The Golden Lord
Miranda Jarrett
A life of deceit…
On the surface, Jenny Dell appeared the model lady,
but nothing could have been further from the truth.
For her, every word and every act was a deception.
Until she met Brant Claremont, the Duke of Strachen,
and learned firsthand about love based on a lie.
“No matter how much any one of us pretends to be someone else, in the end we always are what we are.”
“Ahh.” For whatever reason, Brant relaxed. “Then you are a fatalist? You believe that we can never change from what we’re born? That our destiny remains always the same, with no hope of growth or improvement?”
“No, no, no! It’s not so complicated as that, Your Grace. I only meant that no matter how many changes you may make for the world to see, you are still at heart, or in your soul, the same creature you were born. That’s what I know,” Jenny said with conviction.
She did believe it. How could she not, when so much of her life was unabashed deception? If she didn’t believe in herself independent of whatever new identity she’d concocted, why, then, she’d have nothing at all.
Praise for bestselling author
MIRANDA JARRETT
“A marvelous author…one of romantic fiction’s
finest gems…each word is a treasure, each page
an adventure, each book a lasting memory.”
—The Literary Times
“Miranda Jarrett knows how to put life and love
into her pages and make you believe every word!”
—Rendezvous
“Ms. Jarrett’s ability to always draw the reader>
into a fast-paced tale peopled with likable and
realistic characters and a thrilling plot
is a crowning achievement.”
—Romantic Times
The Golden Lord
Miranda Jarrett
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Epilogue
Prologue
Harrow Public School
Middlesex
1788
T he five boys sat cross-legged in a tight circle on the attic floor, the lantern in their center shaded so that just enough light filtered through to show the cards clutched in their hands and the hoarded heaps of coins before each of them. It was late, very late, and long past the six o’clock lock-up for the night, but no one would dare consider leaving this game.
Brant, as usual, had made sure of that. Through the sheer power of his personality, he’d made being asked to these clandestine games the most desirable invitation in the entire school, and the staggeringly high stakes that could gobble up a term’s allowance in a single hand of cards only served to increase Brant’s own mystique.
But why shouldn’t it? Brant Claremont was the sixth Duke of Strachen, Marquess of Elwes, admired as much for his wit as for his daring on the cricket field. As an orphan, he had only a distant, disinterested guardian to answer to, and his two younger brothers had been sent so far away that there wasn’t even a hint of fraternal competition. To the other boys in his form, Brant’s life seemed as close to perfection as any mortal British male could wish for.
Only Brant himself knew otherwise. Still months shy of his sixteenth birthday, he already understood all too well the terrifying obligations that his wastrel father’s death two years before had thrust upon him, along with the dukedom and a string of mortgaged, decaying properties.
Not that any of that mattered here in the chill of this drafty attic. Now Brant smiled as he leaned forward, the lantern turning his fair hair as gold as the guineas heaped before his crossed legs. He was winning, winning deep, and he did not want his luck to turn just yet.
“Your play, Galsworthy,” he said, his voice deceptively languid. “Draw or show. Any time before Michaelmas will do.”
The others sniggered nervously while the Honorable Edmund Galsworthy scowled down at his hand. “I say, Claremont, that’s cutting it a little rough,” he grumbled. “Not all of us are so deuced quick with ciphering as you are.”
“That’s why we call him the Golden Lord, Galsworthy,” said another boy, obviously with a better hand of his own. “He can turn pasteboard cards direct into guineas if you let him. Your guineas.”
“’Tis luck, no more,” murmured Brant with a modest shrug, careful to mask his own excitement. It was luck, but it was also skill, coupled with the rare gift he had for recalling cards. He could sympathize with Galsworthy’s dilemma—sympathize more, really, than anyone here would guess—but not now, and not with so much at stake. Nearly every shilling Brant won was sent off against his father’s debts, while Galsworthy’s mother was some sort of tin-mine heiress. The poor oaf could afford to lose almost in equal proportion to how desperately Brant himself needed to win.
“But you do know the rules of this game, Galsworthy,” he said. “Laggards must forfeit, else the rest of us fall asleep.”
“I’m considering, not lagging,” snapped Galsworthy, his fingers leaving moist dimples in the edges of his cards as he studied the red and black figures one last time. Slowly he puffed out his cheeks and spread his hand on the floor for the others to see.
“There now, Claremont,” he announced. “That was worth the wait, wasn’t it?”
“Indeed,” drawled Brant. He kept his expression unchanged as he fanned his own cards out on the floor in front of him. “I’d say I’ve won again, Galsworthy, and I— What the devil is that?”
Abruptly the door flew open, scattering cards and panicking boys as two large men thundered into the attic. Brant scrambled to his feet, stuffing guineas into his pockets as Conway, his boardinghouse monitor, caught him roughly by the collar of his coat while Parker, his tutor, gathered up the cards and loose coins as evidence.
“I’ll give you all the devil you can handle, Claremont,” growled Conway, yanking Brant’s feet clear from the floor. “Least I will after Dr. Keel’s through with you.”
“Dr. Keel will have little interest in this,” protested Brant as Parker now seized his arm. “This—this was harmless amusement, a mere game among gentlemen!”
“That’s not what Dr. Keel believes,” warned Conway ominously. “Now walk, you cheating little weasel. Walk!”
Brant twisted, struggling vainly to free himself from the grasp of the two stronger, older men. He heard the tear of fabric, the sound of the sleeve of his superfine coat ripping away at the shoulder, and as he turned to look, one of the men cuffed his ear, hard enough to make him see bright flashes before his eyes.
“You—you have impinged my honor as a gentleman and—and as a lord, Conway!” he gasped, desperate not to show his growing fear as the monitor shoved him stumbling toward the dark attic staircase. Of course he’d felt Conway’s wrath many times before—at Harrow even dukes were flogged regularly in the Fourth Form rooms—but never before had the monitor singled him out away from the others like this. “You cannot—cannot treat me like this!”
“I can treat you a deal worse if I please, Claremont,” said Conway. Like most of the monitors, he was a hulk of a man, able to worry even a tall boy like Brant like a terrier with a rat. “And I would, too, if Dr. Keel didn’t want you in his rooms directly. Now walk.”
This time Brant did as he was told, forcing himself not to panic, to order his thoughts as they half dragged him down the stairs and across the empty courtyard. Dr. Keel was a sensible man; surely he could be made to see this for the foolishness it was. Card-playing after lock-up was hardly the most grievous sin that took place at the school, scarcely worth this sort of melodrama.
But what if this wasn’t about the card game at all? What if Dr. Keel or one of the tutors had finally discovered his blackest, most shameful secret? Was this the reason that Conway and Parker had stopped trying to hide their contempt for him? And what if this were only the first, stumbling step to his complete disgrace and ruin, and a cell in the madhouse where he’d always suspected he belonged?
The headmaster must have been waiting for them, for he answered the door to his study at once. To Brant’s surprise, he was still dressed as precisely as if it were first dawn, instead of near midnight, but then there were whispers that Dr. Keel never slept at all, nor needed to.
“Claremont,” he said grimly, studying Brant from beneath the stiff curls of his wig. “Enter, pray.”
For once Brant did as he was told and, with a final shove from Conway, he slowly went to stand in the center of the bare floor before the headmaster’s desk. His heart pounding, he raised his chin and squared his shoulders in the torn coat, prepared to meet whatever disaster came next. He’d only been in these rooms once before, on the day he’d first arrived at the school, but from Dr. Keel’s glower, he knew better than to expect the same welcoming hospitality this time.
“Claremont,” the headmaster repeated more ominously. “Given all the blessings that your birth has showered upon your head, I’d looked for more from you.”
Brant took a deep breath to steady his words and his nerves. Despite the chill in the room, he was already sweating, his legs itching to carry him from this room and to run as quickly as they could away from this mess.
“I am sorry, sir,” he began. “And you are right. At such an hour, so long after lock-up, I should have been either asleep or preparing tomorrow’s recitation, instead of allowing myself the indulgence of a mild amusement among friends—”
“Is that what you believe your time here at Harrow is to be, Claremont?” interrupted Dr. Keel incredulously, his brows bristling together with astonishment. “Your indulgence and amusement?”
“No, sir, not at all,” said Brant hastily, realizing he could not afford another such misstep. “I should hardly presume—”
“You should hardly presume.” The headmaster paused scornfully, as if struck silent with shock, and shook his head. “How can you venture such a statement, Claremont, when all you have done since you have arrived here is presume?”
“I am sorry, Dr. Keel,” said Brant again. “But if I could—”
“Could what, you sniveling little creature?” demanded Dr. Keel, his voice ringing with his scornful anger. “Is it the list of your iniquities that you wish to hear? Is that the kind of recitation that would please you most?”
“No, sir,” said Brant wretchedly. He tried to remind himself that he was a Claremont, a peer of the realm, while Keel was no more than a lowly public school headmaster, but the agonizing weight of his secret and the dread of its discovery smothered any self-defense. “No, sir, not at all.”
“But you will hear them, Claremont, because it pleases me,” insisted the headmaster, rapping his knuckles impatiently on the desk. “I have kept tallies of what Mr. Conway and the others have reported to me. Because of your rank and the position you shall hold in the world after leaving this school, I have looked away. Most wrongly, it now seems to me, considering how often you have been caught in your amusements after lock-up.”
Ah, thought Brant with bleak resignation, now would come every last misdemeanor that Conway had caught him doing, and that he’d already been duly punished for.
“You have been apprehended fighting with boys from other boardinghouses,” intoned Keen righteously, “swimming naked at night in the pond, gaming and gambling at every opportunity, and consorting intimately with the lowest sort of chits from the village tavern. Then there is the contempt you have repeatedly shown to this school and its scholars by your inferior work.”
In spite of his resolution to stand tall, Brant caught his breath, clasping his hands behind his back to hide their trembling. Here it was, the end at last.
“You have done well enough with your recitations,” continued the headmaster, “well enough to have kept you here by your tutor’s mercy. But from your first day, your written work has been an unfailing mockery of learning. Why, an African monkey with a pen in his paw could do better than these!”
He swept a sheaf of papers from the desk, brandishing it before Brant. “And now come these. What am I to do with you, Claremont? Have you any answers to share with me by way of enlightenment?”
Keel tossed the papers back onto the desk with disgust, and Brant closed his eyes against the awful proof of his shame. He didn’t have to see his examination papers to know what gibberish was scrawled across them or what that gibberish proved. He already knew.
He was no Golden Lord, but an imbecile duke, an idiot from his cradle. That was the truth. No matter how he tried, concentrating until his head ached with the effort, he could not make sense of the letters that others so effortlessly saw as words. No such troubles plagued him with numbers—certainly not at cards—and if a page were read aloud to him, like a nursery story, he’d comprehend and recall every line with ease. Throughout his life he’d contrived scores of little tricks and feints to hide his deficiency, and he’d done well enough to keep his secret, even here.
But to read and write like a gentleman was as impossible for him as flying through the clouds. Awake at night, he imagined that inside his skull his brain was a fraction the size of a normal man’s, woefully shriveled and defective.
And now, it seemed, the rest of the world was about to learn the truth, as well, and scorn and pity and mock him for the half-wit that he’d always been.
“Speak, Claremont,” ordered the headmaster, his voice booming through Brant’s private dread. “I await your suggestions for me.”
Slowly, Brant opened his eyes and met Keel’s gaze, determined to savor what might well be his last few moments as a rational gentleman. “I have no suggestions, sir.”
“None?” Scowling, Dr. Keel thrust out his lower lip and leaned toward Brant. “You surprise me, Claremont. You have taken these other boys sufficiently into your confidence to pick their pockets clean, and yet you have no notion of what I should write or say to their fathers?”
“Fathers, sir?” repeated Brant uncertainly, not following at first. What had the other boys to do with this?
“Yes, Claremont, their fathers,” said the headmaster furiously, once again reaching for the sheaf of papers. “I have had these six letters in the past three days. The accusations are all the same. Hundreds, even thousands of pounds lost to you whilst gaming!”
“’Tis luck,” said Brant slowly for the second time that evening, and what else could it be, to spare him in this marvelous, unexpected way? “Purest luck, sir.”
“’Tis conniving tricks and cheats,” said Keel, thumping his fist on the edge of the desk. “I do not care if you are a peer, Claremont. No true gentleman would win as often as you do.”
“But I do not cheat, sir,” protested Brant. He didn’t cheat, not only because it was dishonorable and ungentlemanly, but also because he didn’t need to. “I never have, not once.”
“Don’t compound your iniquities by lying to me,” said Keel sternly. “Tonight’s game shall be your last here. I will not let you turn Harrow into a veritable Devonshire House of gaming. You are a sharpster, Claremont, a shark who preys upon the trust of your fellows for your own gain, and I shall not tolerate it any longer, or you, either.”
“You are sending me down, sir?” asked Brant, striving to keep the growing, giddy joy from his voice. “I am to leave Harrow?”
“As soon as is possible,” said the headmaster disdainfully. “By tomorrow noon at the latest. Until then I shall instruct Mr. Conway to keep the others in your house away from you. By your actions, you have demonstrated that you are no longer a young gentleman worthy of Harrow. I shall recommend to your guardian that a private tutor might continue with your preparation for admission to university.”
But Brant knew there had never been a question of him going to one of the grand universities at Cambridge or Oxford. His father’s estate was simply too impoverished to afford such a luxury, any more than Brant could expect to make a Grand Tour of the Continent like other peers his age. The disinterested solicitor who served as his guardian had explained it all with perfect clarity: when Brant left Harrow, his education was done.
No, he was done now. He scarcely listened to Dr. Keel’s final admonitions, too amazed by how swiftly one world was closing against him and another beckoning with possibilities. But outside in the shadows of the empty courtyard, returning to his boardinghouse for the last time, he could look up at the stars overhead and laugh with relief and exhilaration and a kind of fierce, wild joy.
He was a fifteen-year-old orphan with scarcely a shilling to his titled name. He could recite much of Homer, Aristotle and Shakespeare from memory, but he could no more read nor write than the commonest plowman. He had neither friends nor family to guide his choices and ease his path, and his two younger brothers were half a world away, if they even still lived. All he had to make his way was his title, his charm, his face and a gift for card-playing.
But he was free. He was free. Now, finally, he was done biding his time with school. Now he could make his own future and fortune, and keep the pledge he and his brothers had made to one another so long ago.
And best of all, his secret and his shame would now be safe forever.
Chapter One
Bamfleigh, Sussex
June, 1803
J enny Dell was exceptionally good at doing things silently and in the dark. She had to be, or else she never would have lived as long, and as grandly, as she already had.
Without so much as a candle to guide her, she now hurried across the dark chamber, her bare feet as quiet as a cat’s paws. While the innkeeper and his wife had been all kind welcome when she and her brother had first taken the house’s best rooms, Jenny knew that same welcome could turn as sour as vinegar wine if they realized she and Rob were leaving them now, in the middle of the night, and quite forgetting the nicety of settling their reckoning.
Jenny was sorry about that, for she’d liked this inn and the rooms that overlooked a pasture filled with sweet-smelling pink clover. But Rob had had his reasons, even if he hadn’t explained them to her just yet. Once he did, he’d be sure to remind her that there was always another inn or grand house waiting over the next hillside, filled with more folk eager for the amusing company of two genteel young persons like Jenny and Rob, and willing to share their own good fortune in return. And where, truly, was the harm in that?
Swiftly, Jenny pulled her three gowns from the clothespress and folded them into her little traveling trunk. Though limited by their travels, her wardrobe was always of the latest fashion, costly Indian muslins with silk ribbons, fine Holland chemises, the softest Kashmir shawl. Rob didn’t believe in skimping when it came to clothes. “Quality knows quality,” he’d say, and indeed Jenny did find it easier to play a lady when dressed like one. Rob was clever about such matters, just as their father had been before him. She shouldn’t forget that, especially now.
Somewhere in the inn a clock chimed three times and Jenny quickened her pace. The last of the men in the taproom had staggered home and the rest of the inn might be sleeping, but Rob would soon be waiting for her on the high road with the chaise. She closed and locked the trunk, and threaded a twisted bedsheet through the leather handles with well-practiced efficiency. Cautiously she pushed the window open—here, as at most country inns, the best rooms came with the most privacy—and tossed the bundle of her traveling cloak, stockings and shoes onto the grass below. Next went the trunk, lowered carefully down to the ground to avoid making too loud a noise when it landed.
She took two deep breaths to steady her racing heart, then clambered out the window, swinging down off the sill to drop into the grass. She untied the sheet from the trunk’s handles, gathered up the bundle of clothes and shoes, and ran barefoot across the sweet-smelling clover, her long, dark braid flopping over her shoulder and the trunk thumping awkwardly against her leg. The road wasn’t far, and even on this night with only a sliver of a moon, she easily spotted the hired chaise waiting in the shadows.
“Did anyone see you, pet?” asked Rob as he took her trunk and pulled it up into the chaise.
“Nary a soul,” she said breathlessly, climbing up onto the seat next to her brother. “Everyone was safely abed. Now will you tell me why we had to flee tonight, and so sudden?”
“Because we had no choice,” he said, no real answer at all. “Because we had to.”
Jenny frowned impatiently. Most everything they did was because they had to, wasn’t it? Their existence was precarious enough without Rob keeping the details from her like this.
“Here I thought we were doing so well with Sir Wallace,” she said. “The way he sought your opinion on those fusty old books in his library, I was sure we’d be snug there for at least a fortnight, and leave with a bit of gold in our pockets for your trouble, too.”
“We were.” Rob pulled the horse away from the tall weeds he’d been grazing and snapped the reins across the animal’s back to hurry him along. “I’d expected us to be invited as guests to Wallace Manor this very day.”
“I know,” said Jenny. “You’ve warned me before that we were perilously short of funds.”
“Well, yes.” Rob sighed, both for the shortness of their funds and the peril attached. “But there were certain, ah, complications that made it better for us to move along tonight.”
“Mrs. Hewitt?” guessed Jenny, pulling on her stockings and shoes as the chaise began moving faster. “Was she your complication?”
“Yes, and a powerfully difficult one, too.” Rob scowled. “All the time she’d been saying she was a lonely widow and coaxing me along, she’d neglected to tell me she’d another beau, a great, strapping grenadier who appeared out of the wainscoting. And I must say, Jen, he did not like my competition.”
“Did he call you out?” asked Jenny anxiously. She knew Rob always carried a pistol, a beautiful French-made gun that he’d won gaming, though he kept it hidden because he knew she didn’t approve. “You did not fight a duel, did you?”
“What, over Mrs. Hewitt?” asked Rob indignantly. “Faith, Jen, grant me more wit and judgment than that!”
Jenny shook her head, wiping the dirt from her fingers with her handkerchief. Although the name stitched on the linen was Corinthia, instead of her own—left from a highly profitable sojourn in Bath last winter when they’d posed as the Honorable Peter Beckham and his sister Miss Corinthia Beckham—she’d liked the Bruxelles lace edging too much to toss it away, even if it meant she’d kept the handkerchief far longer than she’d kept the name.
“So that is why we’re leaving now,” she said with a certain resignation, tucking the handkerchief back into her bodice. “So that you won’t have to defend your honor and Mrs. Hewitt’s virtue.”
None of this was, of course, anything new. Although Rob was twenty-five and clever as could be, he still had not one whit of sense regarding women, and if he continued to follow after their father, he never would. With his bright blue eyes and curling black hair, her handsome brother attracted the fair sex like flies to honeycomb. In that first glow of fliration he could always find some special feature or comely grace in every female he met, whether old, young or in-between. He was the most charming of rascals, for he honestly loved each new woman in turn, almost as much as they loved him.
Now Rob sniffed, wounded. “I’d always thought, Jenny, that you preferred to have me as a live coward, instead of an honorable corpse.”
“I do,” said Jenny quickly, patting her brother’s arm to reassure herself as much as him. “But I’d also rather you kept your breeches buttoned in the process. Now I’ll just have to pray that she didn’t pox you as a parting gift.”
“What could I do, Jen?” he asked forlornly. “The dear little widow played me false. If only she’d been true! You know I would have been as happy as the cows in that sweet clover near the inn if I could but spend the rest of my days with her in Bamfleigh.”
“You would not,” said Jenny matter-of-factly. “You’re just the way Father was. You like variety too much ever to be faithful. You’ll never stop your roaming.”
“For the right lady, I would,” he said confidently. “And you will, too, Jen, though with a gentleman, of course. You’re too young now, but I’ll wager five guineas that the first time you fall in love, you’ll be as moon-struck as every other Dell since Noah trundled down from the ark.”
“I’m nineteen, Rob, more than old enough to fall in love if I pleased,” she said wearily. This wasn’t a new conversation between them, either, nor was it one that Jenny particularly wished to revisit. “It’s more a matter of being sensible than too young. Just because I’m a Dell doesn’t mean I must be a ninny about men.”
Rob answered only with an incoherent grunt, and they fell into an uneasy silence that seemed to match the rocking haste of the chaise through the night. With a sigh, Jenny drew her shawl over her shoulders and propped her feet on the curved top of her trunk, letting both time and distance speed by in a leafy blur.
Rob would never understand her, or that she could want something different from life than he did himself. How could he know that the pastoral existence near the clover field that he’d described in jest was far more appealing to her than the charms of any mere lover could be? Her own snug cottage, a hearth that was hers without any fudging or dissembling: that would be her paradise. All her life she and Rob had spent roaming, first with her father and then by themselves, and wistfully she tried to imagine living in one place long enough to be able to call it home.
“I only hope, Jen,” said her brother at last, as if the conversation had been continuing all along, “that when you do fall in love, you have the decency to do it with some rich old codger who’ll put us both in his will.”
Jenny grumbled. “Oh, yes, so we’ll all three live happily ever after.”
“Don’t scoff, Jen,” said Rob easily, sorry proof that he’d been considering this all along. “It’s as easy to fall in love with a rich sweetheart as a poor one.”
“And don’t you scoff, either, Rob,” said Jenny sharply. She would flirt, and smile, and flatter, and beguile, yes, but she would not seduce, and though she’d yet even to attempt the last with any man, when she finally did, she wanted it to be because she loved him and not because her brother had told her he was rich. “I’ll play whatever role you wish, short of that. Didn’t we agree ages ago that I’d never be the bait for one of your codger schemes, not when I must—”
“Hush,” said Rob sharply, lowering his voice. He turned to look over his shoulder, his hair blowing back across his forehead. “Do you hear another horse behind us?”
“What, on the road at this hour?” She turned around, as well, holding on to the back of the seat as she peered into the night.
“It’s that infernal idiot grenadier, I know it, still looking for his satisfaction and my head.” He slapped the reins again, urging the horse into a faster pace. “Blast the man for being such a prideful idiot!”
“We must be close to the crossroads to London,” said Jenny, her heart racing as the chaise’s tall wheels rocked precariously over the rutted road. “Couldn’t we turn south, the way he wouldn’t expect us to go?”
“The devil knows what he’s expecting,” said Rob grimly. “But I don’t want him getting at you, too.”
“He’ll have to catch us first!”
“Which, given that he’s on horseback and we’re stuck in this ancient rattletrap with a hired nag, is entirely possible. Now, see that stand of trees beyond the next hill? I’m going to slow, and as soon as we’ve ducked below the hill, you’re going to jump out into the grass. You can hide in the trees and wait there, and I’ll come back and fetch you as soon as I’ve lost him.”
“I will not!” cried Jenny indignantly. “I’m staying with you, Rob, and I’m not about to go leaping like a frog from a running chaise!”
“And I say you will,” ordered Rob, concentrating on controlling the horse. “For your own good. You’d be a hindrance, pet. This idiot believes I have defiled his woman, and I don’t want to give him even the remotest chance to wreak his vengeance on you.”
Alas, Jenny understood. Most likely Rob could wriggle his way free more readily without her there in the middle. He’d done it before, and those other times, too, she’d been left or sent to wait elsewhere while he did it. She didn’t want to be a hindrance, nor, to be honest, did she wish to be defiled by an idiot grenadier, either.
“But what if he hurts you?” she protested. “What if you’re left bleeding somewhere? However will I find you again?”
“Because I always find you first, little sister.” He still smiled fondly. “Now come along, you’re only going to have the one chance. How different can it be from jumping out a window?”
“You’re a bully, Rob Dell,” she said, cautiously leaning over the side to gauge the drop to the ground.
“Only if you’re a coward, Jenny Dell,” he answered. “Which I know for a fact you’re not, being my sister.”
“What you should know, Rob, is that I’ll challenge you to a duel myself when this is done.” They were just cresting the hill, the chaise slowing as Rob had promised. She rose unsteadily in the swaying coach, slung her skirts over one arm, and bent just long enough to kiss Rob on the cheek. “God be with you, you ninny, and mind you keep yourself clear of that man’s pistols.”
Then, before she could be afraid, she jumped.
The ground came up harder than she’d expected, the waving grass not nearly as soft as it had looked in the moonlight. She stumbled forward and rolled twice from the force of her landing, then sat upright, gasping, to wave at her brother. Looking over his shoulder, he waved back, reassured, then snapped the reins. The chaise rattled off, over the next hill, and Jenny was alone.
And better she should stay that way, too, she told herself firmly, and not be found by the side of the road by the idiot grenadier. She scrambled to her feet and began to run back up the hill toward the safety of the copse of trees. Their branches were low and gnarled, making her duck and dodge into the shadows, as perfect a hiding place as Rob could ever have picked. Overhead a tawny owl hooted crossly at being disturbed, and with a grin Jenny looked up, trying to spot him through the leaves as she hurried deeper into the brush and trees.
But she didn’t see the owl, and she didn’t see the low-slung branch, either, as she crashed her forehead into the rough bark.
And then saw nothing more.
This was the time of day that Brant liked the best. The new morning had scarcely begun and the old night was just fading away while the stars and moon stubbornly remained in the sky, the dawn no more than a glow on the horizon. The birds had already begun to chatter and soon the field workers would start trudging across the meadows, but for now Brant felt as if he had the world completely to himself, or at least the large green corner of it that belonged to Claremont Hall. With his dogs for company, he rode along the borders of his lands every morning at this time, regardless of whether the summer sun was going to shine warmly on his back or winter clouds threatened snow and wind sharp beneath the brim of his hat.
Although riding his property like this would strike most of his fellow peers as unnecessary at best, and at worst, laughably medieval—the ducal lord of the manor!—Brant had worked too hard to rescue Claremont Hall from his father’s creditors to take his own possession of the estate lightly. As often as he might go up to London, he always came back here. He loved this place, and he took great satisfaction in seeing the improvements he’d been able to make in it. Besides, at this hour, all things appeared wonderfully possible to him, especially on a perfect early summer morning like this one.
“Here, Jetty, Gus, here!” he called as his two black retrievers bounded ahead of him. “How many more rabbits can there be left to chase?”
But the dogs didn’t return as they usually did, instead racing off into a copse of trees not far from the road. Brant whistled for them, and when they still didn’t appear, he sighed and swung down from his horse, looping the reins around a branch.
“Must be a righteous big rabbit,” he grumbled. More likely the pair had stumbled upon something deliciously, foully fragrant only to dogs, and were busily rolling in it. He pushed aside the branches, letting his eyes grow accustomed to the faint gray light as he searched for the two dogs. But this time when he whistled, it was with surprise.
The dogs had discovered something, true enough. Jetty and Gus were sitting on either side of the too-still body of a woman, lying facedown in the old leaves. Hurrying to her side, Brant prayed it wasn’t a girl that he knew, a serving girl from the Hall or the daughter of one of his tenants. He believed in taking responsibility for whatever happened on his land, even tragedies such as this.
But as soon as he knelt beside her, he could see from the fine muslin of her gown and the soft wool of her cloak that she was a lady, no farmer’s daughter, and that the small, pale hand that lay curled on the dried leaves had never seen hard work. Yet lady or not, there was no question that trouble had found her: the skirts of that white muslin gown were grass-stained and streaked with dirt, her once-neat hair a tangle down her back. Worst of all was the raw, ugly bruise on her temple, swelling just below the neat curve of her brow.
Gently, Brant smoothed her hair away from the bruise and touched his fingers to the side of her throat, searching for a heartbeat. At least the girl still lived; he hadn’t been sure. He’d little knowledge of practical physicking, and he wasn’t certain what his next step should be to assist her. His experience with pretty young women—and he now could see that, beneath the dirt and bruises, this one was very pretty indeed—was generally of a far more lively sort.
Jetty whimpered, prodding at the woman’s arm with his nose.
“Stop that, Jetty,” ordered Brant softly. “She’s suffered enough without you adding to it.”
But the dog’s wet nose had already roused her, and with a groan she shifted, flopping onto her side. Her eyes fluttered open and she grimaced with pain, pressing her hands to her temple.
“You’ll be all right, miss,” said Brant. “You have my word on it. Can you tell me what pains you?”
Gingerly she touched the bruise. “Only my head.”
“You’re certain?” he asked cautiously. When he’d first seen her lying in the leaves, he’d been sure she’d been abused and abandoned by some man.
“It’s my head. I should know.” She squinted up at him from beneath her hands. “You’re not the dreaded idiot grenadier, are you?”
“I don’t believe so, no.” The poor girl had been struck on the head and was entitled to speak nonsense. “Do you think you can try to sit upright? That must be the first step toward moving you to a more comfortable place.”
She nodded, and he slipped his arm beneath her back to help raise her. She was a little bit of a thing, more fragile than he’d first realized, and once again he thought of how fortunate she was not to have been more badly hurt, whatever misfortune had befallen her. As soon as he could take her back to the Hall, he’d call the surgeon to come make sure she was as well as she claimed. He always wanted to help those too weak or flawed to protect themselves, especially if the rest of the world had abandoned them—exactly as this girl seemed to have been.
She gasped as he lifted her upright, her eyes closed and her hand still pressed to her temple. With his help, she sat there, not moving. Then to his surprise, she opened her eyes and smiled. With her face so close to his, the effect was dazzling, if dizzying.
The dawn was beginning to reach even into these shadows, and he could now see the details of her features: round cheeks and a dimpled little chin, a surprisingly strong nose softened by freckles, pale eyes that turned up merrily at the corners. She was too elfin to be considered beautiful, but too appealing for him not to smile back.
“There,” she said, her voice thick, almost sleepy. “I did it, didn’t I?”
“You did, indeed,” he agreed, shifting so that her beguiling little mouth wasn’t as temptingly close to his. He’d never been the kind of man who took advantage of such opportunities with women, and he wasn’t about to begin with now, while her wits were so addled. “Rest a moment, and then we’ll try standing.”
“Very well,” she said, reaching out to ruffle Jetty’s ears. “I like your dogs.”
“They like you, too,” he said. Without a shred of shame, Jetty was making blissful growly noises, his eyes unfocused and his tongue lolling from his mouth in canine ecstasy. “That one, there, is Jetty, and the other is Gus, shortened from the far-too-grand Augustus. They were the ones who found you here, you know.”
“Then I thank them for their trouble,” she said, wobbling to her feet. “And I thank you, sir. You see I’m mending already.”
“Don’t be too hasty, now,” he cautioned, doubting she’d be standing at all without his support. “No need to go running off just yet. Can you recall your name, or how you came to be here? I’m not going to send you on your way until you can tell me both. Besides, you likely have family or friends worrying about you.”
Her face lost its sunniness and she looked away. “I— I do not know my name. I suppose it must be my poor foolish head again, but I—I don’t know it. Perhaps if you told me your name, I—I could recall my own.”
“Forgive me,” said Brant gravely. “I should have introduced myself to you before. I am the Duke of Strachen, and you are standing upon my land, not far from Claremont Hall.”
“Oh, my,” she whispered, not listening to him as, instead, she pressed her palm over her bruise. “Perhaps I should not have stood so soon, not when…when—ah, how my sorry head does ache!”
She swayed back against his arm and he caught her just as her eyes closed and she went limp against him. She was as light in his arms as he’d guessed she’d be. But he still didn’t want to subject her to the long walk home and her head jostling against his shoulder with each step, nor could he imagine a comfortable way to carry her on the horse for the same reason. Gallant knights in old romances might carry their ladies fair on a charger like that, but in modern reality, it simply didn’t work.
With concern he looked down at Jetty and Gus, thumping their tails on the ground as they gazed up at him. If he was to be a modern-day gallant knight, then this was what he had for faithful squires. Lucky him.
“Home,” he ordered, hoping that at least for this once, they’d decide to obey. “Home!”
And for once the pair did do as he’d asked, racing off across the open field toward Claremont Hall. They were that loyal to him, or perhaps, like him, already that besotted with the nameless girl. But when the dogs returned to the Hall without him, the men in the stables would be sure to come looking, and he counted on the dogs leading them back here. Until they did, he’d simply have to wait.
Carefully he sat on the ground beneath the trees, cradling the girl in his arms. She looked pale to him, and her breathing had grown so shallow and faint that she once again seemed lifeless.
He’d given his word to her that she’d be all right. It was a promise he now could only hope to keep.
Chapter Two
F or the first few hazy moments when Jenny woke, she was convinced she’d gone directly to Heaven—especially if Heaven was filled with clouds as soft as feather beds to lie upon and as sweet-smelling as a field of lavender, and all of it wrapped up inside the snug, dark cocoon of heavy velvet bedcurtains. She was clean and warm and dressed in a comfortably too large nightshift, with her hair neatly braided into plaits over her shoulders. She was still too sleepy to question how she’d come to this state, but awake enough to relish the blissful peace of it.
She yawned happily, stretching her arms over her head. Happily, that is, until a sudden bolt of pain drilled into the side of her forehead, a pain that was very much the opposite of Heaven. Her yawn turned to a gasp as she pressed her hand to the spot and tried to recall exactly how she’d come by this hideous, throbbing lump.
She’d been riding with Rob in a hired chaise, and because they were being followed by an idiot grenadier—she remembered her brother’s description quite clearly—she’d jumped into the grass, meaning to hide and wait for Rob to return for her. That part of remembering was easy.
But from there, however, things became confused. Somehow she’d struck her head, or had it struck for her. After that, she’d awakened to see two black dogs and a handsome gentleman kneeling beside her, his face showing such concern that she’d almost laughed, or would have if her head hadn’t hurt so much.
But as soon as she’d felt the warmth of his kindness and the strong, sure way his arm had circled her waist to hold her steady—why, then laughing had been the last thing in her thoughts. Then, even as her head had throbbed, she’d found herself wondering what it would be like to lean forward and kiss him, from gratitude and curiosity but mostly because she’d wanted to, pure and simple.
Even the memory of it now made her flush with shame at her own lack of judgment. She’d been absolutely no better than Rob, perhaps even worse, and the man hadn’t even been a rich old codger. Wherever had her good sense fled? If longing to kiss a stranger just because he’d been nice to her wasn’t proof of how hard she’d struck her head, then nothing was.
She groaned again, this time with frustration. She knew there were more things that she should be remembering, important things, yet still they stayed stubbornly out of her grasp, hovering in a hazy fog. She’d have to remember, and soon, because she’d have to leave wherever she was to go find Rob, the way they’d planned, so that—
“Here she is, Dr. Gristead,” whispered an older woman’s voice outside the bedcurtains. “Poor little creature, she’s barely stirred since we put her to bed this morning.”
The poor little creature must be her, realized Jenny just as the bedcurtains were pulled back with a scrape of steel rings along the rod. After the darkness of the bed, her eyes were unaccustomed to even the single candle’s light, forcing her to squint up at the two strange faces staring solemnly down at her: a ruddy gentleman in spectacles and an oversize physician’s wig, and an older woman dressed in gray with a large ruffled housekeeper’s cap that was, in its way, the solemn equivalent to the man’s wig.
“Ah, miss, you’re awake at last,” said the woman, beaming happily at Jenny with her hands clasped over the front of her apron. “How pleased His Grace shall be to hear of your recovery!”
His Grace? Into exactly whose bedstead had she tumbled, anyway? Uneasily, Jenny pulled the sheet a little higher beneath her chin, as if a length of linen would be enough to protect her. The young gentleman beneath the trees must have brought her here—to his father, or uncle, or perhaps just the nearest local worthy known for charity. But “His Grace” meant a duke, and she’d no experience at all with dukes. Although she and her brother had brushed with their share of lesser aristocrats, trying to cozen a lord as high-born and powerful as a duke was more of a challenge than they’d ever attempted.
Now she looked from the doctor to the woman, and smiled faintly, too cautious and bewildered to answer their question. Silence was often the best friend that she and Rob had in a difficult spot, and this certainly qualified as that.
“She’s hardly recovered yet, Mrs. Lowe,” said the gentleman. He took Jenny’s wrist, pinching it between his thumb and forefinger, and frowned ominously. “The beat of her heart is still erratic, and the pallidity of her complexion indicates a continuing ill balance of the vital humors. Attacks to the cranium such as this can often prove fatal, Mrs. Lowe, especially to young females like this one.”
“Goodness,” exclaimed Mrs. Lowe, drawing back a step as if fearing contagion. “To my eyes, Dr. Gristead, she seemed much improved.”
“In medical matters, one cannot rely on sight alone,” said the physician sagely as he held the candlestick over Jenny’s face. He cleared his throat before he began to speak, raising his voice as if she’d trouble hearing, instead of remembering.
“Pray attend to me, young woman,” he said. “I am Dr. Gristead, and this is Mrs. Lowe, the keeper of this fine house. You have been struck insensible, and have lost your wits. You have, however, had the great good fortune in your infirmity to have been taken into the care of His Grace the Duke of Strachen. Are you properly grateful for his mercy?”
What Jenny was was properly dumbfounded. A little vagabond like her, fallen into the care of His Grace the Duke of Strachen! How Rob would marvel at such great good fortune, and how far this could surpass their last situation, there with Sir Wallace and his musty old books! Merciful gratitude might seem like a simple enough question to a man like Dr. Gristead, but Jenny wanted to be sure she said and did the right thing, especially where a generous old duke was concerned.
“Yes, sir,” she murmured at last, sinking lower on her pillows in a puddle of meekness. She was glad they’d braided her hair; the plaits would make her look younger and more innocently pitiful. “I am most grateful, Dr. Gristead.”
The doctor grunted, pleased with her response. “Very good. You are progressing, indeed. Perhaps now, young woman, you can recall your name and tell it to me, as well as the place of your home.”
“My name?” repeated Jenny hesitantly, stalling. Of course she knew her true name—Miss Jenny Dell—just as she knew that she’d been born in Dublin, not far from the theater where her parents had met and performed together. But neither she nor Rob were in the habit of telling their real names or history to anyone. For now, until Rob found her and decided what they should do next, it seemed wisest for her simply to…forget for a bit longer.
“Your name, young woman,” said the physician, his mouth growing more grim with each passing second that Jenny didn’t reply. “Even your given name will be an assistance to us.”
“But we know the young lady’s name already,” whispered Mrs. Lowe. “I told you before that—”
“She must tell us herself, Mrs. Lowe,” said Dr. Gristead sternly. “Otherwise it is meaningless.”
“What is meaningless, Gristead?”
At once Jenny recognized that voice: the gentleman who’d rescued her, and as he came to stand between Dr. Gristead and Mrs. Lowe, she willed herself to look even more languid and weak. He was dressed for dinner, doubtless with the duke himself, in a beautifully tailored dark suit and a red waistcoat with cut-steel buttons and embroidered dragons.
And, oh, my, he was handsome. She hadn’t forgotten that. The candlelight made gold of his hair and deepened the blue of his eyes to midnight. His features were regular, his nose straight and his chin squared, but to her disappointment she saw none of the warm kindness or concern in his blue eyes that she’d remembered. Instead, his smile now seemed distant, impersonal, almost aloof, as he gazed down at her.
“Are you feeling better, miss?” he asked. “If anyone can wrest you back among the living, then it’s Gristead here, though he’s hardly pleasant company while he does it.”
The physician’s frown deepened, as if to prove the gentleman’s words true. “She still does not appear to know her name or any details of her situation, Your Grace.”
Jenny gasped. “You—you are the Duke of Strachen?”
“Ah, Gristead, mark how she does know what’s important!” exclaimed the gentleman she now realized must be the very duke himself, his gaze still so intent on Jenny that she felt her pale cheeks warm. “You should know who I am because I told you myself, there under the trees this morning.”
Her flush deepened. Already she’d misstepped, and all she’d spoken was a single sentence to the duke. The duke. How had this man become a duke, anyway? Oh, her head still hurt far too much for sorting out puzzles like this one! Dukes were supposed to be old and gray and dozing in their places in the House of Lords. They weren’t supposed to be young and appallingly handsome and wear dashing silk waistcoats with Chinese dragons.
“I wish to thank you for your largesse, Your Grace,” she said finally with a wan smile. “Largesse” was one of those words that Rob always made sure to use: it was fulsomely French, and sounded much more impressive and flattering to the largesse’s possessor. “You have been most kind to me, and I promise not to take advantage of your hospitality any longer than is necessary.”
“You shall remain here at Claremont Hall as long as is necessary,” he declared with a lordly sweep of his hand. “You’ll stay until you are quite recovered or your friends or family have fetched you away.”
“Or until you tire of me, Your Grace.” She sighed sadly, taking her hands away from her forehead to better display her bruise—which, if it looked even half as hideous as it felt, would be an undeniable way to prove she’d no business going anywhere. “I won’t burden you, Your Grace. I’ll leave myself rather than do that. I’m not your prisoner, and you can’t keep me here against my will.”
Most gentlemen—especially the gentleman she remembered rescuing her this morning—would have made a gallant protest against her even considering leaving, but not this duke.
“You’re not my prisoner, sweetheart, no,” he said evenly, his expression not changing even a fraction. “But since you met your misfortune on my land, you are my responsibility, until someone else comes forward to claim it, and you.”
“But to be a mere tedious responsibility!” She sighed dramatically. She hoped he wasn’t truly as chilly and arrogant as he seemed. Chilly gentlemen were never generous, and again she wondered sadly what had become of the kind gentleman with the dogs.
“Tell me for yourself, Your Grace,” she continued, striving to sound pitiable enough to rekindle that well-hidden kindness. “How should you like being deemed no more than a charitable obligation?”
“Consider before you speak to His Grace, young woman!” scolded the physician, his brows bristling severely beneath the front of his wig. “You are unwell, true, but that is no excuse for such…such familiarity. His Grace would be perfectly within his rights to send you to the almshouse!”
But the duke himself did not seem to agree. Instead, for the first time, his smile seemed genuinely amused as he studied her with new interest—interest enough that Jenny felt her cheeks blushing all over again.
“Oh, don’t frighten the lady, Gristead,” he said softly. “And you don’t listen to him, Miss—Miss—now whatever am I to call you if we don’t know who you are?”
“But indeed we do know her name, Your Grace,” said Mrs. Lowe, eager to help. “This was tucked in her shift when we undressed her earlier.”
Jenny let out a little sigh of relief as the attention shifted away from her, even if only for a moment. The woman was holding a folded handkerchief out to the duke, and she’d turned it so the letters stitched in red thread in one corner were neatly facing toward him for his convenience. But the duke was far too important to bother to read the name for himself, brushing the handkerchief back toward the housekeeper with an impatient flick of his hand as he looked once again at Jenny.
“Tell us all, Mrs. Lowe,” he said with that same smile seemingly for Jenny alone, as if the request were more of a secret jest between the two of them. “Enlighten us as to the lady’s name.”
“Corinthia, Your Grace,” volunteered Mrs. Lowe promptly. “It’s stitched right there, plain as can be. A lady’s name on a lady’s handkerchief. It’s next to new, likely from her having so many of the same, the way ladies do. You can see how fine the linen is, Your Grace, and this lace trimming—that’s the kind the French nuns used to make in the convents over there, what can’t be bought now for love or coin.”
“All that knowledge from a single scrap of linen, Mrs. Lowe?” The duke studied the handkerchief and shook his head with wry amazement. “I must take care with my own belongings, lest you begin spinning tales about my cravats. But if ‘Corinthia’ marks her linen, then Corinthia her name must be. Would you agree, Miss Corinthia?”
“I—I suppose it must be so, Your Grace,” said Jenny, marveling at how much the housekeeper had concluded from the single handkerchief. None of it was right, of course, but every wrong guess helped build her credibility as a true-born lady. “My name must be Corinthia.”
“It’s a start, Miss Corinthia,” said the duke as he idly smoothed the ruffled cuff on his shirt. “Or perhaps I should rather address you as Lady Corinthia, the way Mrs. Lowe so desperately desires?”
“The given name is sufficient to begin inquiries, Your Grace,” said Mrs. Lowe firmly. “Discreetly, so as not to upset her family any further. Although a lady’s name must not be made common, surely there cannot be too many Corinthias gone missing in Sussex last night.”
“That would be most kind of you, Your Grace,” murmured Jenny. To the best of her knowledge, there hadn’t been any Corinthias gone missing last night, but Mrs. Lowe’s discreet inquiries would serve to let Rob know where she was, and that she was safe. For that matter, she wished she knew if and how he’d escaped the jealous grenadier, and as she thought of her brother, the sum of her family, she felt a single and quite genuine tear slide down her cheek to splat upon the sheet.
“There now, Your Grace, you’ve made her unhappy,” said Mrs. Lowe, reaching over to blot away the tear with Corinthia’s handkerchief. “The poor creature might not be able to recall her home or family, but she still can pine for them.”
Not that the duke cared.
“Tell me, Miss Corinthia,” he said. “Are you hungry?”
“You cannot, Your Grace!” sputtered Gristead indignantly before Jenny could answer. “Given this young woman’s perilous condition, it is not wise for her even to consider eating!”
“And I say it is unwise for her not to,” said the duke with the easy assurance of someone accustomed to always having his own way. “Especially when I’m so hungry myself. Mrs. Lowe, have a table brought, so I might dine in here with the lady. What would you like, Miss Corinthia?”
“Tea, if you please,” she said, realizing she was in fact very hungry, indeed. “And toast, with jam, if that is possible.”
“Anything is possible at Claremont Hall,” declared the duke. “You’ve only to ask. Isn’t that so, Mrs. Lowe?”
“Yes, Your Grace,” said the housekeeper, already backing from the room to begin fulfilling his orders.
“But, Your Grace,” protested the physician again, his chins quivering over the top of his neckcloth. “The young woman is my patient and—”
“Clearly she is out of danger, Gristead,” answered the duke, “and I’m sure you have other patients to see, as well. You can be sure we shall send for you if there is any change.”
After such an obvious dismissal, Gristead could only bow a red-faced farewell and follow the housekeeper from the room.
And leave Jenny alone with the duke.
“So,” he said, pulling a chair closer to the bed. “Here we are, Miss Corinthia.”
“Yes, Your Grace,” she said softly. “Here we are, indeed.”
Indeed, indeed, she thought glumly. It wasn’t just the setting, or the fact that they were alone together, for her unconventional life often tossed her in and out of riskier situations than this. No, what worried her now was how she’d become so acutely aware of the man beside her, of each gesture and word he made. Every detail of him fascinated her, from the way his light hair slipped across his forehead, to the small wavy scar along his jaw, to how his fingers rested lightly on the arm of the chair. He hadn’t so much as hinted at touching her, yet still her heart was racing and her palms were damp, merely from being here with him, and that—that was what put her at such risk and made her feel so uncharacteristically vulnerable.
“You are improved, aren’t you?” he asked with concern, misreading her silence. “I can call Gristead back if you need him.”
“Oh, no, Your Grace,” she said quickly. “I am much better, truly.”
“I’m glad.” He leaned back in the chair with his legs stretched comfortably before him, his elbows on the arms of the chair and his fingertips pressed lightly together in a little tent over the red waistcoat. “But you’re anxious about being here alone with me, aren’t you?”
“Perhaps.” She smiled, ordering herself to put aside her giddiness and concentrate, concentrate. If she didn’t, she could very well find herself in that county almshouse or even the gaol. “My position is not an enviable one, Your Grace. I’ve no sense of who I am, my head aches abominably, and I am undressed and lying in a strange bed, unchaperoned, with a strange man beside me. Isn’t that just cause for anxiety?”
He grinned, clearly pleased by her answer in ways she hadn’t intended. “Not if you trust me as a gentleman.”
“Which is exactly what I keep telling myself, Your Grace.” She slid her shoulders up higher against the pillows until she was almost sitting, being sure to keep the sheets tucked modestly under her arms. “You are a gentleman, a great lord, a man of honor and integrity, and therefore worthy of my trust. Besides, if you’d wished to take advantage of my position, you would have done so already.”
“Ha,” he said, still smiling. “That doesn’t sound like you trust me at all.”
“But I do,” she insisted, though there was something to his smile that warned her against trusting him at all. “I must. What other choice do I have, being that I’m a charitable obligation?”
“I thought we’d already agreed that you were my guest,” he said. He swept his arm through the air, encompassing the entire room. “A lowly charitable obligation would not be put into a bedchamber such as this. My guests, however, are.”
She seized on that. “Have you many guests, Your Grace?”
“Almost none,” he said with a careless shrug. “My brothers, their wives and children. That’s all.”
“All?” she asked, surprised. Most people with grand houses in the country entertained an unending stream of guests for their own amusement as well as for hospitality’s sake. “I should think a lord like you would have an enormous acquaintance!”
“Oh, I do,” he said easily. “But I prefer to see them in London, where they are more manageable and less demanding. I would rather keep Claremont Hall just for me, not them. Here I must please only myself.”
It was very hard for Jenny to imagine a gentleman as elegant as this one living alone among the Sussex fields as a veritable hermit. “Then you must be the prize of every squire’s daughter in the county.”
He grimaced. “Which is precisely why I avoid all contact with the local gentry. I’m certain my neighbors judge me the worst kind of inhospitable recluse and spoilsport. I don’t care. I have more than my fill of society when I am in London.”
Jenny’s smile widened, this time with unabashed relief. She couldn’t begin to guess how far Claremont Hall was from the inn she and Rob had fled in Bamfleigh, or from poor, abandoned Sir Wallace and his library, either. But if the duke didn’t believe in speaking to his country neighbors, then she should be safe enough here, hiding in plain—or rather, grand—sight.
“You are amused that I am a recluse?” he asked dryly.
“No, Your Grace,” she said, twisting the end of one of her braids through her fingers. “I simply do not believe it.”
She meant it as lighthearted teasing to relieve the tension between them, no more, but he didn’t laugh the way she’d expected. Far from it.
“No?” he asked, the edge to his voice a warning that made no sense. “Would you rather believe my interest in this estate is mere country playacting, like the French queen with her beribboned dairy cows before the Bastille fell?”
“No, no,” she answered quickly. She didn’t want to offend him, especially over something as foolish as this. “I only meant that no matter how much any of us pretends to be someone else, in the end we always are what we are.”
“Ah.” For whatever reason, he relaxed. “Then you are a fatalist? You believe that we can never change from what we’re born? That our destiny remains always the same, with no hope of growth or improvement?”
“No, no, no!” She shook her head, then winced and pressed her fingers to the bruise again. “It’s not so complicated as that, Your Grace. I only meant that no matter how many changes you may make for the world to see, you are still at heart, or in your soul, the same creature you were born. That’s all.”
He nodded solemnly. “Then you are a fatalist, if that’s what you believe.”
“That’s what I know,” she said with conviction. She did believe it, too. How could she not, when so much of her life was unabashed deception? If she didn’t believe in herself—Miss Jenny Dell!—independent of whatever new identity Rob had concocted for her, why, then, she’d have nothing at all. “But you don’t agree, do you?”
“On some days I would,” he said lightly, “and other days I wouldn’t. Look, here’s our dinner at last.”
Mrs. Lowe reappeared, leading a little parade of servants. Two footmen came first, carrying a narrow dining table already set with a pressed cloth, followed by more footmen and maidservants bearing cutlery, candlesticks, napkins, even a porcelain bowl full of pink and white flowers, as well as a silver tea service and several covered dishes, each fragrant with wisps of steam.
The table was placed between Jenny’s bed and the duke’s chair, and as one of the footmen lit additional candles, she was able to see more of the details of how well His Grace treated his infrequent guests. She made such appraisals automatically, almost without thinking, for her father had trained both her and Rob in how much such niceties could reveal about their owners’ personalities as well as the depth of their fortunes.
The bedchamber was large and square in the old-fashioned way of country houses, but the furnishings were in the latest London style, delicate and airy, fit for any fine lady. So was the table being set before her: costly new porcelain rimmed with gold, damask linens so spotless she doubted they’d ever been used, and double-weight sterling for the spoons and forks, also so new that the ducal crest engraved upon each one was still crisp and sharp.
In fact, to Jenny’s surprise, everything seemed new. In her experience, titled folk tended to surround themselves with ancient bric-a-brac and gewgaws that had been in their family since at least the days of the Conqueror, another way they separated themselves from jumped-up merchants and mill owners. She’d never expected to see so much that was fresh from the shops in the house of a peer.
But because of the quality of these belongings, new or old, Jenny could come to a most cheerful conclusion: that the handsome Duke of Strachen must be rich as Creoseus, and, even better, that he didn’t mind spending the fortune he so obviously had.
Yet at once she reached a second conclusion, less cheerful, more startling, and terribly disloyal to Rob. As pleasing as her brother would find the duke’s title and wealth, she herself would selfishly trade it all for the return of the smiling country gentleman and his two black dogs.
Clearly the bruise to her head must be more serious than it felt.
“Here you are, miss,” said Mrs. Lowe, plumping Jenny’s pillows herself. One maidservant poured her tea and handed her the cup, while another solemnly buttered triangles of toast and spread strawberry jam exactly to the crusts. The duke’s fare was considerably more substantial, and while Jenny’s toast and tea were just what she’d asked for, she still looked longingly at his dinner: a ragoo of oysters, veal Florentine, roasted artichokes and forced mushrooms, with the wines to go with it all.
Yet though everything was perfectly presented, the servants did not remain to attend while she and the duke dined, the way servants in most such households did, but once again left them alone together. Had this been pre-arranged for her sake, wondered Jenny uneasily, or was it simply another way that His Grace chose to reinforce his solitude here in the country?
“The toast agrees with you, Corinthia?” he asked at last, sipping at his wine. “You feel more fortified, in spite of what Gristead predicted?”
Jenny smiled, and nodded, prepared to watch every word she spoke. Most gentlemen that she and Rob met were elderly and too enchanted with her youth and beauty to ask inconvenient questions. She could hardly expect the duke to be like that. “Much better, thank you, Your Grace.”
“I am glad to hear it,” he said, his eyes too serious to match his smile. “Do you think now you can speak of the grenadier who did this to you?”
“The—the grenadier?” she stammered, confused. “I do not recall any such man, Your Grace.”
“You did,” he said, swirling the red wine in his glass. “When I found you this morning, that was one of the first things you asked. Was I the idiot grenadier?”
Abruptly, Jenny set her saucer down on the table before her. “I told you, Your Grace. I have no memory of such a question, or of any such man, either.”
He tapped his fingertips lightly against the glass. “I’m not asking this to shame you, Corinthia. Pray note that for your sake, I waited until we were alone before I did. You certainly wouldn’t be the first lady led astray by some villain in regimentals.”
“But I wasn’t,” she insisted, trying not to panic as she wondered what else she might have mumbled in those first confused minutes this morning. If she’d spoken of Rob as well as the grenadier, or perhaps worse, climbing from the window of inn, then this ruse was done before it had begun. “I would know if I had.”
“Why, when you cannot recall so much as your own name with any certainty?” he asked with unquestionable logic. “Someone brought you to that remote corner of my land, Corinthia. You didn’t walk there, at least not in the kidskin slippers you were wearing this morning.”
“Is that more of Mrs. Lowe’s deciphering, Your Grace?” asked Jenny, her chin tucked defensively low against her chest. “Or did you determine the state of my slippers for yourself?”
“Be reasonable, my dear,” he said. “If this scoundrel is still prowling somewhere nearby, I need to know, not only for your sake, but for that of the wives and daughters of my tenants. He must be prevented from doing this again.”
She looked down, dodging his scrutiny, her hands betraying her nervousness as her fingers pleated the edge of the sheet into a tight little fan.
Think, think, think! You don’t need Rob to tell you what to do here. Be your own lass, Jen. You know what chances to take, how to turn this inside out and around to your own advantage. When this blue-eyed lord asks you to remember, remember first that you’re clever, too, Jen, every bit as clever as he!
She took a deep sigh, soft and breathy, then began her gamble.
“You have two dogs,” she said softly, still not meeting his gaze. “I remember them finding me. Gus and Jetty, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” he said with such gruff pride that he might have been another dog himself, instead of their master. “Gus and Jetty, the greatest pair of canine rascals in Chrisendon.”
“Oh, but they weren’t rascals to me,” she said, now looking up from under the fringe of her lashes. “Not at all. They’re large, lovely, black dogs who licked my hands to rouse me where I lay, and made little worried noises over me until you came, too.”
“Rascals,” he murmured again, but the way his expression warmed with affection proved she knew she’d made him forget about the grenadier. Here, at last, was the man she’d remembered.
“Not rascals,” she said, that warmth in his face giving her the courage to go on. Now it wasn’t a game or a ruse. Now it was the truth, and infinitely more risky.
“They were gentle and kind to me, your dogs were,” she continued, more wistfully than she realized, and for the first time her smile was genuine, as warm as his own. “Rather like you were then yourself, Your Grace.”
But, instead of returning her smile, the warmth vanished from his eyes and, beneath the elegant clothes, his whole body tensed warily against her. She recognized uncertainty when she saw it, just as she recognized the defensiveness that went with it; but why should either be in a man like this, a peer whose entire world bowed to his wishes?
“Who are you?” he demanded hoarsely, as if she were the one threatening him.
“I don’t know,” she whispered, stunned by his reaction. “Who do you wish me to be?”
“No.” He shoved back his chair and rose, and in three long strides was already at the door. “Damnation, no.”
And before she could ask him to explain, he was gone.
Chapter Three
H e’d not made such a blatant misstep—or such a fool of himself—in years.
Brant stood at the tall, darkened window of the library where he’d fled, and swore again. As a rule, he wasn’t a man overly given to swearing, but this time he knew he deserved every single oath he could muster, and a few more that he invented spontaneously.
The girl had done nothing at all worthy of his idiocy. Without a murmur, she’d gone along with his inane impulse to dine together. She’d made a brave best of his attempts at conversation, and she’d answered his questions as well as her poor battered head permitted. That bruise must have pained her abominably, yet she hadn’t complained once. She hadn’t been able to remember her own name, but she had recalled Jetty and Gus, which was far more than a self-centered dunderhead like himself could reasonably expect from any woman in her situation.
She had, in short, behaved as perfectly as any true lady would, with grace, charm and wit, and an astonishing degree of loveliness. At least he could be objective about that. In London he’d known scores of famous beauties—actresses, titled ladies, courtesans—who’d never have the kind of innate appeal this girl displayed with her braided hair, upturned eyes and, yes, even with that great violet blossom of a bruise on her temple.
So why, then, when all she’d done was to mistake him for what he wasn’t, had he turned on her like some raving Bedlamite?
He groaned and swore again. At least if he were in Bedlam, he’d be safely under lock and key, unable to offend the rest of the world.
He felt something bump against his leg and looked down to see Jetty beside him, panting happily just to be at his side. With a final halfhearted oath, Brant reached down to ruffle the dog’s ears.
“We broke the rules, didn’t we, old Jetty?” he said softly. “Claremont Hall’s always been for us bachelors alone. You know the arrangement, the same as I. No females permitted, not ever. You shouldn’t have found that young lady beneath those trees, and I shouldn’t have brought her back here, so I could make a right flaming ass of myself.”
The dog gave a sympathetic low growl in the back of his throat, turning to look toward the doorway and the approaching footsteps that he’d heard before Brant.
“Good lad,” murmured Brant as the knock finally came on the door. “You’ve saved me from doing it again before another witness. Isn’t that true, Tway?”
The small, pale man in the black suit and snuff wig only bowed slightly over the salver full of letters in his hands. “As you say, Your Grace.”
Brant smiled, oddly comforted by the man’s predictable reply. If anything at Claremont Hall would be unaffected by this young woman’s appearance, it would be Tway, his manservant, secretary, steward and unflaggingly loyal salvation for the last ten years of Brant’s life. His brothers made sport of Tway, noting how his colorless face must have been pinched from old tallow candles, or wagering over what disaster would befall Tway’s mouth if he ever actually smiled. Yet Brant never joined in their jests. Deep down he trusted Tway more than he did either of those same brothers, and with good reason, too. How could it be otherwise, when Tway was the one man alive who understood his shameful secret?
“Your correspondence, Your Grace,” continued Tway, raising the salver a fraction higher, as if the neatly piled letters were an offering. “Do you still wish to make your replies now, or shall I put them aside for tomorrow?”
“Now,” said Brant without hesitation, dropping into an armchair with Jetty settling at his feet. He’d forgotten that he’d set aside this time for business, but the task of answering the requests and queries would help shift his thoughts from the girl. The same easy comprehension of the patterns, percentages and probability that made him so successful at the gaming table had carried over into investing and speculation, even into ungentlemanly trade, and earned him the wealth to match his peerage. “I doubt that there’s anything in there that will improve with age like a wheel of cheese.”
“Very well, Your Grace.” Tway nodded, setting the tray on the desk. He reached for the first letter on the stack and held it open before him, the corners pinched daintily between his thumbs and forefingers. “This first is from Mr. Samuel Lippit of the Pennyworth Mines.”
“Doubtless, Lippit is unhappy about my suggestions for improving the mine.” The Welsh tin mine was one of Brant’s newer business ventures, an experiment that seemed likely to cost him dearly before it turned a profit. “He has always seemed disinclined to make such investments, regardless of the returns they will produce.”
“Precisely so, Your Grace,” agreed Tway. “Shall I commence?”
“Please.” Brant, his legs more comfortably before him as Tway began reading the letter aloud. This was how he and Tway conducted all his correspondence, from detailed arrangements regarding his investments to the most intimate billets-doux from lady friends in London. In the beginning, Brant had claimed a weakness of the eyes prevented him from reading and writing, but he was sure that Tway had long ago deciphered the truth for himself. Yet nothing was ever said between them on the subject, any more than there was further discussion about the nearby cottage that Brant had provided for Tway’s aged mother. It was, in Brant’s opinion, a quite perfect arrangement.
Now Brant closed his eyes to help concentrate on the words that Tway was reading and to compose the proper response to dictate, the way he’d done countless times before. But, instead of that well-organized response, the only thing that kept stubbornly drifting into his thoughts was the girl’s elfin face, the way her tip-turned eyes had glowed when she’d challenged him, how their expression had softened when she’d asked after his dogs, how she—blast it all, she did not belong there, or here, or anywhere else at Claremont Hall!
“Forgive me, Your Grace?” asked Tway, his pen stilled over the letter. “I do not believe I heard you properly, Your Grace.”
“You damned well heard more than enough,” said Brant in enough of a growl to make Jetty’s ear perk. “Have there been any replies to our inquiries about the young lady?”
The corners of Tway’s thin-lipped mouth turned down with disappointment. “No, Your Grace. Not yet. But I should expect some response by dawn.”
“You’re not blathering it all over the county, are you?” demanded Brant with concern. “She’s a lady, you know, not some circus wire dancer with her face pasted on broadsides to the walls of stableyards.”
“Of course, Your Grace,” answered Tway, his voice determinedly soothing. “I have supervised every inquiry myself, Your Grace.”
“Mind you, no interfering sheriffs or magistrates, either.” The girl had already suffered enough without becoming the centerpiece of some sort of county scandal. Hell, for all he knew she already was—a rebellious daughter, perhaps, or an eloping heiress. Anything was possible.
“No, Your Grace. The lady’s name shall remain untrammeled by the public.”
“Very good, Tway,” said Brant, taking another deep breath. “I am reassured.”
But he wasn’t, not at all. He had always considered himself the model English gentleman where ladies were concerned, endlessly polite yet coolly distant. He was a peer, a man of the world. Yet here he was, fussing over this girl and her welfare as if she truly mattered to him, and the harder he tried to stop, the more willfully his foolish brain seemed drawn back to her. And having his dinner brought to her bedside, pretending there was some sort of friendship or intimacy between them—what manner of nonsense had that been?
He really was behaving like a witless ninny, and though he stopped his fingers from drumming on the arm of his chair as soon as he realized he was doing it, he wasn’t fast enough to escape Tway’s notice.
“Her family shall be found, Your Grace,” Tway continued in that same calming tone that Brant, in his present humor, could only find infuriating. “You may be sure of that. And might I say, Your Grace, that I am certain her family will be much gratified by your concern for her welfare?”
“You may say no such thing, Tway,” said Brant irritably. He’d taken the girl in because he couldn’t very well have left her there beneath the trees, not because he wished fame for doing good. Surely, Tway of all men should realize that. “You’ll ruin my reputation if you spread drivel like that.”
Unperturbed, Tway dipped his pen into the ink and waited expectedly over the half-written letter before him. “You were advising Mr. Lippit on the matter of reinforcing the north shaft with new timbers for the safety of the miners working within it.”
Tway was right, of course, in his characteristically roundabout way. What Brant needed to do was to focus on the work before him, on his genuine obligations. If he didn’t wish to make a babbling ass of himself again, then he’d have to be sure to keep away from the situations where it happened. Hadn’t he learned that in his first year in London? Didn’t he know by now that no woman—any woman—could hold a lasting place in his life, not if he wished to keep his secret and his sanity? Hadn’t he long ago decided never to wed and risk passing along his shameful disability to an innocent child?
He should be trusting his own hard-won experience, not his dogs. No more amusing himself with this girl in the guise of concern, and no more cozy bedside suppers as if she were his mistress, instead of an uninvited temporary guest.
He studied the stack of waiting letters with new resolve. “What else is there besides Lippit?”
“Lord Randolph and Lord Andrew wish your support for their bill, Your Grace,” continued Tway. “The overseer from your estate in Northumberland seeks approval for certain improvements, a gentleman inventor wishes you to invest in his new steam engine, and the usual ladies request the honor of your company for the usual invitations.”
Brant nodded with new determination. Surely that should be enough to make him forget a dozen girls with winsome smiles. “That is all, Tway?”
“Not quite, Your Grace.” He slid the last letter from the bottom, tipping it so that Brant could see the familiar seal for himself. “As was previously arranged, Your Grace, Captain His Lordship Claremont and her ladyship will be arriving here in a fortnight for the christening in the chapel, as will Lord and Lady Revell.”
Blast. How in blazes had he forgotten that particular obligation? When, soon after Valentine’s Day, his younger brother George and his wife had produced the first legitimate child in the next generation of Claremonts, Brant had expansively offered to have the boy baptized in the family chapel, with all due pomp and ritual. He was vastly fond of George and his youngest brother Revell, too, and delighted that both his brothers had finally found so much happiness in the last year, both with new brides. Besides, George’s son was now the heir to Brant’s title, at least until the unlikely event he sired a child of his own.
So what could explain why he was suddenly feeling so damned melancholy about such a joyful family celebration?
What do you wish me to be…?
She couldn’t have guessed the truth, and yet she had. How could she know that all his life he’d wished himself to be other than the sorry creature he’d been born?
“You need not concern yourself, Your Grace,” Tway was saying, for once misinterpreting Brant’s silence. “Most certainly the young lady will have been reunited with her family before then. You can be sure that she shall be quite gone from Claremont Hall before Captain His Lordship arrives.”
“Quite,” said Brant softly. There was no useful reason to correct Tway’s misconception, any more than there had ever been any lasting purpose to trying to change himself, no matter how hard he tried. “Now pray, return to Lippit’s reply, or we shall be at this until dawn.”
Jenny lay awake for what seemed like an eternity, listening until she was sure the rest of the household was fast asleep for the night. She slipped from the bed, wrapping the coverlet around her shoulders as a makeshift shawl, and padded barefoot across the darkened room to the window. Cautiously she pushed aside the heavy curtains a fraction, peering down along the walls to the house’s other windows. All were as dark as her own, and with relief she pushed the curtains more widely open. The window’s sash was latched but not locked, and she easily slid it open.
The clean night air rushed into the closed room, sweet with the songs of night birds and the scent of the lawns and the flower gardens, and she breathed deeply. That alone helped lessen the ache that still throbbed in her head; she’d always preferred the outdoors anyway, and hated feeling trapped in a closed-up house, particularly one where she’d already made such a mess of things, and without even trying, either.
With the coverlet bunched around her shoulders, she swung her legs over the sill. A narrow balcony ran along the facade beneath the windows, and though there was no doorway from her bedchamber, it was simple enough for Jenny to slip down to the paving stones and hurry along to the end of the balustrade, keeping close to the wall and away from the moonlight.
Anxiously she scanned the shadowy fringes of the trees and bushes, waving the coverlet back and forth as she searched for a sign from her brother. The few times they’d been separated by chance before, Rob had always reunited with her, one way or another, by the following night, and together they would then plot their next step. Rob would know exactly how to soothe this duke that she’d only been able to insult. She wasn’t even sure how she’d insulted him—asking a man what he’d like her to be had always been one of her standard questions, making them puff up and preen that she’d be so obliging when all she was really doing was learning more about them for Rob.
But tonight no matter how hard Jenny studied the gardens, there wasn’t a sign of her brother’s cheerful face popping from beneath the hemlocks, no false owl’s hoot calculated to catch her ear. She twisted her hands inside the coverlet, her apprehension growing with every second. It wasn’t like Rob to abandon her like this. Surely even given her accident, she must be easy enough for him to find, especially if the duke in turn was seeking information about her family in the most worrisome way imaginable.
No. The only answer—the answer Jenny desperately didn’t want to accept—was that the irate grenadier had caused Rob more trouble than he’d expected. With another worried little prayer for his safety, she leaned over the edge of the stone wall, hoping against hope to finally spot her wayward brother.
“Ha, so it is you, Miss Corinthia, surprising me again,” said the duke behind her, so suddenly that she gasped with surprise. “Here I thought I was the only ghost to patrol this walk.”
Jenny turned to face him, thankful that the moonlight would hide her guilty flush. At least she hadn’t been interrupted calling Rob’s name, or far worse, with Rob himself here on this walkway with her.
“Your Grace,” she said with a little dipping curtsy inside her coverlet cocoon. “I should say you are far too much of this world for me to mistake you for a ghost.”
“Flesh and blood and bone, you mean.” He held his hand out toward her to judge for herself. “I can assure you I’m real enough.”
She didn’t have to take his hand to know that. He had shed his jacket and unbuttoned his waistcoat, and the neck of his shirt was unbuttoned over his throat and a good deal of his bare chest. His sleeves were carelessly shoved above his elbows and his hair was no longer sleekly combed but rumpled and tousled, the way she’d remembered from when he’d first found her. He looked comfortably disheveled, too, more relaxed and also somehow much more male, as if a veneer of gentlemanly propriety had been shed along with the stiffly embroidered evening coat.
Had he forgiven her? she wondered warily. Heaven knew dukes could do whatever they pleased. Was this his way of showing that he was willing to overlook whatever unwitting misstep she’d made earlier?
“I trust my eyes to tell me the truth, Your Grace,” she said, hugging the coverlet around her shoulders. “I could scarce mistake a gentleman as imposing as yourself for some wandering specter.”
“Ah,” he said lightly, lowering his hand to the balustrade as his gaze never left her face. “So much for the magic spell cast by moonlight. Are you feeling better, then?”
“Thank you, quite.” She nodded, nervously smoothing her hair back behind one ear. How could she not be nervous, considering how carefully she’d have to tread with him? “Your Grace, please let me ask your forgiveness for…for whatever I said before that…that disturbed you so.”
He frowned. “Nothing disturbed me,” he said, “and so there’s no reason to apologize. Shouldn’t you return to your bed?”
“I’m not sleepy,” she said. “When I asked you what you wished me to be, Your Grace, I meant nothing wrongful by it. I only meant that because I could—can—recall nothing of my past, it seemed reasonable enough to look forward, to the present and the future where for now you are the only constant.”
“I can send for a sleeping draught from Dr. Gristead if you wish.” His looked down at his fingers resting on the moss-dappled stone, considering. “You are my guest. That is all. I have asked for no such grand gesture as to make me the center of your universe.”
“It’s fresh air that I sought, not sleep,” she said, “much the same as you did yourself. And I intend no grand gesturing, Your Grace. Rather, it’s the one practical thing I can seize for myself. If I have no other past, then I must make do with what I have in the present. And that, you see, is you.”
Oh, Jenny, Jenny, that was awkwardly phrased, and to what purpose? Think, lass, think! Think of what Rob would say, how many useful details he’d be learning of the duke and his circumstances in this precious time alone together, while all you can do is to babble on like some giddy green serving girl!
“I haven’t even tried to sleep yet,” the duke was saying, still looking away from her. “You see how I haven’t changed my clothes since supper. From habit I seldom see my bed before three or even four.”
“Fine gentleman often don’t, Your Grace.” She’d learned that from her father, who’d freely embraced gentlemanly habits—gaming, drinking and other such late-night amusements—without the income to support them. “I’d scarce expect you to keep farmer’s hours and rise with the cock’s crow.”
He smiled at her, something so unexpected that she felt a shiver of startled pleasure ripple down her spine.
“But I do keep farmer’s hours,” he admitted, “especially here in the country. I find I can accomplish all manner of things when the sun is down. Some nights I simply don’t sleep at all.”
“But that’s not good for you, Your Grace!” she protested, gliding over the nighttime accomplishments. Those were best left without inquiry, at least while she wore only a coverlet and a nightshift and most especially while she was feeling so giddy in his presence. “Perhaps you should be the one to ask for a sleeping draught.”
“I think not.” He shrugged carelessly, a simple gesture filled with potent charm. “I’ve been like that as long as I can recall, at least since I was boy at school. Besides, if I’d been snoring away yesterday morning, the way you’d have me do, then I wouldn’t have gone out with Jetty and Gus, and I—rather, they—wouldn’t have found you.”
She ducked her chin contritely. “I should thank you again, Your Grace, if you would but allow me.”
“Which I won’t, because it’s not necessary.” He tapped his palm on the balustrade and smiled again, the kind of smile meant to end their conversation as definitely as a period did a sentence. “Now whether either one of us plans to sleep or not, Miss Corinthia, perhaps it would be best if we each returned to our separate—”
“No—that is, not yet!” She gulped, wondering desperately what had become of all her well-practiced poise in such positions. She was supposed to be good at this. “That is, the evening is so fair, and I am not tired, and you aren’t, either, and…and—”
“And so we should remain here together awhile longer?”
She nodded vigorously, relieved he’d understood despite her dithering.
“Even if this must seem a, ah, compromising situation for a young lady like yourself?” he asked, more bemused than scandalized. “Swaddled only in bedclothes, your feet quite bare, alone in the moonlight with a wicked old rogue like me?”
She made a little puff of indignation. “I never said you were wicked, or old, or a rogue!”
He laughed, and roguishly, too. “I’ll admit I’m gratified by that, even though I shouldn’t be. You know there are others who would judge me with far less sympathy in these circumstances.”
“I wouldn’t. Besides, who else will ever know?” she asked, sweeping one arm, draped with a coverlet wing, to encompass the rest of the sleeping household. “Who is there to see us, Your Grace, or even to miss us when—oh, please, you are not married, are you?”
“I?” he asked, a question to her question and no answer at all. “Why?”
“Because I should like to know, Your Grace,” she explained. “Not because I have any designs upon you, but because while being your guest is one thing, being the guest of you and your lady wife would be quite another altogether.”
“Ah,” he said. “So you would expect her to have come inspected you by now?”
“Well, yes.” Jenny smiled wryly. “I don’t believe any wife worth her salt would lump me into the same category as a stray puppy.”
“And here we had a straw-filled basket and a dish of warm milk all ready for you in the stable, right beside Jetty and Gus!” He chuckled, but the smile didn’t last and even in the moonlight she could see the fresh wariness in his expression. “But tell me. Why does my being wed seem so damned inevitable?”
“Because of who you are, Your Grace,” she answered promptly, with another little curtsy for emphasis. “You’re not like common folk, free to marry or not as we please. Dukes must marry their duchesses, to produce the next generation of heirs to your lands and titles and goodness knows what else.”
“But I’m not married,” he protested. “Never have, nor likely ever shall.”
“No, Your Grace?” she asked curiously. “How…how remarkable.”
Of course Rob would judge it not only remarkable but remarkably lucky. It was always easier to win the confidence and trust of a lonely bachelor, to gull him without a wife to ask suspicious questions about where his money was going. That was the situation here, as Rob would see at once, and one he and Jenny had worked often before.
And yet for Jenny it wasn’t the same at all. How could she lump this duke into the same hamper with the other fusty old bachelors with bad teeth and ill-fitting wigs that she and Rob had known?
“‘Remarkable’?” he repeated, still guarded. “You consider it so remarkable that I have never inflicted myself upon some poor woman in matrimony?”
“No,” she said. “Rather I think it remarkable that no woman has inflicted herself upon you. Surely you must have a trail of broken hearts to your credit.”
“I can assure you there’s not a one,” he said, his wariness fading, as if she hadn’t said what he’d been dreading after all. “You flatter me to believe otherwise, miss, but if you knew me better, you’d realize that I’m hardly the great prize you seem to think.”
She frowned. Of course he was a prize. He was a duke.
“But let us speak of you, instead,” he continued. “Are you some fortunate man’s wife?”
“Oh, no,” she answered promptly, her thoughts still on the question of prizes. “I’m most certainly not married.”
He paused, letting her answer hang between them for so long that now she was the uneasy one.
“You’ve remembered that much more, then? Enough to make you sure there’s no worried husband scouring the countryside for you?”
“There’s not—there can’t be—because I would know,” she said softly, and as she did, she realized how much she meant it, too. “If I loved a man enough to marry him, nothing would make me forget him.”
“That’s a rashly romantic thing to say,” he scoffed. “If you’ve been struck hard enough to have forgotten the name you’ve had since birth, how could you possibly remember your lover’s, instead? Here, give me your left hand.”
Before she could refuse, he’d claimed it for himself, holding her fingers up into the moonlight.
“There now, that’s more logical proof,” he said. “No wedding ring.”
She pulled her hand free, rubbing the empty finger where he’d touched it. “My ring could have been stolen by Gypsies.”
“Then thieves would have taken the gold hoops from your ears, as well,” he countered. “Besides, a ring worn day and night, such as a wedding ring, would have left its mark upon your finger.”
Gemini, he was quick at this sort of banter, quick as Rob! “All that proves is what I said before. That even if my head cannot say for certain if I’ve a husband or not, my heart—my soul!—would never forget.”
He wrinkled his nose as if he’d smelled something foul. “Rubbish,” he declared. “Only poets and over-wrought young girls believe that.”
“Then you do not believe in love, Your Grace?”
He sighed with world-weary resignation. “I believe that men and women can find a thousand ways to amuse one another in bed and out of it, and call it love,” he said. “And I believe in the useful partnership of marriage for producing children, if it brings reasonable happiness and contentment to both the husband and the wife. But as for Cupid’s darts and boundless souls and all the rest of the established claptrap—no, I do not believe in that, for it doesn’t exist.”
She frowned, perplexed. The duke was claiming to be exactly the opposite of her brother, who could fall in love with a donkey if she fluttered her lashes at him. “Then you have never been in love for yourself, Your Grace, have you?”
“I have generally tried to govern myself by reason,” he said with a solemnity at odds with his disheveled hair and unbuttoned shirt. “I’ve always tried to avoid being ruled by my passions.”
“If you can say that, Your Grace, then you simply haven’t met the special one who’ll convince you otherwise,” she suggested. “I know that must be the case with me. I have yet to find any gentleman that pleases me enough to love. But I shall. I know it.”
“Ah, and so we are back where we began,” he said softly, his half smile now unexpectedly bittersweet. “Here we are, with your heart able to recollect more than your head.”
“I suppose we are, Your Grace.” She drew the coverlet more tightly around her shoulders. Ordinarily she would have laughed and tipped her head to one side in the well-practiced way that gentlemen found so charming.
Yet this time didn’t feel ordinary. Perhaps it was only the bruise on her forehead, or perhaps it was the moonlight addling her wits and making her see things in his expression that weren’t truly there. This time, just this once, she wished she didn’t have to do what she’d practiced. She longed to be able to explain what he said, to ask if that bittersweet half smile meant that he, too, still longed to find the love that didn’t seem to exist.
But he was the grand Duke of Strachen, while she was no more than an invented girl named Corinthia, not even real. Her sole purpose in being here in this house—and only from purest luck at that—was to be pleasing enough that the duke would think kindly toward whatever scheme Rob would decide to invent. Tonight’s moonlight would never matter as much as the money—a loan, an investment, or a gift—that Rob would coax from the duke’s pocket, especially not after she and Rob vanished one morning, off into the next set of false names and identities.
No, better to smile than to dream, and far, far better to keep her wits sharp and keen than to go longing for something that couldn’t be changed. The moment she began thinking with her heart, instead of her head was the same moment the luck would end, and she and Rob would find themselves taken up and tried as common criminals, with transportation or the gallows as their final reward.
That is, if Rob ever did return to find her….
“You are cold,” the duke was saying with concern. “You’re shivering.”
“No, Your Grace,” she said quickly, forcing her smile to be winning even as she began inching back toward her window. If she’d shivered, it had been from the reminder of the gallows and her fears for Rob, not a common chill, and certainly not from anything that he could remedy. “Only…only more weary than I first thought.”
He took a step toward her, his hand gallantly outstretched to offer support. “Then let me guide you back to your rooms. There are, you know, easier paths than hopping through the window.”
“The window does well enough for me, Your Grace.” Tonight she was the one running away, not him, but it was the wisest course—the only course, really—before she blundered and said or did something that couldn’t be undone. Far better to retreat now, until morning, when she could meet him with a clear head in the bright, unmagical light of day.
Lightly she pulled herself up onto the windowsill before he could stop her, the coverlet billowing around her bare legs.
“You were right before, Your Grace,” she said breathlessly. “We should say good evening now and part. Good night, and pleasant dreams. Good night!”
Chapter Four
B rant rode slowly through the misty rain, his collar turned up and his hat pulled down against the damp, the two dogs loping along ahead. This was the other side of June mornings, with the green grass blurring in a hazy mesh with the gray sky, soft and wet and peculiarly English, and usually as irresistible to Brant as a bright, cheerful dawn. While his brothers might have sailed as far as they could across the world and away from these fields, to him there could never be a more lovely place in every season and weather than the rolling lands around Claremont Hall.
At least that was how he’d felt on every other morning before this one. Now the clouds could part before the most beautiful rainbow in all creation, and he’d scarce notice in his present mood. The girl had been under his roof for only the briefest time, yet already his entire household was in a blasted turmoil of distraction.
A branch of wet leaves slapped across his cheek and he muttered an irritated, halfhearted oath at his own inattention. And that was the whole problem, wasn’t it? If he were honest—which, as a gentleman and a peer, he generally aspired to be—his household was functioning perfectly well, the way they always did. He was the only one who wasn’t. The girl smiled, she wept, she sighed, she sunk languidly back against her pillows with her hair in childish pigtails, she flashed him a glimpse of a charmingly plump calf gleaming silver-pale in the moonlight, and now he was a hopeless, useless muddle of inattention.
Inattention to everything reasonable and productive, that is. To her, this lost country waif without a memory, he was attending all too well.
He’d told himself sternly that it wasn’t the girl herself, but the mystery she represented. He didn’t like mysteries. He liked things ordered, arranged, neat in their proper places, the way he’d remembered them to be. He took it as a personal, rankling challenge that this girl didn’t seem to belong anywhere. He wasn’t even convinced that Corinthia was her true name, and she didn’t seem to be, either. And Brant didn’t like guessing games. He needed to know.
Which was why he was now heading toward the squat Norman tower of St. Martin’s, and the rambling timbered cottage nestled beside it that served as the parsonage. While his father had neglected the church just as he had everything else, Brant’s luck and success had provided a new roof that didn’t leak, new bellows that didn’t wheeze for the small pipe organ, even new leading for the windows so the wind wouldn’t whistle through the cracks during the psalms every Sunday. He’d even granted the living to a local man from the county, instead of to one of the better-connected applicants.
It wasn’t that Brant was particularly pious, or eager to make a great show in this life with an eye to the next, especially not here in the country. Rather he assured himself that such improvements were simply one more responsibility of his title that had been neglected too long by his father, and another way to help keep his tenants happy and, ultimately, the estate happily profitable, as well.
Ordered, arranged, neat, with everything exactly as it should be: it all made perfect sense, didn’t it?
“G’day, Your Grace,” called the oldest Potter boy, racing from the house, not bothering with a coat as he hurried to take the reins of Brant’s horse. Jetty and Gus bounded around the boy, their tails whipping as they snuffled happily at the interesting new smells on his trousers.
“And a fine, wet morning to you, Simon. Is your father at home?”
“Aye, Your Grace, that he is.” With open admiration the boy stroked the white blaze on the horse’s long nose as Brant swung down from the saddle, and the horse whinnied contentedly in return. “Shall I put this fellow in the stable for you, Your Grace? If it pleases Your Grace, I can rub him down proper, too, and give him a bit to eat.”
Brant nodded. A sympathetic appreciation for horse-flesh was always a fine quality in a boy, especially if the horse agreed. “Let him drink first, Simon, and let these two rascals have a sip, too. But mind you, if you spoil Thunder—that’s his name, you know—if you spoil Thunder too much, he won’t want to carry me back home.”
“Oh, no, Your Grace,” answered the boy so solemnly that Brant chuckled. “Thunder will be ready the minute you call for him, and Jetty and Gus, too. You can rely on me, Your Grace.”
“Thank you, Simon. I shall.” Brant turned toward the house so Simon wouldn’t see his smile. Yes, all was well with the world, so long as the bond between boys and horses and dogs remained this strong. Too bad that wasn’t what had brought Brant here; his grin had disappeared by the time he reached the parsonage’s heavy oak door.
He’d scarcely begun to knock before the door flew open, with Mrs. Potter herself eagerly waiting on the other side. Clearly, Simon hadn’t been the only one to see him arrive.
“Do come inside, Your Grace, do!” she ordered, bustling aside with a harried curtsy. She was a county girl herself, the daughter of one of his tenant farmers, and even her giddy rise through the social ranks to become the reverend’s wife hadn’t given her airs or changed her cheery good nature. With four children of her own and a good many more from the parish running in and out, she was everyone’s mother, her thick sandy hair always slipping from beneath her starched cap and small sticky handprints pressed perpetually into the hem of her apron. “I won’t have it said that I’ve let His Grace the Duke wait outside on my step in the muck and the wet!”
“As you wish, Mrs. Potter.” Obediently, Brant stepped inside, shaking the raindrops from his hat before he let her take it. “Simon told me your husband is at home.”
“Of course he is, Your Grace!” She beamed, neatly smoothing the damp beaver felt of Brant’s hat with her sleeve before she set it on a chair with the greatest care possible. “He’s working on his sermon, Your Grace, same as he does every week at this time, but for certain he’ll see you.”
Briskly she ushered Brant back to the back parlor, where Reverend Potter was toiling over his next sermon. And he was toiling, his broad back bent and his brow furrowed and his shirtsleeves rolled up to spare them from the ink, with books propped open around him for inspiration. Seeing how tightly the quill was clutched in Potter’s ink-stained fingers, Brant could secretly sympathize all too well with his agony—not, of course, that he’d ever be able to confess his own miserable weakness, or find any comfort in commiserating. He was the Duke of Strachen, wasn’t he?
Mrs. Potter loudly cleared her throat. “Attend me, my dear. His Grace is here to see you.”
At once Potter looked up, startled, and groped for his coat as he jumped to his feet.
“Ah, ah, Your Grace, forgive me, please!” he exclaimed as he thrust his long arms into his coat sleeves. “I’ve never a wish to keep you waiting, but my sermon—you see how it is, how lost I can become in the writing of it. My meager talents are seldom worthy of the divine challenge ‘’
“It’s of no matter, Reverend,” said Brant as he moved more books from a chair to sit. “Once again I’ve come to consult your knowledge of the neighborhood.”
“Yes, yes.” Potter smiled with satisfaction; he was on more comfortable ground here than with the sermon. Little escaped his notice in his parish, and he’d helped Brant before to solve small problems among his people before they grew to large ones. “I’m always delighted to be at your service, you know. Ann, please, tea for His Grace. Now it’s not a problem with the Connor girl, is it? You know her mother was so pleased you’d found a place for her up at the Hall.”
“No trouble at all from that quarter,” said Brant, unwilling to be distracted. “Have you heard of any military men in these parts?”
“Military?” The minister frowned. “A regiment quartered in this county?”
“A lone soldier, I’d say, passing through on leave. Most likely an officer, a grenadier.” Brant made a little tent of his fingers, tapping the tips together as he remembered how the girl had spoken of such a rascal. “Have you heard of any such man visiting family or friends, or perhaps stopping for a can of ale at the tavern?”
Potter shook his head. “I cannot say I have, Your Grace. Not that I know of everyone’s comings and goings, to be sure, but I would have heard of such a man. Even the children in the schoolhouse would have spoken of a soldier in uniform. But is the man dangerous, wanted for some crime?”
“Perhaps,” said Brant, purposefully vague. Although he trusted Potter and his reticence, for the sake of the girl’s good name he’d keep what little he knew of her to himself as long as he could. “I have certain suspicions, that is all.”
“I’ll send word the instant I learn anything.” Potter sighed. “I know the Bible counsels us to be welcoming to strangers, Your Grace, but I agree that there are times when it is perhaps the wisest course first to question those we do not know.”
Ann Potter returned with a tea tray, setting it on the table between the two men. “So you have settled what’s to be done with the young lady, then?”
Brant looked up sharply. He’d come here looking for news, not to volunteer it. “The young lady, Mrs. Potter?”
“Aye, Your Grace.” Her round face flushed, but she didn’t back down, folding her hands tightly over the front of her apron. “The confused young lady what’s at the Hall. You scarce had to ask, Your Grace. We understood, and we should be quite happy to have her here to stay with us, as long as she needs.”
“Then you have misunderstood me, ma’am,” said Brant briskly, surprised that she’d even consider such an arrangement. The girl would stay at Claremont Hall for as long as was necessary, and that was an end to it. “There is no reason for the lady to be moved here with you. All her needs are being tended sufficiently at the Hall.”
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