Excerpt from My Inconvenient Duke
CHAPTER ONE
Camberley Place, Surrey
Friday 30 March 1832
Raucous laughter. Drunken shouting.
“Devil take them.” Lady Alice Ancaster opened her eyes and stared up at the tester. “What time is it?”
She sat up in not quite complete darkness. She pulled the edge of the bed curtain to one side. The window curtains remained closed, meaning her maid hadn’t yet risen—though the drunken louts would soon rouse Aunt Julia’s household.
Dawn had cracked, it seemed, but only just.
It was remarkable how much noise three inebriated men could make. She’d last seen them departing for the fishing house for a night of carousing. They couldn’t have stayed there? They must come here, directly under her window?
“I have to kill them,” she said.
She flung back the bedclothes and said bad words. She pushed the bed curtains fully open and said worse words. She stumbled getting out of bed, but found her slippers. As her eyes adjusted to the heavy grey light of a damp morning, she discerned her dressing gown, neatly laid out at the foot of the bed. She pulled it on and started for the window.
More shouting and laughter. Then the crack of a pistol.
She leapt to the window in time to see her brother fall to the ground. “Hugh!”
She ran from the room.
***
“Is he dead? He’d better not be dead.” Alice tried to pull free of the Duke of Blackwood’s grasp. “Let me see.”
He wouldn’t loosen his hold. She jammed an elbow into his ribs, not gently, and struck her heel against his shin. He made a small noise, barely an “oof,” but his grip eased enough so that she could pull free.
She fell to her knees beside her brother. Black powder streaked Ripley’s face. Blood, too. He seemed so still.
She put her hand on his chest. Through layers of coat, waistcoat, linen, she felt warmth and the unmistakable rise and fall. Breathing. Still alive.
She swallowed panic and made her voice clear and sharp. “Don’t stand there like the worthless pieces of lumber you are. Send for a doctor. Now. Call for a litter. Make haste! He can’t be let to lie here.”
“Stunned, y’know, thash all,” the Duke of Ashmont said. “Pistol. Went off in Ripley’s face, dinnit?” He turned his bleary blue gaze to Blackwood.
Blackwood blinked, one dark eye opening more slowly than the other. He nodded. “Went off in his face.”
“Get help!” she said.
Ashmont dragged a hand through his blond curls. He shook his head—as though he had a hope of clearing it that way. Then he started away, stumbled, and fell over. And lay there.
“Juno, give me strength,” she said.
She became aware of the Duke of Blackwood crouching beside her. “Not . . . dead,” he said. He swayed, and she put out a hand to push him away. That was all she needed, one of these great oafs falling on her.
“He might have been killed,” she said. “What is wrong with you? Drunk, shooting off pistols, so close to the house—and this house, of all places. Do you three think of anybody else, ever? And you—the one I believed had a functioning brain. You let this happen.”
She bent over her brother. “Oh, Hugh.”
She brushed his black hair from his face. His eyes opened. Green like hers. Also bloodshot, unlike hers. She took one of his hands. The glove was burnt in places.
“I reckon it mish-mif-misfired,” Blackwood said.
A corner of Hugh’s mouth turned up. “You . . . reckon?” He laughed, then winced, then started coughing.
Blackwood pulled her back and dragged her to her feet, an instant before the Duke of Ripley rolled over and cast up his accounts.
“He’s all right,” Blackwood said. “Stunned, thash all.”
“He’s burnt!”
“Yes. Go back to bed now. Cold out here. Damp. You’ll catch your death.” He waved a hand up and down, indicating her attire. “Not enough clothes.”
He was swaying, blinking, his words slurring together.
She grasped his lapels and shook him, an impossible feat had he been sober. This was because the Duke of Blackwood, like his two friends, was over six feet tall and solid muscle (including his head) and could not be moved when he chose not to be moved.
“Wake up,” she said. “Get my brother out of the wet and into the house. I don’t care how you do it, but you’d better not upset Aunt Julia.”
Their selfishness passed all bounds. To behave so, at a house to which death had brought such acute grief. If Ripley had been killed . . .
An image flashed into her mind of a smirking face and a short, unpleasant conversation.
But her brother wasn’t dead. Yet.
She nodded toward Ashmont, who remained on the ground, smiling up at the cloud-thickened sky. “And while you’re at it, drag Luscious Lucius over there to a trough or pump and get him back in his senses—to the extent that is possible. Do you understand?”
Blackwood’s gaze slid from her face down to her hands, still clutching his lapels. “Best let go, then, don’t you think?”
She jerked her hands free, and he staggered back a pace.
“I hate you,” she said. “I shall never forgive you.”
She wanted to cry. She wanted desperately to cry. She was so tired of this. And it was never going to get better. She knew that. She’d known for a good while.
They were hopeless.
Their Dis-Graces. That was what the world called the three dukes, and the world wasn’t wrong.
But she would not cry in front of them.
Ripley was alive—for now—and there was nothing she could do for or about him.
Time to face facts. These were the men they’d become. They were not going to turn into better men. They’d only grow worse, and it was mad to hope otherwise.
She would have to make a plan.
***
Giles Bouverie Lyon, eighth Duke of Blackwood, Marquess of Rossmore, Earl of Redwick, etc., etc., became suddenly and unhappily sober.
He watched Alice march away, dressing gown floating about her in the morning mist, and revealing a great deal more of her tall, shapely body than her usual attire did. No stiff petticoats concealed her hips. No gigantic sleeves turned her arms into balloons. Her nightcap had fallen askew, her braid was loosening, and long, waving locks of black hair trailed over her shoulders.
The stuff that dreams are made on.
A dream, no more. He’d made his choice years ago, an easy choice at seventeen.
His friends or the girl.
He’d made the choice here, at Camberley Place, during the annual late summer gathering of cousins and friends. He, Ripley, and Ashmont had gone down to the fishing house, as they usually did, but Ripley was watching him in an odd way. Then, when Ashmont settled down to serious fishing, Ripley drew Blackwood aside.
“Don’t look at Alice that way,” he said.
And Blackwood, heart pounding with guilt, instantly took offense: “What way?”
“You know what I mean. You’re getting ideas and you’ll give her ideas, and it won’t do.”
Too late, he could have told his friend. He’d got the ideas. He understood the warning all too well, though. Alice was fifteen. She was a gently bred maiden, a lady. He, Ashmont, and Ripley were wild and rebellious and ill-behaved. They broke any number of rules. But innocent girls were sacrosanct. Also dangerous and complicated and far too much trouble for too little fun.
Best to pretend they didn’t exist.
“If you want Alice, you’ve got to take the respectable road,” Ripley said. “My sister deserves Sir Bloody Galahad. And that’s not us. Not me, not you, not Ashmont, by a long stretch. If you’re with us, you can’t be with her. I won’t have her trifled with. I won’t have her hurt. She bore enough of that with my father.”
“I would never hurt Alice.”
“Then make up your mind. Us or her.”
Not the hardest choice at seventeen: a life of excitement—adventures, pranks, fights, parties, not-so-innocent girls, and general rule-breaking with the two fellows who’d stick with you through thick and thin—or a life of following rules.
At seventeen he’d had more than enough of following rules.
He’d chosen the friends.
Easy enough at first. Easy enough when he and she were miles and miles apart. But when Alice was nearby, inches away . . .
He’d lost his head once and hurt her. He’d stuffed the memory into a deep mental cavern, but it escaped from time and time to haunt him.
It was all too easy for a man like Blackwood to hurt her, to cause damage, unthinkingly. Had Ripley been killed this morning . . .
But he hadn’t, and the best way for Blackwood to atone was to clean up the mess he and his friends had created.
He made himself look away from Alice’s retreating figure and attend to the business at hand.
He gazed down at Ashmont, who still lay on the ground, smiling up at the dark clouds massing overhead.
“This always happens when you’re about,” Blackwood said. “Can’t take you anywhere.”
The pistol. Ashmont’s idea. An ancient pistol they’d found . . . where? He couldn’t remember.
Had they been so lost to reason as to let Ashmont load it? Or had Ripley done that?
Or me?
Blackwood’s stomach knotted. He knew, better than anybody, the correct way to clean and load a pistol.
He turned back to Ripley.
Black in the face, with streaks of red, and . . . well, not pretty, in short.
All things considered, not so bad.
Still.
“Done puking?” Blackwood said.
Ripley sat up fully. “Daresay.”
“Want a doctor?”
“Hell, no.”
One of the servants burst through the door of the south front and ran to them. “Her ladyship said there was an accident.”
“Don’t fuss,” Ripley said. “Send Snow to me.”
“Not only Snow,” Blackwood said. “All three of our manservants. And have the carriage readied.”
“Carriage?” Ripley said. “We got here only the day before yesterday. My aunt—”
“Lady Charles has seen enough of you. You’ve never been beautiful, but at present you’ll frighten small children and dogs. You most certainly will upset her. We’d do well to make our exit, and quickly.”
Lord and Lady Charles Ancaster had always made Blackwood feel as welcome as their nephew. Their home had been a refuge from the time he, Ripley, and Ashmont had first become schoolmates and friends.
Lady Charles had lost her husband two years ago. She missed him very much. They all did.
They three had behaved badly. True, they always did, and true, she was used to them and forgave a great deal. All the same, they ought to have confined their games and dares to the fishing house down by the river, well away from the main house. As to shooting the old pistol: unforgivably careless.
He put out a hand. Ripley grabbed it and winced as he hauled himself upright.
“M’sister frightened you, that it?” Ripley said.
“Yes.”
“Me, too, sometimes. Not sure how she does it, but mustn’t let her catch on. Can’t let her forget who’s head of the family.” He looked over at Ashmont. “What about him?”
“We’ll throw him over a horse and take him to one of the inns at Guildford,” Blackwood said. “The servants can follow. I want to be gone. Now.”
Most of all, he wanted not to be ashamed.
But there were cures for that and for many other maladies.
***
The dukes wisely vacated the premises. Since out of sight did not equal out of mind, after breakfast Alice walked down to the fishing house. There she knew she’d find the solitude she needed. She brought a book with her.
The small stone building was a square one-room structure. It held a fireplace, an ancient marble table, and three chairs. When the dukes visited, the servants brought down camp beds, linens, and other furnishings as well as food. Not luxurious by any means, but luxury wasn’t what one came here for.
The servants had tidied the place promptly after the dukes’ departure.
All Alice had to do was rebuild the fire before she settled at the table to read. From time to time she looked up at one of the diamond-leaded windows.
. . . man, from the remotest antiquity, found it convenient to exert his strength to subjugate his companion, and his invention to show that she ought to have her neck bent under the yoke; because she as well as the brute creation, was created to do his pleasure.
Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was not precisely Alice’s bible, but close enough.
“Forty years,” she said. “Forty years since you wrote this, Mrs. Wollstonecraft, and nothing has changed.”
She set down the book and rose. She walked to the door, opened it, and looked out at the river.
More than two years had passed since her Uncle Charles’s funeral. A fog of grief blanketed those days. One incident, though, remained starkly clear.
After the will had been read and everybody else had apparently left the library, Alice had returned to search for the book about the Knights of the Round Table.
A number of fine, ancient items lived in the room. There was a chest once belonging to King James I. One of King Charles II’s writing desks had been another perquisite of some ancestor’s position at Court. The curio cabinets held scores of treasures. But the Recueil des Romans des Chevaliers de la Table Ronde was most beautiful and precious to her, on more counts than one. It had captured her imagination shortly before her tenth birthday, after her own knights in shining armor, Uncle Charles and Aunt Julia, had rescued her from the Tollstone Academy for Girls.
This day she found her unpleasant cousin Lord Worbury lurking in the library. He was bent over the book, which lay on the royal writing desk.
He gave her an assessing look, up and down, his light brown eyes mocking.
She responded with a coolly polite smile. She’d humiliated him years ago. He’d got what he deserved, though he’d never see it that way.
“Congratulations,” he said. “Ripley gets everything.”
Uncle Charles’s will hadn’t mentioned Worbury because Uncle Charles knew he was a poisonous black mold on the Ancaster escutcheon.
“It was mainly Ripley’s to start with,” she said. “Camberley Place was our father’s and his father’s, and so on, as you know.”
Uncle Charles had taken it over when she was a child, when her father had begun neglecting his properties. Economizing, Papa called it.
“And Ripley’s heir will inherit everything,” Worbury said. “Not you. Not Lady Charles. None of her daughters.”
“How kind of you to be concerned on the ladies’ account,” she said. “But as you must have heard a short time ago, my uncle left his wife amply provided for. His daughters have married well. Certainly Ripley will make sure that no member of his family wants for anything.”
“I daresay he will. Ripley’s a generous fellow. And if—heaven forfend—he leaves us, John Ancaster will carry on in the same manner. All will be well.”
He smirked and stroked the book cover, and it wanted every iota of her self-control to keep from bashing his head on the desk.
How dare he touch it? How dare he pollute this house with his presence? But he was a vulture, and somebody had died, and he was bound to hope he could pick at the carcass. Nobody had wanted to chase him away, because he was all too likely to make a scene and cause Aunt Julia further distress. They’d treated him to cold courtesy instead. He pretended not to notice, but of course he’d nurse a grudge.
“Quite so,” she said. She started to turn away, to put distance between them before her temper got the better of her.
“Let’s hope they both live long, then, eh?” he said. “Or sire sons before they go. Because after them, it’s . . .” A long pause ensued while he pretended to think. “Oh, dear. The next in line for the dukedom seems to be me.” He shook his head. “And then, I suspect, it will not be quite the same.”
Alice came back to the present, her gaze still upon the river, sparkling in the capricious sunlight.
“No, nothing will be the same,” she said softly.
Only a simpleton would believe the day would never arrive when Worbury inherited, when all this and more would be his. The morning’s events had made that as clear and sharp as a slap in the face.
She remained at the fishing house, looking into the future. Eventually rage and anxiety settled to a bearable level. Late that afternoon, she felt composed enough to consult her aunts Julia and Florentia.
The conversation was long and painful.
When she wrote to her best friend, Alice kept matters to essentials.
My dearest Cassandra,
It seems I cannot go on being content with my life as it is. My brother and his two friends show no signs of moderating their behavior. To ask for maturity is asking for the moon. With John Ancaster’s recent death, my not-distant-enough cousin Worbury becomes my brother’s heir. Since Ripley’s behavior promises an untimely demise, I need not explain the consequences for the dukedom and all those dependent upon it. I am only one of many, but one of the few able to do anything about it.
I’ll soon be five and twenty, and as the aunts pointed out, my situation is not secure. Unlike you, I haven’t seven more or less loving brothers or openminded grandparents. Ergo, I must undertake the perilous quest of finding a husband. This involves two dragons: Society in general and Men specifically. The ton isn’t wrong to disapprove of and fear my brother and his friends. These same people don’t know me very well, which means I shall have to establish my Perfectly Unexceptionable Wife credentials. As to the Male of the Species: You know what my father was like. My mother had no inkling when she wed him, and she was helpless to stop him from sending me away to that so-called school. Marriage is a gamble, and one isn’t wrong to worry about choosing badly. Still, you and I have taken all the precautions we can. We’re not helpless women.
In sum, I cannot rejoin you in Florence, and you are not to think of returning to England for the present. The aunts say it will want six months to a year for the scandal to die down and for your father to “achieve a calmer frame of mind,” as Aunt Julia puts it. She, meanwhile, is writing a letter to Ripley, warning him to stay away from London until I have completed my quest.
This is a horrid short letter on so grave and disruptive a subject, I know. However, it is as much as I trust myself to say intelligibly at present. By the time we return to London, I hope to have achieved a calmer frame of mind myself.
I love you dearly and miss you dreadfully,
Your most affectionate,
Alice
***
London
Evening of the following day
The Duke of Ripley was late joining his two friends at Ashmont House. They gathered in Ashmont’s capacious dressing room, as they often did before an evening’s entertainment.
“Change of plans,” he said. “Can’t stay in London.”
He flung himself into one of the three chairs set before the fire and tossed a letter onto the small table there.
Blackwood took up the letter. He recognized the handwriting. “From Lady Charles.”
“I’ll save Ashmont the trouble of reading it, rather than risk injuring the delicate workings of his brain,” Ripley said. “Aunt Julia says Alice is going on the Marriage Mart, and I’m to keep well away, so as not to cast a shadow over the proceedings and frighten away her lovers.”
Blackwood froze, his startled gaze on his friend and his mind going black for an instant, as though Ripley had thrown him against a wall.
He was aware of Ashmont speaking, but the voice seemed to come from a great distance.
“Marriage Mart?” Ashmont said. “Alice? But she never bothered about it before.”
“She’s bothering about it now,” Ripley said.
“That’s a facer,” Ashmont said. He rubbed a knuckle against his perfect nose. “Alice getting married. Already. What a funny thing. I had an idea she’d marry me one of these days, you know, after I was ready to be reformed and everything.”
“Alice is too intelligent to marry you, even if I’d allow it, which I wouldn’t.”
“To tell the truth, I wouldn’t allow it, either, if I were you,” Ashmont said. “If I had a sister, I wouldn’t let her marry any of us.”
Of course not, Blackwood thought. Out of the question. Alice deserved Sir Bloody Galahad, not a drunken troublemaker of a degenerate who let his friends fire defective pistols.
All the same, it was . . . hard to take in.
He found his voice at last. “This is a surprise. She said nothing of such plans. The opposite. She and Lady Kempton planned to return to the Continent.”
“Read it for yourself,” Ripley said. “The point is, I’ve promised my aunt I’ll be a good boy and go away, as she commands. It was bound to happen sooner or later. Past time Alice thought of marrying. I ought to be glad she doesn’t mean to try her luck with foreigners. Titles over there don’t mean much, and half these so-called noblemen haven’t a pot to piss in.”
Blackwood unfolded and smoothed out the letter his friend had wrinkled. He began reading, but the words blurred as his mind retreated to the past.
The first time he’d seen Alice, she was ten years old. He’d watched, heart in mouth, while she climbed out of a second floor window of Camberley Place and descended via the ivy-encrusted bricks.
Alice was escaping durance vile, her brother had explained.
“She had a bad time of it early in the year,” he said. “A grim sort of school my father sent her to. Don’t know exactly what happened there, but it didn’t agree with her. Now she and my Aunt Julia’s niece Cassandra Pomfret are practicing to be warriors or knights or some such. Maybe both. All things considered, it’s best to let Alice go her way, because she will, whether we like it or not, and then things get complicated. So the rule is, we keep out of it, unless, you know, there’s murder or that sort of thing.”
Other memories crowded in. Alice that day, jumping to the ground and throwing a triumphant grin his way as she ran by the two boys. Alice teasing Blackwood when he failed to decipher the girls’ secret code. Alice squinting as she aimed a pistol while his hand guided her arm to the correct position. Alice, her head tipped back, looking up at him and laughing, her green eyes sparkling with mischief.
Alice, in his arms, once.
All in the past and the past was done, he told himself. He’d made his choice and it was a decade too late to un-choose.
He let the curtain fall, shutting out the scenes.
He refilled his wineglass and read the letter through.
He set it aside. “We’d better start packing,” he said.
CHAPTER 2
Fashionable Arrivals
—Lady Kempton and Lady Alice Ancaster, on Wednesday afternoon, at Sussex Place, the Regent’s Park.
—Foxe’s Morning Spectacle
Thursday 5 April 1832
—Since the return to London of a high-ranking peer’s beautiful and charming sister, floral tributes fill the rooms of a fashionable Regent’s Park abode and a steady parade of callers may be seen on days when the ladies are at home.
—Foxe’s Morning Spectacl
Wednesday 11 April 1832
***
Hatchard’s Bookshop, Piccadilly
She came. She saw. She conquered.
The Duke of Doveridge didn’t know he was conquered. Men rarely do, until it’s too late.
Others in the vicinity could have enlightened him. One of these was Lord Frederick Beckingham, uncle and erstwhile guardian to the Duke of Ashmont, and very possibly the most perceptive gentleman in London—to a point.
Although Doveridge had appointed to meet him here, His Grace, caught up in a discussion with the senior clerk, failed to notice Lord Frederick’s arrival.
Doveridge noticed the one shortly afterward, however.
Still busy with the clerk, he felt the air stir about him. A glance at the entrance showed him two ladies.
He broke off mid-sentence, his grey gaze fixed on Lady Kempton’s tall, dark-haired companion.
She was not pretty, any more than a goddess is pretty.
Her features were firmly sculpted: a straight, decided nose, splendid cheekbones and jaw. As to her mouth . . . oh, not a pretty mouth at all, but one that put mad ideas into a man’s head, though he was no puppy or green schoolboy, but a hardened bachelor of two and forty years.
It was the mouth, some wise observers said, that reduced a man to a blithering idiot.
It was unfashionably wide, full, and inviting and at present offered a faint, dangerous hint of a smile, the kind that seemed to hold a universe of possibilities.
None of these distinctive features offered a clue to what she was thinking.
I know her, he thought. I’m sure I know her.
He ought to. He knew everybody.
He was a duke, a preposterously rich and influential one. He’d been one of the previous King’s favorites and continued in that not always enviable position in the present Court.
Forgetting whatever it was he’d come for or had been talking about, he walked away from the clerk and toward the goddess.
He did recognize her chaperon, Lady Kempton, a handsome, middle-aged widow. He greeted her with his usual grace and charm, but it wanted all his sense of dignity not to let his gaze fix on the young lady with her. He was aware of his heart beating in an immoderate manner while he tried frantically to remember something, anything to do with this stunning creature. Had he not read something, very recently? No use. His mind refused to function properly.
“Ah, Duke, we had not looked to see you back in London quite yet,” said Lady Kempton. “But you are fully well, fully recovered, I see.”
He was too old a hand to flush at the reminder of his recent infirmity: a bout with sciatica that had nearly crippled him, and common enough in men and women of any age. All the same, he’d prefer not to be reminded when a shockingly attractive young woman was present. Perhaps he winced a little on the inside.
“A mild indisposition, no more,” he said. “Along with a disposition to breathe cleaner air and get away from the noise of politics for a time.”
Then she spoke. “I know that look,” she said. “Duke, you are trying to put a name to my face.”
Lady Kempton threw her a reproving glance, which she ignored.
“I am asking myself how I could forget,” he said.
“Easily. We were introduced during my first Season. You were so gallant as to dance with me. Pray don’t trouble your mind trying to remember. I’ve been abroad a great deal, and I was not memorable that evening. It was my brother and his friends who attracted all the attention.”
“I fail to see how you could fail to attract attention,” he said, “if an elephant irrupted into the room, chased by six lionesses.”
“It wasn’t an elephant but a goat,” she said. “Almack’s. The creature was introduced to the company. You will remember her, a peaceable being who took no notice of the fuss. She was last seen being led out, the calm eye in the midst of the storm. A silk rose from a lady’s dress dangled from her mouth.”
The scene appeared in his mind instantly: the women shrieking, running about, feathers flying, turbans toppling. Three young men under the orchestra stand, laughing themselves sick. He had laughed, too.
He laughed now, and heads turned their way. “Good heavens, how could one forget?”
“That was my brother’s doing,” she said. “Ripley and his friends. I’m the wretch’s sister—and now, I see, the light dawns.”
He was enchanted. “Lady Alice. Of course.”
She bowed her head a very little, and the artistic furbelows of her hat danced with the movement. She was dressed in exquisite taste, in a redingote of deep onyx. His own taste being exquisite, he did not fail to notice details indicating the forefront of Parisian fashion.
He didn’t remember the young lady he’d danced with. He was one of London’s best dancers, and the patronesses could always count on him to lead out his share of debutantes. Whatever Lady Alice had been like on that night some half-dozen years ago, she was altogether different now. This sophisticated young woman would be impossible to forget, goats or no goats—or elephants, for that matter.
“We’ve come for the latest sensation,” Lady Alice said. “Mrs. Trollope’s book about the Americans. We’re behindhand, it seems, having been abroad for so long.”
“Not so far behindhand as the Americans, according to the author,” the duke said. “Be warned. The book is not for the squeamish.”
Lady Alice’s green eyes sparkled with mischief. She smiled, clearly amused, and the smile made him dizzy.
At that point, Lord Frederick Beckingham joined them, and the duke, aware that he was in danger of making a fool of himself, gently took his leave. He left the shop, with no recollection of his appointment. He had other things on his mind.
He did not see Lord Frederick’s faint smile as he watched him go.
***
—One of Society’s most admired young ladies has caught the eye of London’s most dedicated bachelor. Where so many other fair have failed to win the gentleman’s hand, will this exotic succeed?
—Foxe’s Morning Spectacle
Monday 23 April 1832
***
Newmarket
Wednesday 25 April 1832
The London newspapers of days earlier lay scattered about the coffee room of the Rutland Arms. Few gentlemen had given them more than a glance. Rumor, opinion, counter-opinion, and the occasional fact regarding the Reform Bill filled most of the columns. Hardly soul-stirring. And the columns titled “Sporting Intelligence” could offer only old news to those on the spot at the Newmarket Craven race meeting.
It had rained yesterday. It rained harder today. Nonetheless, the Dukes of Ashmont and Ripley had gone out to the racecourse, and were very possibly draped over railings or lying on their faces in the mud at present, having enjoyed an eventful evening.
Though he had no plans to lie on his face in the mud, the Duke of Blackwood intended to join them at some point. He’d laid out a sum on the Oatlands Stakes. Afterward, win or lose, one could look forward to festive dinners. Depending on the host, one might encounter attractive women of less-than-strict morals. Most certainly one could expect gambling. Probably fights. No, since Ashmont was about, fights were not probably but definitely.
At the moment, however, Blackwood was studying Foxe’s Morning Spectacle, seeking confirmation of news he’d heard this day.
A crease formed between his black eyebrows.
He frowned and tore out the offending page. He stared at it for a moment, then crumpled it. Not his affair what Alice did or with whom. He’d made his choice.
He was about to hurl it into the fire when Ripley flung his great carcass into the room. “Where the devil’d he go?” he said.
Blackwood stuffed the scrap of newsprint into his coat pocket. His valet would go into spasms, but what were pockets for, if not to put things in?
“Ashmont, you mean?” Blackwood said.
“Who else? He was there. Then he was gone.” Ripley threw up his hands. “Went off with a girl, I’ll wager anything—the one I had my eye on, most likely—but he might have dropped a hint. I looked about, you know, and up and down, because you can’t tell with him. Up on a roof. Down in a ditch.”
“Half drowned in a horse trough,” Blackwood said. “Hanging off the back of a haycart.”
“Almost got himself trampled yesterday.”
“Yes. I was there.”
“After this and the First Spring Meeting we’ll go on to Castle Ancaster,” Ripley said. “Give him a rest cure.”
Ripley’s ancestral pile occupied a sizable expanse of Yorkshire’s West Riding. He’d spent thousands restoring this and his other properties.
It was a beautiful place. Quiet. Even with Ashmont there.
London was not quiet.
A fierce inner struggle ensued. It was none of Blackwood’s affair what she did. He wasn’t Sir Bloody Galahad.
His mouth opened, and the wrong words came out, “You’ll have to go on without me. Tell Ashmont I’ve business in London that won’t wait.”
Ripley gave him a long, hard look. He’d healed well enough from the pistol explosion. Since his had never been the prettiest countenance, being rough-hewn rather than classically beautiful like Ashmont’s, or otherworldly like Alice’s, the small burn scars were hardly noticeable.
You let this happen . . . I hate you. I shall never forgive you.
Alice’s choked voice.
The tender way she’d brushed Ripley’s hair from his damaged face.
Watching her walk away into the mist.
“Business,” Ripley said. “In London. Must be deuced important.”
Blackwood took out the torn piece of paper and gave it to Ripley, saying, “You promised your aunt you’d keep away.”
“Mustn’t frighten off Alice’s lovers. What do you reckon? They’ll forget I exist? Out of sight, out of mind? But Aunt knows best.” He glanced over the scrap. His green gaze grew puzzled.
“I must agree with your aunt. The husband-hunting will go more smoothly if you’re not looming over the proceedings.”
“Wasn’t intending to loom. What the devil do I want with their mealymouthed Good Society? Hour after hour of propriety until a fellow wants to stick a fork in his eye.”
Blackwood didn’t want it, either. He’d had too many years of freedom to relish the idea of reentering the suffocating world Alice had entered.
“Wasn’t intending to interfere,” Ripley went on. “Her beau—whoever he turns out to be—will have to come to me in any event for all the legal matters. If I don’t like him, I’ll pitch him out. Simple enough. But these women fuss over every little thing, and one must do as Aunt Julia says.”
“There’s a bit of a problem. Rumors I heard today.” Blackwood waved a hand over the heaps of newspapers. “Nothing there. But it turns out your cousin Worbury’s in London, after all. He slunk back quietly. No mention of him under Fashionable Arrivals.”
Ripley stared at him. “Back, is he, by gad? Everybody said he was in Calais or Calcutta or some such, hiding from his creditors.”
Pryce Ancaster, Ripley’s great-great-uncle Edward’s son and the first Viscount Worbury, had been a military hero who’d fully earned his title. Pendric Ancaster had inherited the title but none of his late father’s stellar qualities.
“It seems he had a run of luck at cards,” Blackwood said. “So he claims.”
“A run of luck at fraud, more likely. Or he did away with his French landlady for her life savings.”
“However he contrived it, he’s in London.”
“I don’t like it,” Ripley said. “You remember the time at Camberley Place, when Cassandra Pomfret and Alice gave him a drubbing and left him sobbing in the river.”
“Because he tried to drown a kitten.”
“Two little girls. Twelve years old to his sixteen.”
“I remember.”
“They march off, bruised, filthy, and wet, leaving us with the problem of what to do with him.”
He and Ripley had been fourteen, their fathers still alive. In those days Blackwood held the courtesy title Marquess of Rossmore. Ripley was Earl of Kilham.
Blackwood saw the scene, as clearly as if it played on a stage before him.
Worbury cries for help as he struggles to get out of the river.
Rossmore and Kilham look at each other.
Kilham: Not likely to drown. Water here’s shallow.
Rossmore: The stones, though. Slippery. Weeds, too. The swine could get tangled and fall and break his skull.
Kilham: The world will be a better place then.
Rossmore: I agree. On the other hand, there’s bound to be unpleasantness, and I should like not to have my visit cut short.
Kilham: You think this fits the Murder or That Sort of Thing category?
Rossmore: Very possibly.
Sighs and swearing ensue. They climb down the riverbank to assist the battered bully to solid ground. They offer Wormy, as he was known at Eton and elsewhere, a few parting words of wisdom.
Kilham: My advice to you, cousin, is to hold your tongue about this little contretemps. On account you might not come out so well in the telling.
Rossmore: And on account you might have a painful accident if you blab.
Kilham: One more piece of advice. Don’t annoy Alice. That sort of thing never ends well.
A silence ensued while the two men reflected upon Alice.
Then Blackwood said, “Your aunt said Alice’s situation was delicate.”
“Because of me. Us. Yes, yes, I know. My sister needs to prove she’s respectable. She doesn’t need her public menace of a brother about, striking terror in her beaux’ hearts.”
“Do you imagine Worbury won’t try to undermine her? You know he never forgives or forgets. You know he’s a liar and a sneak.”
“A swine. Yes, I know.” Ripley scowled. “This isn’t good news. But we’re not good for her, either. We’re supposed to play least in sight.”
Out of sight, out of mind. That was best. On the other hand . . .
“I realize this is Alice we’re talking about,” Blackwood said. “She isn’t the typical wide-eyed innocent. She wasn’t that during her first Season.”
“Alice can take care of herself. Alice wants to take care of herself.”
“The trouble is, she’s lived abroad. She doesn’t know London as we do. She doesn’t know the men as we do. Somebody ought to be on the spot. Somebody needs to keep an eye on the men, not only Worbury but the fortune hunters and other bad characters. Discreetly, of course.”
Ripley was taking it in, thinking. “And it’s Alice,” he said. “Which means somebody needs to be on watch for Murder or That Sort of Thing. If my sister needs to right a wrong, there’s no saying what might happen. Didn’t she have to leave Barcelona or one of those places because of a fuss with a donkey seller? Hit him with the stick he’d beat the donkey with and set off a to-do.” He sighed. “Alice.”
“I don’t doubt she’ll do her best not to make a spectacle of herself or put herself in danger,” Blackwood said.
“As long as there isn’t Injustice with a capital I. Then all bets are off.”
“You understand, then. Somebody needs to be there, discreetly. You promised to keep away. Ashmont is—”
“Out of the question. Discretion is a foreign country to him. On Mars.”
“That leaves me,” Blackwood said.