“You have only lately come up from the country,” Alyssa said tactfully. “Perhaps a wider acquaintance among what London offers would be in order. before you make your choice of a wife.”
He stiffened indignantly. “You have no notion of all the females who have thrown themselves at me since I have been in London!”
In fact, Alyssa had a very good notion. Given Stanwood’s title, lineage, and the great fortune he would one day inherit, every nubile young lady of quality and ambitious mama in London had undoubtedly tried to shackle him.
“And every one of them was so silly and insipid and dissembling,” Stanwood continued in exasperation. “They told me only what they thought would please me. You are the one woman I have met in London who says what she truly thinks. And you are capital fun besides.”
“But you met my family today.” The stricken look on the marquess’s young face told Alyssa how much hat introduction had shocked him. “I cannot imagine that yours would welcome such a connection.”
“You are so very different from them. I do not understand how you could have been raised under the same roof as...” His tongue seemed to tie itself in embarrassed knots.
Alyssa had not been, but she did not enlighten him to her true background. It would not help to discourage his suit if he learned that her surname was Eliot, not Raff, and that she came from a distinguished family on her father’s side. She said gently, “You see, Jeremy, even you recognise what a mésalliance a match with me would be.”
He stiffened indignantly. “You are trying to fob me off. But I shall have you! I adore you!” The marquess’s amiable face hardened into mulish obstinacy. “If you will not have me now, I shall devote myself lo winning you!”
With a sinking heart, Alyssa perceived that she was doing exactly what she did not want to do: making the winning of her hand a challenge to him, so that he was fired with stubborn determination to have her. His interest was far more likely to wane if he thought her already his, especially if she then conducted herself so that he would soon rue having won her.
“I will not accept no for an answer!” he cried in a recalcitrant, impassioned voice.
She said soothingly, “Then I shall not say no, but only on one condition.”
Although she had been careful not to say yes, either, he misinterpreted her answer as acquiescence. “I shall make you so happy.”
Alyssa did not correct his mistaken impression that she had accepted his offer. Instead, she said, “You did not agree to my condition.”
“What is it?”
“That we keep our romance secret,” she said, deliberately avoiding the word betrothal.
The happiness on Jeremy’s face gave way to dismay. “For how long?”
“A year.” That would give her plenty of time to cure his tendre for her. In truth, she was certain that it would not take her more than a few weeks.
The marquess was crestfallen. “A year! Why? I planned that we should be wed by then.”
“No! I could not bear to have it said that I am a wicked hussy who snatched her husband from his cradle before he was old enough to know his own mind!” she cried dramatically. “Oh, I should die of shame! If you love me, you will not subject me to such humiliation!”
“No, no, of course not,” her young suitor stammered.
“Besides, I cannot conceive that your papa would permit you to wed so young.”
“He was married and had two children by my age. He will not—he cannot—stop me!”
“Yes, he can. You must have his permission until you reach your majority, and that is two years away,” she reminded him.
Jeremy said mutinously, “If he refuses his permission, we shall elope to Gretna Green.”
Alyssa managed a horrified shriek. “We shall do no such thing! Think of the scandal! Think of my reputation. How can you ask such a thing of me?”
Stanwood was instantly contrite, and she pushed home her advantage. “You must swear that you will tell no one of our secret.” Again she deliberately avoided using the word betrothal.
“No one. Except Papa.”
That was the last person Alyssa wanted to think that she was betrothed to his son. From all that she had heard about the duke, he was a merciless opponent. The thought of what he would do if he thought her engaged to his son made her cry in alarm, “No, you most particularly must not tell your papa! Promise me that you shall not!”
“I must tell him,” Jeremy said stubbornly. “I have never kept a secret from him in my life.”
“Then I reject your offer!” She held up her hand to silence his protest. “No, I am adamant. Do not waste your breath!”
“Why, I believe you are afraid of him,” the marquess said wonderingly, “but you should not be. He s the very best of fathers.”
Which, if true, was precisely why she should be terrified of him, Alyssa thought grimly. He would be justly outraged by such a mésalliance for his son.
“All right,” Jeremy said reluctantly. “I promise not to tell Papa, but I cannot like keeping it from him. I know that once you meet, you and Papa will get along famously.”
More likely infamously! Alyssa thought, praying that Jeremy s puppy love would end quickly. If the duke learned that his son considered himself betrothed to her, Carlyle’s fury would surely be monumental.
Chapter 2
If anything, Alyssa underestimated His Grace the Duke of Carlyle’s rage upon learning about her.
The young marquess, true to the letter if not the spirit of his word to Alyssa, did not tell his father. Nevertheless, word reached the duke at Beauchamp that very day.
After leaving Alyssa, the marquess, wishing to buy his betrothed a gift befitting a future duchess, went to see Mr Hugh Page. This gentleman held a unique position with the duke, whom he had served for seventeen years with intelligence, devotion, and dedication. As Carlyle’s trusted major-domo and confidant in all matters of business, no man alive knew more about His Grace’s affairs, both financial and personal, than Hugh Page.
The duke kept his son on a tight financial leash, and the jewels that Stanwood wanted to purchase would necessitate his receiving several months of his allowance in advance from Mr Page, a request that not unnaturally aroused that astute gentleman’s curiosity. Somehow, under his adroit questioning, Stanwood let slip his happy news.
To His Lordship’s dismay, instead of felicitating him, Mr Page said sharply, “You must tell your father.”
“But I cannot!”
“Why do you not wish him to know?”
Since Stanwood wanted nothing more than to tell his father, who had always been more like an indulgent older brother than a stern papa to him, he said frankly, “I do want him to know, but Alyssa insists on keeping it a secret. She made me promise particularly that I would not tell Papa. I think that she is afraid of him.”
And well she should be, Mr Page thought. The sketchy details that he had subtly extracted from Stanwood had given him an unpleasant picture of the youth’s intended. Mr Page was not a betting man, but he would be willing to wager a year’s salary that Alyssa Raff would soon be very sorry indeed that she had set her cap for the duke’s son.
“If you cannot tell your father, then I shall,” Mr Page said. “That way you will not have told him and, therefore, you will not have broken your promise to your betrothed.”
Mr Page’s solution greatly appealed to Jeremy. However, out of deference to his betrothed’s wishes, he demurred. “No, I cannot permit you to tell Papa.”
“You cannot stop me. If Miss Raff complains, you may heap all the blame upon me for treacherously betraying both your confidence and your wishes.”
This mollified Jeremy’s opposition, but he said uneasily, “Neither you nor Papa can tell anyone else. Alyssa insists that our betrothal must remain a secret.”
“Rest assured that our lips will be sealed,” Mr Page said with an irony that was lost on the marquess.
After Stanwood’s departure, Hugh Page set about discovering
all that he could about one Alyssa Raff. What little information he gleaned so appalled him that instead of carrying the news to Beauchamp the following morning as he had intended, be went late that afternoon on the fastest horse that Marsh’s excellent stables could provide him.
With each passing mile, his dread of the forthcoming session with Carlyle increased. For all the duke’s reputation as a rake, he was as loving and devoted a father as Hugh had ever seen and would take the news of his son’s folly badly. Hugh hated being the bearer of such unhappy tidings to a man whom he held in affection and esteem. Despite Carlyle’s ruthless reputation, he was always kind and generous to the few people he truly cared about, and he had demonstrated toward Hugh a courtesy and a confidence that was unheard of in employers. During their many years together, Mr Page had come to understand the duke very well indeed and, as a result, would have walked through fire for His Grace.
By the time Hugh Page was escorted into the presence of Richard Jeremy William Carstair, the eighth Duke of Carlyle, in the great library at Beauchamp, he was roundly cursing Stanwood for having made him the recipient of his blasted secret.
“To what do I owe the pleasure of this rare visit to Beauchamp, Hugh?” the duke asked with an engaging smile as Mr Page made his bow.
“Your Grace will find it no pleasure,” Hugh said grimly.
Carlyle raised one of his thick, dark eyebrows questioningly. It was easy for Hugh to see why the duke cut such a notorious swath among the ladies, both highborn and high-flying. He was a dashingly handsome figure. With a lean, trim body that needed no corset, brown hair as thick as it was curly, and a lithe grace, he looked younger than his thirty-six years. His voice was deep, pleasant, and deceptively soft. A pair of glittering, penetrating eyes, hazel flecked with gold, beneath heavy brows dominated his aristocratically sculpted face with its perfectly proportioned nose and sensual mouth. The hardness of these remarkable eyes, the unusual thickness of his dark brows that could knit together in a fierce scowl, coupled with his utter disregard for others’ opinions of his behaviour, had contributed quite as much as that behaviour itself to his fearsome reputation.
Hugh, however, knew a different man, especially when he was surrounded by his family at Beauchamp. How much more relaxed and easygoing His Grace was there than in London, where he habitually wore a harshly cynical countenance.
And there was nothing that he was more cynical about than women. And why not? Hugh thought, the way so many of them shamelessly threw themselves at him. Carlyle was generally pursued rather than pursuer, but he was a quarry willing to be caught. Yet he made no false promises. He was forthright about matrimony being a trap in which no woman would ever again catch him. Having long ago fulfilled his obligation to produce an heir, he wanted nothing more to do with marriage. Not that he trifled with innocents. Knowing the rules of the game he played so well, he confined his amours to sophisticated beauties of the ton and to the fashionable impures. His liaisons were always brief, by his voice, not the lady’s.
“Such a face, Hugh, alarms me,” Carlyle observed. “What is it?”
Reluctantly, Hugh broke the news of the marquess’s betrothal. For the first time in all the years that Hugh had known him, the duke was robbed of speech.
“I tried to point out his youth to him,” Hugh said to fill the silence, “but he only reminded me that you were married when you were sixteen.”
“Yes! Thrust into a marriage bed when I was hardly more than a child myself, with a woman six years my senior. A woman I hardly knew.” The duke’s words were permeated with such bitterness that Hugh flinched. “I should never have left Jeremy in London when Ellen fell ill and I had to return here.”
“How is Lady Ellen now?” Hugh asked.
“Recovered.” Relief softened the duke’s face so that he looked almost boyish. “My sister Hester is taking her to Bath in the morning to partake of the waters for a month.” His handsome face hardened again. “Who is this chit who has so enchanted my son? Some silly young flirt scarcely out of the schoolroom, with coaxing ways?”
“Hardly. She is five-and-twenty.”
“Five-and-twenty! Jeremy’s scarcely nineteen.” His thick brows snapped together in the Carlyle scowl. “If she has been on the town all these years, I must know her.”
“Her name is Alyssa Raff.”
“I never heard of her.”
“I am relieved.”
The duke’s hard eyes narrowed. “Explain.”
“She is the elder of two daughters. Her mother is the widow of a Cit who died last year, leaving her in much reduced circumstances. In the past two months, her fortunes have mysteriously improved.” A deep frown creased Hugh’s face. “I have not yet seen Alyssa, but I was able to observe her mother and younger sister as they returned home this afternoon.”
“That bad?” asked the duke, correctly interpreting Hugh’s expression. “What does the sister look like?”
Hugh grimaced. “Very much like that dreadful barque of frailty from whose clutches you had to extract Lord Sidney when he first went on the town.”
“Good God!” the duke exclaimed.
“Mrs Raff and her younger daughter are clearly ill-bred, tasteless, vulgar females. Frankly, Your Grace, I was shocked.”
“Then why on earth would you think that I might know of Alyssa Raff?”
Hugh coloured slightly. “I fear it would not have been in honourable circumstances. From what little I was able to learn, I fear there is something very havey-cavey about her. Mrs Raff recently moved from the large house where she had lived for nine years into more modest quarters, and I interviewed several of her former neighbours. In all the years that she resided in the large house, Alyssa did not live with her, although she occasionally made brief visits, arriving in an elegant carriage accompanied by servants in expensive livery. It is only during the past few weeks that she has again been under her mother’s roof. Her return to the family home, by the way, coincided with the improvement in her mother’s fortunes.”
Carlyle’s face was as black as the sky during a thunderstorm. He was notorious for his blunt speech, and he did not mince words now. “Under whose protection was the strumpet living?”
“I was not able to ascertain that,” Hugh answered, relieved that His Grace had immediately drawn the same conclusion about Miss Raff that he had.
Within twenty minutes, the duke’s household was in an uproar, following his announcement that he was leaving immediately by horseback for London, not waiting even for his valet, Thompson, who was to follow the next morning after packing what wardrobe his master would require in London. Although the scandalised Thompson could not imagine that His Grace could survive a night in London without his assistance, one look at Carlyle’s furious face silenced the protest his loyal valet had been about to voice. Never, he confided later to the butler, had he seen His Grace in such a pelter.
As his horse galloped through the night toward London, the Duke of Carlyle seethed at the aging, scheming doxy who had ensnared his son.
How cleverly Miss Raff must have woven her net around Jeremy, taking advantage of his youth and inexperience. The duke was particularly incensed by her extracting a promise from the boy that he would not tell his father of his betrothal. Of course she did not want him to learn of it, for the cunning jade knew full well that he would nip her little romance in the bud. She knew, too, that Jeremy could not marry for two years without his father’s permission. Her plan must be to lure the boy into an elopement to Gretna Green before his family became aware of his involvement with her. Well, she would not succeed!
Carlyle knew from his own bitter marriage the misery and disillusionment in store for a green youth who fell in love with a sophisticated, faithless woman several years older than himself. He clenched his hand around his mount’s reins. He was determined to save Jeremy, whom he dearly loved, from such suffering.
His Grace had known that London would be a dangerous place for a youth as amiable and naïve as his son and
had postponed his introduction to it for as long as he could. With Jeremy’s great expectations, he was certain to be pursued on the one hand by an army of marriageable young ladies and determined mamas eager to lure the future Duke of Carlyle into marriage, and on the other hand by male parasites equally eager to lead him into the dissolute life that claimed so many young Sons of rich fathers. When Carlyle had reluctantly brought his son at last to London, it was with a determination to make him aware of both dangers.
The second had been the easier to deal with. The boy, who loved the country and its pleasures, liked London even less than Carlyle had expected he would. To his father’s relief, Jeremy had no taste for gambling and whoring and hell-raising. He had quickly grasped how silly and empty and ultimately unsatisfying was the life led by so many young men in London.
He was less discerning, however, about the motives and true nature of the resolute young ladies and their mamas who sought to shackle him. So with patience and humour, Carlyle subtly pointed out their wiles and ruses, seizing every opportunity to mock their machinations, flirtatious coyness and insincere tongues.
It was not that he objected to his son’s marrying, but he wanted for him a wife who would love him for himself, not for the title and fortune he would inherit, an intelligent, good-humoured woman with a domestic nature, who would be content with the country life that Jeremy preferred and would devote herself to her husband and children instead of yearning for London’s frivolous society, entertainments and flirtations.
His Grace was determined to spare Jeremy the heartbreak and disillusionment that he himself had suffered. Which was why the duke would never permit Miss Raff to become his daughter-in-law. He cursed himself for having left Jeremy alone in London with no one but Sidney to look out for him. Carlyle had thought it safe to do so because he had been certain that Jeremy had absorbed his father’s subtle lessons about the deceits and trickery of determined females. But clearly the duke had been wrong, or his son would not have been encoiled by a cunning hussy.
The Duke's Revenge Page 2
