The Truth About Dukes Page 4

  “Did she elope with a tutor? A curate? A connection from her former life?”

  “That was my first thought, but Althea said Constance positively loathed her music teacher and her French tutor, that she had no use for the riding instructor and even less for the dancing master. My bank staff never frequented my home, and our neighbors tended to be older couples with grown children. She ran off alone and she was gone for more than three months.”

  At the foot of the garden, Althea was standing much too close to Lord Nathaniel—or he to her. Was Constance watching this scene from the gallery, and if so, what did she make of her sister’s sudden engagement?

  “Constance excels at hiding,” Jane said. “When I first married you, I thought she would be my greatest challenge. Althea confronted me directly about my intentions where you were concerned; Stephen did so even more overtly. I kept waiting for Constance to question my motives or test my resolve, but she never did. She was polite and quiet, no trouble at all, but to this day I have the sense she will pounce if I ever serve you a bad turn.”

  “She caused a great deal of trouble when she was fifteen.”

  “Many of us are troublesome at that age, Quinn. Where did she go?”

  “I still don’t know the whole of it. When I eventually found her, she was handling the rough work in the kitchen of a private hospital in the West Riding.”

  Good God, Althea had just kissed her fiancé’s cheek. The kiss had been chaste enough, but Quinn’s heart still lurched at the sight.

  “Why would a girl who knew how dangerous the streets could be run off like that, Quinn? Why turn her back on safety, security, and loving family?”

  The lovebirds wandered up the walk, arm in arm, meandering back toward the house.

  “Constance was initially unforthcoming about the why of it. When I brought her home, I had to promise that I’d not question her, or make a great to-do, or call anybody out. She would have gone right back to scrubbing potatoes if I’d so much as raised my voice.”

  “She has endless self-discipline,” Jane said, smoothing a hand over her skirts. “All four of you do, Stephen most of all.”

  Self-discipline was not a characteristic Quinn would have attributed to his brother. Stephen was self-indulgent to a fault, but also inhumanly determined on his objectives.

  “There is more to the tale, Jane, but I’ll save it for when I’m not mustering my resolve to impersonate a gracious, doting older brother.”

  Jane kissed him, much as Althea had kissed Nathaniel. “You are a gracious, doting older brother. You suspect Constance encountered Rothhaven when she worked at that private hospital?”

  “I can’t think when they might have met otherwise.” Did not want to think of how they could have met otherwise.

  “You still don’t know why Constance ran away?”

  “That’s the part of the tale that must keep for another day.” Quinn rose and extended a hand to his wife. “Constance leaves the room if I so much as hint that I’d like to discuss her past.”

  “She figured out early how to manage you.” Jane slipped her hand through Quinn’s arm and by subtle changes of posture and expression, became the gracious duchess beaming at a prospective addition to the family.

  God above, where would he be without her?

  “You are the only woman who knows how to manage me,” Quinn said, as Althea and Nathaniel drew closer, “and that will ever and always be true.”

  Chapter Three

  Robert found that indulging Lady Constance Wentworth’s urge to do some sketching was oddly restful. Her sitting room was small, which soothed a few of his sundry anxieties, and she herself was a distraction from those same worries.

  He did not know if the locking mechanism on the door worked from both sides, for example. Had no idea if the windows were locked or merely fastened. Did the adjoining bedroom have its own door to the corridor? How, precisely, was her balcony situated?

  To investigate those factors—they were not details—would have been the behavior of an eccentric. Her sitting room was carpeted—always a fine thing, when a man might fall to the floor insensate at any moment—and her sofa plush and comfortable.

  Her lips were plush too. They were an extravagance in an otherwise spare and serious countenance, though she pressed her mouth into a line as she concentrated on her drawing. Behind a practiced, blue-eyed guilelessness, her gaze was still wary. She’d done her hair in a simple chignon worthy of a chambermaid, and she wore a plain blue afternoon dress, only a touch of lace at the collar and a dash of white embroidery at the cuffs.

  Lady Constance was trying very hard to appear unremarkable, a wren among the Wentworth peacocks, and yet in the intensity of her focus, in her quiet, in her studied plainness, she begged for further study.

  “What happened to you?” Robert asked.

  She spared him not even a glance. “I went home, as you apparently did, eventually.”

  “You left home of your own volition, while I did not. Did your family receive you decently?”

  He’d worried for her, for years he’d worried whether the soft-spoken, blue-eyed maid had found safety. She’d shown courage, ingenuity, and kindness in a place those virtues had all but deserted. When she’d left, he had not dared reply to her letter for fear his epistle would get her in trouble.

  Then too, slipping another letter past Dr. Soames’s watchfulness would have been tempting fate.

  “Chin up half an inch, Your Grace. My family was excessively understanding.” She made the word understanding into something burdensome, a quality that induced both guilt and resentment.

  A combination Robert knew all too well. He tipped his chin up. “Shall we make explicit an agreement not to discuss our former association?”

  Over the top of her sketch pad, she aimed the most fleeting scowl at him. “I do not violate confidences, and if I know anything about you, it’s that you don’t either. My family has no idea that we’ve met, and I prefer they remain in that blessed state of ignorance. They would speculate. Chin up.”

  “Nathaniel has never asked about conditions at the hospital. Some of it, he saw for himself. Some of it, I described for him to explain my otherwise unexplainable behavior. I would not want my brother to learn the whole of it.”

  This glance was different, a little bleak, a little curious. “I don’t know the whole of it, Rothhaven. I wasn’t there that long, and I had the sense you’d learned much about managing your situation before I arrived. You had newspapers, the other residents generally did not. You had that violin, you had books.”

  She fell silent, her pencil pausing. Then she took up her eraser.

  “Are we agreed, my lady, that our present acquaintance will appear to be one of first impression?”

  “You are a duke with a known illness. That your father, born in a less enlightened age, hid you away to keep your falling sickness a secret will make a certain sense to those who learn of it. They will pity you or they will derive mean satisfaction seeing a man of high station afflicted. What explanation can there be for a duke’s sister plucking chicken carcasses and chopping leeks?”

  She considered her sketch, then bent close to the paper and resumed drawing. “Why would a girl raised in dire poverty,” she went on, “actively seek out the lowliest employment in the most scandalous place she could find, once that girl’s station in life had considerably improved? Such stupidity has no plausible explanation. The scandal would be ruinous, and I owe my family too much to bring that down upon them.”

  She fell silent, curling that full lower lip under her top teeth.

  Robert reminded himself that the girl who’d run from her improved station hadn’t known her brother would become a duke. She’d had no idea at the time that nieces would come along whose options could be foreclosed by a scandalous auntie.

  She had known, though, where she could blend in, where her family would never think to look for her. She’d been clever, that girl—and desperate.

  “You have my word,” Robert said, “nobody will learn of our prior acquaintance from me.”

  “Nor from me, though mind you, my siblings are abominably clever. Stephen in particular likes to solve puzzles, but Jane and Althea notice details too.”

  “And what of His Grace?” Robert asked. “How did he react to your return?” If Quinn Wentworth had hurt his sister in any way, Robert would hurt him back. To betray trust when a prodigal came home broken in spirit and exhausted in body demanded punishment.

  “Quinn was all that is decent. He’s always decent, because Jane expects it of him. Jane married him because he expects decency of himself. Here.” She sat up and tore the page free from the sketchbook. “It’s rough, but not a bad start. You are an interesting subject.”

  Robert took the sketch with a sense of foreboding. He saw himself in mirrors, and when a man lived a reclusive life, his turnout became a low priority. He wasn’t exactly going to pot, but he did not ride, he did not fence, he did not—as Nathaniel did—strip off his jacket and cravat on occasion and join in with the laborers mending wall or clearing a drainage ditch.

  On this occasion, though, Robert had donned company attire and acquitted himself as much like a duke as possible. That had been a challenge. His only pattern card for how a duke behaved had been an arrogant, self-interested father willing to consign his firstborn to hell for the sake of appearances.

  Robert studied the image on the page in some surprise.

  “Well?” Lady Constance asked, setting aside her sketch pad and pencil. “Will you sit for me again or have I given offense?”

  The man on the page was a bit haughty, also proud—the sketch found the difference between justified pride in an ancient lineage and aristocratic arrogance. He shaded toward the first, but not entirely. He was no boy, this fellow, and he exuded a man’s physical self-possession and intelligence. He might not be precisely handsome—what mattered handsome?—though he would give a good account of himself in any debate.

  The last, most intriguing aspect of the portrait was a hint of humor lurking deep in the eyes. An acceptance of life’s absurdities gained through firsthand experience. A man with that quality could be a tolerant friend, if somewhat irascible.

  “You have turned me into a duke.”

  “An accident of birth did that. I sketched the person who sits before me.”

  Constance was an accomplished artist, but then, anything she undertook—from a disguise, to a sketch, to the study of pianoforte—would be done well.

  She also knew how to respect a silence, how to remain still and quiet so an inspiration could steal forward from the shadows in a man’s head.

  “You said I need a plan, my lady, for when an assault is made on my legal competence. You have given me a glimmer of an idea.” Robert needed solitude and time to work out the details, but he could feel them swimming in the depths of his imagination. Patient focus could lure them to the surface, and he was nothing if not patient.

  “That’s good, then,” she said, a smile dawning in her eyes, only to disappear when Jane, Duchess of Walden, appeared in the doorway.

  “I should have known this would happen,” Her Grace said, marching right into the room and peering at Robert’s sketch. “Constance is talented, and we thwart her artistic impulses at our peril. Your Grace, my husband is asking for a word with you in the family parlor. I believe the marriage settlements are to be discussed.”

  She wiggled her eyebrows as if sharing a bit of gossip. Robert had no idea if the duchess was poking fun at her husband, at the topic of marriage settlements, or at the notion of a man who’d not left his property in years negotiating finances with a wealthy banker.

  “I’ll show you to the parlor,” Lady Constance said, “and I will leave the sketch on the sideboard in the foyer. I did promise you could have it, after all.”

  The duchess claimed she needed to confer with the nursery maids, meaning Robert had Lady Constance’s company to himself as they descended the main staircase.

  “I have never negotiated marriage settlements before,” he said. “I likely will never negotiate them again.”

  “You won’t marry? Won’t see to the succession as all titled men must?”

  “I have the falling sickness. Or had you forgotten?”

  “And does this illness render you incapable of siring children?” She put that hopelessly blunt question to him at the foot of the steps.

  “It does not, but the illness can run in families. I have some evidence suggesting my father was afflicted.”

  “And yet nobody recalls him as anything but a highly effective, self-possessed duke. How odd.”

  Robert again had a sense of innuendo escaping him. “Are you teasing me?”

  “Yes, I am. I expect I will commit the same transgression regularly. Best learn to tease back, Your Grace. Now, about these settlement negotiations: The issue isn’t money. Althea’s portion is generous and earning good interest. Quinn respects a fierce negotiator. He will expect you to be accommodating and generous because the aristocracy believe in appearing gracious to each other, but instead you must be a staunch advocate for your brother’s welfare.”

  She drew him along the corridor, pausing outside a room from which masculine voices rumbled. “Don’t give too much too easily,” she went on. “Demand that every detail be in writing—every detail. Quinn will leave something out of the first draft to test you. It’s a favorite tactic with him. Good luck.”

  “Thank you,” Robert said, for he could not recall another occasion when anybody save Nathaniel had so clearly taken his part.

  Her gaze became a tad wary. “For the sketch?”

  “For the sketch, for the advice. For…” For not ending up dead at the age of fifteen. “For teasing me.” He yielded to impulse then, probably for the first time in months, and bent to kiss her cheek. Very forward of him, despite the fact that their families were soon to be connected.

  Very bold.

  Constance kissed him back, also on the cheek. “Remember to be fierce.”

  Then she sashayed up the corridor, leaving Robert feeling a little dazed, a little bemused, and perhaps even—possibly?—a little fierce.

  “This is monstrous,” Lady Phoebe Philpot said. “Monstrous, Mr. Philpot, and as a solicitor, society looks to you to uphold the decorum and dignity of the realm. You must do something.”

  What Neville Philpot longed to do was take up his newspaper and leave for the stable, where a man could find a sunny bench, a pint of summer ale, and some dignity of his own. Painful experience told him Phoebe would only work herself into more agitation if he left her to fret, and when her ladyship was agitated no sunny bench in all of England was safe from her dramatics.

  “I rather thought the sovereign was charged with upholding the dignity of the realm,” Neville replied, pretending to sort through his correspondence, “or perhaps the military, though they do a wretched poor job of it.”

  Phoebe stomped across the library, her footfalls thumping on the new carpets. “Do not jest with me, Neville, not on a topic of this magnitude.”

  Neville had yet to figure out what exactly that topic was. Phoebe had summoned him home from York several days ago with a cryptic note. He had only that morning been able to leave his legal duties and return to his country seat. On occasion, Phoebe’s tempers blew themselves out if she was left to her own devices for a few days.

  This was apparently not such an occasion.

  “Dearest wife, for a lowly solicitor much pre-occupied with the press of business, please do explain which monstrosity has you in a pet now.”

  She bowed her head, the picture of feminine martyrdom. Phoebe had married down all those years ago. An earl’s daughter accepted the suit of a promising young solicitor only if enormous pots of money were involved. The pots of money were more or less intact, mostly because of Neville’s abilities as a lawyer, but with each passing year, Phoebe’s irritability grew.

  Afternoon sun caught the dusting of powder on her cheeks, intended to hide the approach of middle age. He’d seen her pulling a gray hair from her head last week, and she spent enough on creams, tinctures of youth, and restorative lotions to beggar a sultan. Phoebe was not yet forty, but to Neville she was taking on the qualities of a bitter old woman—and he knew not how to make her happy.

  “We have all been deceived,” Phoebe said, gazing off at some vast horde of aggrieved innocents that existed only in her imagination. “The lot of us, from the lowest potboy at the posting inn to the neighbors, very likely to Vicar Sorenson himself. The Duke of Rothhaven allowed us all to believe his younger brother—Nathaniel—was the titleholder. I expect you to see the family prosecuted for perpetrating such a monstrous fraud.”

  Neville refrained from laughing only from long experience dealing with clients. They wanted the impossible for free, they expected miracles for a pittance, and most of them believed any injustice they suffered was the worst outrage ever to befall mortal man or woman.

  “Phoebe, might we think this through?” Neville considered pouring himself a brandy from the decanter on the sideboard, but the hour was early, and Phoebe would disapprove. “We have our standing in the community to consider, and whoever the real duke might be, he is a duke.”

  “What matters our standing in the community when an outrage of this magnitude will go unpunished?”

  Insight dawned as Neville studied Phoebe’s pinched features and glittering gaze. She’d been a pretty young woman and was still an attractive lady, but she had borne him no children, and—to give credit where due—not for lack of trying. She’d miscarried twice and delivered a stillborn son at seven months.

  That a ducal family’s supposedly deceased heir should pop out of the bushes as casually as a hare returning to his favorite clover patch would affront her sorely.