A Duke by Any Other Name Page 2

  Instead he took the chair, whipping out the tails of his riding jacket like Lucifer arranging his coronation robes.

  “Thank you,” Althea said. “When you march about like that, you give a lady a crick in her neck. Your orchard is at least a mile from my home farm.”

  “And downwind, more’s the pity. Perhaps you raise pigs to perfume the neighborhood with their scent?”

  “No more than you keep horses, sheep, or cows for the same purpose, Your Grace. Or maybe your livestock hides the pervasive odor of brimstone hanging about Rothhaven Hall?”

  A muscle twitched in the duke’s jaw.

  Althea had been raised by a man who regarded displays of violence as all in a day’s parenting. Her instinct for survival had been honed early and well, and had she found Rothhaven frightening, she would not have been alone with him.

  She was considered a spinster; he was a confirmed eccentric. He was intimidating—impressively so—but she had bet her future on his basic decency. He patted his horse, he fed the beast treats, he took off his spurs before calling on a lady, and his retainers were all so venerable they could nearly recall when York was a Viking capital.

  A truly dishonorable peer would discard elderly servants and abuse his cattle, wouldn’t he?

  The tea tray arrived before Althea could doubt herself further, and in keeping with standing instructions, the kitchen had exerted its skills to the utmost. Strensall placed an enormous silver tray before Althea—the good silver, not the fancy silver—bowed, and withdrew.

  “How do you take your tea, Your Grace?”

  “Plain, except I won’t be staying for tea. Assure me that you’ll send your swineherd over to collect your sows in the next twenty-four hours and I will take my leave of you.”

  Not so fast. Having coaxed Rothhaven into making a call, Althea wasn’t about to let him win free so easily.

  “I cannot give you those assurances, Your Grace, much as I’d like to. I’m very fond of those ladies and they are quite valuable. They are also particular.”

  Rothhaven straightened a crease in his breeches. They fit him exquisitely, though Althea had never before seen black riding attire.

  “The whims of your livestock are no affair of mine, Lady Althea.” His tone said that Althea’s whims were a matter of equal indifference to him. “You either retrieve them or the entire shire will be redolent of smoking bacon.”

  He was bluffing, albeit convincingly. Nobody butchered hogs in early spring, for any number of reasons. “Do you know what my sows are worth?”

  He quoted a price per pound for pork on the hoof that was accurate to the penny.

  “Wrong,” Althea said, pouring him a cup of tea and holding it out to him. “Those are my best breeders. I chose their grandmamas and mamas for hardiness and the ability to produce sizable, healthy litters. A pig in the garden can be the difference between a family making it through winter or starving, if that pig can also produce large, thriving litters. She can live on scraps, she needs very little care, and she will see a dozen piglets raised to weaning twice a year without putting any additional strain on the family budget.”

  The duke looked at the steaming cup of tea, then at Althea, then back at the cup. This was the best China black she could offer, served on the good porcelain in her personal parlor. If he disdained her hospitality now, she might…cry?

  He would not be swayed by tears, but he apparently could be tempted by a perfect cup of tea.

  “You raise hogs as a charitable undertaking?” he asked.

  “I raise them for all sorts of reasons, and I donate many to the poor of the parish.”

  “Why not donate money?” He took a cautious sip of his tea. “One can spend coin on what’s most necessary, and many of the poor have no gardens.”

  “If they lack a garden, they can send the children into the countryside to gather rocks and build drystone walls, can’t they? After a season or two, the pig will have rendered the soil of its enclosure very fertile indeed, and the enclosure can be moved. Coin, by contrast, can be stolen.”

  Another sip. “From the poor box?”

  “Of course from the poor box. Or that money can be wasted on Bibles while children go hungry.”

  This was the wrong conversational direction, too close to Althea’s heart, too far from her dreams.

  “My neighbor is a radical,” Rothhaven mused. “And she conquers poverty and ducal privacy alike with an army of sows. Nonetheless, those hogs are where they don’t belong, and possession is nine-tenths of the law. Move them or I will do as I see fit with them.”

  “If you harm my pigs or disperse that herd for sale, I will sue you for conversion. You gained control of my property legally—pigs will wander—but if you waste those pigs or convert my herd for your own gain, I will take you to court.”

  Althea put three sandwiches on a plate and offered it to him. She’d lose her suit for conversion, not because she was wrong on the law—she was correct—but because he was a duke, and not just any duke. He was the much-treasured Dread Duke of Rothhaven Hall, a local fixture of pride. The squires in the area were more protective of Rothhaven’s consequence than they were of their own.

  Lawsuits were scandalous, however, especially between neighbors or family members. They were also messy, involving appearances in court and meetings with solicitors and barristers. A man who seldom left his property and refused to receive callers would avoid those tribulations at all costs.

  Rothhaven set down the plate. “What must I do to inspire you to retrieve your valuable sows? I have my own swineherd, you know. A capable old fellow who has been wrangling hogs for more than half a century. He can move your livestock to the king’s highway.”

  Althea hadn’t considered this possibility, but she dared not blow retreat. “My sows are partial to their own swineherd. They’ll follow him anywhere, though after rioting about the neighborhood on their own, they will require time to recover. They’ve been out dancing all night, so to speak, and must have a lie-in.”

  Althea could not fathom why any sensible female would comport herself thus, but every spring she dragged herself south, and subjected herself to the same inanity for the duration of the London Season.

  This year would be different.

  “So send your swineherd to fetch them tomorrow,” Rothhaven said, taking a bite of a beef sandwich. “My swineherd will assist, and I need never darken your door again—nor you, mine.” He sent her a pointed look, one that scolded without saying a word.

  Althea’s brother Quinn had learned to deliver such looks, and his duchess had honed the raised eyebrow to a delicate art.

  While I am a laughingstock. A memory came to Althea, of turning down the room with a peer’s heir, a handsome, well-liked man tall enough to look past her shoulder. The entire time they’d been waltzing, he’d been rolling his eyes at his friends, affecting looks of long-suffering martyrdom, and holding Althea up as an object of ridicule, even as he’d hunted her fortune and made remarks intended to flatter.

  She had not realized his game until her own sister, Constance, had reported it to her in the carriage on the way home. The hostess had not intervened, nor had any chaperone or gentleman called the young dandy to account. He had thanked Althea for the dance and escorted her to her next partner with all the courtesy in the world, and she’d been the butt of another joke.

  “I cannot oblige you, Your Grace,” Althea said. “My swineherd is visiting his sister in York and won’t be back until week’s end. I do apologize for the delay, though if turning my pigs loose in your orchard has occasioned this introduction, then I’m glad for it. I value my privacy too, but I am at my wit’s end and must consult you on a matter of some delicacy.”

  He gestured with half a sandwich. “All the way at your wit’s end? What has caused you to travel that long and arduous trail?”

  Polite society. Wealth. Standing. All the great boons Althea had once envied and had so little ability to manage.

  “I want a baby,” she said, not at all how she’d planned to state her situation.

  Rothhaven put down his plate slowly, as if a wild creature had come snorting and snapping into the parlor. “Are you utterly demented? One doesn’t announce such a thing, and I am in no position to…” He stood, his height once again creating an impression of towering disdain. “I will see myself out.”

  Althea rose as well, and though Rothhaven could toss her behind the sofa one-handed, she made her words count.

  “Do not flatter yourself, Your Grace. Only a fool would seek to procreate with a petulant, moody, withdrawn, arrogant specimen such as you. I want a family, exactly the goal every girl is raised to treasure. There’s nothing shameful or inappropriate about that. Until I learn to comport myself as the sister of a duke ought, I have no hope of making an acceptable match. You are a duke. If anybody understands the challenge I face, you do. You have five hundred years of breeding and family history to call upon, while I…”

  Oh, this was not the eloquent explanation she’d rehearsed, and Rothhaven’s expression had become unreadable.

  He gestured with a large hand. “While you…?”

  Althea had tried inviting him to tea, then to dinner. She’d tried calling upon him. She’d ridden the bridle paths for hours in hopes of meeting him by chance, only to see him galloping over the moors, heedless of anything so tame as a bridle path.

  She’d called on him twice, only to be turned away at the door and chided by letter twice for presuming even that much. Althea had only a single weapon left in her arsenal, a lone arrow in her quiver of strategies, the one least likely to yield the desired result.

  She had the truth. “I need your help,” she said, subsiding into her chair. “I haven’t anywhere else to turn. If I’m not to spend the res
t of my life as a laughingstock, if I’m to have a prayer of finding a suitable match, I need your help.”

  Chapter Two

  Lady Althea sat before Nathaniel, her head bent, her fists bunched in her lap. Ladies did not make fists. Ladies did not boast of breeding hogs. Ladies did not refer to ducal neighbors as petulant, moody, withdrawn, and arrogant, though Nathaniel had carefully cultivated a reputation as exactly that.

  But those disagreeable characteristics were not the real man, he assured himself. He was in truth a fellow managing as best he could under trying circumstances.

  I am not an ogre. Not yet. “I regret that I cannot assist you. I’m sorry, my lady. I’ll bid you good day.”

  “You choose not to assist me.” She rose, skirts swishing, and glowered up at him. “I am the only person in this parish whose rank even approaches your own, and you disdain to give me a fair hearing. What is so damned irresistible about returning to the dreary pile of stone where you bide that you cannot be bothered to even finish a cup of tea with me?”

  Nathaniel was sick of his dreary pile of stone, to the point that he was tempted to howl at the moon.

  “We have not been introduced,” he retorted. “This is not a social call.”

  She folded her arms, her bearing rife with contempt. “That mattered to you not at all when a few loose pigs wandered into your almighty orchard. You do leave your property, Your Grace. You gallop the neighborhood at dawn and dusk, when there’s enough light to see by, but you choose the hours when other riders are unlikely to be abroad.”

  Lady Althea was unremarkable in appearance—medium height, dark brown hair. Nothing to rhapsodize about there. Her figure was nicely curved, even a bit on the sturdy side, and her brown velvet day dress lacked lace and frills, for all it was well cut and of excellent cloth.

  What prevented Nathaniel from marching for the door was the force of her ladyship’s gaze. She let him see both vulnerability and rage in her eyes, both despair and dignity. Five years ago, Robbie had looked out on the world from the same place of torment. What tribulations could Lady Althea have suffered that compared with what Robbie had endured?

  “You gallop everywhere,” she said, a judge reading out a list of charges, “because a sedate trot might encourage others to greet you, or worse, to attempt to engage you in conversation.”

  Holy thunder, she was right. Nathaniel had developed the strategy of the perpetual gallop out of desperation.

  “You travel to and from the vicarage under cover of darkness,” she went on, “probably to play chess or cribbage with Dr. Sorenson, for it’s common knowledge that your eternal soul is beyond redemption.”

  Nathaniel’s visits to the vicarage—his sole social reprieve—would soon be over for the season. In December, a Yorkshire night held more than sixteen hours of darkness. By June, that figure halved, with the sky remaining light well past ten o’clock.

  “Do you spy on me, Lady Althea?”

  “The entire neighborhood notes your comings and goings, though I doubt your Tuesday night outings have been remarked upon. The path from Rothhaven to the village skirts my park, so I see what others cannot.”

  Well, damn. Vicar Sorenson was an indifferent chess player, but he was a good sort who believed his calling demanded compassion rather than a sacrificial duke.

  “I will hold your sows for a week,” Nathaniel said. “After that I make no promises.”

  He strode for the door, lest the lady attempt to prevent his egress.

  “I am poor company,” she said to his retreating back, “but I will not bore you. I must learn how to deal with local society on my own terms, and you have perfected that art. Nobody laughs at you. Nobody dares suggest that your foibles merit ridicule. You have taken a handful of peculiar behaviors and turned them into rural legend. Your life is exactly as you wish it to be and nobody would dream of gainsaying your choices. Our neighbors accept you, foibles, eccentricities, and all. I must learn to make them accept me as they do you, and you are my only possible tutor.”

  Nathaniel’s common sense, the internal lodestar of all his decisions, shrieked at him to keep walking. To ride his horse straight back to Rothhaven Hall and lock himself in the walled garden until autumn.

  But he was not an ogre. Not yet. He half turned. “Who laughs at you?”

  “Everybody.”

  “I am not laughing, thus your answer is inaccurate. Does Vicar laugh at you? Does Granny Dewar?”

  Lady Althea picked up his plate of sandwiches and brought it to him. “Everybody in Mayfair. If I make any attempt to move in the circles expected of a duke’s sister, I am a walking joke. Even my sister-in-law’s good offices were not enough to protect me from ridicule, and she is a duchess. I have hope that I will do better here in Yorkshire—guarded hope. Good food should not go to waste.”

  The sandwiches were not merely good, they were delicious, a reminder that chicken went down well with a dash of curry, and beef benefited from a light application of basil and black pepper. At Rothhaven Hall, old Cook rarely served fowl of any kind. Half a century ago, he’d been a potboy, then a baker’s apprentice. Now he was a cook of limited patience and even less imagination.

  Lady Althea clearly employed a chef.

  “Have you a dancing master?” Nathaniel asked, finishing his sandwich. “A music master? A tutor who can teach you to dabble in watercolors?”

  “Do not patronize me,” she said, returning to her chair. “My brother saw to it that his siblings were exceptionally well educated. I can embroider, tat lace, dance, sing, draw, paint, plan a menu, ride, drive, manage a budget, engage and sack servants, and otherwise comport myself competently in three languages, but with polite society, I am a perennial figure of fun.”

  On the table beside her chair lay an etiquette manual, A Lady’s Guide to Correct Deportment by Mrs. Harriet Norman.

  “And you seek to improve your grasp of proper behavior by reading that drivel?” The third sandwich was cheese and butter with a hint of dill and coriander. Nathaniel adored cheese that had a personality. He’d forgotten such delicacies existed.

  “That drivel,” Lady Althea said, “is intended to aid the shopkeeper’s daughter who seeks to marry a squire, the squire’s niece who longs to wed a cit. I have searched the length and breadth of the realm. No manuals exist that tell a woman how to comport herself when she’s…”

  Her brows drew down, her gaze fixed on Nathaniel’s empty plate.

  “Good food shouldn’t go to waste,” he said. “My compliments to your kitchen. You were saying?”

  “If you agree to hear me out, I will stuff you with sandwiches until it’s dark enough for you to risk a mere trot back to Rothhaven. Your horse might thank me.”

  “Loki is a stranger to gratitude. An obliging hostess would excuse herself at this point, have a word with the footman under the guise of ordering a fresh pot of tea, and tell the kitchen to send a wheel of this cheese over to Rothhaven.”

  Extraordinary how satisfying a few sandwiches could be when they were prepared with some skill.

  “An obliging hostess might,” Lady Althea said, setting two more cheese sandwiches on a plate. “I am a jumped-up gutter rat draped in Paris fashions, according to a certain marchioness. Her sister the countess declared me an unfortunate oddity and amusing in a sad sort of way. If I sent you a cheese, you would likely rebuke me for my generosity with another one of your epistolary scolds. I would be the first in the shire to collect three of those setdowns, and that would only add to my notoriety.”

  She held the plate out to him, and Nathaniel lacked the fortitude to refuse it. The glowering, articulate woman who’d cut him down to size with a few words was sounding more and more bewildered.

  More and more defeated.

  He took the chair opposite her and accepted the plate. “I don’t know as I’ve ever met a gutter rat before, much less one who can be described as ‘jumped-up.’ While I do justice to the tray, perhaps you can provide a few details regarding your unusual provenance?”

  Nathaniel would listen to her tale, polish off a few more sandwiches, then gallop home. Or perhaps—Loki was young and his stamina limited—they’d travel the distance at a smart canter instead, just this once.