Fool Me Twice

by Meredith Duran

  He realized he was staring. There was something . . . interesting . . . about her face. How easily he read it. How long had it been since he had really seen anyone? How long since he had paid attention to the small details, the nuances of expression?

  Why, he could remember no images from the last year. Nothing visual at all, save the garden. The garden that was dead now. But he remembered it in full bloom this summer. That was all. Nothing else. As though his revelation, how blind he had been to Margaret’s nature, had blinded him to almost everything . . .

  He did not even remember who had attended the funeral. He remembered nothing but the grave, which he had visited weeks afterward. Who were you? That had been the only thought he’d felt capable of holding. Who lies here? Who were you, really?

  But even that had been blindness in a sense, a massive self-deceit. It was not Margaret he’d been marveling at, but his own ignorance, the immense space of all the things he had not guessed and never suspected. He, who had prided himself on foreseeing everything.

  “Wait,” he heard Mrs. Johnson say. One of the maids had moved to toss the letters into the fire. That girl was an obedient servant. “Your Grace,” his housekeeper said. She moved into his line of vision; he saw, in the resolute tilt of her chin, that she had recovered her courage. Such a small observation, to reveal so much. Once, he had been very good at reading faces. Once he could have read a lie from thirty paces. “I cannot think you truly wish to burn all this mail,” she was saying. “What if—”

  “Yes,” he said scathingly. “God forbid I should miss an invitation to a charity ball.”

  She frowned but made no retort. His brain supplied it for her: There are countless important matters that might be addressed in those letters.

  “I could read them,” said Mrs. Johnson.

  He laid down the paper. “You,” he said flatly. “You propose to read my private correspondence.”

  Even the maids were gawking at her. He noted that with vicious satisfaction. They thought her as mad as he did.

  “Well . . .” Her jaw squared. “If it’s fit for burning, I suppose it’s fit for my eyes as well. Unless you have a secretary?”

  He snorted. “No.” O’Leary had been called home to Dublin several weeks—no, he realized with a shock, several months ago. “No secretary.”

  “Well, then—”

  “I sacked him.” This was not true. “He kept insisting on looking through my mail.”

  She laughed.

  He felt his brow knit into a frown, which he directed at the breakfast tray. Had he been joking? God’s blood, but his head was addled. It felt full of cotton. Bat wings and spiders and nails. How long since his brain had truly worked?

  His attention drifted to the headline.

  “Well?” asked the termagant. Her own word. He could not fault her self-knowledge.

  What was she nattering on about? He couldn’t quite recall. BERTRAM A BOON. He thought of the pistol, tucked away in his bedroom. His old life was dead. He could take it back, no doubt. But that wasn’t what he wanted.

  What he wanted was to wreak bloody havoc. Let loose the hounds of war.

  “Your Grace—”

  “Yes,” he snapped, just to shut her up.

  “Thank you.” He heard the swishing of her skirts as she approached. God above! Could she not leave well enough alone? “There is another thing I wished to ask you,” she said as she sat across from him—sat down in his presence without so much as a by-your-leave. Now, this deserved a sharp word. He opened his mouth, but she beat him to it, leaning across the chiffonier to whisper, “By any chance, did you consume five pounds of truffles last week?”

  What in God’s name? “No.”

  “I thought not.” She plucked off her eyeglasses, revealing eyes a startling shade of light blue. He abruptly forgot what he’d been about to say. She was polishing the lenses with her sleeve as she continued to speak. The words might as well have been gibberish.

  Her eyes were the precise shade of the sky over his garden this past summer. On the cloudless days, when the sun shone brightest, this had been the shade of the sky. It had glowered at him like a taunt. Not for you. None of this is for you anymore.

  She replaced the spectacles on her nose, the glare of her lenses masking the miracles behind them.

  Housekeepers did not possess such eyes.

  “And I will look through your letters,” she finished solemnly. She rose and walked away, leaving him . . . confused. He took a testing breath. Yes, it wasn’t his imagination: she left the faint scent of roses behind her.

  Was that perfume? How had he not noticed it before? It was precisely as he had imagined the scent of the garden. But he had never allowed himself to open the window, for fear of being disappointed.

  God damn it.

  He inhaled again as the door closed behind her.

  His housekeeper smelled like the summer.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “Get on your way!”

  Olivia, seated at the desk in the duke’s study, tilted her head to listen. That had been Polly just now, out in the hall.

  “Oh, come on now, don’t pretend to be cross.”

  And that was Vickers. With a sigh, Olivia laid down the letter—the fourteenth she had opened today that was addressed to the duke. For a fortnight she had been going through these letters, making annotated lists that Marwick received without comment and, so she suspected, never bothered to read.

  In other times, other places, she might have been frustrated at her work being so summarily ignored. But the list of his correspondents read like the index in a book of modern history. Reading these letters felt as pleasurable as eavesdropping in a palace. It was not seemly for a secretary to take such private and personal interest in her work.

  Then again, she wasn’t a secretary, was she? She was a housekeeper, which meant the argument in the hall—now growing progressively shriller—was her business to squash.

  As she started for the door, she heard Vickers say, “I saw how you looked when Muriel came up to me before. A bit green at the gills! Jealousy, what?”

  “Ha! You think I care if a trollop and a dunce—hey! Get your hands off me or I’ll pop you.”

  Olivia opened the door. Vickers had Polly crowded up against the wall, sandwiched between the suit of armor and a hip-high Chinese vase. “Mr. Vickers,” she said sharply.

  The valet sprang around. “Here now!” He gave a sheepish rub to his bald spot. “I was looking for you, ma’am. Cook wants your approval on the next week’s meals—”

  “My foot you were looking.” Polly gave him a hard shove, and he stumbled toward Olivia, who sidestepped him neatly. He spilled onto his knees.

  Olivia looked down at him. His bald patch was cherry red. “Have you no work to do, Mr. Vickers?”

  “What work?” Polly cried. “He thinks he’s the duke himself, he does. Loiters like a pasha, and imagines us his harem girls!”

  Sputtering, he clambered up. “Nonsense. Say now, Mrs. Johnson, you saw her shove me. That’s not right.”

  Polly came violently off the wall. “You’re lucky all I did was shove. I’ve had enough of you, you lout.”

  “See?” Vickers skipped backward. “She’s out for me. Always hanging about; I can’t take a step without finding her underfoot—”

  “That’s a lie,” Polly shouted.

  “—and for that matter, I’m not the only man she dangles after,” Vickers said. “Ask about the lad that turns up every night, just begging for a glimpse of her. Ask how quickly she runs to him.”

  Polly turned white. “You hush up.”

  “Say!” Vickers grabbed Olivia’s wrist. “A regular rags-and-patches production, that ruffian. I’d wager he could use a batch of truffles to sell.”

  Polly gasped. “Why, you . . . He’d never!”

  Olivia gave a pointed look at Vickers’s hand. He snatched it back. “Begging your pardon, ma’am.”

  She turned her look on Polly, who was s
haking like a fence post in a gale. “Polly,” she said evenly, “you—”

  “Of course you’d believe him,” Polly cried. “You’ve disliked me since the day you set foot here. But how was I to know you’d not come for the maid’s position? I couldn’t guess—”

  “Polly!” Olivia set her fists on her hips. “You will go back to your duties.”

  Polly gaped like a beached fish. And then, with a poisonous look divided between Olivia and Vickers, she snatched up her skirts and raced off.

  Olivia rounded on Vickers: short, plump, with the coloring of a dirt patch after a drought. “I must say, Mr. Vickers, you make a very poor Romeo. If I catch you harassing the maids again, you will lose your post.”

  “Hey now!” He squared his shoulders, a posture that would have seemed far more impressive had Olivia not topped him by several inches. “I am His Grace’s own man. My position here—”

  “And what is that position, precisely?” She did not bother to scrub the coolness from her voice. Snitches might prove handy for housekeepers, but that did not mean she must like the breed. “For by my understanding, a valet is to tend to his master’s personal needs—and I have never once seen you in his presence.” She narrowed her eyes. “Indeed, perhaps that’s the problem. For it would take only a single look at His Grace to understand that he has no valet at all.”

  “That’s unfair!” He blew out a breath, cheeks billowing. “I know he looks unkempt. But you can’t imagine. The last time I ventured into his bedroom, he took the shaving kit and threw it at the wall.”

  “And when was that?”

  He pursed his lips and made no reply.

  “Not recently, I take it.”

  “I never got the kit back,” he said sullenly. “And I can’t help it if he refuses my services—”

  “Yes, you can. You can insist upon them, Mr. Vickers.” God in heaven, she had managed to get Marwick into his sitting room, hadn’t she? Must she do all the rest, too? At this rate it would take a year to get Marwick out of his quarters.

  “I can’t overrule him. Who do you think I am? He’s the bloody master of the house!”

  “Watch your language,” she said. “And if he will not let you shave him, then at least you might hold up a mirror.”

  He frowned. “For what purpose?”

  “To show him his appearance. He looks like an overgrown sheepdog.”

  His jaw set. “There’s no point. It’s hopeless. I’m sorry you can’t see it, but I won’t be made to risk myself—”

  “Then I will.” She turned on her heel and marched toward the stairs. “Are you coming?” she said over her shoulder. In reply, he folded his arms. She clicked her tongue in disgust. “No, of course not.” Useless, the lot of them.

  * * *

  The sitting room was empty, but the door to the duke’s bedroom stood open. Olivia flew through it and found Marwick reading in a wing chair by the window. “Put your valet to work or sack him.”

  He did not look up from the book. “All right.”

  All right? She stood there a moment, confused. “Well? Which is it?”

  He shrugged. The afternoon light fell lovingly across his face, gilding his skin and picking out the laugh lines around his mouth. When he had earned those, she could not begin to guess. He was the least laughing kind of man she’d ever met.

  “Will you not answer?” she said. Despite herself, her attention began to wander the room. The maids had stacked up all the papers and placed them on the bookcase—barring a few that littered his dressing table.

  He looked up, following her gaze. “Yes,” he said curtly. “As you see, the maids came this morning. That fulfills the extent of your obligations here, Mrs. Johnson. If you have a complaint about Vickers, take it up with Jones.”

  She huffed. “Jones will not sack him without your approval.”

  “Well, then. There you have it.” He settled deeper into his chair and held up his book with a pointed air: I am busy.

  On a stroke of daring, she walked to the dressing table and made a show of straightening the papers. To her disappointment, these were fresh notes, observations on political items in the newspapers that he’d been reading so regularly of late.

  “What are you doing there?”

  She hastily dropped the papers. “If the maids came in this morning, what is all this mess?” The marble countertop held a terrible jumble of rumpled cravats and apothecary bottles.

  “I am not in the mood for banter,” he said coldly. “You will—”

  “I’m looking for your shaving kit.” She pushed aside the cravats, uncovering a hand mirror and other sundries. “Vickers said he hasn’t seen it since you hurled it against a wall, and I—ah!” She picked up a tortoiseshell comb. “Behold this remarkable invention. You might wish to try it sometime.”

  He stared at her, a faint line between his brows. And then, mouth flattening, he turned back to his book.

  His inattention suited her. Picking up the hand mirror, she drifted, oh so very aimlessly, toward the bookcase. The stack of documents piled on the middle shelf was a foot thick. The uppermost page was a letter, dated 1883, in Marwick’s handwriting, to Lord Audley—

  “The kit is not on the bookcase,” he said flatly.

  She held up the mirror. “Here, have a look at yourself.”

  Ignoring her, he turned a page.

  “Oh, yes, I’m sure that book is only two or three hundred years old,” she said. Sarcasm might be the lowest form of humor, but certainly it was also the most satisfying. “You were content to keep it on the floor, but now you can’t spare a single moment before reading onward.”

  “Hardly so old.” He held it up so she could see the spine: The Count of Monte Cristo, by Dumas.

  “Ah, a tale of revenge. Are you seeking inspiration?”

  He gave her a rather threatening smile. “So far, our hero seems spineless.”

  “You must be in the early section, then. I assure you, after Dantes spends years and years locked away, growing into a ragamuffin, he emerges quite deadly. Why, the first thing he does is to cut his hair.”

  He slammed shut the book. “You are peculiarly deaf to the cues most servants know to listen for. Was there some purpose to your visit? If not, you are dismissed.”

  She held up the mirror again. “Here is my purpose: you look like a wildebeest. If your valet—”

  “I don’t believe you know what a wildebeest looks like,” he said mildly.

  Hesitantly she lowered the mirror. He was right; she hadn’t the faintest idea what a wildebeest looked like. “Well, you look how a wildebeest sounds like it should look.”

  “That doesn’t even make sense.” He opened his book again. “ ‘Sheepdog’ was the better choice.”

  She glared at him. “Do you enjoy being likened to a dog? Shall I bark at you again?”

  He closed the book on his finger and leaned back to look at her. “Do you wish to bark, Mrs. Johnson? Yes, you seem to be feeling particularly canine today—at least, you’ve got your hackles up.” Eyes narrowing, he considered her. “The shrillness does remind one . . . But no, a poodle is too feminine.”

  She sucked in a breath. “How rude. Are you implying—”

  “An Irish setter? A fine match for your hair. But no,” he said regretfully, “I believe the only answer is a Chihuahua: all irksome bark, and no bite.”

  She cast aside the mirror. “I have been reading your letters,” she said through her teeth. “Do you know how many of your friends wish to see you? Imagine what they would make of you if they saw you in this state.”

  Mistake. His face tightened. “A fine thing that I am not receiving.”

  “Your valet is harassing the maids. Have you no concern for the innocent women in your employ? Only give him something to do. That’s all I ask.”

  “In exchange for what?”

  She hesitated. “What do you mean?”

  He put aside the book, and she felt a quick pulse of panic as he gave her his ful
l and undivided attention. Something mocking and untrustworthy had stolen over his expression; his smile looked distinctly unkind. “Why should I give him something to do? How would it possibly benefit me?”

  She gaped at him. “The welfare of your household would benefit you. And—ha!” She pointed triumphantly at his hand, which had just risen to brush hair from his eyes. “A haircut would benefit you directly.”

  “And give you far too much satisfaction,” he said. “You do realize, Mrs. Johnson, that you take a very unseemly enjoyment in harassing me? It isn’t at all fitting for a domestic.”

  “You misunderstand. I don’t enjoy it at all.” But an uneasy feeling gripped her. Why, he might be right: she had lost track of her purpose here. Lulled into a false sense of security, she had allowed herself to be distracted by putting the household to rights—and the sheer challenge of prying this mule from his rooms.

  “I don’t enjoy it,” she repeated fiercely. But the quicker she lured him out, the quicker she could see her mad plan through. And certainly no gentleman would ever dare set foot from his private quarters as long as he looked like a wildebeest sounded as though it should look, and a sheepdog certainly did look. “I assure you, I find my duties most distasteful.”

  His smile spread. It suddenly seemed to bode ill for her. “Do you? Very well, I believe you. Your manner suggests a very put-upon feeling. If you wish so much to see my hair cut, you may do it.”

  “What?” She took a step back. “I never—that’s absurd. How would I know to cut a man’s hair? I’d make a terrible hash of it.”

  He made a tsking noise, all mocking sympathy. “Duty can be so onerous. A very good thing I pay you for it, no?”

  “Let me ring for Vickers.” She turned for the bellpull. “He’ll be here in a blink—”

  “Absolutely not. You will wield the scissors, or no one shall.”

  Something serious had crept briefly into his tone. Turning back, she tried to laugh. “Surely you’re not saying you don’t trust him—”

  He reached for his book again. “Enough.” All levity had left him. “Leave me be.”