A Duke in Disguise

by Cat Sebastian

  “Of course it’s nothing less than murder,” Ash said in that deep, steady voice that he had always used to calm Nate down. “It’s worse than murder, because it will go unpunished. And of course the trial was grossly wrong and unfair. We all know that. We all agree at this table.” My God, they had been through this often enough in the past months. Verity opened her mouth to say as much but Ash, without looking at her, made a shooing gesture under the table which she interpreted as Shut up, Plum. “The only point on which we disagree is whether you’re going to print a lunatic screed that gets us all arrested.”

  “What I wrote is the truth,” Nate answered, sounding more like a child of ten than a grown man of past twenty.

  “A fat lot of good the truth has ever done anyone,” Verity burst out, unable to hold her tongue. “Besides, even the truth can be couched in words that don’t get anyone brought before a judge.”

  “Wooler was acquitted!” Nate protested, referring to a publisher who that summer had been tried for seditious libel after publishing material criticizing the House of Lords. “And I’m certain Hone will be, when he’s tried later this autumn.”

  “And Mr. Cobbett went to America to avoid another turn in prison,” she shot back, alluding to a fellow reformer who had once spent two years in prison for a pamphlet that was critical of the government. As soon as Lord Sidmouth ordered the arrest and prosecution of anyone suspected of printing sedition, Cobbett had sailed to New York.

  “William Cobbett is an old man,” her brother retorted.

  “My father says he’s done with politics,” said one of the young printers, adopting a self-consciously conciliatory tone that made Verity want to crack her dinner plate over his head. “He says he’ll only trade in obscenity from now on. Says people will always pay for that, paper duty or no paper duty.”

  “Less time in prison too,” said another man. “And no chance of being done up for treason. Three years hard? Piddling stuff.” Verity could not determine whether he was joking.

  “Better than transportation or hanging,” pointed out the first young man.

  “Or disembowelment,” agreed the other. They clinked their glasses together in happy salute of the manageable punishment for printing obscenities.

  Verity sighed. “I’m so sorry,” she told Amelia once the young men had all resumed their quarrel. “They haven’t any manners at all.”

  “This is much more interesting than the dinners I usually attend,” she said brightly. Seventeen was young enough for anything to be interesting, Verity supposed.

  “I daresay your mother has kept you well clear of sedition and blasphemy. I’ll have to apologize to her.” Verity groaned inwardly at the prospect. It had been half a year since she and Portia Allenby had ceased being lovers. But they had been friends before, and Portia seemed determined that they would remain friends, even though every moment they spent together reminded Verity of how very ill-suited she was for affection, romance, and possibly even friendship.

  Amelia furrowed her brow. “All those scientists she has on her Wednesday nights are quite blasphemous, at least if my understanding of their science and general theology are correct.”

  Portia Allenby had once been the mistress of a wealthy nobleman and now held a salon at which writers, scientists, and other luminaries gathered. She let her daughters have run of the house no matter what topics were being discussed. But Verity had to think that Portia might not want her eldest daughter to be at a dinner table where there was frank disparagement of the government without the benefit of decent food and wax candles. Good wine helped a great deal to make conversation seem academic rather than something that could at any moment spill out into the streets and end with pitchforks and treason trials.

  “Would you ever trade in . . .” Amelia bit her lip, plainly at a loss for words. “In the sort of material the young men were talking about?”

  “Lewd novels?” Verity supplied. “Explicit prints? If they were any good, perhaps.” Beside her, she heard Ash’s low laugh. “Well, I would,” she insisted. “We don’t put out many books, but I’d make an exception. My father always said that more than one bookseller made his fortune on clandestine printings of Fanny Hill. But I wouldn’t put out another Fanny Hill, which I dare say a number of gentlemen have found very amusing, but it doesn’t have much in it for the ladies.”

  Now she could feel Ash’s gaze on her and it gave Verity a strange feeling to be talking about obscene literature so close to him. With so many people crowded around the small table, her shoulder nearly touched his.

  “You and your brother are no different,” he said, an indulgent half smile playing on his lips. “Any other person would be coming up with law-abiding ways to keep the business afloat. The two of you are fighting over which laws to break.”

  “If I printed that sort of thing, I’d be most careful, I assure you. Only the best filth for Plum and Company’s readership.”

  Later, after Nate and his friends left to get soused at a gin house and Amelia had been collected by her mother’s carriage, Ash and Verity sat amidst the remains of supper and the wine from Ash’s room.

  “Revolution is all he speaks of,” she said while splitting the last roll and giving half to Ash. “And in turn all I talk about is the need for prudence, and so we go round and round. I think we’ve been having the same conversation since you left for Bath.” The wine had gone to her head a bit. Her thoughts were muzzy and her speech was free. “I feel like a prison warden. Or a very cross nursery maid. I’m always scolding Nate or counting farthings or wondering where the last candle went.” These repeated quarrels were robbing her of her affection for her brother, the bookshop, and her work. There was so little joy in it, and these days there wasn’t even the thrill of working for a good cause, because she felt precious little hope for success in the face of a government bent on tyranny. She drained her glass. “With you here, though, I’m not alone.” Good God, she was more than a little drunk if she was being that maudlin out loud.

  Ash emptied the wine bottle into her glass. “You’ve never been alone. You have dozens of people in and out of this house every day—your writers, workers, customers, other booksellers. I’ve been back less than a day, I haven’t left the house, and I’ve already seen almost everyone I know in this city.” The firelight glinted off his dark hair and cast shadows across the strong planes of his face. She hastily looked away.

  “That’s not what I meant.” All those people who came and went wanted or needed something from her. That was the common thread running through every relationship Verity had known, starting with her overbearing father and continuing right through to Portia Allenby. What Verity offered was never enough and now she had nothing left to give. Giving more would mean nothing remained for herself. And maybe that made her hard and unfeeling, but she’d live with that if the alternative was self-effacement.

  She felt the warmth of his hand on top of hers and nearly startled in her seat. By unspoken consent, they seldom touched. They had never discussed the parameters of their friendship, but they measured out these touches as carefully as any housewife measured out the lumps in the sugar bowl. They were for special occasions, feast days, homecomings. Two, three touches a year. Any more frequent and heaven knew what would happen.

  Verity knew exactly what would happen, though. Sometimes she let herself think of it, when night had fallen and she had the sheets pulled up to her chin. It was important that it never actually come to pass, because Ash was the type who would get ideas and insist on marriage. And the last thing in the world Verity needed was a husband. She had seen what marriage had done to her mother: it had worn her down, whittled her away at the edges until she had all but disappeared. Partly that was because her father had not been a particularly kind man. He had been a radical and a democrat; he had memorized passages from Mary Wollstonecraft’s book. But as far as Verity could tell, the man had never once thought to apply those ideas to his own wife. It was, Verity assumed, the old adage about power
corrupting: marriage gave a man too much unchecked power over his wife and children, transforming otherwise decent men into petty tyrants. Her mother had ultimately been dependent on the whims of a man who was both mercurial and self-serving, critical and harsh. Verity had fought hard to maintain a degree of control over her fate: Plum and Company was hers as much as it was Nate’s, both on paper and as a matter of practical fact. The only people she relied on were those whose wages she paid. The prospect of a husband—and children, presumably—would make that independence impossible.

  “Look at me,” Ash said, his voice low, and Verity managed to tear her gaze away from where their hands touched. She turned her face up to his. The candles had burnt down and the room was lit only by the fire and one weakly flickering lamp, but she could see the dusting of new beard on his jawline, the dark gleam of his eyes. She allowed herself to appreciate how very handsome he was, another practice she allowed only in the strictest moderation. His hair was nearly black and fell in haphazard waves across his forehead. His jaw was strong but his eyelashes were decadently pretty and he had a few utterly incongruous freckles scattered across his nose. There. She had noticed all those things and still was quite in her right mind.

  “Plum,” Ash said, and she had the fleeting impression that he was looking at her with the same tightly leashed admiration. He shook his head and let go of her hand. That ought to have been enough to restore their normal equilibrium, but she could still feel the traces of his touch on her. Later, when she was back at her desk, working by the light of a guttering candle, she caught herself wishing that Ash were with her, that his hand was on hers and his body beside hers. She had the uneasy sense that something between them had shifted out of place and she did not know how to put it back the way it belonged.

  Chapter Two

  After a thankless morning spent settling bills and paying wages, Verity had to face the fact that the amount left over was less than it had been the month before, or even the month before that. All the booksellers of her acquaintance had the same complaint: bread wasn’t getting any cheaper and neither was coal, so people were buying fewer books. They were also buying fewer broadsides, pamphlets, tracts, ballads, and the rest of their stock in trade. Plum’s Weekly Register, which their father had founded twenty years ago, and which Nate and Verity now published, accounted for the bulk of their profits. She had no doubt that people paid their sixpence to read Nate’s impassioned tirades. If, as she had been begging him, he toned them down, they would lose readers.

  She needed to come up with another way to bring in a bit of extra money, and she thought perhaps a monthly magazine for women of a class wealthy enough to afford the paper tax might be just the thing to get them through the winter, if only Verity had the faintest idea what ladies wanted to read. She supposed she ought to know herself, although she was not precisely a lady, due to her father having been a common printer rather than an overbred drain on society. But when she considered what she wanted to read—political treatises, occasional broadsides, and too many novels than she really ought to make time for—it didn’t correspond at all with the material she found in the ladies’ magazines that were spread out on the desk before her. She had no use for fashion plates, because she could not afford new gowns; nor did she care for maudlin verse, improving tales, or the sort of society gossip that was punctuated with a superfluity of exclamation marks. She doubted such fare was what most women wished to read.

  She was turning this puzzle over in her mind when the chatter from downstairs altered. Nate and Charlie had been laughing with the men in the workroom, but they abruptly went silent. This usually meant that a customer had come into the shop. An actual, paying customer, not one of the men Nate slipped pamphlets to without collecting the tax. But it couldn’t have been a customer because a moment later she heard the light tread of expensively shod feet heading up the bare wooden stairs.

  When she saw Portia Allenby standing gracefully in the doorway, Verity’s first thought was that she wished she had worn something else. Not that she had anything fine to wear even if she had wanted to, but she did not know how two people were meant to converse as equals when one wore an ink-stained frock of mouse-colored wool, three years old, much mended and twice turned at the cuffs, and the other wore—she didn’t quite know what Portia Allenby was wearing. The various trims and elegancies that adorned Portia’s person were, to Verity, emblems of a world she found both alien and objectionable. But at the same time Verity couldn’t help but see herself through the eyes of her former lover: shabby, hungry, and lacking.

  Portia always looked like a small army of lady’s maids had buffed and polished her to a high luster before sending her forth to grace mere mortals with her presence. Her hair was black, her skin ivory, her profile immaculate. Verity happened to know that Portia Allenby had passed her thirty-fifth birthday, but looking at her, anyone could be forgiven for having thought she was indeed her daughter Amelia’s slightly older sister.

  “Portia,” Verity said, rising to her feet. “I haven’t any tea,” she blurted out. She also hadn’t any other potential refreshment to offer guests. She hastily glanced around the room, as if she’d somehow notice that it was less drab and dingy than usual, as if the musty scent of books and damp would choose today to dissipate, and the windows would spontaneously shed their layers of soot and grime. This was her room, in her house, where she ran her business, and most of the time she was proud of it. Not when Portia Allenby stood there in all her splendor, though. Since they had ended their affair, they had confined their meetings to Portia’s house, and now Verity remembered why.

  Portia stepped forward and clasped Verity’s hands before Verity could warn her to beware getting ink on her pretty gloves. At this close range, Verity could detect the perfume that always lingered close to Portia’s person. Perhaps it was soap, or the fragrance of the powder that dusted Portia’s face, or perhaps it came in a fine glass bottle all the way from Paris. It smelled rich and vaguely foreign, but subtle, much like Portia herself.

  “Of course you don’t, my dear,” Portia said in her mellow, refined voice. “I’m not here to impose on you. I have the carriage waiting below, so I won’t keep you from your work. I wanted to drop a word in your ear about Amelia.”

  Heat began to rise in Verity’s cheeks. “I didn’t realize Nate meant to bring his friends to supper the other night. I suppose it was rather more raucous than Amelia is accustomed to.” She thought again of Amelia in her fine white muslin, listening raptly to the seditious chatter of booksellers.

  “No, no. It’s not that.” Portia sank gracefully onto the sofa, and only then did Verity realize she was still standing. She sat abruptly in her own chair. “I have no objection to anything that Amelia hears or anyone she might meet while in your company. I quite trust your judgment. My concern is more what might happen while she’s here, outside your doing.”

  “Pardon?”

  “A raid, my dear. An arrest. That wouldn’t do at all. She’s nearly eighteen now, and with any luck will make her debut in the spring.”

  “Her debut?” Verity asked. “I hadn’t realized you had such hopes for her.” During the months that she had been a near-daily visitor in the Allenby household, there had been a steady stream of tutors, drawing masters, French governesses, and all the other staff essential to the raising of elegant young ladies. But Verity had thought Portia simply meant to provide her daughters with a first-rate education, not prepare them to be launched into the upper echelons of society.

  “She is the daughter of a marquess. On the wrong side of the blanket, of course, but Ned acknowledged my girls as his daughters. Lord Gilbert acknowledges them as his sisters.”

  “And the current Lord Pembroke?”

  Portia pressed her lips together. “He’ll take some doing. But my point is that I don’t want to jeopardize that. Pembroke is . . .” She let her voice trail decorously off.

  A stuffed shirt? An unapologetic Tory? Everything that Verity had devoted her
life to fighting? She couldn’t help but feel the insult implicit in Portia’s remarks. Of course being a guest in Verity’s home would threaten Amelia’s standing with the very hierarchy Verity wanted to dismantle. That was the entire point. And here Portia was asking Verity to cooperate.

  “Lord Pembroke has very precise standards,” Portia said, smoothing the fabric of her gown beneath her gloved hands. “I plan to ensure that Amelia adheres to those standards. Her being brought before a magistrate would quite put paid to all my hopes for her.”

  “All your hopes,” Verity repeated. “I thought your hopes were for her to—” Verity silenced herself, suddenly aware that the very sight of her—shabbily dressed and weary—must make Portia even more eager to ensure her daughters had a different fate. She changed tack. “A debut, though. Are you sure that’s what Amelia wants?” Verity had the strong impression that Amelia would prefer idling in the bookshop, arguing with Nate about the rights of man and the merits of the latest Greek translations, rather than dancing at balls and making polite chatter at tea parties.

  “What she wants is immaterial. The fact of the matter is that she is a marquess’s daughter. That is her birthright. Heaven knows it’s her only birthright. Every shilling I saved over the years has gone towards making sure the girls had every advantage. The entire point of the salon is to persuade people to associate with us despite our background. In order to have a salon, I have to have a good house and a full staff. Why do you think I did all of that? For my own amusement? No, it was for my girls, to make sure they had the best future they possibly could.” She sighed, causing the feathers on her hat to flutter sympathetically. “Marrying well is the surest way for my girls to be safe and prosperous. Their futures are not mine to throw away.”

  “I see,” Verity said. And she did see. She couldn’t blame Portia. Some quiet, traitorous part of her wished her own parents had cared half as much for her as Portia did for her daughters.