The Truth About Dukes Page 3

  “I’m glad you feel that way,” Nathaniel said, finishing his wine. “I’ve accepted an invitation for us to enjoy luncheon at Lynley Vale tomorrow. His Grace of Walden, ably assisted by his duchess, will want to interrogate me and start the settlement negotiations.”

  “They can interrogate you all they please, provided they do so politely, but when it comes to the settlements, Walden will address himself to me.”

  Nathaniel looked up from his wineglass as if a loud crash had come from the direction of the warming pantry. “I beg your pardon?”

  “I am the nominal head of this family now, and even in my infirmity, I have managed our investments. If we assume I am sane and sound enough to uphold the duties of the title, one of those duties is negotiating marriage settlements.”

  “So…it…is.” Nathaniel spoke slowly, like a man blinded by the approaching glories of holy matrimony to the true ramifications of setting aside the ducal role. He put his empty glass to his lips, then set it down. “You haven’t touched your wine.”

  “I don’t care for that vintage with this dish. This sauce wants a good claret.”

  “You never notice the wine pairings. You never even seem to notice what’s on your plate.”

  Robert held the largest mushroom up on his fork. “I am a duke now. I must notice many things that I paid no heed to before.”

  Whether I want to or not.

  “The courtship dance has moved on to the second phase,” Rothhaven said, offering Constance his arm. “The engagement is a fait accompli, and now Nathaniel must pass muster with the lady’s family. I do believe he relishes the challenge.”

  They strolled the Lynley Vale portrait gallery, a long, narrow room along the back of the manor. The gallery faced west and enjoyed abundant afternoon light. Constance pretended to study a portrait of some old fellow in a ruffed collar and sagging hose, but she’d seen this painting a dozen times before. The Elizabethan gent wanted restoration, though even if he were brightened up, he’d be an unremarkable specimen as both a subject and a painting.

  “Does Althea face a similar challenge where you’re concerned?” she asked. “Must she meet with your approval?”

  “She meets with Nathaniel’s approval. Who am I to question my brother’s choice?”

  “You are the Duke of Rothhaven.” But who was he really? Rothhaven looked more at ease than he had the night of Althea’s ball, though he’d said little at lunch. Jane had begun probing around the edges of Nathaniel’s plans for married life, and Constance had been taken aback to learn that Althea happily anticipated moving to some property twenty miles distant.

  “And if I disapproved of Nathaniel’s choice of wife,” Rothhaven said, “do you think he’d reconsider marrying your sister?”

  “Not for an instant.” Nor would Althea reconsider her choice of husband. “One feels a bit dismayed by such confidence. Althea is no Puritan, but her experience of men has been limited mostly to ballroom flirtations, fortune hunters, and idle speculations. Now she is engaged to a fellow I hardly know, and soon they’ll take up residence someplace I’ve never been. I had thought they’d bide here at Lynley Vale or with you at Rothhaven Hall.”

  Rothhaven stopped before the next picture, an informal rendering of the previous Duke of Walden in his youth. His Grace had apparently been an approachable sort, for the artist had captured him leaning on a fence, his hand outstretched toward a leggy bay colt. The Dales in all their green glory undulated to the horizon, and a sky worthy of the Low Country masters billowed with fluffy clouds.

  The image should have been one of bucolic joy, but Constance saw menace in the dark tree line bounding the pasture, and loneliness in the young duke’s hand, outstretched to a wary beast.

  “Might we continue this conversation someplace less…empty?” Rothhaven asked.

  “Empty?” The gallery was full of light and quiet as well as of pictures and elegant conversational groupings.

  “Your ancestors stare from their gilt frames,” he said, gaze on Constance’s hand resting on his arm. “A different pair of eyes regards us every few feet, and yet the room echoes. The windows let in abundant light, but they also allow anybody with a spyglass and access to the fishing cottage to peer in. I would rather be someplace else.”

  “You were serious when you said being out-of-doors makes you uncomfortable.”

  “And I assure you, my lady, I am serious now.”

  He was also avoiding looking at any of the paintings. “You were watched, at the hospital.” Constance turned toward the door, her arm still linked with Rothhaven’s.

  “I was observed. I wasn’t supposed to find the spy-holes the good doctor had bored all over the walls of my chamber. When I did find them, I could not cover them up or he’d simply drill new ones and chide me for being ungrateful. I learned to tarry behind my privacy screen and drape towels in unusual locations.”

  “You were ungrateful, to want the smallest measure of privacy?” Constance forgot to allow her escort to hold the door for her.

  And Rothhaven apparently forgot to hold it for her. They left the gallery nonetheless, Constance scooting through the door ahead of him.

  “The doctor observed me for my own safety,” Rothhaven said, “the better to treat my illness.”

  “Except he didn’t treat your illness, did he? He simply poked at you as if you were a lizard in a jar.”

  “A ducal lizard, so he poked carefully. Where are we off to now?”

  “My sitting room. It’s on the east side of the house, so we’ll have less sunshine at this time of day, and nobody can spy in the windows. Why are you allowing Nathaniel to hare off to Crofton Dike, or whatever the place is called?”

  Rothhaven would not be hurried, though Constance now felt a sense of urgency about their destination. Quinn, Jane, Althea, and Nathaniel were strolling in the garden, which was a polite way to say Jane was offering Nathaniel private instructions on the proper behavior of a husband toward his beloved wife. Once that lecture concluded, Rothhaven would be expected to accompany his brother back to the Hall.

  “Nathaniel’s estate is Crofton Ford, a pretty little cottage of twelve bedrooms that came to him through a maternal aunt.”

  “And are you banishing him to this cottage? Not very gracious of you, Rothhaven.” She led him into her sitting room and drew the curtains closed. “The couch will do.”

  Rothhaven stopped two feet inside the door. “I beg your pardon?”

  “The couch.” Constance waved a hand at the emerald velvet upholstered settee. “The green will pick up the color of your eyes, though all I have to work with at present is a pencil. If you take that end”—she nodded toward the corner—“you’ll be half in shadow, which will give me an interesting challenge for a three-quarter profile.”

  Rothhaven remained right where he was. “Does one or does one not typically ask a subject’s permission before sketching that subject?”

  “Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. If I’m sitting in the park, a sketch pad open on my lap, and a pair of dowagers are feeding ducks ten feet from my bench, I don’t bother the ladies with a request to continue sketching. I will give you any drawing I complete, and you may do with it what you please.”

  The point of the exercise for Constance was to better understand the second duke to whom she would have a family connection. One ducal title had cost her severely. A second was a daunting prospect.

  “Very well,” Rothhaven said, “I consent to sit for your sketch. Do I understand that you would rather your sister set up housekeeping closer than twenty miles away?”

  He took the indicated corner of the sofa and positioned himself so he was caught in both light and shadow. The effect was intriguing, for the illuminated portion of his face conveyed a detached aristocratic mask. Dignified, a little impatient, like Wellington eager to return to his troops.

  The shadowed portion of Rothhaven’s countenance was more complex. He looked out on the world with not merely a sense of disappointment, but rather, with the certain knowledge of betrayal. Sadness, anger, possibly resignation…

  Constance’s pencil began to move, and she bestirred herself to recollect Rothhaven’s question. Conversing with a subject was a skill most portraitists developed of necessity, and he’d asked about…

  “I never thought to be parted from Althea at all,” Constance said. “We are allies, comrades in arms—or in ball gowns. Nobody in the whole of London knows exactly what leaps and stumbles I’ve made to arrive where I am, save Althea.” Even Althea did not know the whole of the tale, but she hadn’t needed the details. She’d had the rough sketch, and that had been enough.

  “So how is it,” Rothhaven asked, “that your sister tarried in Yorkshire long enough to capture Nathaniel’s heart while you went to London for the usual social whirl?”

  His eyebrows were intriguing. The slight swoop gave him an air of expecting answers even when no specific question was on the floor.

  “Althea indicated that she no longer needed or wanted my companionship. We spent the Yuletide holidays together at my home, Thorndike Manor, where Althea passed most of the time reading in her room. She was visiting me less and less, and extending fewer invitations for me to visit her. I knew something was afoot when she declined to go shopping with me in York as the New Year began. Then it became apparent that she needed me to go to London.”

  “Needed you to go to London? Does anybody ever need to go to London?”

  Such disdain, from a man who’d likely never left Yorkshire, and yet, his question was insightful too.

  “Althea needed me to make the journey south without creating a fuss, to arrive at Quinn and Jane’s home in the usual course, pretending that Althea’s choice was of no moment. As it is, they didn’t leave her alone for long, did they?”

  His eyes…a mere pencil sketch would never do justice to a gaze that complicated. Rothhaven was both calm and turbulent. Distant and intensely present. To study him made Constance thirsty for a glass of wine—or something stronger.

  “Your sister will not depart for Crofton Ford out of any distaste for your company, my lady. I all but told Nathaniel to leave the Hall.”

  His nose was easy. A proud beak, worthy of his title. The line was straight—no boyhood breaks or brawling—and gave his features an implacable quality. Rothhaven would be polite, even considerate, but he would not back down from a fight.

  What had he…? “Why send away the brother who loves you so? Why not allow him to make those choices?”

  “Because Nathaniel loves me so.”

  His mouth was another challenge. Not quite grim, particularly not with the slight ironic quirk he gave it now.

  “You sent your brother away, because he would never abandon you, given a choice.”

  “He would stay by my side out of guilt, because the falling sickness can run in families—my father was apparently prone to it—but Nathaniel is free from it. His is the guilt of any family member faced with an afflicted sibling. He sees my suffering and cannot put his own interests first.”

  Constance had to make several tries to get his lips right, and still…Lord, she wanted a glass of wine, or—how long until sunset?—brandy.

  “Is it Nathaniel’s guilt you are managing or your own, Your Grace? You cannot help an infirmity that has afflicted you since boyhood.”

  “True, but I can help the extent to which that infirmity casts a pall over my brother, at least for the present. He deserves a few happy years.”

  Constance had been studying her subject long enough to attempt his chin and jaw in one smooth line. More resolution here, and maturity. Rothhaven was not a boy, not a pretty youth, and yet he was attractive.

  “Why only a few happy years?”

  A bleakness came over Rothhaven’s expression, quickly chased off with that ironic smile. “I was hidden away for more than a decade because my condition makes me unfit for the title. When some impecunious distant relation or meddling neighbor decides that my father was right to remove me from the line of succession, Nathaniel will find a way to blame himself. He will take up his mantle of misery, and likely never again set it aside.”

  Constance wanted to tell Rothhaven to be quiet, to stop distracting her, but the purpose of conversation was to distract the subject. To aid him to remain still and relaxed while being closely studied.

  She erased her first attempt at his chin. “You are clearly sane and hale. Who could declare you unfit?”

  “I am sane at present, but what about five minutes from now, when you address direct questions to me and I simply stare past you—what then? When I cannot sit a horse for fear of a shaking fit overcoming me in the saddle—I have nightmares about that. When I refuse to take strong spirits for fear that too will increase the frequency of my seizures?”

  He had barely sipped his wine at lunch, and Constance had been tempted to drink it for him.

  “But you come right,” she said. “You soon regain your composure and your mind is unaffected. There are no perfect peers, Rothhaven. I’ve danced with enough of them to know. They limp, they suffer megrims, they go blind. His Grace of Devonshire is all but deaf. The king’s gout is so bad he can barely walk. Your primary burden appears to be one of guilt, which makes no sense to me at all.”

  Rothhaven turned his head slightly, so more of his features fell in shadow. “No sense at all, Lady Constance? Truly?”

  The craving for a brandy tried to take over her concentration, but just as His Grace battled an ailment of long-standing, so too had Constance learned to deal with the temptation of the decanter.

  “You moved,” she said. “Please resume your previous posture.”

  He paused a telling beat before complying. Perhaps he knew how intimately acquainted she was with the sticky weight of guilt. More likely he was making shrewd guesses and letting innuendo do the work of certainty.

  His Grace might be prone to seizures, but his mind remained quite sound. Perhaps it was his heart that refused to come right, another affliction with which Constance was too well acquainted.

  “Will Lord Nathaniel do, Your Grace?” Quinn asked his wife, as Althea walked with her swain at the foot of the garden.

  “They humor us, Quinn,” Jane replied, taking a seat on a wooden bench. “Those two will marry, whether we approve of the match or not.”

  Quinn came down beside her, wondering what Jane saw when she gazed at Lord Nathaniel and his intended.

  “They seem compatible. He’s loyal to family, and Rothmere land marches with ours. I want to object to this betrothal, but my only grounds would be that Althea grew up when I wasn’t looking, and I wasn’t done cosseting her myself.”

  Jane laced her fingers with Quinn’s, which had become a habit somewhere between the first and second babies.

  “Is Nathaniel loyal to family, or is he deceptive?” Jane mused. “Nathaniel knew for five years that his older brother was alive. He allowed all and sundry to continue to think Robert dead, as the previous titleholder intended, when Robert had instead come to live at the Hall. I wonder if Nathaniel didn’t enjoy playing the duke.”

  “Babies make you introspective.” Quinn rested his arm along the back of the bench, for when Jane was expecting, his need to touch her, to hold her close and protect her from all perils, was constant.

  “Babies make me bilious and tired and weepy. This baby is turning me into the Duchess of Unscheduled Naps,” she said, smoothing her hand over the slight rounding of her belly. “I wish we knew Lord Nathaniel and his brother better.”

  “We likely will, in time. I can tell you this: Nathaniel’s version of playing the duke, rarely leaving Rothhaven property, never socializing, neglecting his seat in the Lords, looks a lot like brotherly devotion to me. I suspect brotherly devotion is also why Rothhaven himself supports this match. I don’t think anything less than a strong fraternal bond would drag that man from his estate even to take a meal with his nearest neighbors.”

  Jane laid her head on Quinn’s shoulder. “Is that why you asked Constance to show His Grace the portrait gallery? Because Rothhaven has a retiring nature?”

  “Not retiring, Jane, reclusive. Nathaniel claims the falling sickness is most of the explanation for Robert confining himself to the Hall for years on end. No man wants an audience when he has a shaking fit.”

  “And the rest of the explanation?”

  “I can only speculate.”

  Jane sat up and peered at him. “You know something you’re not telling me. Constance and Rothhaven appear to have a prior acquaintance. How can that be, when he’s a recluse, and she has been tucked safely under your wing since Jack Wentworth’s death?”

  Early in the marriage, Quinn had deceived Jane. Out of misplaced consideration for his new wife’s delicate sensibilities, he’d kept a few plans to himself—and nearly got himself killed in the process. Death would have been an acceptable result of such foolishness, but disappointing Jane had been nearly unbearable.

  She had forgiven him. Quinn did not make the mistake of presuming he would be granted such clemency twice.

  “Constance hasn’t always been tucked safely under my wing, Jane.”

  “You worked,” she said, patting his arm, “as a youth. I know. You took any paying job, and you were a footman for a time, though you sent wages home for your siblings.”

  As dearly as Quinn loved his wife, as much as he trusted her, this tale was still difficult to recount.

  “After Jack Wentworth died, I became a clerk at a bank in York. The owner of that bank bequeathed me some means and many useful connections. My situation began to improve, partly because I was willing to travel—to Scotland, to London, to the ports, and thus I left my siblings in the care of tutors and governesses from time to time. When Constance was fifteen, I came home from negotiating a loan to a Birmingham gunsmith and found my sister had fled the premises.”

  “Fled the premises? Fled, Quinn?”

  Leave it to Jane to seize on a telling detail. “That was my sense. I searched for her everywhere, hired runners, questioned every neighbor, offered a reward, took out advertisements, posted spies at every coaching inn and quay, but she had vanished. We knew her flight had been premeditated because she took some old clothes and a bit of money.”