The Duke of a Thousand Desires

by Jillian Hunter

  Simon stiffened. “I thought I had entrusted her to a husband who would cherish and protect her.”

  “I could not protect her from herself. But let us stop this.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Kieran is a thief, in more ways than one,” Bruxton said bitterly. “I can’t make you trust me, Simon. When Susannah died, I mistook your animosity toward me as grief. I accepted this. I felt adrift for a year after she took her life. I wanted to blame someone, anyone, and I blamed myself. Now I see the truth. He is the one who led her astray.”

  “Give me proof.”

  “He witnessed her fall. He might have threatened to expose her for all I know. He might have taunted her to jump. You’ve read the coroner’s report of autopsy. Even now I struggle to accept that she chose to die.”

  “What reason would she have for melancholy?”

  “She had miscarried our child, and we wanted a family. We quarreled when I forbade her to ride in the woods. She defied the doctor’s wishes. I’d no idea that during those times she was intimate with our groom. It was an affront to me, to our marriage, and the child we’d lost.”

  “I take it that you will pursue a case against Kieran?”

  “Only if I must,” Bruxton said. “Any such action will not further my political aspirations.” He half turned toward the door, glancing at the salver of unopened letters on the table. “I’ve delivered the message I meant for you and your wife. I hope one day you and I shall be friends again. Until then we have no choice but to carry on with our lives.”

  “I won’t be able to forget Susannah.”

  “Nor will I. She is always with me. Still, mourning cannot last forever. One day I will have to remarry. Lest you hear it from another, I will confess now that I have taken a mistress.” He bowed. “I shall leave you to your own arrangements. I noticed the luggage in the hall. You know where to find me should you wish to restore our friendship. Until then, be advised to watch your back.”

  The earl’s visit had disrupted Simon’s plans. Having lost the advantage of early travel, he took time to share his thoughts with Ravenna over a late luncheon of hot tea and roast-beef sandwiches in the small parlor. “I am vastly relieved that you stayed upstairs during Bruxton’s visit,” he said.

  “Is there any chance he might be telling the truth?” she asked as they pushed aside their plates in silent accord and moved to a pair of armchairs by the fire.

  “I don’t know,” he answered. He stared at her over the gaming table that sat between them, heaped with a small collection of books they had selected to take to the country.

  “Perhaps, for your peace of mind, I should return with Aunt Glynnis to Wales.”

  “I want you in my sight,” he said firmly. “London is a city of spies and intrigue. Caverley Hall was designed not only for elegant living but for protection. I lived there most of my life. I know the blueprint by heart. I’ll rest easier with all of us tucked within its walls. At least until I can decide the next move.”

  “Or someone else does,” she said in worry. “You spent your childhood there with Susannah?”

  “She went to finishing school. I attended university and traveled. My brother joined the Royal Navy. We saw each other infrequently as we grew older.”

  She looked down at the table. “You don’t believe she could have been attracted to her groom?”

  “She mentioned him in her letters. She was an avid horsewoman like you.”

  Ravenna had not known Susannah well enough to understand her temperament. Nor, it appeared, had Simon. “It didn’t strike you as odd that she wrote of him?” she said.

  “Not at the time. You speak fondly of Isolde. I often refer to Timpkins at the club, no matter what a young rascal he is. I thought she’d accepted her marriage. It’s obvious I deluded myself. Now I don’t know what to believe. I can’t stand Bruxton, fair or not. Have I been on a goose-chase to appease my conscience?”

  She ached for him, at the guilt he carried. She could give him many things but not peace. “Did she have a lady’s maid like my Isolde?” she asked. “One close to her who would have known the intimate details of her day? It is difficult to hide a liaison from a confidante.”

  His eyes glinted in appreciation. “I’ll remember to interrogate Isolde if I ever suspect you of having an affair.”

  “Isolde would never betray me.” She slipped from her chair to kiss his marked cheek. “Nor would I you.”

  He grasped her hand. “But if I gave you cause? If I harmed or frightened you, would you not be justified in taking steps to find a comforter, even if that comfort was another man?”

  “We will never know, Simon,” she said. “Is there any stone you might have left unturned? Did your sister keep a journal? My cousin Charlotte revealed her scandalous desire for her husband in her diary.”

  “What is wrong with that?” he asked in amusement. “A journal is meant to hold such thoughts, isn’t it?”

  “They weren’t married at the time she wrote this shocking work. She admitted illicit longings for him. In quite explicit terms for a lady, or so I’ve heard.”

  “And?”

  She frowned. “Her diary fell into the hands of a blackmailer. It caused no small amount of grief for her and her husband Gideon. One could say she accidentally became his duchess. They chased all over London for that book. I believe at one point the duke was holding it in his hands in your favorite brothel.”

  “I don’t have a favorite brothel,” he said with a calm smile.

  “No matter. The diary appeared in the rookeries before it was returned to Charlotte. The thief turned out to be a friend of Harriet’s, a defiant young criminal who was dubbed the Duke of St. Giles to her street duchess. You are not the only person I know with a notorious nickname.”

  “If Susannah kept a journal that implicated Bruxton in any abuse, he’d have destroyed it,” he said. “A blackmail attempt would have been made by now. Unless the Irishman is doing so in secret and that is why Bruxton came here in a panic.”

  “Irish?” she said slowly.

  “The groom. Kieran Healy. Is his name familiar?”

  “Not at all.”

  “He has a pleasing voice with a trace of an accent,” Simon went on. He stared at her intently. “Why?”

  “The man at Grayson’s party,” she said. “He may have had an accent. Not English or Welsh. My ears were ringing. There was confusion everywhere, and now I might be influenced by what you’ve said. He mumbled only a few words.”

  He disengaged his hand from hers and shoved back his chair. Ravenna hopped around the table in apprehension. “Kieran evidently knows his way around a stable as well as he does a lady’s bedchamber.”

  She watched him with increasing concern. “Why would her groom want to kill you?”

  “Perhaps he was afraid I would find something in her letters to incriminate him. God only knows. Bruxton mentioned a child. Susannah never told me of a pregnancy. Evidently all three of them were hiding secrets.”

  “Where are you off to?” she asked, alarmed.

  “My study. I’m going to send a message to Heath and read through her letters again.”

  “I will help.” She rang for a servant to indicate they’d finished their luncheon. “I’ll order a pot of strong coffee.”

  He waited for her at the door. “It doesn’t seem reasonable that Kieran would come here if he’s on the run. Not if he wanted a good chance to kill me.”

  “If only we always acted on reason,” she said as she caught up with him. “Of course, if I had done so, we wouldn’t be married.”

  “You regret the result?” he asked, catching her by the sash of her gown.

  She swung back against him. “I shall not give you another iota of sympathy as long as you continue to doubt me. Unhand me. We have reading to do.”

  Hours of reading, as it turned out. Ravenna quoted aloud the last of Susannah’s letters from her cramped position between Simon and his red leather writing box on the
sofa.

  “’We spent the afternoon in the woods again today,’” she read. “’Matthew has forbidden me to do so, but I no longer listen to him. He is to return tomorrow, and the estate is in chaos. Only last week he informed me of his plans for a house party and does not remember that Mrs. Littleton has broken her arm. When are you to visit us, Simon? You have been promising for months. I am in desperate need of my older brother’s shoulder.

  However, I understand that you are busy in London. Perhaps one day when you are married, I will see you …’” Ravenna broke off. “Well.”

  Simon opened his eyes. “And?”

  “Nothing else. Nothing to incriminate anyone that I can perceive. She missed you. She missed your brother and his family, too. She defied her husband to ride. Who is Mrs. Littleton?”

  “The housekeeper at Bruxton Manor. She was at home the day Susannah died and passed away herself a few months afterward. It wasn’t surprising. She was elderly and in frail health. She had served the earl’s family forever as I recall. I spoke to nearly everyone in the parish after my sister’s funeral. Several acquaintances promised to keep in touch with me. The general opinion is still that her death was a mishap.”

  She refolded the letter, her brow creased in thought. “But you have to make certain.”

  “She asked me to visit,” he said, his voice deep with self-recrimination. “I didn’t pay attention.”

  “But you are now.”

  He collected the letters and locked them back in the box. “No stone unturned,” he mused. “Have I missed one? Lend me your perspective. My brother wants to believe her death was a tragic accident.”

  “I agree with you that her groom is the key.”

  “Do I hunt him down?”

  “Don’t you dare,” she said. “Bruxton is right about one thing. A man running for his life is a desperate creature.”

  “I might never learn the truth without him. I know he wanted to tell me more than he did.”

  She shook her head. “You might not return to me alive if you confront him,” she said. “You regret not listening to your sister. At least you can listen to your wife. Do not go after him, Simon. I am afraid to be left by myself. I have grown dependent on you.”

  “Liar. You are afraid of no one.”

  “But I do need you. That is the truth.”

  35

  Simon tended to relax his guard a day or two after returning to his country villa. Caverley House was not as fortified as a medieval castle, but it did claim a position of strategical hauteur upon a heavily wooded hill. He had always known that one day he would come home to live out his life and fulfill his ducal obligations. He would rest easier with Ravenna safeguarded inside its walls.

  He wanted to cast off the cloud that hung over his childhood memories.

  He imagined his sister fidgeting in the hall where his family had gathered for their official portrait. He heard her piping voice in the old nursery he and Ravenna visited by candlelight. A puppet sat on the bare floor. He picked it up, untangling the cobwebbed strings, and placed it on a shelf.

  “She was a quiet girl,” he said. “She rarely fussed and yet she wept her heart out the day I told her she was to marry Bruxton. She swore she’d rather be a spinster. I’d believed until then that she approved of him. I assumed she was nervous and would recover in a week or so.”

  “She had good manners,” Ravenna said. “She was brought up to obey. So was I. But I haven’t always done what I was ordered.”

  “Thank God,” he muttered, and closed the nursery door. He smiled at her as around them servants hastened to light pewter wall-torches to dispel the darkness. “I wish we’d arrived in the daylight. Tomorrow I’ll show you the parkland. Radnor will welcome his new home.”

  She accompanied him down the spiral stairwell to their bedchamber on the next floor. “We shall make happy memories here, Simon. Your sister won’t be forgotten.”

  “You haven’t seen the bedchamber yet,” he said, grinning up at her from the landing. “We’ll make a memory or two there, I promise.”

  A chambermaid giggled from an alcove where she stood in attendance. Ravenna shook her head at Simon in affectionate dismay. He wanted to tell her that she had saved him from his bitterness, that she had already given him his most cherished memories. But they had an audience, even here in the country. And for the moment he would contain his desire for her until they were behind closed doors.

  A tangy wood fire scented with rosemary sprigs welcomed them. Ravenna delighted in the warmth of the room as she admired the escritoire that covered one entire wall. On the desktop sat a box of ink bottles, a seal, numerous pens, and a supply of foolscap. She could write hundreds of letters to her female cousins chronicling country life. She could even start a scandalous diary of her own.

  But it was the behemoth two-poster bedstead that held her eye, draped with turquoise silk curtains that billowed to the floor like waves. It was quite a bed, a statement of noble dominance. She might have been daunted by its size alone. But it suited the house, as did her husband.

  One would not expect a duke to sleep in a cot.

  “That bed served as a pirate ship when we were small,” Simon said as she removed her half-boots. “My siblings and I played buccaneers of the Spanish Main until one day the tester broke and our father banished us outside to the ruins to wage our wars.”

  “I suppose you’ve been taking prisoners under the covers ever since,” she said with her lips pursed.

  He grinned, sliding his hands around her shoulders to unfasten her cloak. “I have never brought a woman to this house.”

  She climbed up the steps to the bed and reclined against the tasseled pillows in contentment. “It is a magnificent home.” She would likely conceive their children in this bed, and once they started a family, the house would not seem quite as large or quiet.

  She sat up slowly. Simon had removed his coat and taken a chair across the room at a table supplied with clean glasses and a bottle of port.

  “We’ll ride out early to meet the tenantry,” he said, pouring their evening drinks. “The neighbors will call in the afternoon. You’ll have a chance to charm in one of your new bonnets.”

  “The neighbors are in for a shock if any of them met Isolde and Timpkins during our ‘honeymoon.’”

  “Timpkins is well-enough known in the village that he wouldn’t have risked a detailed inspection. I believe they stayed behind the gates.” He rose to pull out a chair for her. “Sit with me.”

  She had just reached the table when the report of a gun jarred the idyllic stillness of the estate.

  They shared a look; neither panicked. He set her glass back on the table, untouched. Ravenna slipped on her boots. Simon opened his traveling case and removed three pistols. He placed one inside his coat, the other his boot. The third was the Manton that Heath had recommended for Ravenna. He handed her the weapon and drew her from the leaded-window where she stood peering through the curtains into a bank of fog.

  “All I can see is the chapel spire,” she said.

  “That’s part of the Gothic ruins I mentioned a moment ago.” He turned her firmly back into the room toward the fireplace. “I’ll send Timpkins and Isolde up before I warn the rest of the staff. There’s a passage next to the mantelpiece. I’ll open the panel and leave you to decide whether you need to hide. There should be flint and tinder at the end of the tunnel. Do not light a candle unless you feel you will die in the dark.”

  “I don’t mind dark tunnels,” she said as he ran his hand under the mantelpiece. “But I would rather you take Timpkins than leave him here.”

  The panel swung open. A moldy odor wafted into the room. “Dammit,” he said. “I should not have insisted Rhys wait a day to join us. Was Bruxton right? Was I too stubborn to listen to him?”

  “We don’t know anything yet, Simon.”

  “I know that whatever happens I am all the better because of you. You are a practical duchess.”

  “And you
?”

  “A romantic duke. I concede.”

  Timpkins tucked the pistol into his waistband and whirled around to glare at the woman who had sneaked up behind him in the mist. So appealing was Isolde with her flowing black hair and white pelisse that he almost refrained from criticizing her recklessness. “What are you doing out here?” he demanded.

  “I thought to check on you before bed and saw that you had left your room,” she said breathlessly.

  “Wasn’t that improper of you?”

  “Do not antagonize me, Mr. Timpkins,” she said, her usual steady voice warbling. “When I noticed your gun was missing from the cabinet, I felt my heart drop to my knees. I was so distraught I ran straight into the butler’s pantry to seek his aid.”

  Timpkins stared over her head and saw half the domestic staff arranged along the brewery wall. “You could make my heart stop without a weapon whatsoever,” he said, moving forward to comfort her.

  “You shouldn’t talk in such a manner.” She glanced at the gun in his hand. “Why and who were you shooting at?”

  “I was thinking back to our honeymoon – to the night when someone was prowling about the place, and I got an idea in my head to climb a tree, with my gun, and act as if I was an assassin.”

  “Whatever for?” she asked, blinking rapidly.

  “His grace told me that Lord Heath climbed the walnut tree in London to gain the gunman’s perspective.”

  “Heaven protect us.”

  “I made as if I was aiming at the duke at the marquess’ party, and you’ll never believe what happened.”

  “Probably not. I do not believe what I am hearing now.”

  “You interrupted my shot. I had pegged that oak sapling as the duke and you interrupted as I was about to fire. It is ironical considering how closely your actions mimicked those of the duchess.”

  “Ironical is not the word you mean.” She backed up to the wall with her arms folded. “’Idiotic’ is more appropriate. Furthermore, oh, honestly, Timpkins. What does this clownery prove?”