Dukes to Fall in Love With: A Historical Regency Romance Collection

by Bridget Barton

  And, having only met Ronald Belville on the two occasions he had attended her mother at home, Ella had judged that every misgiving the people of their acquaintance had about the Earl was true. It was not anything he had said, nor anything he had done, but there was something about the man which spoke of an ill temper and ruthlessness that Ella did not want to become any better acquainted with.

  “Then you will agree that you are simply being silly, my dear.” Ariadne smiled triumphantly.

  Ella was so antagonized that she almost told her everything that had crossed her mind there and then, without sparing her feelings at all.

  Instead, she took a deep breath and held it, just as her father had always taught her, and rose from her seat to cross the drawing room and look out of the window.

  As Ella stared out across the beautiful gardens, so natural and free, allowing a little disorder here and there, she was struck by the awful feeling that Longton Manor might not be her home for very much longer.

  There were trees everywhere and such wonderful arrangements of beds, many of which contained wildflowers. Lord Winfield had always been keen on the garden and had developed a long and respectful relationship with the old gardener, Jameson. Between them, they had created a garden that was just out of the common way. It did not quite conform to the neatness and rigidity that was the current fashion; a fashion which always seemed to Ella to make the outside world look like the inside world. People were so keen to show off fine gardens that they had almost become akin to well-decorated drawing rooms.

  But the grounds at Longton Manor were a wonderful break with the new tradition. They spoke to Ella of nature and true beauty, instead of the peacock form of beauty which always seemed to thrive by denying nature instead of embracing it.

  To society now, nature was something to be tamed, to be controlled. It had to be cut away and held in check, with every blade of grass standing to attention at exactly the same height as its neighbour. Where was the real beauty in that?

  “Mama,” Ella began again in a cautious tone. “We have everything we need here. We have been fortunate that the Manor and all of Papa’s money has been left to us. We have a fine home and our circumstances, in terms of wealth and security, have not changed because Papa has passed.”

  “I know,” Ariadne said a little impatiently.

  No doubt she thought she had won the argument for that day.

  “We do not need to search for security elsewhere.”

  “And you think I am searching for security with the Earl of Dandridge?” She arched her eyebrows so high that she looked like a different woman altogether.

  “Perhaps.” Ella could feel her confidence waning as she looked at her mother’s fierce expression.

  “I do not need security, Ella. But I do want something more than this.” She spread her arms wide and looked disdainfully around her.

  “More than this?” Ella was hurt and offended, and it was clear in her voice.

  “Oh, you are too much your father’s daughter. You are so painfully content with everything around you that you frustrate me almost as much as he did.” Ariadne was forgetting herself.

  “This is a fine home, Mama, and Papa was a fine man.” Ella felt anger surge through her. “How can you look around you with such dissatisfaction?”

  “Because I want more than this. I am tired of making do.”

  “How on earth can this life we have here be described as making do? Papa provided well for us both. We have never been without any of the things we wanted or needed. I have never had to make do, as you put it Mama, and neither have you.”

  “Do not raise your voice, Ella.”

  “Forgive me, Mama, but I am so frustrated. I feel as if you are insulting Papa and everything he did for you.”

  “Oh, because I was a governess, you think I ought to be grateful?”

  “Not grateful, Mama, but gracious, yes. You talk as if Papa has done you some great disservice all these years. And you talk as if we are in the gutter when the Winfields are a fine old family of wealth and standing.”

  “You have no ambition for yourself at all.” Ariadne rose from the neat brocade covered couch and made her way to the fireplace. She pulled the bell rope for tea and turned back to look at her daughter. “I dread to think what sort of a match you might make one day.”

  “When I marry, Mama, it will be for love.”

  “Then you are as much a fool as your father raised you to be. Really, the times I begged him to urge you into one direction or another regarding a suitable husband, but no, he would not have his precious daughter forced in any way, even for her own good,” she huffed loudly. “And now, here you are, a woman of twenty years with no suitors on the horizon and a romantic notion that the best marriages are made for love alone, without any thought to status, wealth, or the future.”

  “Is status so important to you, Mama? After all, you are already a baroness.”

  “A Baroness? What is that when I might be a …” At the last moment, Ariadne remembered herself.

  “A countess?” Ella supplied a little sarcastically. “After all, if you married the Earl of Dandridge, that is what you would be. You would no longer be Baroness Winfield, but the Countess of Dandridge.” Ella’s voice was almost a whisper.

  Would her mother finally admit the truth to her? Or would she continue to try to hide it?

  “There is nothing wrong with wanting better, Ella.” Ariadne’s tone was much calmer than Ella had been expecting; it was almost peaceful.

  “There is no man on this earth better than my father was.” Ella felt treacherous; she hated her mother at that moment.

  “You have a good deal of growing up to do, my dear.”

  “No, I do not.” Ella rose from her seat to leave the room.

  “Where are you going? I have sent for tea.” Her mother had such a total lack of awareness that she looked most aggrieved that her daughter would think to leave when tea was coming.

  “I do not want to sit with you,” Ella said truthfully. “You have already decided to marry Ronald Belville, and the rest is simply a shallow adherence to propriety. You are waiting out your one year, and that is all. And you are waiting it out most impatiently as if the whole thing is not so much grieving as it is an inconvenience.”

  “If I marry the Earl, then that is my choice and not yours. But you should think carefully, my dear. After all, you would be coming with me to live in Dandridge Hall.” Incredibly, Ariadne began to sound excited. “Just think of that! What a fine life you would have in so great a mansion.”

  “I could not bear to leave Longton Manor. I care nothing for fine mansions and every luxury. I want my life here in the home of my father.”

  “If I marry, it will no longer be the home of your father.”

  Ella felt suddenly hot and nauseous. She had not even thought about the fate of Longton Manor if her mother married again. But, of course, everything that was now theirs would instantly become the property of the Earl the moment he married her mother.

  They would be at that man’s mercy for their safety and security; they would literally be giving up everything. And why? So that her selfish, ambitious mother could be known by all as the Countess of Dandridge and have even more servants at her disposal than she already did.

  And Ella would be forced to live in a strange house with a man she did not like and a family she did not yet know.

  “Mama, please, you must think about this. We would have nothing of our own anymore. We would be at that man’s mercy.”

  “You silly girl! We would have everything our hearts desire!”

  “No, we would have everything your heart desires, Mama, not mine. You do not know what is in my heart.”

  “And at this moment, I do not care to,” Ariadne said sharply. “For you are not being very sensible and you do not deserve my consideration if you are going to behave like this.”

  “I do not remember having your consideration before, Mama, so I shall not notice its loss.”<
br />
  “Perhaps you should leave now. I do not think I care to take tea with you after all.” Ariadne turned to look across the drawing room, casually dismissing her daughter as if she were staff.

  Without another word, Ella quietly made her way out of the drawing room.

  Chapter 2

  Rufus Darnley sat behind his great oak desk in the study at Hillington Hall, his elbows leaning heavily on a stack of papers whilst he rested his chin in his hands.

  “Your Grace, I think it is a very wise decision.” Henry Mercer, the attorney, looked at the Duke of Hillington through grey, kindly looking eyes. “After all, at five and thirty, I daresay the time has come.”

  “Yes, I am sure it has, Henry.” There was something defeated in his tone, something so resigned as if he were being led up the steps to the gallows. “I suppose I had always thought that I might one day happen across a young woman I had something in common with.”

  “I think it is so rare a thing, Your Grace, that to act practically is a very much more sensible solution. At least when you approach the thing with common sense, you are able to choose a young lady on her qualities, her very suitability to be your wife. I am afraid that when the heart is followed, such common sense flies out of the window.”

  “I cannot tell whether your words are making me feel better or worse, Henry. There is a part of me which applauds your practicality on the issue, and another which feels as if all hope is squashed.” Rufus laughed.

  “I think hope comes with practicality, your Grace.” Henry Mercer laughed also.

  It had been a very long time coming, but Rufus felt a certain sense of relief now that he had enlisted his attorney’s help in the matter of finding himself a suitable bride. At five and thirty, the time really was drawing near that he ought to produce an heir to the Duchy. With nothing but very distant male relations to inherit should anything happen to him, Rufus felt the sudden weight of responsibility.

  After all, his own very fine father had been proud to have a son to whom he could pass the title which had been in their family for generations. To not produce an heir of his own would be to let his father down, Rufus was certain of it.

  And, despite the fact that his own dear father had been dead for fifteen years now, still, he missed him greatly and wished to please him, even though he was not on the earth to see it.

  “Henry, what you say makes a good deal of sense. I suppose it is time for me to let go of the notions which have hung around me for so many years. I have wasted too much time waiting for a woman of sense to come along, one who attracts me with wit and intelligence instead of fine gowns and over-made faces. After all, it has been many years that I have searched for such a woman to no avail. Perhaps it is time to take the commonsense approach.”

  “And when it becomes known that you are looking for a bride, you will have your pick of all the county, Your Grace.” Henry smiled, his ageing face crinkling pleasingly as he did so.

  “The problem is, I have had the pick of the county ever since I became the Duke, and it has not helped me one bit. In all that time, I have not settled upon a woman who truly attracted me.” He shrugged.

  They both knew, of course, that that was not entirely true. The Duke of Hillington had been attracted once, very attracted, and he had been so scorched by the experience that he had spent many years after choosing not to repeat it.

  “Ah, but you will be looking with very different criteria from here on in, will you not?”

  “To be honest, Henry, I cannot begin to imagine what the criteria would be. What should I be looking for in a good match, in your opinion?” There was not another man on earth of whom Rufus would have asked so open a question, displaying such a great lack of knowledge of his own.

  “Well, a good background, obviously.”

  “Yes, I suppose so.”

  “A very solvent family.” Henry smiled. “By which I mean very wealthy.”

  “Presumably you think that I should be insisting on a very healthy dowry.”

  “Absolutely, Your Grace. The Duchy coffers are in good order, of course, but they are so because of many generations of good management and fine marriages. It may not speak to the last vestiges of romance in your soul, Your Grace, but these practicalities ensure the health and wealth of a fine estate like this for generations to come. As considerations go, it is of paramount importance.”

  “Well, if you say so,” Rufus said without any conviction, even though he knew the old attorney spoke sense.

  Henry Mercer had been an attorney for the Duchy for almost as long as he had been an attorney himself. He had been a young man when the old Duke had retained him as his attorney, long before Rufus himself was even born. Henry Mercer had been a feature in Rufus’ life, a very present figure, and a man who seemed as much a friend to his father as an attorney employed to see to Duchy matters.

  Rufus’ father had trusted Henry with everything, and Rufus realized that the time had come for him to lay yet one more matter in the ageing attorney’s hands. The matter of his own matrimony. And, of course, it was not simply a matter of Rufus’ marriage, but the very continuation of the Darnley line as Dukes of Hillington.

  “So, what else are we looking for?” Rufus said, noting that he needed to move on with it all, to accept the cold practicalities of an arranged marriage.

  “We need a sociable young lady, but not too sociable. Someone who will shine at your side at every event without overpowering it with her own personality.”

  “That seems like a lot to ask.”

  “Not really, again, it is just common sense. People must be pleased to be in your wife’s company, for she will so often be expected to be with you wherever you go. To have a young lady of an agreeable nature is very important indeed, but it is equally important that she does not have so strong a character that that character itself is very obvious to all around.”

  “This is more complicated than I thought,” Rufus said absently, all the while imagining his bride-to-be as a small, brightly coloured budgie, pretty to look at and pleasing to listen to as it chirped and tweeted, but also easily silenced by simply throwing a black cloth over its cage.

  He began to feel a little depressed by the notion.

  “It is not so complicated, Your Grace. I suppose I am merely saying that you do not want a young lady who is too gregarious.”

  “Oh, I suppose that makes sense,” Rufus conceded, wondering if it really did.

  “And, I daresay, you might quite like her to be pretty.”

  “Yes, I daresay,” Rufus said and smiled.

  However, Rufus knew that beauty often changed into something else altogether when the personality became apparent. He had spent a good deal of time in the company of young ladies who were truly beautiful on first glance and, no more than an hour later, suddenly unattractive when some disagreeable part of their personality became known to him.

  Rufus did not consider himself to be particularly discerning. He did not have a list of wants in a woman at all. All he had ever really wanted was a certain amount of truth and openness, combined with the sort of intelligence that made a young woman more interesting. Instead, he was often presented with young ladies of great beauty and little else. Unless, of course, you counted their ambition as a quality.

  And Rufus was so attuned to the idea of ambition that he very quickly spotted it in others. It was as if the more he looked for it, the more he found it, and yet he yearned for something else, for something completely different.

  But, in the end, perhaps that was the lot of the man who held so high a title. Competition for his attention was generally fierce, and it was no doubt born of nothing more than ambition itself. Quite where he was supposed to meet a young woman who did not care about such things was a mystery to him. For surely such a woman, one who did not search for status, wealth, and title, would not seek him out in the first place. He felt as if he were trapped inside a great ball, being rolled down a hillside as his thoughts, the same old thoughts, tumbled
all around him repeating themselves over and over again.

  It was nothing new, nothing that had not existed for fifteen years or more. So, just thinking over old ground again would change nothing. Identifying the problem would not suddenly result in a solution. It was not as if by knowing that he did not want an ambitious young woman that suddenly an unambitious one would appear before him, for that had yet to happen.

  “So, as you see, there is not really so much to it. I am sure that we will have identified just the right young lady for you in no time at all,” Henry said when Rufus had not spoken for a while.

  “And how are we to go about it all?”

  “Well, I shall set a little gossip abroad that the Duke of Hillington has finally decided to look seriously for a wife.” Henry laughed. “And such gossip is, believe me, Your Grace, very easy to spread.”