Storming the Castle

by Eloisa James

  “All I asked was that the silver be thoroughly polished on a regular basis.”

  Philippa closed her eyes. “I cannot imagine how you did all that you claim a butler should manage in one day, and neither can poor Ribble. At this rate, you will know all there is to know about medicine in six months rather than a year.”

  “Did you see that your father sent another letter?” he inquired.

  She nodded. “He has launched into a ferocious battle with a benighted professor from Cambridge who had the temerity to disagree with his reconstruction of Napoleon’s first campaign.”

  “I like your father,” Wick said. “He is a model of perseverance.”

  “He’s too rigid,” Philippa said. “He will never accept that anyone else is right, even about the trivial detail.”

  Wick grinned down at her. “And yet . . . here I am.”

  “Well, that’s true,” Philippa said. “He did change his mind about you. And I still smile every time I think about his insisting that I go to the village merely to return that silly book. It was very unlike him to participate in your charade.”

  “What you should smile about is the image of me practicing that horse business,” Wick said. “I could have been at your side a full two days earlier had it not been for the hours and hours I lost, sweeping the knife boy up before me in the saddle.”

  “Oh dear,” Philippa said sleepily. “I hope you didn’t drop him.”

  “Often,” Wick said. “But he didn’t break anything. I came to you the moment I felt reasonably certain that I wouldn’t drop you.” He touched her nose lightly. “You are the most precious thing in the world to me.”

  The corner of her mouth quirked, and she whispered, “Love you,” then she was asleep.

  Wick lay beside her, watching as the sunlight shifted across the bed, making stripes over the bare skin of his exquisite wife. The doctor side of him cataloged the tiny swell in her stomach, and the way she dropped asleep at any time of the day. The man side of him noticed that her bosom was even more enthralling than it had been when they married, three months ago.

  And the child side . . . the small boy inside, who was never quite sure of his place in life . . . That small boy had vanished.

  He belonged here, next to a woman whom he loved more than life itself.

  Though how that happened he didn’t know. In fact, he didn’t really understand his own luck until years later when his eldest daughter Clara grew old enough to discover fairy tales. Then, with stories of knights, dragons, lovely maidens, and magic beans swirling through the house, Wick realized who he was. Not an illegitimate son of a grand duke. Not the best doctor in the country. He was the stable boy who won the princess.

  The stories never said much about the stable boy’s birth. They just said that the princess was as beautiful as the sun and the moon.

  But most importantly, those stories all end the same way.

  They lived happily ever after.

  About the Author

  ELOISA JAMES is the author of nineteen award-winning romances. She’s also a professor of English literature, teaching in New York City, where she lives with her family. With two jobs, two cats, two children, and only one husband, she spends most of her time making lists of things to do—letters from readers are a great escape! Connect with Eloisa on her Facebook page (www.facebook.com/EloisaJamesFans), through her website (www.eloisajames.com), or through e-mail at eloisa@eloisajames.com.

  By Eloisa James

  When Beauty Tamed the Beast

  A Kiss at Midnight

  A Duke of Her Own

  This Duchess of Mine

  When the Duke Returns

  Duchess By Night

  An Affair Before Christmas

  Desperate Duchesses

  Pleasure for Pleasure

  The Taming of the Duke

  Kiss Me, Annabel

  Much Ado About You

  Your Wicked Ways

  A Wild Pursuit

  Fool for Love

  Duchess in Love

  Kiss at Midnight

  “Eloisa James’s writing is absolutely exquisite.

  She is one of the brightest lights. ...

  Her writing is truly scrumptious.”

  Teresa Medeiros

  “You’re extraordinarily beautiful.”

  While Kate was still registering that comment, he gathered her up in his arms and lowered his head to hers.

  All that restless, wild energy she felt in him poured into his kiss. She thought kissing was about a brush of the lips, but this ... this was about tasting and feeling. He felt like silk and fire.

  He tasted like fire. She leaned into it, opened her mouth, feeling a tremor go down her back. He murmured something hot and sweet. She dimly remembered that she meant to give him a lesson, to teach him not to kiss any lady he met.

  She ought to slap him.

  But then he might take his lips away.

  Yet one rather small, cool voice in her head reminded her exactly who she was, and who she was kissing.

  By Eloisa James

  A KISS AT MIDNIGHT

  A DUKE OF HER OWN

  THIS DUCHESS OF MINE

  WHEN THE DUKE RETURNS

  DUCHESS BY NIGHT

  AN AFFAIR BEFORE CHRISTMAS

  DESPERATE DUCHESSES

  PLEASURE FOR PLEASURE

  THE TAMING OF THE DUKE

  KISS ME, ANNABEL

  MUCH ADO ABOUT YOU

  YOUR WICKED WAYS

  A WILD PURSUIT

  FOOL FOR LOVE

  DUCHESS IN LOVE

  A Kiss at Midnight

  Eloisa James

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2010 by Eloisa James

  ISBN 978-0-06-162684-5

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  This book is dedicated to the memory of my mother, Carol Bly. She didn’t care too much for the genre of romance—or so she said. But she read my sister and me fairy tales over and over, enchanting us with princes who swept in on white chargers and princesses whose golden hair doubled as ladders. She gave me my first copies of Anne of Green Gables, Little Women, and Pride and Prejudice. In short, Mom, it’s all your fault!

  Acknowledgments

  My books are like small children; they take a whole village to get them to a literate state. I want to offer my heartfelt thanks to my personal village: my editor, Carrie Feron; my agent, Kim Witherspoon; my website designers, Wax Creative; and last, but not least, my personal team: Kim Castillo, Franzeca Drouin, and Anne Connell. I am so grateful to each of you!

  Prologue

  Once upon a time, not so very long ago . . .

  This story begins with a carriage that was never a pumpkin, though it fled at midnight; a godmother who lost track of her charge, though she had no magic wand; and several so-called rats who secretly would have enjoyed wearing livery.

  And, of course, there’s a girl too, though she didn’t know how to dance, nor did she want to marry a prince.

  But it really begins with the rats.

  They were out of control; everybody said so. Mrs. Swallow, the housekeeper, fretted about it regularly. “I can’t abide the way those little varmints chew up a pair of shoes when
a body’s not looking,” she told the butler, a comfortable soul by the name of Mr. Cherryderry.

  “I know just what you’re saying,” he told her with an edge in his voice that she didn’t hear often. “I can’t abide them. Those sharp noses, and the yapping at night, and—”

  “The way they eat!” Mrs. Swallow broke in. “From the table, from the very plates!”

  “It is from the plates,” Cherryderry told her. “I’ve seen it with my own eyes, Mrs. Swallow, that I have! By the hand of Mrs. Daltry herself!”

  Mrs. Swallow’s little shriek might have been heard all the way in the drawing room ... except the rats were making such a racket that no one in that chamber could hear anything.

  Chapter One

  Yarrow House

  The residence of Mrs. Mariana Daltry; her daughter, Victoria; and Miss Katherine Daltry

  Miss Katherine Daltry, known to almost all as Kate, got down from her horse seething with rage.

  It should be said that the condition wasn’t unfamiliar to her. Before her father died seven years earlier, she found herself sometimes irritated with her new stepmother. But it wasn’t until he was gone, and the new Mrs. Daltry—who had held that title for a matter of mere months—started ruling the roost, that Kate really learned the meaning of anger.

  Anger was watching tenants on the estate be forced to pay double the rent or leave cottages where they’d lived their whole lives. Anger was watching the crops wilt and the hedges overgrow because her stepmother begrudged the money needed to maintain the estate. Anger was watching her father’s money be poured into new gowns and bonnets and frilly things ... so numerous that her stepmother and stepsister couldn’t find days enough in the year to wear them all.

  It was the pitying glances she had from acquaintances who never met her at dinner anymore. It was being relegated to a chamber in the attic, with faded furnishings that advertised her relative worth in the household. It was the self-loathing of someone who can’t quite bring herself to leave home and have done with it. It was fueled by humiliation, and despair, and the absolute certainty that her father must be turning in his grave.

  She stomped up the front steps girding her loins for battle, as her father himself would have said. “Hello, Cherryderry,” she said, as their dear old butler opened the door. “Are you playing footman now?”

  “Herself sent the footmen off to London to fetch a doctor,” Cherryderry said. “To be exact, two doctors.”

  “Having a spell, is she?” Kate pulled her gloves off carefully, since the leather was separating from its lining around the wrist. Time was when she might have actually wondered if her stepmother (known to the household as Herself) was malingering, but no longer. Not after years of false alarms and voices screaming in the middle of the night about attacks ... which generally turned out to be indigestion.

  Though as Cherryderry had once commented, one can only hope.

  “Not Herself, this time. It’s Miss Victoria’s face, I gather.”

  “The bite?”

  He nodded. “Dragging the lip down, so her maid told us this morning. There’s a swelling there as well.”

  Sour as she felt, Kate felt a pulse of sympathy. Poor Victoria didn’t have much going for her outside of her pretty face and prettier frocks; it would break her stepsister’s heart if she were permanently disfigured.

  “I have to talk to Herself about the vicar’s wife,” she said, handing her pelisse to Cherryderry. “Or rather, the former vicar’s wife. After his death, I moved the family to the far cottage.”

  “Bad business,” the butler said. “Especially in a vicar. Seems that a vicar shouldn’t take his own life.”

  “He left her with four children,” Kate said.

  “Mind you, it’s not easy for a man to get over the loss of a limb.”

  “Well, now his children have to get over the loss of him,” she said unsympathetically. “Not to mention that my stepmother sent an eviction notice to his widow yesterday.”

  Cherryderry frowned. “Herself says you’re to dine with them tonight.”

  Kate stopped on her way up the stairs. “She said what?”

  “You’re to dine with them tonight. And Lord Dimsdale is coming.”

  “You must be joking.”

  But the butler was shaking his head. “She said that. What’s more, she’s decided that Miss Victoria’s rats have to go, but for some reason she banished them to your chamber.”

  Kate closed her eyes for a moment. A day that had started out badly was only getting worse. She disliked her stepsister’s pack of little dogs, affectionately, or not so affectionately, known to all as the rats. She also disliked Algernon Bennett, Lord Dimsdale, her stepsister’s betrothed. He smiled too easily. And she loathed even more the idea of sitting down to dinner en famille.

  She generally managed to forget that she had once been mistress of the household. After all, her mother had been bedridden for years before she died, and sickly most of Kate’s life. Kate had grown up sitting opposite her father at the dining room table, going over the menus with Mrs. Swallow, the housekeeper ... She had expected to debut, and marry, and raise children of her own in this very house.

  But that was before her father died, and she turned into a maid-of-all-work, living in the garret.

  And now she was to come to dinner, in a gown that was out-of-date, and endure the smirking pleasantries of Lord Dimsdale? Why?

  She ran up the stairs with a sickening foreboding in her stomach. Kate’s stepmother was seated at her dressing table, examining her complexion. The afternoon light fell over her shoulder, lighting her hair. It had a glare to it, that hair, a fierce yellow tint as if the strands were made of minerals. She was wearing a morning dress with a pleated bodice of lilac net, caught under the breasts with a trailing ribbon. It was lovely ... for a debutante.

  But Mariana could not abide the fact that she was no longer in her thirties. In fact, she had never really accepted the loss of her twenties. And so she dressed herself to create an approximation of Mariana-at-Twenty. One thing you had to say for Kate’s stepmother: She had a reckless bravery, a kind of fierce disregard for the conventions governing women’s aging.

  But of course if Mariana’s costumes were the outward expression of her ambition, they were also the refuge of the failed. For no woman yet has appeared twenty in her forties, and a deliciously sensual gown cannot restore youth.

  “I gather you finished your peregrinations amongst your friends and bothered to come home,” Mariana said acidly.

  Kate took one look around her stepmother’s boudoir and decided to remove a heap of clothes from what she was almost certain was a stool. The room was mounded with piles of light cottons and spangled silks; they were thrown in heaps over the chairs. Or at least where one presumed chairs to be. The room resembled a pastel snowscape, with soft mountains of fabric here and there.

  “What are you doing?” her stepmother demanded as Kate hoisted the gowns in her arms.

  “Sitting down,” Kate said, dropping the clothing on the floor.

  Her stepmother bounded up with a screech. “Don’t treat my gowns like that, you stupid girl! The top few were delivered only a day or two ago, and they’re magnificent. I’ll have you ironing them all night if there’s the least wrinkle, even the least.”

  “I don’t iron,” Kate said flatly. “Remember? I put a scorch mark on a white gown three years ago.”

  “Ah, the Persian belladine!” her stepmother cried, clasping her hands together like a girlish Lady Macbeth. “I keep it ... there.” She pointed a long finger to a corner where a towering mound of cloth went halfway to the ceiling. “I shall have it altered one of these days.” She sat back down.

  Kate carefully pushed the stack of gowns a little farther away from her foot. “I must speak to you about the Crabtrees.”

  “God, I hope you managed to shovel the woman out the door,” Mariana said, lighting a cigarillo. “You know the bloody solicitor is coming next week to assess my manag
ement of the estate. If he sees that scrap heap of a cottage, he’ll make no end of fuss. Last quarter he prosed on and on till I thought I’d die of boredom.”

  “It’s your responsibility to keep the cottages in good repair,” Kate said, getting up to open a window.

  Mariana waved her cigarillo disdainfully. “Nonsense. Those people live on my land for practically nothing. The least they can do is keep their own houses in good nick. That Crabtree woman is living in a pigsty. I happened by the other day and I was positively horrified.”

  Kate sat back down and let her eyes wander around the room. The pigsty of a room. But after a moment she realized that Mariana hadn’t noticed her silent insult, since she had opened a little jar and was painting her lips a dark shade of copper.

  “Since her husband died,” Kate said, “Mrs. Crabtree is both exhausted and afraid. The house is not a pigsty; it is simply disorganized. You can’t evict her. She has nowhere to go.”

  “Nonsense,” Mariana said, leaning closer to the glass to examine her lips. “I’m sure she has a bolt-hole all planned. Another man, most like. It’s been over a year since Crabtree topped himself; she’ll have a new one lined up by now. You’ll see.”

  Talking to her stepmother, to Kate’s mind, was like peeing in a coal-black outhouse. You had no idea what might come up, but you knew you wouldn’t like it.

  “That is cruel,” she said, trying to pitch her words so that she sounded like the voice of authority.

  “They have to go,” Mariana stated. “I can’t abide sluggards. I made a special trip over to the vicarage, you know, the morning after her husband jumped from the bridge. Bringing my condolences.”

  Mariana preferred to avoid all the people working on the estate or in the village, except on the rare occasions when she developed a sudden taste for playing the lady of the manor. Then she would put on an ensemble extravagantly calculated to offend country folk, descend from her carriage, and decipher in her tenants’ startled expressions their shiftless and foolish natures. Finally she would instruct Kate to jettison them from their homes.