A Duke Too Far

by Jane Ashford

  “She’ll probably tell you all sorts of things you don’t know about your own home,” said Miss Deeping.

  “Will you stop,” said Miss Moran. “You make me sound like a dreadful bore.”

  “Never,” replied Miss Finch. “You are always full of interesting tidbits.”

  These four had clearly been friends for a long time, Peter thought. Their exchanges had an easy rhythm that he envied. He agreed to take them around the house in the morning.

  Macklin expressed his interest in coming along. Miss Julia Grandison did not. “You’ll be covered in dust,” she said.

  “Very true,” said Peter. “You must be prepared for rather a lot of it.”

  “But it will be ancient dust. Eh, Sarah?” said Miss Finch.

  “Venerable dust,” Miss Moran replied.

  “Ducal dust,” said Miss Deeping with a sidelong smile at Peter.

  “They are only teasing,” said Miss Ada at Peter’s side.

  “Yes, I see.” He wasn’t sure whether he minded. He hadn’t really been teased before. His lost sister had been a serious girl. Not humorless. Precisely. But certainly no jokester. “What did you mean by Delia’s last wishes?” he asked Miss Ada. He’d been thinking about this phrase since she first uttered it.

  “We can’t talk about that here,” said the girl.

  “Why not?”

  She nodded toward her chaperone on Peter’s other side and gave him a conspiratorial smile.

  The result was astonishing. The curve of those full lips and the sparkle in her dark eyes counteracted the harsh effect of the eyebrows. She went from stern to stunning in a single instant. The smile seemed to literally warm him, like a crackling fire on a cold day. It was almost enough to make him forget his question. But not quite. “Whatever can you—” he began.

  “Is that a bat?” asked Miss Deeping.

  Naturally it was, Peter saw with a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach, even though he’d shut every nearby door that would latch. The dining room had a stone arch and couldn’t be entirely closed off.

  The scrap of black dipped and fluttered above them. Miss Deeping threw her arms over her head. Miss Finch crouched in her chair. Miss Moran loosed a small shriek.

  And a small whirlwind erupted from the vicinity of Miss Ada’s feet. Her tiny dog, which had been silently well behaved up to now, went berserk. In a frenzy of barking, the little creature raced up and down the room, leaping for the bat as if its tiny legs had springs.

  The bat looped lower. Miss Finch squeaked and also covered her head with her arms.

  The dog jumped amazingly high for its size. Time almost seemed to slow as it hurtled into the air. The bat veered downward. The two drew closer, nearly, nearly meeting. Then the dog fell back, and the bat flew on.

  “Ella, no!” said Miss Ada.

  Peter noticed Macklin. The earl was gazing at him with a cocked head and a half smile, almost as if he was enjoying this spectacle. Easy for him to do so. It wasn’t his house infested with flying rodents. Were bats rodents? Obviously, that didn’t matter. Whatever its species, the creature was frightening his guests and driving a pet dog mad. With a sigh, Peter bent and picked up the wooden paddle from the floor. Rising, he caught up his napkin in his other hand.

  The frenzied dog raced around Peter’s feet as he stalked the bat. Peter had to take care not to trip or kick the little animal as he tracked the bat’s flight pattern. Cries from the table and Miss Julia Grandison’s stentorian exclamations didn’t help. But at last, he calculated the correct angle and administered the rap that knocked the bat from the air. Bending quickly, he scooped it up in his napkin, only just snatching it out of the tiny dog’s reach. Ella reared against his leg, front paws scrabbling, demanding the prize with a fury of barking.

  Peter held the bundled bat well out of the dog’s reach. He handed the napkin off to Conway, who carried it from the room. Ella followed him, still in full doggy voice, her tiny body vibrating with emotion. Murderous outrage? Territorial indignation? Defensive loyalty?

  Turning, Peter found his guests looking at him with varying degrees of astonishment. Of course. He was certain they’d never seen anything like that before. He’d tried to appear conventional despite his surroundings, but now he’d established himself as the eccentric duke in the crumbling castle. A sigh escaped him. Alberdene certainly was crumbling, and he supposed he was a bit out of the ordinary. But he’d hoped to play down the latter.

  Well, there was nothing to be done now except try to be charming. Surely he was capable of charm? It was difficult to say actually. He’d had almost no opportunities to gain or exercise such a skill.

  He returned to his chair, setting the paddle back on the floor. Everyone’s eyes followed his movements. He straightened, smiled, drank a little wine, and summoned his wits. “Your dog doesn’t like bats,” he said to Miss Ada, and immediately deplored his choice of remark.

  “I don’t think she’s ever seen one before,” the girl replied. “But apparently she does not.”

  Miss Moran began to giggle. Miss Finch took a deep breath. “I was afraid it would fly into my hair,” said Miss Deeping.

  “I’ve never known a bat to do that,” said Peter. “Despite the stories. In fact, they seem uncannily able to avoid it.”

  “And you are an expert on bats, I suppose,” said Miss Julia Grandison dryly.

  One might as well embrace one’s fate, Peter thought. What other choice was there? “I am rather. They’re…indigenous.” He blinked. Where had that word come from?

  “Where has the footman taken it?” asked her niece.

  “Out to the battlements. It will recover in a bit.” He didn’t want them to see him as a killer. The older woman raised her eyebrows. Now she would tell him that the bat would simply fly back inside, Peter thought. And that his efforts were futile if he did not kill them. But she didn’t speak.

  “Ella is usually such a good dog,” said Miss Ada.

  Her aunt’s snort argued otherwise.

  “The footman won’t let her out, will he?” the girl added.

  “I’m sure he’ll take care not to. As should you. There are foxes and other beasts in the woods that would eat her.” Which added to the general impression he was making by suggesting that his grounds were a roaring wilderness. Peter pressed his lips together to keep any further slips from escaping.

  “Unless she drove them mad with barking first,” said Miss Julia Grandison. “Really the most undisciplined animal.”

  “I don’t see how I was to train her about bats,” replied her niece. “We haven’t any at home.”

  And there was his situation in a nutshell, thought Peter. A cracked and moldering nutshell. His visitors would most likely flee Alberdene at the first opportunity, which was a rather melancholy thought, he found.

  * * *

  Late that evening, the four young ladies gathered in the bedchamber Ada and Sarah were sharing. Ada’s aunt Julia had insisted that they sleep two to a room, so that, as she put it, “the men couldn’t get at them.”

  With hair braided for sleep, in nightdresses and shawls, they looked as they used to do in similar sessions at school. They did have a fire here, as they had not then, and Ella was curled up on the hearthrug, exhausted after her exertions with the bat.

  “How long are we staying here?” asked Charlotte, lounging in an armchair. “The piano is so out of tune that it sounded like a yowling cat. I think it’s been warped by damp.”

  “I want to look over the house,” replied Sarah from the bed. “Particularly the Norman tower on top of the hill.”

  “Fine,” replied Charlotte. “That may be interesting for a day or two. But what then? Look, the stuffing is coming out of this chair.” She pulled on a tuft. “The place is falling apart.”

  Harriet, sitting cross-legged at the foot of the bed, looked at Ada, prop
ped up by pillows. “What is your deep secret, Ada? You insisted we had to come but never said why.”

  They all gazed at Ada, their faces showing varying degrees of concern. They’d been doing that throughout the journey, as if they somehow knew about her dreams. But they didn’t. “I should tell the duke first.”

  “Tell him what?” asked Charlotte. “Something about Delia? What in the world did you mean about her last wishes?”

  Like every mention of Lady Delia Rathbone, this brought solemnity down on them. They had known each other far longer than they’d been acquainted with her. But Delia had been part of their group for two years. Her death had shocked them all.

  “You never told us anything about last wishes,” said Sarah.

  Ada wished they hadn’t heard that phrase. She wished she hadn’t said it. “It’s not exactly that,” she said. “Or it is, in a way. I think.”

  “What is?” Charlotte’s dark eyes narrowed. “What are you plotting?”

  “Nothing!”

  “I don’t see why you shouldn’t tell us now,” said Harriet. “We won’t tattle, and you don’t even know him.”

  “He was her brother.” Ada tried to keep her tone emotionless and, from the changes in their expressions, clearly failed.

  “You like him!” exclaimed Sarah. “You didn’t say you liked him.”

  “Because that would have been…exaggerating,” replied Ada. A good word for it, she decided. “As Harriet pointed out, I don’t know him.”

  “That didn’t stop you mooning over that actor in the play at Bath,” said Charlotte.

  Ada threw a pillow at her. “I was thirteen!”

  Charlotte deflected the pillow, which fell on Ella. She jumped up with an indignant bark.

  “Well, I think it’s romantic,” said Sarah, blinking her pale lashes.

  “You think nearly everything is romantic,” replied Charlotte. “You find ways to make the most mundane events into epics.”

  “No I don’t. But this is. I think the duke must be very lonely, living in this great house all alone.”

  “Don’t go Byronic on us,” said Charlotte. “He seemed to have a jolly time swatting bats out of the air. I didn’t know whether to laugh or succumb to the vapors.”

  This last phrase drew derisive glances, as nothing could have been more unlikely.

  “He looked haunted,” said Sarah.

  “He did not. Not in the least.” Charlotte turned back to Ada. “And he is definitely not a good prospect.”

  “Prospect! What a word.” Ada evaded her friend’s sharp gaze.

  “We’re honest among ourselves, are we not? Haven’t we agreed on that? Money is important in life, and he obviously has none.” Charlotte pulled another tuft of stuffing from the armchair and held it up as a piece of evidence to prove her point.

  Ada looked away.

  “Unless you’ve suddenly become an heiress?” Charlotte continued. “Oh no, that’s Harriet, not you.”

  “I’m not an heiress,” said Harriet.

  “Yes, you are. What are you intending with this duke, Ada?”

  “Nothing! Don’t be managing, Charlotte. You promised to stop interrogating. This visit isn’t about that.”

  “What then? Tell or we won’t believe you.”

  Ada shifted under her friends’ eyes. The four of them usually told each other everything. But she just couldn’t admit to the dreams. She was rather ashamed of them. They seemed the sort of thing she ought to be able to throw off on her own.

  “What are you up to?” asked Harriet. “If this is one of your mad schemes…”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” protested Ada. “When have I ever made mad schemes?”

  Charlotte held up one finger as if about to tick off a list.

  “Don’t start,” said Ada. She would tell them about everything else, she decided. It was time. “I have something of Delia’s.”

  “I thought all her things were sent back.” Harriet gestured at the house. “Here.”

  Ada nodded. “But I couldn’t stop thinking about her,” she admitted. “After.” This trip must have made that obvious anyway. “I went to the room where she stayed at our house.” Actually, she’d gotten into the habit of sitting there alone, but no need to mention that. “And looked around. And I found something under the mattress.”

  All three of her friends spoke at once.

  “Under the—” began Harriet.

  “Something? What?” asked Sarah.

  “So you took it to your mother?” said Charlotte. Sarcastically, as if she was well aware that the answer was no.

  “I was going to,” replied Ada. She had thought of handing it over, for a fleeting moment.

  “But you didn’t,” Charlotte said.

  Ada shook her head.

  “You didn’t write to arrange this visit either, did you?” asked Harriet.

  She hadn’t written because she didn’t want to be refused, Ada thought. And she hadn’t exactly said she’d written. Not in so many words. Her friends were all looking at her. Oh very well, she’d practiced a small deception. They didn’t understand how important this was. They weren’t woken nearly every night by grim dreams. They hadn’t seen Delia lying in the mud. She squashed that recollection.

  “So what did you find?” asked Sarah again.

  This was the thing, Ada thought. She must keep her focus on the present. “It’s a sort of…document.”

  “Sort? What does it say?”

  “I can’t read it,” replied Ada. “It’s in a foreign language.”

  Charlotte perked up. “Which?”

  “I can’t tell.” Ada slipped off the bed and went to her dressing case. She extracted a folded sheet of paper and brought it to show them. The four girls clustered together to read.

  “Well, that’s not French or German,” said Charlotte.

  “Or Italian,” said Harriet. Unlike Ada, she had profited from lessons in this tongue.

  “Are you sure it’s not just gibberish?” Charlotte frowned, running a finger over the lines. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”

  “I don’t think it can be,” said Ada. “It was so carefully hidden away. But I don’t know what it is. I thought I would show it to her brother and see if he knows what it means.”

  “I wouldn’t tell my brother if I had secrets,” said Sarah.

  “Even if he was the only family you had?” asked Ada.

  They all contemplated this sad fact.

  “That must be strange,” said Charlotte, who had a large and lively family.

  Ada put the page aside. “The other thing is, Delia told me a few days before she…died that she’d solved a puzzle about her family. She said it would change everything.”

  Charlotte looked skeptical. “Delia did tend to talk that way. She was worse than Sarah for flowery language.”

  “I beg your pardon?” said Sarah.

  “She seemed to really mean it,” said Ada, though Charlotte was of course right. Delia had often spoken like a Shakespearean heroine. Ada hadn’t paid a great deal of attention at the time, particularly when Delia refused to be more specific.

  “Well, she generally did,” replied Charlotte. “She specialized in meaning. But her…prognostications didn’t always come true.”

  The others looked at the paper, then back at Ada.

  “So you’ve brought us here to figure out what she meant?” asked Harriet. “A mystery? Why didn’t you say so?”

  “The Grandison team reunited,” said Sarah.

  “You make us sound like horses,” said Harriet.

  At Charlotte’s raised eyebrows, Sarah added, “We did discover where Mary Yelton’s purse had gone. And the ring taken by the crow.”

  “True.” Charlotte’s dark gaze grew speculative. “So we are to find out
what this secret is about. I suppose we might do that.” Her expression belied her bland words. She was thrilled at the prospect. So was Sarah.

  Ada was filled with warmth for her friends. She might be plagued by dire dreams, but she had staunch companions.

  “No sneaking though,” said Harriet, their perennial voice of caution.

  “Of course not.” Ada considered. “Except around Aunt Julia.”

  No one argued with that.

  * * *

  In the deeps of the night, Peter heard an unfamiliar noise from the lower floor of his house. His room was near the head of the stairs, and sound carried easily up the stairwell. As he hadn’t been asleep, he heard it clearly. Something had fallen down below.

  He reached for the woolen robe he kept near his bed and lit a candle by feel. He was often awake in the night. Indeed, his common pattern was to sleep for a time, wake to read or think or even walk a little, and then go to sleep a second time. He’d been this way since he was a child and never felt ill effects.

  Stepping into leather slippers, he left his room and moved quietly down the steps, holding the candle high.

  He saw no other light. Shadows loomed around him, shifting with the moving candle flame.

  He passed through the lower hall, peered into the dining room and found it empty. The largest reception room was ahead, and he heard another soft sound from that direction.

  The door was open on darkness. He strode forward with his light held before him, and started at a shimmer of white in the corner of his eye. There were no ghosts at Alberdene. Delia had longed for them and searched for them and never found any. Peter turned toward the pale spot.

  Miss Ada Grandison stood there, clad in only her thin nightdress. Her dark eyes were enormous. Her lips were parted. She looked bewildered and afraid. “Miss Ada?” he said. “What are you doing here?”

  “I don’t know.” Her voice quavered. “It was so dark. I didn’t know where I was.” She swayed, putting out a hand as if to steady herself.

  Peter stepped forward. Setting the candlestick on a table, he put an arm around the girl and led her to a chair. She half fell into it. He knelt beside her. “I don’t understand. Why did you come downstairs?” he asked. Indeed, he wondered how she’d gotten here without any light.