
The answer arrived one early April evening when a castle servant discovered a little girl of seven years or so abandoned on the drawbridge. She had jet-black hair and eyes an unearthly shade of blue that in a certain light looked almost violet. All that could be coaxed from her was that her name was Edlyn and that her mother had left her here to live with her father, who was a duke. She knew, or refused to reveal, nothing else of her background.
Father and daughter loathed each other on sight. Edlyn grieved her mother with a vengeance that seemed unnatural in a young child. She threw fits and refused to eat. She threatened to jump off the turret. She bit her nursemaid’s finger clear to the bone.
Her very existence eclipsed the lives of those who struggled to care for her. Her young aunt Ravenna and the two great-aunts who ruled the castle stopped reassuring themselves that she would outgrow her sorrows.
She ran away the day she turned thirteen and twice a
year thereafter. She gave her best gowns to the gypsies and dressed herself in the black crepe of perpetual mourning. She grew her hair to her waist, only to cut it off above her ears one Christmas Day. She sat at the dinner table like a wicked sprite.
Her father forbade her to utter another word about the mother who had abandoned her.
And for reasons he could never fathom, Griffin became her champion. She never confided in him, and for that he was glad. But he was the one she ran to when she was upset, the one who hoisted her on his shoulders and let her swing from the wrought-iron chandelier while he ran around the hall three times, then shouted, “Drop!” And she did, safely in his arms.
It wasn’t that he considered himself to be the family peacemaker. He merely seemed to be the only person in the castle who did not incur her wrath.
“I hate you. I hate you. I hate you,” she was chanting with her usual malevolence for her father as he sauntered through the passage screen one morning. “I hate you so much that I would burn my bones in acid for a potion to make you die.”
Griffin grabbed an apple from a bowl on the banqueting table. “I hate him, too,” he said genially. “What has the knave done to upset our beautiful Edlyn today?”
Liam, slumped on a bench by a blazing fire, snorted in disgust. “Beautiful? Both of you belong in Bedlam.”
Then, when she stormed off in her usual melodramatic fury, the armorial swords mounted above the fireplace dropped to the stone floor with a clatter that sent the three dozing hounds into a howling frenzy. Liam jumped out of his chair. Griffin fell against the table laughing like the lunatic his brother had just called him. It never occurred to him that Liam might not be immortal. No one in Castle Glenmorgan had died before his time. An unhappy girl’s curse could not alter the course of history.
Liam knelt to the fallen swords. “If I didn’t know better, I’d swear she did that on purpose.”
“Perhaps she did,” said Aunt Glynnis, studying the tiny spider that dangled from a gossamer thread above her pianoforte.
“She’s definitely inherited the Welsh talent for strangeness,” Aunt Primrose said in concern, the three hounds settling in her tiny shadow.
Liam looked up in vexation. “Is she going to behead me if I don’t obey her nasty little demands?”
Griffin gave him an evil grin. “You’d better start wearing a helmet, or I’ll be the duke, and everyone will be in trouble then.”
“Take the dukedom,” Liam said, touching one of the swords to Griffin’s shoulder. “I dub thee the Most Wicked Duke Who Ever Was. Anyway, I’d rather ride horses in hell than stay in this moldering castle and have a girl who may or-well, damn her, anyway. The next time she runs off, I will not chase after her.”
The two aunts drew a simultaneous gasp that frightened the spiderling up its thread into the blackened rafters. “Don’t say things like that, Liam,” Aunt Glynnis whispered. “That spider might weave your words into the devil’s own web.”
Griffin raised an eyebrow in mischief. “Then I wish I could marry an Irish princess who would make me laugh every night-”
“Unfeeling fools,” Aunt Primrose said from her chair. “Don’t you realize that the girl wants her mother more than anyone in the world, which is hardly a surprise considering that her father is a rude young rakehell who cannot even behave when his elders are in the room?”
Griffin and Liam straightened, bowing this way and that at the aunts, at the dogs, at each other, until Aunt Glynnis picked up a pair of apples and stuck one apiece into their grinning mouths.
In the months following Edlyn’s outburst, Liam reluctantly made plans to travel to England to court the woman brave enough to be his wife. He and Edlyn still clashed whenever they spent more than a few minutes together. Griffin, their two aunts, and their twin siblings, Ravenna and Rhys, were still forced to intervene more times than the allied powers completing the peace treaty.
Was there a woman in London, in the whole of England, strong enough to bridge the family divide?
Edlyn withdrew until she became a shadow. Everyone wondered why she seemed agreeable to accompanying Liam to London. Could she be growing up at last? She didn’t object when Aunt Primrose explained that she would make friends her age at school and no longer be allowed to wander about with the gypsies who lived nearby. A week before the journey, she had already packed her own bag and talked the guards into promising to feed the crows that nested on the parapets.
Griffin challenged his older brother to one last ride through the woods and over the river wall. Liam never refused a dare. Griffin had never lost a race.
Not a day had passed since that Griffin didn’t picture Liam standing in the stirrups with his windblown hair bristled up like a hedgehog. “Come on!”
Griff guided his horse down the incline. “I’ll go first.”
“No, you won’t. You challenged.”
They stared across the river, absorbing the beauty of Glenmorgan, young pagans who preferred wildness over London’s pleasures, warriors at heart.
Griff lifted his face to the sky. The light was swiftly fading. The mystical irradiance that bathed the battered castle stones would soon disappear. Storm air drifted in the breeze.
“Let’s do it tomorrow,” he shouted to Liam.
“Giving up already? I’ll jump,” Liam said, wheeling. A dying ray of light caught his smile and outlined his agile figure as he set in his spurs.
A crow flew toward the castle turret. Griffin felt the drum of his brother’s hoofbeats through his bones. Invincible.
His brother’s mare had never before balked at a jump or thrown a rider. Not that anything could hurt Liam. The great vital lump that landed in the water had steel woven into his body and soul.
“Duke! If you want to cede the race right now, I won’t tell anyone what a bloody fool you’ve made of yourself.” Griff waited, then dismounted. He knew as he slogged through the water that at any moment his brother would tackle him by the knees and half-drown him to prove he could. This day would not be different than countless others.
“Liam. Get up, idiot.”
The head groom, who’d been following at a distance, splashed up beside him in his thick riding boots. “Move aside, my lord.”
The mare scrambled up the embankment. Griffin grabbed his brother’s riding coat at the shoulder, turning him onto his back. “Please,” he whispered.
The groom pulled off his jacket. “His neck is broken. It was an accident. Let me lift him onto the rocks.”
Griffin sank to his knees. “Did you see it?” Their eyes met.
“Aye,” the groom said. “And so I shall swear.”
He hadn’t seen. No one but Griff had witnessed what happened. It was inevitable that some of the villagers in Glenmorgan would ask themselves if he’d done more than entice his brother into taking that fatal jump.
Wasn’t that enough?
He would be the one who had to tell Edlyn and the rest of the family. She had lost her mother, and now he was responsible for her father’s death.
After the funeral and a suitable period of mourning, they would travel to London together-he, the seventh Duke of Glenmorgan, to find a wife, and Edlyn, to learn the rules she would break for the rest of her life.
Chapter Five
It was a strong effort of the spirit of good but it was ineffectual. Destiny was too potent, and her immutable laws had decreed my utter and terrible destruction.
MARY SHELLEY
Frankenstein
The red salon filled in moments. Ladies buzzed about, footmen swarmed, and a sharp-eyed scullion at the hearth swept up the few ashes that Harriet had missed. Griffin would never have recognized Charlotte Boscastle, as they had both been in the cradle at the time of their only acquaintance. She stood almost as tall as he, her blond hair drawn off a delicate oval face that could have graced a cameo. Miss Gardner was easily the most arresting person in the room, with her tightly knotted red hair, piquant features, and marked lavender dress. Her disheveled
charm drew his eye so often he feared he would be caught.
She did catch him once as he looked up from the fireplace.
Her brows rose. Calmly, she turned to the tea table, concentrating on the cups as if one of them contained a gold sovereign. His gaze slid down her creamy décolletage to the damning brand above her bosom. Not only did it appear that the smudge had darkened, but the ruffled hem of her ruined dress had not escaped the soot, either.
He gazed down into his goblet at his reflection. He’d made another fearsome first impression, and he hadn’t even tried. It seemed to get easier every time.
“Are you looking in the River Styx?” a throaty voice asked at his elbow.
He glanced around in hesitation at his niece, who never missed the chance to spread her personal gloom around.
As was so often the case, it was his aunt, Lady Primrose Powlis, who quickly intervened before anything worse could erupt.
“Do I smell smoke? I hope something hasn’t gotten caught in the chimney. You weren’t puffing on one of those vile cheroots again, Griff?”
He glanced good-naturedly at his aunt. She was a small woman, whose spirit increased as her physical self diminished every year. Her booming voice could chill his blood. Her sweet wrinkled face was a beloved comfort. The rain had fortunately destroyed her atrocious hat. Her silver-white hair was flattened beneath an intricate netting of tiny ivory pearls, showing a bald spot here and there.
Annoying, intrusive, she manipulated her family without a thought, making up stories and heartrending fibs as served her purpose. And it was because her purpose nearly always derived from a genuine concern for those she connived that Griffin adored her.
He rarely admitted this to her, however. She took enough advantage of him as it was.
She was also uncannily observant. He was not at all surprised when in her next breath she accused him of setting Miss Gardner on fire with an imaginary cigar.
The Wicked Duke Takes a Wife Page 3
