No Dukes Need Apply (The Impossible Balfours Book 4)

by Gemma Blackwood

  The last thing she wanted was for Malcolm to hear that she had spent the days of the election sighing with regret.

  “Allow me to serve you a little more trout, my lady,” said Lord Louis, who was seated beside her. “There really is no finer way to bolster oneself for the final push than a hearty meal!”

  Every bite of the delicious spread before them had turned to dust in Selina’s mouth, but she nodded and thanked Lord Louis for his thoughtfulness.

  “There are still plenty of voters expected to turn out later today,” Louis was saying, as happily as though he truly believed there was any way they could resist Sir Roderick. “We must keep up our energy and our spirits to the last!”

  “I cannot thank you enough for your support in the past few days, my lord,” said Selina. “I am sure your presence has made a world of difference.”

  Louis blushed and shook his head. “My presence is hardly worth tuppence where these mercurial men are concerned, my lady. I am neither known as a great mind nor the heir to a great fortune, and greatness – of whichever sort – is what seems to tempt them.” His blustering cheerfulness faltered a moment. “I am only sorry that I could not do more.”

  “Nonsense. You have been a great boon to the final days of our campaign! All the more so because your help was so unexpected.”

  Louis shifted uncomfortably. He set down his knife and fork and spoke soft and low with shame. “It would have been still more unexpected to find me speaking out against Sir Roderick and denouncing his bribery. That, I know, would have been the noble thing to do. And yet I have not.”

  “You would not have achieved anything by it,” said Selina. Louis shook his head ruefully.

  “No. What’s the word of an earl’s younger son against that of –” He glanced sideways at Selina. “No, I still cannot do it. I cannot speak ill of my friend, though I know he has done wrong.”

  “His Grace of Caversham is not at fault for Sir Roderick’s behaviour,” said Selina, calm and even. “Perhaps it is uncharitable for us to wish that he had cast Sir Roderick out. Even dukes must have companionship, after all. It speaks highly of the duke that he has forgiven Sir Roderick.”

  “I fear it would have been much better for him to abandon the man.” Louis took up his cutlery again, the prospect of a little more food bringing the light back to his eyes. “However, there is no use crying over what cannot be helped. I am surprised to hear you speak so well of Caversham, my lady. I had the impression that you and he…” He stopped to chew on a piece of potato, and his eyes widened as though he had only just realised what he was saying. He swallowed hard. “In any case, I think you have the right idea. Companionship is precisely what Caversham needs. He’ll never admit it, but he knows as much himself. Why, the way he spoke of your brother’s wife after that lovely ball she threw for the ambassador!” Louis gesticulated expressively with his fork. “Ah, what a night that was! Caversham told me the following day that he would never settle for anyone less accomplished when he came to choose his own duchess.”

  “Really?” Selina’s lips tightened around her polite smile. She knew perfectly well that Malcolm had not assigned any credit for the ball to Daisy.

  “Oh, he was quite forthright on the subject. ‘A woman who could pour her heart into a ball like that – and all for the benefit of another,’ he said to me. ‘I might never deserve her, but I have always considered her the only woman worth having.’” Louis dabbed the corner of his mouth with a handkerchief. “‘Well, Caversham,’ I told him, ‘you’ve missed the boat there. You never glanced at the girl when she was Miss Daisy Morton. If you meant to catch her, you went about it entirely wrong.’ And he laughed, but not happily, I think. In fact, I’ve rarely seen him so forlorn.”

  Selina laid her hands in her lap so that Louis would not see them tremble. “Does he often talk that way about ladies he admires?”

  “Never! That’s why it struck me so. Caversham’s never been the sort to get sentimental over a woman.” Louis stopped to take a sip of wine. “But I must admit, he is precisely the sort to give his heart to a woman he can never have. That would be truly typical. He’s always been his own worst enemy.”

  Prickles of heat and ice were running over Selina’s body. It had never been more difficult to maintain her composure. Across the table, Anthea was watching her curiously. Selina touched her cheek and found it flaming hot.

  “Are you well, Selina?” asked Anthea, leaning forwards to whisper it so that no one else heard.

  “Please excuse me,” she said, rising from her seat without a further thought for decorum. “The heat.”

  In fact, the day was remarkably cold, but nobody objected when Selina hurried from the room. She stumbled upstairs to the cosy chambers she and Anthea had taken for the nights of the election and, alone at last, gulped in air as though she had just surfaced from a raging torrent.

  Malcolm was a flirt. Insubstantial. Fleeting. His constant silly quips about the vacancy for a Duchess of Caversham had never meant anything. Yes, he had proposed to her recently, but that was to assure his victory in the election. Any affection he felt for her was a recent development. Nothing serious. Nothing deep.

  Selina clutched at the bed post and lowered herself carefully onto the soft mattress. There was no help for it. She no longer believed a word of her old assumptions about the duke. She had not believed them since the night he first kissed her. No, since before that. She’d told him a secret she’d never breathed to anyone else over a game of piquet, hadn’t she? She’d returned his letter unread because she knew what it would say. She’d given him a brush-off at the ambassador’s ball far colder than any man deserved. It hadn’t seemed out of the ordinary then. It was the same way she’d treated him for years.

  How many of those years had he spent secretly longing for her, unable to admit it – not to her, and certainly not to himself?

  What a tragic waste of a good man’s heart.

  Outside, a steady, grey rain was falling. The view over Twynham’s rooftops blurred and distorted, its shades of dull slate all running together.

  Malcom had never felt further away than he did now.

  18

  “Damn and blast!”

  Malcolm was amazed to find that the words had not exploded from his own lips. His coachman’s face, when it emerged from beneath the body of the phaeton, was red with embarrassment.

  “Forgive my language, Your Grace. It’s the axle. It’s completely torn in half. I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do without –”

  “Without a master who is smart enough not to drive his own carriage into ditches. Or, at the very least, one who doesn’t neglect overseeing the repairs in favour of an extra hour with a lady who despises him. Is that it?”

  The coachman gaped. “I – I’m sorry, Your Grace?”

  Malcolm removed his glove and wiped his hand across the sweat beading on his brow. The air had grown muggy, despite the season, and there was a metallic tang on the wind that only ever heralded a storm. “It’s not your fault, Higgins,” he said. “I broke the phaeton at Lady Aldershot’s, and I failed to check that it was sturdy enough to bear another journey. I drove like the wind while you clung on behind.” He slapped his glove absent-mindedly against his leg, looking down the long road until it disappeared over the brow of a hill, Twynham still out of sight. The grey misery of the skies seemed rather appropriate. “It’s all my own fault.”

  “I’ve made the carriage secure, at least,” said the coachman. “Please step inside, Your Grace, and wait under the hood while I go to fetch help.”

  A spot of rain landed on Malcolm’s nose, cold and sharp, and woke him from his self-recrimination. “No, Higgins. That won’t do at all.” He narrowed his eyes at the brow of that inauspicious hill. “How far are we from Twynham, do you suppose?”

  “At least five miles, Your Grace. I’ll be back with help before dark.”

  “No, no.” Malcolm eyed up the horses, a matched pair of greys, lively and full of tempe
r. Precisely the sort of horses which made a man proud as he careened about town. Distinctly not the sort of horses that a man wanted to ride bareback, in kerseymere trousers.

  Higgins was unfurling the umbrella. “Please, Your Grace, I’m sure you’ll be more comfortable inside the carriage.”

  Malcolm held up a hand, stopping Higgins with the umbrella awkwardly half-open. The duke removed his hat and tucked it under his arm.

  A steady rain was falling now, barely more than mist, cold as an icicle and light as a kiss. He turned his face towards it and bore the shudder that ran down his spine without as much as a murmur.

  “Get into the carriage, Higgins,” he said. “There’s a pistol under the seat which you can use to keep footpads away. I’ll send someone up to you presently.”

  Before the coachman could protest again, before he could change his mind, and just as the skies opened and the storm began in earnest, Malcolm was running along the Twynham road.

  “Selina?” Anthea’s smile was kind and brisk, as though determined not to mention her sister’s wan expression. “It’s time.”

  Selina sighed and rubbed her temples. “Forgive me, Anthea. I must have been half-asleep. I’m ready.”

  There would be no joy in witnessing the inevitable outcome of the Twynham election, but Selina was determined to see it through to the end.

  “We don’t have to go,” said Anthea, as Selina stopped to run a hand over her coiled curls in the mirror. “It’s raining hard enough that nobody will expect us.”

  Selina straightened her shoulders. She looked a little paler than she would have liked, but there was no helping that. Everything else was in place, from the gauze of her fichu to the single dark lock of hair tucked behind each ear.

  “I expect it of us,” she said. The usual iron was back in her tone. Anthea smiled in recognition.

  “Then of course we’ll go.”

  They joined Mr and Mrs Forrester, Lord Louis, and the rest of their party at the door of the inn. A maidservant – the one who had fetched Selina out to speak to Malcolm in the garden on that painful day – brought out Selina’s coat. As her own maid settled it around her shoulders, Selina met the inn girl’s eyes for a moment. She wondered how much the girl had discerned from the strange meeting of a duke and a lady in the inn’s little courtyard garden. Whether she’d told anyone what she suspected. Whether she, like Anthea, had guessed that Selina’s crisply turned-out exterior had very little to do with the turmoil in her heart.

  The maid bobbed a curtsey, saying nothing. But Selina noticed the girl’s eyes following her as she left the inn with her head held high. There was a light in them that, if Selina were vain, she would have called admiration.

  It was oddly cheering. She might not be capable of winning elections – or dukes, for that matter – but one thing was still in her power. She could set a fine example.

  For the admiring maid, for the worry in Anthea’s eyes, for disappointed women everywhere, Selina walked across the square to Twynham’s Town Hall with all the poise of a queen.

  As they approached the hall, taking care not to leave the shelter of the large umbrellas the gentlemen were holding above them, her purposeful stride was interrupted by a young boy in knickerbockers and a rain-drenched cap. He dashed out of the hall so fast he almost crashed into Mr Forrester, and then with barely a nod of the head and a how-do-you-do he was off again, running through the puddles as though his life depended on it.

  Selina held her skirts out of the way of the dirty water splashing up in the boy’s wake and started onwards again. Mr Forrester, alert as ever, laid a hand on her arm.

  “Something’s the matter,” he said. “Listen.”

  Selina cocked her head. A certain degree of hustle and bustle was always to be expected during an election, but the roar of noise coming from inside the Town Hall had a different tenor. Men were raising their voices, not in excitement, but in anger. Several gentlemen erupted from the Hall’s large doors, clutching their hats to their heads to keep them on, and hurried off in various directions.

  “A riot?” Anthea’s eyes gleamed with excitement. She dug around in her reticule and withdrew a notebook and a pencil. “How thrilling!”

  “Wait.” Selina knew all too well that Anthea was liable to fling herself into the most dangerous circumstances to dig up a thrilling story for her readers. She turned to Mr Forrester. “Is it really a riot? Are we in any danger?”

  “I don’t believe so,” he said, with a puzzled frown. “But something odd is going on, my lady. Perhaps you ought to wait here while Lord Louis and I –”

  “Nonsense,” said Selina. She took the umbrella from him and swept forwards, taking Anthea’s arm as she went. “Nothing short of violence will keep me from witnessing what takes place here today.” She gave Mrs Forrester an enquiring look. “What do you say, Mrs Forrester?”

  The diminutive woman summoned up a stock of courage much greater than anyone had suspected of her yet. She took her husband’s arm and looked up at him with such determination that he gave a start. “We are coming in with you, my dear. Lady Selina is quite right. Only the most dreadful danger would keep me from your side now!”

  Mr Forrester coughed, his cheeks reddening. He avoided Lord Louis’s eyes. “Well, then. That settles it. Stay close to me, ladies. I will have you out of there at the first hint of –”

  “Curse you!”

  The words lashed out like the bite of a venomous snake. Selina was astonished to see that the speaker was none other than Mr Griggs, the portly and affable voter of Twynham.

  “Curse you, Forrester!” he snarled, shaking his fist. “I don’t know how you did it, but upon my word – upon my life –”

  He glanced over his shoulder, as if suddenly fearful of being overheard, shot Mr Forrester a glare that dripped with bile, and stormed off, his cane clacking violently against the cobblestones.

  “What do you suppose that was about?” asked Anthea, as she scribbled down notes at furious speed.

  Selina nodded Mr Forrester onwards. “We won’t find out standing out here in the rain.”

  The Town Hall was a scene of total uproar. Men were shouting at one another, red in the face. Men were waving silver-topped canes in the air, hats fallen to the floor. Two gentlemen were being held apart by their friends, topcoats askew and fists swinging. But for the most part, the cries of outrage and raised fists were directed at the dais at the far end of the hall, where the Returning Officer had set up his table to count out the votes.

  The bespectacled old official was finding his task significantly more difficult than usual, due to the pair of boots planted firmly across the tabletop. A pair of boots which must once have been very fine, but which were now scuffed and stained with fresh mud.

  These boots rose to meet a pair of muscular thighs that Selina wished she did not find quite so familiar. A pair of kerseymere trousers were plastered to said thighs with rain. The shirt above them, still, by some miracle, belted close against the supple waist, was near-transparent from the soaking it had received. The rather fine topcoat which hung half-shrugged onto the heaving shoulders would never be the same again.

  And Malcolm, hair flattened against his face, hat jammed upon his head at an angle that went beyond rakish and into the absurd, and cheeks reddened with the aftereffects of a monumental effort, raised his voice above the hubbub and roared out loud enough to quiet the outraged audience, “I say that these twenty men are not eligible to vote! And if anyone dares argue, I shall begin reading out the names and let the public form their judgement!”

  The Returning Officer pushed his spectacles further up his nose and raised his hand timidly, reaching for the paper which Malcolm brandished. “Sir, if I may?”

  “You may not!” Sir Roderick’s command would have been more impressive if he had less of a wheeze, but he did his best. “There is no proof – no evidence –”

  Malcolm leaped down from the table, landing squarely in Sir Roderick’s path. “The proof i
s my word, Roddy,” he said. He stared into the older man’s eyes for an instant of pure tension, then shrugged and turned to the Returning Officer. “I am the Duke of Caversham, and I say this election has been illegally bought. And I ought to know, since it was my man who bought it.”

  He handed over the list of names. An expectant hush fell over the room. Even the two gentlemen aiming punches slackened their efforts and hung gasping from their friends’ sturdy arms, gazing up at the Returning Officer as he peered at the paper.

  “Your Grace –” he began.

  “How do we know he’s the duke?” a rough voice demanded from the crowd. “He’s come running in off the street – he could be anyone!”

  “Go,” Selina whispered to Mr Forrester. He stopped long enough to squeeze his wife’s hand before pushing forwards to reach the dais.

  “I know this man,” he said. “This is the Duke of Caversham, indeed. I’ll stake my name to it.”

  “You would, Forrester! We all know you were about to lose!”

  “Roddy?” Malcolm turned to his one-time friend. There was silence.

  Selina saw the movement of Malcolm’s lips. It was impossible to hear what he said, from that distance, but it looked like, Must you be entirely disgraced?

  Sir Roderick’s face was sucked-lemon sour. “This is the duke,” he said. “I’ve known him since he was a boy.”

  Malcolm bent down and offered a hand to Mr Forrester, pulling him up onto the dais. He kept hold of the hand while Mr Forrester found his feet and shook it firmly.

  “I must beg your pardon, sir,” he said, loud enough for the whole room to hear, “for using such underhanded tactics against you. May I take this opportunity to wish you every success in your future career. I am certain that it will be magnificent.”