Forever and a Duke

by Burrowes, Grace

  A word of thanks, offered in parting.

  * * *

  “You are certain?” Walden asked. “You don’t want time to consider?”

  Rex was far from certain, but the decision he’d made felt both liberating and terrifying, suggesting the choice was sound.

  “The solicitors will take forever to draw up the documents,” he said, surveying the volumes of poetry assembled in Walden’s library. When was the last time Rex had taken an hour to enjoy good verse? “The lawyers’ deliberations will give me ample time for second thoughts.”

  Walden was attired for an outing, though a tiny stain that looked like jam marred his linen. Rex, by contrast, was still wearing the ensemble Jackson Naylor had recommended for an evening of catching thieves.

  Plural. After that enlightening chat with Mama, Rex had called on Eddie and confirmed that illegal brokering had paid for Eddie’s matched team, his mistress, and his well-appointed apartment. The brokering was likely impossible to prove, which left banishment to Peebleshire as Eddie’s fate.

  “Are you angry?” Walden asked. “Finding out that your relatives have been stabbing you in the back must have been an unpleasant revelation.”

  “Come here,” Rex said, waggling his fingers. “You cannot go out in public with jam on your neck cloth.”

  “I’m a papa,” Walden said. “I can go out in public in any state I please. As long as one of my daughters is grinning at my side, clutching me by the hand, I will be forgiven any number of minor imperfections in my wardrobe.”

  “This imperfection is a jam stain,” Rex said, “not a badge of honor.” He retied Walden’s cravat so the stain wasn’t visible.

  “It’s both,” Walden said, using his reflection in a glass breakfront to survey Rex’s handiwork. “I hope you learn that one day soon. My solicitors, unlike the leeches you employ, can have the documents drawn up within the week.”

  “I won’t be here.”

  Walden fluffed the cravat, so the jam stain peeked out from beneath his lace. “Running off to brood?”

  “We’re peers,” Rex said. “I am among the very few men who can call you out, Walden. I’m running off to France.”

  “Licking your wounds? Do you think you’re the only duke who’s had a rotter or two among his relations?”

  Rex stalked across the room, forcing Walden to stop preening and to instead look at him. “Where would you be without an auditor who could spot larcenous thoughts as they formed in the heads of your clerks, tellers, and customers? Where would you be without a woman quietly toiling away out of sight, a lady who knows every rig and scheme ever attempted at a financial institution? You have built a reputation for scrupulously fair dealing, Walden, but you’ve maintained that reputation in part because Eleanora Hatfield has been patrolling your bank’s ramparts.”

  “She was born to perform that office,” Walden said. “She thrives on it. I gather you seek to steal her away?”

  “I seek to offer her a real option.”

  Walden consulted a gold watch, though the mantel had an eight-day clock that looked to be keeping good time. The duke was stalling, then, considering options of his own.

  “Eleanora likes to remain beyond the notice of the customers and managers,” Walden said. “She wanted a post answering directly to the partners, and she’s done well with that arrangement.”

  “Do you know why she sought such anonymity?”

  “I have my suspicions.”

  Rex silently commended Walden for guarding a lady’s secrets, but that very display of caution confirmed that Eleanora’s problems extended beyond a grandparent ruined by scandal and a cousin absconding with two hundred pounds. Lord Stephen had all but said as much over a morning cup of chocolate, but he too had refused to provide details.

  “I will leave you to flaunt your finery,” Rex said. “I suspect a certain young lady is packing for a voyage, and I do not intend to let her sail alone.”

  Walden had somehow positioned himself between Rex and the door, though Rex hadn’t noticed him doing it.

  “You ruin her at your peril, Elsmore. I value my association with you, but a duke is as a duke does. Eleanora has worked for years to establish herself as a decent woman. You take that away from her, and I will remind you that I am one of the few men who can and will call you out.”

  “Will you stand up with me when I speak my vows? Will you welcome my wife and me under your roof when I marry a duchess polite society shuns? Will you offer hospitality to Eleanora when she’s no longer an employee who serves you well?”

  Rex was gratified to see he’d caught the almighty Duke of Walden by surprise, though His Grace recovered quickly, and his smile put Rex in mind of the duchess’s hound.

  “Of course you and your duchess will be welcome under this roof. Her Grace of Walden wouldn’t have it any other way, and she counts many other well-born ladies among her acquaintances. I sincerely hope you have the chance to enlist their aid.”

  That was the second ray of sunshine to penetrate Rex’s day, the chat with Mama having been the first. “Then I’m off to France.”

  Walden resumed his preening before the glass breakfront. “Try Dieppe,” he said. “If you’ve no other place to start.”

  “Why?”

  “Just a suggestion. Dieppe is a quiet town but not too far from Paris. Mail and English travelers reach it quickly.”

  “Thank you.” Rex strode for the door but had to leap back as a blond footman opened it from the corridor.

  “Mrs. Eleanora Hatfield to see Her Grace,” the footman said. “Excuse me, Your Graces. I thought the lady would like to wait in here for the duchess to come down. I did not know the library was in use.”

  He had a slight accent, Scandinavian or German, and Eleanora stood behind him with the hellhound panting at her side.

  “Take Wodin,” Walden said to the footman. “I’ll leave Elsmore to keep the lady company, and I’ll be across the corridor should anybody have need of me.”

  Walden paused to whisper something in Eleanora’s ear before pulling the door closed, and then Rex was alone with his beloved. All the flowery speeches he’d spent half the night rehearsing, all the clever arguments he’d concocted, flew out of his head at the sight of Eleanora looking pale and for once, uncertain.

  “If you want to move to France,” he said, “we’ll move to France. I’d rather your parents move here to England instead, but even more than that, I need to know that you’re safe and happy. Tell me how to make that happen, and if it’s within my power to bring it about, I’ll do it.”

  Eleanora stalked past Rex, whirling only when she reached the poetry shelved across the room. “Who told you about my parents?”

  “Nobody has told me, but an exceedingly clever auditor taught me to notice what’s in front of me. You mentioned cousins, siblings, grandparents, all manner of family, but you never once brought up your parents. You do, though, threaten to abandon me for the shores of blasted France. Why is that, I asked myself, and then the answer presented itself.

  “Will you do as I’ve been doing,” he went on, “and sacrifice your happiness for the sake of familial duty, Eleanora? Are you truly determined to rejoin your exiled parents rather than reach for the joy that’s standing before you, or will you find the courage to be my duchess?”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Ellie cowered by the books lining the walls of the Walden library and tried to think. Elsmore looked very, very determined and willing to fight dirty to get what he wanted. Every duke should know how to fight dirty, though she didn’t want him resorting to such measures on her account.

  “You cannot live in France,” she said, grasping at the nearest spar of reason floating among the wreckage of her morning. “You are an English duke.”

  “I’m also a Scottish earl, but I don’t dwell in Peebleshire, do I?” He came closer, step by measured step. “I am a Surrey farmer, though I spend only a small portion of my time there where I’m happiest. I’m your lover—or I
was—and I claim that identity on the strength of only a precious few hours that sparkle in my memory like every wish ever granted to a despairing man.”

  “I cannot marry you.” Ellie had spent hopeless dark eternities telling herself that. “I cannot. You’d hate me.”

  “Would I?” Elsmore came to a halt before her, a solid wall of black-clad man who looked more like a minion of darkness than a duke. “My cousin and heir has been embezzling not only from my bank customers, but also from my own sisters, aunts, and dependents. I am furious with him, but I do not hate him. James seized opportunities I put under his very nose. When he exploited those opportunities, I was too busy being bored witless at the theater to curb his greed.”

  Do not touch Elsmore. Do not put your hand on his dear, handsome, fierce person. For if Ellie touched Elsmore, she’d want to cling to him.

  “You blame yourself,” she said.

  “In part, I do, and what I have allowed to go wrong, I must put right. James deserves hanging. Naylor forbid that course. He said you’d disapprove.”

  Elsmore bore his signature beguiling scent, and his cheeks were freshly shaved. Ellie put her hands behind her back.

  “Jack had no right to tell you what to do,” she said. “When a man commits multiple felonies and betrays the trust of family and customers alike, his fate should not be decided by my fancies.”

  “I’m selling most of my shares in the bank, Eleanora.”

  Ellie left off staring at Elsmore’s chest. “You’re what?”

  “I am selling most of my shares in Dorset and Becker. I’ve explained to Walden exactly what has transpired with James, and His Grace is willing to take on the thankless task of putting the place in order. He has the means and temperament to do it. I lack both, and more to the point, I could not be both the head of my family and hold a controlling interest in an institution that employs family members. Cousin Howell needs his job, ergo, I will relinquish a controlling interest in the bank.”

  Ellie sidled away, down the bookcase, around Elsmore. She put an enormous globe between them, a fitting metaphor for their situation.

  “Walden will sort out Dorset and Becker,” she said, “but you should not have given up your shares. Land rents have done nothing but drop since the war ended, you have few truly commercial ventures compared to many other peers, and your estates are flung all over the realm, making them harder to manage.”

  Elsmore wandered off to an orrery positioned before a large window. The planets and their satellites circled the sun in endless orbits, set in motion by a winding mechanism that the duke cranked a few turns.

  “And you still think you are not suited to be my duchess,” he said. “Tell me about your parents.”

  Why must he seize on that detail now? “I had one of each, a father and a mother. Mama dwells in Normandy, and I’d like to visit her.”

  “We can visit her together. Tell me about your father.” Elsmore spoke both gently and implacably.

  “You will not let this go.”

  “I’ve learned to listen, Eleanora. You taught me that. Tell me the tale, and I’ll listen to every word.”

  “I don’t want to say those words.” Didn’t want to think them or acknowledge that they existed. “I want only to balance ledger books and make accounts come right. I am good at it.”

  He stood on the other side of the known universe and held out a hand. “Tell me. I love you, and wherever the story leads, you will not journey there alone.”

  She wrapped her arms around her middle and kept her gaze on the golden sun at the center of the complicated model. I love you. The last man to make that declaration had come to a very bad end.

  I love you, my little Ellie. Be a good girl for Papa. Make me proud of my best girl. Not poetry, not much more than a father’s platitudes, but they’d been his final words to her.

  The universe wound to a halt, and still Elsmore stood with his hand outstretched. “Tell me, Eleanora. I’m listening.”

  Ellie withstood a drowning tide of pain, until Elsmore’s fingers closed around hers. If he let her go, she’d sink and never surface. And for what? Ledgers and accounts? Years toiling over books that any half-awake clerk could put to rights? Family that had never needed her in any real sense?

  “We’ll go to France,” Elsmore said, stepping closer, “if that’s what you want. We’ll live in obscurity at Ambledown. I’ll deed it to you and we’ll live there in sin. We’ll set up a household in York, but twelve estates, thirty-two near relations, a ducal title, a bloody box in Drury Lane, and shares in a damned bank mean nothing, Eleanora, if you force me to muddle on without you. I love you.”

  He enfolded her in a careful embrace that by degrees became more secure. In Elsmore’s arms, Ellie found every comfort she’d ever needed, every joy she’d aspired to, every dream she’d cherished in secret.

  Also the courage to say the hard words.

  “Papa was a counterfeiter. He was hanged before a jeering mob on a pretty Monday morning.” And then, at long last, she began to cry.

  * * *

  “Somebody is upset,” Jane, Duchess of Walden, muttered, pacing before the door of the family parlor. Across the corridor, the door to the library stood closed.

  “Somebody is probably crying her heart out,” Walden replied. “We’ll be late for our outing if we eavesdrop much longer.”

  “We are not eavesdropping. We are concerned for our guests. Was Eleanora angry?”

  Walden took his duchess gently by the elbow and stilled her pacing. “I suspect she has been angry for much of her life.”

  He and Jane wore the finery appropriate for strolling in the park. To appearances they would be very much the duke and duchess on display with their darling daughters in tow. Quinn liked parading about at Jane’s side, liked seeing polite society brought to heel by a poor minister’s daughter and a guttersnipe from York.

  Arrogant of him, but a duke was expected to be a bit arrogant.

  “Why would Eleanora be angry?” Jane asked. “She has an excellent post, one suited to her abilities, one very few women could hope for. Her wages are ample, and you and Joshua respect her for the asset she is.”

  The weeping from the library grew softer.

  Quinn recalled the day Eleanora Hatfield had marched into his bank, prepared to turn the place upside down over tuppence. “Anger can sit atop a world of hurt.”

  Jane gave him the look, the one that said she was sparing him verbal acknowledgment of what he’d just admitted—about his own anger, about the world of hurt he’d been raised in.

  “Eleanora’s path has been difficult,” she said, worrying a fingernail. “One doesn’t learn to spot every patch of boggy ground and every inaccurate sum while embroidering samplers in a rose garden.”

  A thunder of small feet on the floor above suggested the nursery contingent was about to interrupt the proceedings. “Shall we leave our guests in peace, Your Grace?”

  “If he breaks her heart, Quinn, I will ruin him.”

  So fierce. “Of course. And if she breaks his?”

  “We will intervene. A moping duke, above all things, is not to be contemplated. Come along. I know you like to show off your ladies in the park, and we like to show you off as well.”

  Quiet voices murmured behind the library door.

  Quinn offered Jane his arm as the two oldest girls slid down the bannister and the third churned down the steps pulling her nurse by the hand. God willing, Elsmore would soon know the joy of being taken captive by his womenfolk, or at least by one woman in particular.

  * * *

  “Grandpapa claimed his son was the greater artistic talent,” Eleanora said, “but he had no money to give Papa a proper education.”

  Rex was indulging in the pleasure of holding Eleanora in his lap, stroking her hair, and rubbing her back. She was still sniffly, still taking the occasional shuddery breath, but a long overdue storm was moving out to sea.

  “So your papa received an improper education?” />
  Eleanora folded Rex’s handkerchief, which had become hopelessly wrinkled in her clutches. “We were in Birmingham at the time. Every metal trade in the realm is pursued there, and Grandpapa thought engraving would provide Papa a steady, honest living. Then some war or other ended, the gunsmiths and artificers took up engraving, and the newest employees were let go. My aunt did what she could to survive, and Papa…”

  “He did what he could, in hopes of retrieving his sister from a dubious profession.” What a damned muddle. What an unfair, sad, stupid muddle.

  “There’s no retrieving a woman or a family from ruin.”

  Rex kissed Eleanora’s temple. The sofa was commodious, but he propped a pillow at Eleanora’s back in hopes of making her more comfortable still.

  “A family cannot be retrieved from ruin easily, I agree, but it can be done.”

  Eleanora glared at him, her lashes still spikey with tears. “This is England, and not even a duke can erase an executed felon from the family escutcheon.”

  “Did you know that the Eighth Earl of Argyll was executed for treason, his lands and titles forfeited? Two years later all was restored to his son, who became the ninth earl. Matters went along smoothly until the ninth earl had the bad judgment to participate in the Monmouth Rebellion, so alas, he was done away with as well.”

  “My papa was not an earl.”

  “The tenth earl—the son and grandson of traitors—was raised to a dukedom. I could list you any number of similar tales, from a foreign secretary in this century married to a legendary courtesan, to a duke’s daughter who waited all of two days after her divorce to marry her lover, then two of her children when grown, though half siblings…” Eleanora was regarding him as if he’d begun discoursing in Mandarin. “Society gossiped and whispered, but nobody refused their invitations.”

  “And none of that is relevant because I am an auditor, not a duke’s anything.” Eleanora scooted away and took the place beside him. “The situation is hopeless, Elsmore. You mean well, but you cannot marry a woman bound to be a disgraced duchess.”