That, Jack thought in irritation, was unfair. The Stowe family had been close to his for decades. The late earl had been his father’s dearest friend, and Lady Stowe and Jack’s mother were inseparable. It was both tragic and fitting that the same boating accident claimed the earl’s life and, after a week of illness, the duke’s, as well. On his deathbed, his father had begged Jack to see that Lady Stowe and her young daughter, Lucinda, were taken care of, and Jack had promised. In the seven years since, he had done everything for them the moment it was asked. He had never abandoned them.
It was true he’d forgotten about this particular ball. Normally he would have gone, if Lady Stowe and her daughter were to attend. Lucinda was making her debut this Season, and Jack knew his father would expect him to do anything he could to ensure she was a success among the ton. The last time he’d seen her, just after Christmas, she’d admitted she was nervous about it.
But his mother was not thinking of Lucinda’s nerves, she was trying to shame him into rushing back to London, something he had no intention of doing. Not only was he not accustomed to being coerced and shamed, he still hadn’t figured out what to do about Mrs. Campbell—but he found her dangerously exhilarating, far more so than any ball.
He stuffed the letter into his pocket and took his time returning to the breakfast room. There was one sobering note of warning in it that he could not ignore. Of course Philip would discover a way to make him at fault, thereby deflecting any blame or reproach from himself. As long as the duchess believed Philip was more victim than scoundrel, she would continue making allowances for him instead of encouraging him to reform his ways. Perhaps Jack ought to open the account books and show his mother exactly how much he’d paid to settle Philip’s debts recently; he was certain Philip hadn’t told her. His father had believed it was not a woman’s place to see any accounting but the household expenditures she supervised, and that she should submit even those to her husband for approval. The late duke had treated his wife and younger son with an indulgence that left them both in ignorance of, and absolved of any responsibility for, the consequences of their actions. All of that had descended onto Jack, and the expectation that he would continue doing everything exactly as his father had done was beginning to wear.
Mrs. Campbell was seated at the table eating by the time he returned to the breakfast room. Today she wore a simple dress of dark green. He wondered where she’d got it, and then reminded himself that he ought not to be thinking about her clothing at all, as long as she was provided something decent. This dress, alas, had a slightly higher neckline than the housemaid’s dress of yesterday.
“Good morning,” she said with a smile at his entrance.
“Good morning.” He resumed his seat at the table. Somehow he must keep Percy from setting eyes on her. Percy had been his father’s man before his, and at times Jack suspected his loyalty was more to the dukedom than to the duke, whoever that fellow might be. Percy wasn’t blind, and if he reported that Jack had hared off to Alwyn House with a beautiful woman, it would inflame the duchess. Jack didn’t bother to think about why he cared. “Would you care to explore the attics today?”
She looked at him in amazement, and Jack realized how odd the question sounded. “You inquired about dungeons and torture chambers, neither of which Alwyn has. The attics would be the closest I can offer. The rain continues, which means we are stuck in the house. I am struggling for anything to pass the time.”
Her lips quirked in that sly smile he found so entrancing. “When you present it so appealingly, how could I miss the chance?”
They finished breakfast, and Jack told Wilson to fetch some lamps. He also murmured to his butler that nothing should impede Percy from returning to London as soon as possible. Then he headed toward the east wing with Mrs. Campbell at his side, unaccountably eager to exploring the dim, stuffy attics.
“What manner of things shall we find up here?” she asked as he opened the door leading to the attic stairs. A rush of warm stale air hit him in the face as he considered the question.
“In truth, I’m not sure. It’s been decades since I went up.”
She gathered her skirts and followed him up the stairs. “Another exploit with Philip?”
Jack grinned, glancing back. From this angle he could see down her bodice, and it almost made him miss a step and drop his lamp. “Er—no,” he said, trying to remember the question. “Philip once got lost and took such a fright he refused to come up again.”
Her hands full of skirts, she looked up, her lips parted in surprise. “No!”
His mouth was dry. Perhaps this was a terrible idea. All he could think of now was being alone with her in the dark. She didn’t seem angry with him anymore, and it had been an eternity since he found any woman so tempting . . . “It became my hideaway after that,” he said, still distracted by her mouth and the plump curves of her breasts. “Free of mothers and younger brothers and any sort of lesson.”
“What did you discover up here?” She was a little out of breath, breathing harder than usual as she reached the top of the stairs. Covertly Jack watched the rise and fall of her bosom, straining the bonds of her drab green dress.
“Old furniture, mostly,” he said. Sofas and settees where one might seduce a woman properly. “With the odd suit of armor.”
“Oh my.” She stepped into the attics. The high mansard roof arched above, invisible in the darkness. The rain drummed down on the slate over their heads, not fiercely but steadily. Thanks to the leaden skies it wasn’t hot in the attics, but comfortably warm. “I see what you mean,” his guest exclaimed softly.
“Hmm?” She might have been a Madonna, reverently painted by an adoring artist, as she raised her face in awe toward the ceiling so far above them. Her skin glowed like gold in the light of his lamp.
“What a perfect hideaway!” She smiled broadly. “No one would ever find you. And as you said—full of furniture. With a lantern, some biscuits, and a good book, who might not want to squirrel away on a lonely day?”
Jack thought of the decanters of brandy, not books, he’d brought up here to enjoy in secret. There was a good chance the bottles were still up here, where he’d carefully hidden them as a lad. He also thought of doing as she said, hiding away up here all day with her. “Er—yes. Who would not?” He lifted the lamp higher and moved farther into the quiet attics.
They wandered slowly. Like the rest of Alwyn House, the attics were kept in good order, with furniture neatly ordered and stored by room. Mrs. Campbell discovered an ornate birdcage, and Jack was surprised to remember his grandmother’s parrot. “Possessed of a viciously sharp beak,” he said with a grimace.
She laughed. “That sounds like you put your fingers through the wires of the cage.”
“Why would you think that?” He studied the golden cage, still hanging from its stand. “I remember it being much larger than this. The parrot was enormous.”
“No wonder he bit,” she murmured. “Any creature trapped in a too-small cage would lash out on those who caged him.”
“I didn’t cage him,” said Jack. “He left a scar.” He rubbed his thumb along his forefinger, where there was a faint mark from the bite.
She only smiled. “Imagine how the parrot felt. He was still confined to the cage.”
He gave her a sharp glance but she had walked on, her expression clear, already engrossed by a curious chair. Jack remembered that as well—it had once been in the library—and he showed her how to flip the seat up to turn the chair into a stepladder. That led them deeper into the attics until they reached the end of the east wing, and when Jack took out his watch, he was shocked to see they had spent hours rummaging in the dust. And most shocking of all, he would have sworn it had been only a few minutes.
“This is almost as intriguing as the house proper,” she said, sitting gingerly on the edge of an old, worn-out settee tucked against the e
aves. “It’s a history of your family.”
“Not quite.” Jack stepped over a trunk and opened one of the tall, narrow windows. It stuck after opening a few inches, but the fresh breeze felt deliciously cool. He could see the stables from here and wondered if Percy had left yet. “You’d have to go to Kirkwood Hall for that. It’s been in the family since before Henry Tudor took the crown.”
“Goodness! What a lot of history that must be.” She leaned toward the window, inhaling the rainy air.
“Due to a compulsion to save everything for future generations. A hundred years from now this attic floor will have broken down and collapsed under the weight of family history.”
She smiled, her gaze directed out the dust-covered window. “Only think how fascinating your great-grandchildren will find it.”
“To read my old Latin lessons? Unlikely.” He had found his and Philip’s old schoolbooks, neatly stacked in a desk he dimly remembered from the nursery quarters. Why anyone had kept those was beyond him.
“I don’t know,” she said wistfully. “They will see your portrait downstairs, pompous and regal. It might please them to no end to discover proof that you were once a boy with poor penmanship who had to write his Latin verbs over and over, just as they might have to do.”
Jack ignored the bit about his portrait being pompous. He leaned against a particularly ugly chest of drawers opposite the sofa she sat on. She wasn’t guarded now; her expression was nearly the same one she had worn yesterday when he asked about her mother. “It sounds like you’ve been that child.”
“I?” Her lips curved and she heaved a sigh. “No. My parents died when I was twelve. I have almost nothing left of either of them.” She hesitated, her gaze distant. “My father was disowned by his parents and I was never able to explore his family home. Everything of his youth was lost to me, but if I had the chance to read his old Latin lessons, to see what he drew in the margins, simply to have something of his . . . I would seize it.”
“Why?” She blinked, and Jack realized he’d asked the question rather stridently. He moderated his voice. “Why was your father disowned?”
“For marrying my mother.” She lifted her chin. “He never regretted it.”
Jack raised one brow. There had been something very like regret in her voice as she talked of the family history her father had lost by being disowned.
“He didn’t,” she insisted. “His father wanted him to marry a girl whose family lived nearby, someone he’d known since they were children. It would have been like wedding his sister, Papa used to say, and it would have given his father—” She stopped, pressing her lips together. Her eyes flashed and she looked quite fierce, despite the smudge of dirt on her chin and the cobwebs on her borrowed dress.
Jack guessed she had no good opinion of that grandfather. “He was fortunate he was free to follow his heart.”
She looked at him sharply, but then her annoyed expression melted into one that was almost pitying. “He chose to follow his heart. It required certain sacrifices on his part, of course, but he accepted them as part of the bargain he’d made.”
“Commendable,” replied Jack. Her father hadn’t been the heir, then, at least not to any significant estate or title. No heir was permitted to follow his heart unless his heart led him to a lady of impeccable breeding and fortune. “But why was your mother so unacceptable to your grandfather?”
She drew breath to answer, then went still, her eyes focusing on him with renewed wariness. “She was French,” she said in the light tone he’d come to recognize as a diversionary tactic. Jack guessed there was more objection to her mother than being French, but he let it go. For now.
“Not Parisian, although I’ve no idea if that would have been better or worse. She came from Nice,” added Mrs. Campbell.
“One supposes it didn’t matter, given her inability to be the English girl who lived nearby.”
She laughed. “Precisely! And in all honestly, I don’t think there’s any pleasing my grandfather. He would have found something to disapprove of regardless of whom Papa married.”
“One of that sort, is he?”
“When I was a child, I nicknamed him the Ogre,” she replied with a cheeky wink.
Jack laughed even as he tucked the fact away in his mind. She’d said her parents died when she was twelve; had her grandfather done something on their deaths to earn her enmity? It wouldn’t be unheard-of for a man to cast off an unwanted grandchild, particularly one from a marriage he had opposed. Perhaps Mrs. Campbell had learned to look out for herself from an early age. And then her husband appeared to have been a useless fellow as well, which would only have made her more independent. Who was this woman? Jack was beginning to wonder why she seemed to have no connections at all.
“Since you were not able to excavate your own family attics, I am pleased to offer you mine,” he said instead, making a half bow. “Your grandfather sounds much like my great-grandfather.”
“The one who exiled his wife here?” She dusted a clean spot on the windowsill and rested her elbow against it as she settled more comfortably on the old settee. The breeze stirred the loose wisps of hair at her temple, almost as if a lover’s gentle fingers stroked it. “Why did he do that?”
“I don’t think he cared for her, nor she for him.” One tendril curled around her jaw, teasing the corner of her mouth. Jack was mesmerized by it, and in the dim attic felt at full liberty to stare.
“One wonders why either agreed to wed the other.”
He smiled without amusement. “It was an advantageous match for both. The Dukes of Ware don’t wed for trifling matters like affection.”
“No?” She seemed genuinely surprised, tilting her head to face him. “Never?”
Jack thought of Portia. He would have married her, as mad in love as he’d thought himself, and it would have been a disaster. “Not to my knowledge.”
“And here I thought a wealthy, powerful duke could do as he pleased, wed whom he chose, and no one could say him nay.” She shook her head in mock sadness. “Instead you’re required to wed a piece of land or a sum of money rather than a person.”
His mouth thinned in irritation. “Hardly required.”
“Oh.” She gazed at him, wide-eyed. “Each generation chooses to marry for purely financial reasons, then.”
“I’ve not married anyone,” he said. “Obviously.” She lowered her eyes and smiled. Too late he realized she’d only been tweaking him. He let out his breath and stared out the window. He could just see her face from the corner of his eye. “I expect I have as much freedom to marry as you do.”
Her head came up. “What does that mean?”
Ah, a hit. He lifted one shoulder. “You’re an independent widow, able to do as you please and with no one to say you nay.”
“Except when I wish to go home,” she said with a pointed glance. “Do you think your ancestors were happy, wedding for dynastic reasons?”
“Happy? I have no idea. Satisfied? I believe so. One presumes they found . . . delight in other places.” He knew they had. His ancestors were fiendishly organized men, and Jack had seen the records of gifts for mistresses and lovers. His grandfather had kept a house in London specifically for trysts, with instructions to the housekeeper to turn the mattress and place fresh linens on the bed every day.
“My parents loved each other very much,” she said softly. “They found delight in each other. Perhaps more practical marriages would have yielded more wealth or property, but I believe nothing could have matched their happiness.”
“Is that what you want?”
She met his eyes. “Would you believe it if I said yes?”
“I—” He stopped, remembering how he’d accused her of trying to attach a wealthy husband. “I would.”
For a moment she didn’t reply. Then a smile crossed her face, and her tone turned lig
ht again. “It would be wonderful, but that sort of match seems very rare.”
That didn’t answer the question. Not that it should matter to him who or why she married, so long as she didn’t set her sights on Philip. Which she’d already denied in convincing terms. So what sort of man was she looking for? Jack cleared his throat, wondering how the hell he’d got into this conversation anyway. “Shall we explore the other side of the house while the light is still good?”
She was on her feet before he finished the question. “By all means.”
Sophie thought she might be losing her mind. How on earth had she got into a discussion of love and marriage with the duke?
It must be the dark, warm atmosphere of the attics, softening her wits. Or perhaps it was the decades of family history all around her, something she had never had in her life and secretly craved. The thought of finding her mother’s childhood doll or her father’s first music book made her feel uncharacteristically sentimental. Surely that explained why she had told him, of all people, about her parents’ romantic but illicit marriage. Only Eliza and Georgiana knew about that, yet somehow she’d opened her mouth and told the Duke of Ware.
The eastern side of the attics were not as intriguing. Neat rows of crates and trunks lined the walls, and when she managed to pry open one crate, it turned out to hold pieces of metal, wrapped in flannels under the straw.
“A knight’s suit of armor and weaponry!” She held up one piece in triumph, a long rod with a wicked hook on one end. “How many enemies do you think your ancestors struck down with this? It looks like a spear.”
My Once and Future Duke (The Wagers of Sin #1) Page 11
