The Duke's Dilemma

by Nadine Miller

  Emily felt her heartbeat quicken erratically. “The duke was looking for me?” Despite herself, she felt a moment of elation just knowing he’d worried what had happened to her, even though she suspected it was nothing mare than a brief attack of conscience.

  “Humph! The scalawag’ s conscience is bothering him no doubt, and well it should,” Lady Sophia declared, echoing Emily’ s very thought.

  “But we must let him know Miss Haliburton is safe,” Lady Cloris said. “The dear boy is probably worried sick.”

  “Do him goad. Make him think twice before he spins one of his fairy tales for another gullible young innocent. “

  “I don’t know, my lady.” Brummell’ s expressive brows drew together in a frown. “He’s likely to be very angry when he learns the truth. I’ve only seen the duke lose his temper once, but I can’t say I wish to see it again.”

  The earl set his teacup down with a bang. “Please, Aunt Sophia,” he begged, “let me tell him where she is. Brummell’s right. Montford has a terrible temper once he’ s riled, and I can’t afford to get him down on me, not with him holding my purse strings for another year. He’ll cut me off for sure if he thinks I’ve held out on him, and I’m already in the basket—and my quarterly’s coming up this very month.”

  “And what do you think, Miss Haliburton? We’ve heard from everyone else.” Lady Sophia fixed Emily with one of her ferocious stares.

  “I do not know what I think,” Emily answered frankly. “Except that I am stunned to learn someone like the Duke of Montford does indeed possess a conscience like the rest of us.”

  She let her gaze travel from one to the other of her newfound friends. “I certainly do not want the earl, or any of the rest of you, to suffer the duke’s wrath because of me.” She paused. “But I must admit I shall not be at all sorry if he turns the Bow Street Runners loose on my aunt and uncle.”

  Both Lady Sophia and Brummell burst into laughter and Lady Cloris and the earl soon joined them. “Well, that is that,” Lady Sophia said, when she could finally speak. “You will simply have to take your chances, Percival because I say we proceed with ‘the plan’ as proposed. The duke will learn of Miss Haliburton’s whereabouts on Friday night and not a minute before.”

  Jared took a firmer hold than usual on the ribbons as he urged the grays along the crowded, stall-lined streets of the London Stews to the location Sam Haggerty had chosen as a meeting place. The stench here was a hundred times more potent than in the more fashionable districts, and both Jared and the groom riding behind him, were forced to limit their breathing to short, shallow breaths to keep from gagging.

  Everything from battered iron pots to Axminster carpets, all of it used and much of it stolen, was sold on these streets, and vendors, spotting his elegant carriage, left their stalls to hold up their wares and urge “the toff” to take advantage of their prices.

  Ragged children with dirt-streaked faces and ancient, knowing eyes trotted beside him, begging for the price of one of the hot penny-pies the old women hawked from trundle carts, but tempted as he was, Jared left his coins in his purse, knowing all too well if he tossed so much as a ha’ pence to one of the urchins, he ‘d instantly be mobbed by a hundred others.

  He carried a loaded pistol hidden beneath his topcoat and the groom carried another in plain sight for all to see. But night would soon be falling, and no man in his right mind would be caught in this section of London after dark. A cold, numbing horror seized him at the thought of Emily somewhere in this welter of awful humanity, struggling to survive on these fetid streets. Even if luck was with him and he found her, would she ever recover from such an appalling experience?

  Minutes later, he pulled to a stop at the appointed place, handed the reins to the groom and leapt down to the street. A shadow instantly detached itself from the side of the nearest grimy building, and Sam Haggerty stepped forward.

  “This is it, your grace. The place where the girl fitting your lady’s description is working. Time’s right. According to my source, she just took up the profession a fortnight ago. “Devil take it. This can’t be,” Jared choked, as an oily-looking fellow in faded purple knee-britches and a stained yellow topcoat ascended the stairs and pushed open the door. “This is a damned brothel, and the lowest kind of brothel at that. Miss Haliburton would never be caught dead in such a place. “

  Haggerty shrugged. “You said she was a gentlewoman turned into the streets without a penny. In my book that leaves her two choices. One of these,”—he jerked his thumb toward the disreputable establishment—“or the Thames. I can check with the lads who drag the river each morning but I doubt they ‘d be much help. I’ve seen some of the bodies they’ve fished out and I doubt their own mothers would recognize them…”

  Jared swallowed the bile rising in his throat and without another word, followed the stoic runner through the shabby doors. They were met by the fattest and most malodorous woman he had ever seen. She was dressed in a shapeless, gray garment bearing the remains of at least a dozen different meals, and at first glance he judged her weight to be a good twenty-five stone.

  It was obvious she recognized the runner as-an old acquaintance, and once she’d accepted the coins he dropped in her outstretched hand, she led them down a grimy hallway and stopped before one of a long row of doors.

  While Jared watched, she pushed open the door, revealing a young woman in a flimsy pink wrapper sitting on an unmade bed. Her hands were folded in her lap, her eyes downcast, her rich brown hair cascading about her shoulders like a heavy mantle.

  “Emily?” Jared stepped forward, his heart thudding against his ribs.

  The girl raised her head and stared at him through eyes utterly devoid of expression. “My name is Mary, sir,” she said dully, but I can be Emily just as well, if it will please you.”

  Jared drew a deep breath as relief surged through him. Turning to Haggerty, he shook his head. “She is not the one we seek.”

  He returned his gaze to the girl, who still stared at him with her great, sad eyes. “But hell and damnation, I can’t leave her here. She’ s no more than a child.”

  “I’m afraid you have no choice, your grace,” Haggerty said with a chilling lack of compassion. “It’s too late; the chit’s been here a fortnight. She’ s already ruined.”

  Ruined! The very word the old woman had used to describe Emily. “The devil she is,” Jared said, clenching his fists to keep from wringing the runner’s neck. He turned to the girl, whose small, heart-shaped face had suddenly come alive. “Are you willing to do an honest day’s work to support yourself?” he asked “I’ll do anything,” she declared fervently. “Anything but this.”

  “Very well then. Put on your clothes and come with me. I’ll send you to Brynhaven, my estate some twenty miles from London. The staff is large enough so one more maid will never be noticed. “

  He smiled kindly at the girl who had leapt to her feet and was busy scrambling into a nondescript brown frock much like the one Emily had worn the first time he’d seen her. “I’ll give you a note to carry to my housekeeper. She’s a good woman. She’ll work you hard but she’ll treat you fairly.”

  “Think what you’re doing, your grace,” Haggerty warned. “You can’t just walk out of here with her. She’s probably in debt to the house; the girls always are, and don’t think that fat old woman listening at the door don’t have a team of bully boys ready to see she pays up. You know the way of things down here in the Stews, even if it ain’t your bailiwick. How far do you think you’ll get with such as them at your heels?”

  “I’m taking the girl,” Jared said stubbornly, shoving a wad of pound notes into the runner’s hands. “Pay the procuress whatever it takes to buy her out of this hell hole.”

  It was an illogical thing to do; the girl was nothing to him. She was just one of the great multitude of prostitutes who filled London’s brothels or walked London’s streets. But she did resemble Emily a little, and somehow he couldn’t just walk out and leav
e the sad-eyed child to wait for a parade of unwashed, unfeeling men to defile her.

  Odd. He’d never before given a thought to the kind of life a prostitute led. Possibly because he’d never frequented brothels—not even the select ones so many of his acquaintances used. He’d always preferred to keep a mistress under his protection to serve his needs.

  He thought about it now—and about all the poor creatures who, like Mary, waited out their dismal lives in such dismal rooms—until they were too old or too ill to wait any longer.

  He found himself wondering how many of them had been forced into the profession because some titled member of the ton had betrayed them as he’d betrayed Emily.

  By Friday, Jared was at his wit’s end. Night after night he’d walked the streets hoping, by some miracle, to find Emily. It was, he knew, a useless exercise in frustration. Still, it was preferable to lying awake wondering where she was or worse yet, to dropping off to sleep.

  For on the rare occasions when he closed his eyes, he had the same recurring nightmare of the cold waters of the Thames washing over her pale, lifeless face.

  The last thing he felt like doing was attending the opera tonight. But he was obligated. He was, after all, the one who had persuaded Catalani to perform, and the funds raised would benefit the poor devils who lay maimed and dying in the Duke of York Military Hospital. He’d invited his longtime mistress, Lady Carolyn Crawley, to share his box because she would no longer be sharing his life.

  For he couldn’t bring himself to touch her and doubted that he would ever be able to do so again. In fact, there were times when he found himself wondering if he would ever again desire any woman if Emily were lost to him.

  He would give Carolyn her congé tonight along with a very expensive gift. For she had been his friend as well as his lover for the past six years, and he owed her that much. Then he would return home and ‘drink himself into mindless oblivion.

  The note came while his valet was dressing him for the evening. It was on the cheapest kind of paper and he instantly recognized the scrawling, almost illegible, handwriting.

  I think I have a lead on Miss Haliburton. Highpockets Harry, a cutpurse who, works the King’s Theatre area, bumped into a lady of her description on the street the night you mentioned. Saw some fancy dressed toff take her up in his curricle. Don’t yet know who he was, but I promise you I will soon. At least it is better than the Thames. — Haggarty

  Jared was torn between a staggering sense of relief and a monumental wave of anger and jealousy so intense it emptied his lungs of air and left him breathing so hard, his frantic valet started burning feathers and plying him with hartshorn as if he were some dowager with a fit of the vapors.

  He had half a mind to organize an army of servants to knock on every door in fashionable London until he located her. For he knew his Emily. She would feel so indebted to the lecherous Corinthian who had saved her from the horror of the streets, she would get all. weepy and emotional. And a weepy, emotional Emily was a vulnerable Emily.

  But by all that was holy, it would be pistols at dawn if the blighter dared to lay a hand on the future Duchess of Montford.

  CHAPTER. FIFTEEN

  “So it is farewell then, your grace?”

  Even in the dim interior of his carriage, Jared could see the bitter twist to Lady Carolyn Crawley’s lovely mouth as she fastened the exquisite emerald earrings to her earlobes. “You will note I wore my emerald necklace in expectation of your parting gift.”.

  Jared sighed. “You know me well, Carolyn.”

  “So I thought. But it seems I was mistaken. If there is any credence to. the gossip running rampant throughout the ton. You didn’t really ravage that girl, did you? I cannot imagine I was so mistaken in you.”

  “No, of course not. But I might as well have. I put her in such a compromising position, her reputation is”-—he choked on the word—“ruined. I must find her, wherever she is, and offer for her.”

  “And what of my reputation?” she asked somewhat petulantly. “Everyone in London knows I have been your mistress these past six years.”

  “And the Earl of Skiffington’s mistress before me and Lord Falkener’s before him.”

  “Enough! You have made your point.” She laughed softly, ruefully. “What a black-hearted devil you are. I cannot think how I came to fall in love with you.”

  Jared raised a skeptical eyebrow. “I was not aware love was ever a part of our arrangement, my lady.”

  “Of course you weren’t. How could I tell you how I felt when every time the subject came up, you declared love was simply a term coined by hypocrites to pretty up their natural lust.”

  Jared searched the face of the woman whose body he knew as intimately as his own and wondered how he could have failed to realize he knew nothing of her heart or mind. “I am sorry,” he said gently. “I would never intentionally cause you pain.”

  ” I have survived pain before. I shall survive it again.” She tossed her head of gleaming, golden curls. “And don ‘t you dare pity me, for that I could not bear. I shall have no difficulty finding another protector; the wealthiest men of the ton will be standing in line to take up where the Duke of Montford left off.”

  “That will not be necessary, my dear. I have put the Kensington house in your name and made arrangements for a quarterly allowance to cease only upon your death. With a little clever maneuvering, you should be able to move into a more acceptable level of society. God knows at least half the so-called proper matrons of the ton have pasts more colorful than yours.”

  He turned to stare out the window at the passing scene, avoiding her eyes. “You have given me many good years, and I care too much about you to live with the thought of your having to sell yourself merely to survive.”

  “You care about me?” Lady Crawley looked genuinely surprised. “I would never have guessed.”

  Now it was Jared’s turn to be surprised. “My God, Carolyn, we have been bed partners for six years. How could you think I had no feeling for you? I have always considered you my friend as well as my mistress.”

  “Have you really? How very odd. Yet you have never given me permission to address you as anything but ‘your grace.’”

  Jared felt a humiliating flush spread across his face—something that had happened too often of late. He cringed. “Am I really as stuffy as you paint me?”

  “I did not say you were stuffy your grace. Stuffy implies boring, and that you have never been. You are just exceedingly high in the instep, but then I suppose one must expect that of a duke.”

  Lady Crawley shrugged her lovely shoulders with the same grace she did everything else. “Ah well! It makes no mind now, does it? And I am sincerely grateful for your protection, as well as all the lavish gifts you have given me—especially this last and most generous one. If I had more strength of character, I would politely refuse it, but a woman with my expensive tastes cannot afford too much pride.”

  She reached across the space between them and caught Jared’s hand in hers. “Find your country miss, your grace, and make her yours. For already I see the changes she has wrought in you. Given time, she might make you as human as the rest of us.”

  Jared gave a snort of mirthless laughter. “Now you sound like Edgar Rankin. Perhaps there is truth in what you say. But if this past sen’night is an example of what it is to be ‘human,’ I am not certain I shall survive the experience.”

  The Royal Theatre was, as Lady Sophia, had predicted, full to overflowing. Emily had scarcely finished settling the two old ladies in their luxurious first-tier box, when she realized an odd silence had settled over the crowded auditorium. She looked about her and found every set of opera glasses in the house trained on her—including those of Beau Brummell, who stood in his usual place in the pit with the rest of the ton’s leading dandies.

  She took a deep, calming breath. It was obvious this was going to be a very long and very difficult evening. Despite the thrill of hearing the great Catalani, she wo
uld be immensely relieved when it was over.

  Only moments later it was brought home to her just how long and how difficult an evening lay ahead when a cumulative gasp spread through the assemblage like a breeze rippling through a forest.

  “Montford must have arrived,” Lady Sophia said, leveling her spectacles at a box on the opposite side of the great hall. “Just as I thought, and he has ‘that woman’ with him.”

  Emily’s breath caught in her throat and every bone in her body turned to water. She kept her eyes studiously trained on her lap, for fear she would encounter the duke’s gaze if she raised her head.

  Lady Cloris lifted her glasses. “Oh, my goodness. Is that Lady Crawley? You must admit, sister, she is really quite beautiful.”

  “Lady Crawley indeed!” Lady Sophia gave an indignant sniff. “A title the chit acquired by marrying a ne’er-do-well baronet who fled to the Americas less than a year later to escape debtors’ prison. Furthermore, she is five-and-thirty if she ‘s a day and common as coal dust.”

  Surreptitiously, Emily stole a brief look at the woman in the duke’s box, and her breath caught in her throat at the sight of the stylish golden-haired beauty who was the duke ‘s mistress. Compared to the sophisticated Lady Carolyn Crawley, she felt the veriest country mouse, despite her elegant new gown.

  “Aha! Montford has seen us.” A triumphant smile spread across Lady Sophia’s flushed face and she quickly dropped her glasses to her lap.

  Lady Cloris’s glasses followed suit. She pressed a shaky hand to her bosom. “He looks terribly angry, she managed in a hoarse whisper.

  “Angry? He looks ready to commit murder.” Lady Sophia chuckled with obvious glee. “And observe that flock of sheep below us. They couldn’t be playing their parts more perfectly if we’ d rehearsed them.”