My Own True Duchess Read online

  “Like that.”

  “Oh, you clever, clever boy. Good boy, Comus. Shake.”

  Diana, leave. Jonathan had wanted a quiet ramble to sort out his thoughts, and instead, he was beset with a prodigal child whose governess would chide her for getting her hands dirty, and likely chide him as well, while cooing at the dog.

  “You can’t confuse him with a lot of chatter,” Jonathan said. “You say his name, give him the command with your voice, and show him the desired action with your hand. Name, command, cue. Try it.”

  The infernal girl spun on her heel. “I shall be a famous trainer of dogs! I’ll teach them to do magic, and they will be the best dogs in all the world. Comus, shake.”

  Comus was peering up the path again.

  “You must focus on him, so he will focus on you,” Jonathan said, hunkering before the dog again. “Watch me.”

  Thus did Mrs. Theodosia Haviland come upon Jonathan shaking hands with a drooling hound, while a nattering little female extolled the virtues of dressing up a mastiff as a unicorn.

  “There you are,” Mrs. Haviland said, marching forward. “What have I told you about this behavior?”

  About …? Jonathan was saved from making a fool of himself by Comus’s tail whacking against his boots.

  “Sorry, Mama,” Diana said. “I had high spirits, and look, I made a new friend.”

  “Sir,” Mrs. Haviland said, gaze swiveling to Jonathan. “I must humbly apologize for my daughter’s—Mr. Tresham?”

  “Mrs. Haviland.” Jonathan bowed. Comus woofed softly. “A pleasure to see you again. I gather Diana is your daughter.”

  Diana was a little minx, peeping up bashfully from under the brim of her bonnet, her hand softly stroking Comus’s head.

  “My daughter and my despair. Diana, you know better.”

  “But I had high spirits, Mama, and the park is so lovely, and Comus is ever so grand.” She graduated to scratching his ears, for which Comus obligingly lowered his head.

  As a child, Jonathan would have had his ears boxed for such a retort. Comus, not having had the upbringing of a ducal heir, was shameless when it came to having his ears scratched. Any minute, he’d—

  In the next instant, the dog was on his back, begging for a belly scratch. His tongue lolled, his tail brushed the grass, and in as much as nearly two hundred pounds of dog could wiggle, he wiggled.

  “Comus, up,” Jonathan said, lifting his leash hand. “ Up, now.”

  “Oh, but he can’t scratch his own tummy.” Diana dropped to her knees beside the dog. “What an aggravation that must be when such a nice, big, healthy fellow has an itch he’s unable to scratch.”

  Jonathan did not dare glance at Mrs. Haviland.

  “Diana Melisande, you will assist Williams with the dusting for the rest of this week,” she said, “and you will not return to the park for the next seven days.”

  “I don’t care.” Diana scratched away as Comus’s back leg twitched madly. “I’ve made a new friend, and Comus likes having his belly rubbed. When I grow up, I’ll be a dog trainer, and I’ll name all my best dogs Comus.”

  The dog was learning a bad habit, the child was being rebellious, and Jonathan did not want to be in London at all, but if he had to be in London, he’d take a clearing in Hyde Park shared with Mrs. Haviland over any other option, save solitude with his ledgers.

  “Don’t laugh,” Mrs. Haviland muttered. “If you laugh, any hope of re-establishing order is lost.”

  Jonathan wanted to laugh—the dog was being ridiculous, the child was a scheming little baggage, and Mrs. Haviland was not the composed, self-possessed lady Jonathan had met the previous evening. He liked that aspect of the situation quite well.

  He touched her arm and winked, then raised his leash hand again. “Comus, get up this instant, or you’ll be pulling the knacker’s wagon before sundown.” Jonathan used the same voice he applied to unruly patrons at his clubs, the same voice that had faced down drunken lordlings, Paris criminals, and bumptious boards of directors.

  The dog was on his feet so fast Diana leaped back and took her mother’s hand.

  “Good boy,” Jonathan said, “though you forgot yourself for a moment. See that it doesn’t happen again.”

  Diana was looking at Jonathan as if he’d doubled in height, while her mother was clearly pleased.

  “The poor dog was tempted from proper decorum by an unruly child,” Mrs. Haviland said. “One cannot blame a mute beast for undignified behavior when an otherwise intelligent girl sets such a bad example for him.”

  Diana’s lower lip jutted at an angle Jonathan had recently seen from Miss Dora Louise.

  “Diana, Comus is large enough to challenge a bear,” he said. “He’s fierce enough to kill a grown man, and if he shows the least bad manners, he’ll lose his place as a trusted pet. He won’t find another home willing to dote on him as my aunt and uncle do. If he forgets the habit of obedience, his life will be short and miserable. Don’t risk his happiness for the sake of your momentary pleasure.”

  That jutting lip quivered gratifyingly. “I only wanted to pet him.”

  “Then you should have asked,” her mother said. “Reward the dog for disobedience, and you condemn him to a terrible fate.”

  Comus sat panting and clueless at Jonathan’s side, probably doing more to acquaint the girl with a guilty conscience than all the lectures in the world could.

  “I’m sorry, Comus,” Diana said.

  “And?” Jonathan prompted, for he knew childish rebellion in all its guises.

  “I’m sorry, Mama. I should not have run up the path by myself, and I should not have scratched Comus’s belly without permission.”

  Despite the subdued tone and teary eyes, the girl was doubtless swallowing back a thousand arguments for why her behavior—tempting an enormous dog to ignore his master in public—really wasn’t that awful. Jonathan took a leaf from the dog trainer’s book and caught the pupil being obedient.

  “Perhaps you’d like to walk Comus around the perimeter of the clearing?” Jonathan said. “Your mother and I can supervise from the bench. If Comus must heed the call of nature, you wait for him. Otherwise, he’s to stay by your side while he investigates the undergrowth.”

  “I can walk him? Truly?” The teary-eyed gaze was gone like dandelion seeds in a brisk breeze. “You’ll let me walk Comus by myself?”

  “Anybody who has lost her park visitation privileges for the next week, who will be dusting the house from top to bottom, should take advantage of what liberty she has.” Jonathan passed over the leash. “Yes, you may walk the dog.”

  “Diana, wait.” Mrs. Haviland withdrew a black ribbon from her pocket and rebraided the loose plait, then retied the other ribbon more snugly. She accomplished this in less than five seconds, and then Diana and Comus were off across the grass.

  “He seems like a good dog,” Mrs. Haviland said.

  “She seems like a high-spirited child.” Had her mother ever been that independent and contrary?

  “Let’s sit. Keeping up with Diana can leave one winded.”

  “Have you other children?” Jonathan asked, escorting the lady to the bench.

  “No, and that one is enough for any six mothers.”

  Diana held Comus’s leash while the dog rooted in the hedgerow. She was talking to him, her words snatched away by the racket he created and the spring breeze.

  “You worry about her.” And clearly, Mrs. Haviland loved that contrary girl.

  “To be a parent is to worry.”

  Jonathan’s parents had worried—about their latest amour, their latest marital battle, the latest scandal, or the latest gossip. They had not worried about their son, when they even recalled they had a son.

  “She’s lucky to have you,” Jonathan said, “as I was lucky to make your acquaintance last night.”

  In the afternoon sunshine, Mrs. Haviland’s maturity was more apparent, or perhaps what showed in her eyes was fatigue. She was a pretty woman, an
d she’d likely been a beautiful young lady. Today, she was a tired mother, a bit overwhelmed, and in need—as Jonathan had been in need—of a respite.

  “She knows,” Mrs. Haviland said. “I don’t know how Diana pieced it together so early in life—servants’ gossip or native wit—but she knows if she’d been born a boy, our circumstances would be different. I lost track of her while searching for the missing hair ribbon. Waste not, want not.”

  If Jonathan made enough discreet inquiries, he might have unearthed the details of Mrs. Haviland’s circumstances—and drawn attention to his interest in the lady. Perhaps that explained why Mrs. Haviland had volunteered what nearly amounted to a confidence.

  “I take it an inheritance was involved?”

  The dog was on his back legs, front paws braced against a tree trunk. In that posture, he stood taller than most men. Diana waited with uncharacteristic patience while Comus satisfied his curiosity about the path of a long-gone squirrel.

  “A title was involved,” Mrs. Haviland said. “My husband was in line for the Penweather viscountcy, though like you he was the previous titleholder’s nephew rather than his son. Another nephew holds the title now, a fellow over in Hampshire. Any number of people will doubtless acquaint you with my history if Dora Louise mentions she saw us in the library together.”

  Comus watered a shrub, and again, Diana waited patiently.

  “Dora Louise will keep her pretty mouth shut,” Jonathan said. “I made it plain that young women who gossip about others raise questions regarding their own whereabouts at the time of any curious incidents.”

  “Thank you.”

  For that bit of prudence, Jonathan did not want thanks. “This troubled you?”

  “I’m a widow, Mr. Tresham. Our reputations matter. I can be behind a closed door with you and not be ruined the first time it occurs, but a habit of being closeted with single gentlemen would see an end to my invitations.”

  “Because Society is nothing if not hypocritical. Diana is very good with the dog.”

  “You were good with her.”

  That observation had a whiff of we must be going about it. “Did my basket arrive?”

  “And your flowers. You needn’t have, but thank you. If Diana learns the chocolates were from you, she’ll make you the hero of all of her fairy tales.”

  Jonathan had wanted to make Mrs. Haviland smile, not make her mouth pinch up in that resolute line. “I learned something while I danced a quadrille with Dora Louise.”

  Mrs. Haviland left off watching her daughter long enough to spare Jonathan a curious glance. “From Dora Louise Compton?”

  “About Dora Louise. She titters.” Jonathan affected a high-pitched giggle, which earned a puzzled look from the dog. “Incessantly, loudly, gratingly. The entire ballroom was forced to notice that I’d partnered her by virtue of that battle trumpet sounding at frequent intervals. I must marry—my uncle and his duchess are elderly, there is no spare—but thanks to you, I don’t have to marry a tittering ninnyhammer.”

  Ah, a smile. “You make her sound like a variety of North American bird: the junco, the chickadee, the tittering ninnyhammer.”

  Jonathan took Mrs. Haviland’s hand in his and raised her knuckles to his mouth, though, of course, he did not touch his lips to her glove in public.

  “I am eternally in your debt. If you ever need anything, if you are in want of an escort, if that child needs a stern lecture, or if you develop a yearning for fresh peaches, you will apply to me, Mrs. Haviland.”

  He’d flustered her, which meant he’d at least made an impression. The girl and dog were edging closer, so Jonathan stood.

  “Might I escort you home?”

  “Thank you, no,” Mrs. Haviland said, rising. “We follow a prescribed path, one intended to work off Diana’s high spirits. The more routine I can impose on her, the less mischief she gets into.”

  “You are a very good mother,” Jonathan said, letting go of the lady’s hand. “You might err on the side of too much or too little discipline, you might bungle as a parent from time to time, but you see her and you love her. That matters to a child tremendously.”

  He’d said too much, and not on a topic remotely akin to flirtation. Jonathan tipped his hat, collected Comus, and took the dog snuffling and sniffing up the path. They were past the park gates and halfway home before Jonathan realized how extraordinary the encounter had been.

  He’d conversed with an unmarried woman about topics other than the weather or fashion.

  He’d enjoyed the exchange, despite the presence of a manipulative child and a drooling mastiff.

  And he’d wanted to make an impression on the lady—a lasting, positive impression.

  * * *

  “Jonathan danced with Dora Louise Compton,” Lady Della Haddonfield said. “He even spoke to her. I saw him all but whispering in her ear, and Dora Louise will not do, Nicholas.”

  Della was small and dark, unlike her tall, blond Haddonfield siblings, and while not mighty, she was a whirlwind. When Nicholas, Earl of Bellefonte, was near his youngest sister, he felt like a mastiff beset by a kitten. The little creature was pretty, sweet, and perpetually in motion, but what was one supposed to do with it?

  “Tresham danced with any number of young women,” Nick replied, etching tiny lines in the tail of the nightingale he was carving. “My countess does not suffer bachelors to sit out, and Tresham isn’t rude.”

  “Not on purpose,” Della replied, holding up the unpainted pigeon Nick had finished carving last week, “though Jonathan has a forbidding quality.”

  Tresham had an instinct for self-preservation. “Della, he’s a ducal heir. He’s a wealthy, single, young ducal heir, and the present titleholder is getting on in years.” Quimbey was seventy if he was a day and had only recently married. His duchess was well past child-bearing years, and yet, the couple billed and cooed like the newlyweds they were.

  Quite cheering, to see marital bliss among the elders.

  “You’re saying what everybody else is saying,” Della replied, putting down the pigeon and making another circuit of Nick’s woodworking shop. “Jonathan is Mr. Eligible. I hate that term, as if he’s the last true bachelor in Mayfair.”

  Why didn’t I take my countess driving when I had the chance? Why didn’t I install a lock on the door to my woodworking shop?

  “Della, you must not meddle. The worst affliction a bachelor can suffer is a meddling relation.” Nick had warned his wife the previous evening along the same lines. Leah had kissed him, patted his cravat, and gone back to surveying her ballroom with the gimlet eye of a matchmaking general.

  Della whirled, and by the very swish of her skirts, by the thump of her slippers against the plank floor, Nick knew he’d said something wrong.

  “Relation,” Della said, her voice low and bitter. “That’s as close as you can come to admitting the truth. Jonathan Tresham is my brother, Nicholas. I have blood in common with him.”

  This anger in Della was new and bewildering. She’d always been a cheerful girl, a baby sister a brother could dote on… even if Nick’s step-mama had conceived Della in an irregular liaison with Tresham’s father.

  “He’s your half-brother, but what matters blood, Della, when we love you, we have always loved you, and the late earl loved you most of all?” Nick’s papa had accepted his wife’s by-blow in the spirit of a man who’d been no saint himself and who had, in his imperfect fashion, loved his countess and every child under their roof.

  “Papa is gone,” Della said, hefting an awl and holding it like a dagger, “and Jonathan is the only link I have to my real father. You’d toss Jonathan into the arms of any scheming henwit with the audacity to waylay him.”

  Somebody had waylaid Tresham. One of Nick’s sleeve buttons had come loose at last night’s ball, and he’d ducked up to his dressing closet for another pair. The shortest route had taken him past his study, from which Tresham’s voice in conversation with a woman had drifted. A footman had come by wit
h a tray bearing generous portions of food, and Nick had silently wished the lady good hunting.

  Though a quiet tryst in a secluded study was an unlikely beginning to a courtship.

  “Tresham has wit enough for ten bachelors, Della. You’re the one trying to marry him off.”

  “I met him less than a year ago, Nicholas. If he must marry, I want him to marry the right woman.”

  Nick set aside his knife, for tail feathers wanted concentration, which was impossible with Della fretting and pacing.

  “You are worried that Tresham will ignore his connection to you once he takes a duchess. That he’ll marry a high-stickling prig whose self-importance ignores the realities of human nature and the existence of Tresham’s only sibling.”

  Della came to a halt before the birdcage Nick had crafted for his nightingale. The wire was painted gold. A wooden facsimile of a lilac bush would provide the fake bird a fake perch. Leah could hang it in her parlor without a living creature having suffered for the sake of human pleasure.

  Della opened and closed the cage door, which squeaked a bit. “Jonathan will be a duke. He can’t marry just anybody.”

  Nick risked draping an arm across her shoulders. “His uncle held out against the matchmakers for decades, and Tresham is no fool. If he cuts you, if he ignores you, if he in any way hurts your feelings, Leah will do him an injury that jeopardizes the succession of his title.”

  And then Nick would kill him.

  Della leaned against Nick’s side and set the awl on the workbench. “I want to be his friend, Nicholas, but all I am to him is an inconveniently persistent nuisance.”

  Nick took Della by the hand and led her to the workshop’s window seat, a perch where Leah read by the hour. This docility from Della would be gone in five minutes, so he’d make what use of it he could.

  “Tresham isn’t one of us, Della. He has no idea how to go on with a family. He was shipped off to public school at age seven, went straight to Cambridge, then undertook travel before he turned twenty. He was a brawler in the schoolyard, but became senior wrangler in mathematics at university. He’s unfamiliar with polite society, unfamiliar with family, and not just any duchess will suit him.”