Orkenay pulled back in alarm. “Your grace, I only meant that I had heard that she was exactly what you say . . . an independent woman, not bound by rules. I am so sorry if I have offended you in any way, but no more was meant than just that. I would never impugn the honor of a lady in any manner; I should think you would know me better than that, Alban!”
Caught, and seeing the eyes of the others on him in puzzlement, Alban muttered an apology. How could he explain that the offense was not in the words but the tone?
“Does she live here alone?” Fitzhenry said, quickly filling the silence as they all turned back to the path and continued their walk.
“No, she has a companion, a Mrs. Douglas.”
“Older lady?”
“No, actually, she is only about thirty, or even younger, I suppose.”
Bart spoke up, over his shoulder. “Alban told me last night that she is very beautiful, and for him to say that . . . I know how particular he is about feminine beauty, so I expect something extraordinary in the way of feminine pulchritude.”
“Don’t know why I said that,” Alban muttered, reluctant to praise her too vociferously, though just Bart’s word brought back the eyes, the skin and the lush form of the widow Mrs. Douglas, and the dreams of her that had soothed those hours of the night when he did sleep. But she was not at all his type of woman, and would never do as a mistress for other reasons he had already canvassed. He must put that from his mind.
“We shall judge for ourselves,” Bart said as the gloom brightened and the trees thinned. “Here is the cottage.” He stopped at the edge of the clearing.
Alban had strode into it so quickly the evening before he had not had a chance to drink in its quaint loveliness, made more so by the last blooms of the roses that trailed the garden wall and gate, and adorned the mellow gold stone walls, touched now by morning sunlight. It was very much a woman’s home, though he didn’t suppose he had ever thought of it in that way before. At one time, many years before, it had been the huntsman’s cottage, but when Lady Eliza left London and Alban Hall, she had chosen Bodenthorpe Cottage as her home.
“It’s lovely,” Fitzhenry said. “But I’m famished.”
Alban, roused from his reverie, said, “Yes, let’s go in.”
• • •
Kittie, fussing with the roses in a vase for the dining table in the breakfast room, heard tramping footsteps, but surely it was more than just two men? Or could the noise be attributed to the duke’s overlarge feet? She almost giggled at the thought, and then restrained herself. She had determined that the best demeanor to assume in the face of her overwhelming idiocy in the company of the duke was one of withdrawal. He was there to see his aunt, after all, not her. She would neither thrust herself forward nor make more than the most simple of answers to any questions that should happen to be addressed to her.
She heard voices in the parlor. That must mean that his grace and Mr. Norton had been shown in and were greeting Lady Eliza. She took a deep breath and summoned the courage to sally forth. Entering the room was a shock. It was filled with men, black-coated, brown-coated and green-coated men. She was about to withdraw and regain her equilibrium, but Lady Eliza, even through the din, had heard her footstep.
“Ah, here is Kittie now. Introduce the gentlemen, Alban.”
The duke turned to her and seemed without words for a moment, his brown eyes fixed on her. But then he said, “Mrs. Douglas, may I make known to you Lord Orkenay, Sir John Fitzhenry, and my very good friend Mr. Bartholomew Norton. Gentlemen, this is my aunt’s valued friend and companion, Mrs. Kittie—or is it more properly Kath . . .” He stopped, his face blanched, but then shook his head. “Uh, Mrs. Kittie Douglas.”
The gentlemen came forward and bowed over her hand, one by one. But Kittie’s attention was caught by the duke, who had turned away and stared out the window. What was wrong?
Lady Eliza loudly said, “Kittie’s name is just that, Alban. It is not a diminutive of some longer name.”
Kittie gazed around in confusion, but the duke stayed by the window.
“We were admiring the roses outside of the cottage, Mrs. Douglas,” the duke’s friend, Mr. Norton, said. “Is that your handiwork?”
“I do garden and I do tend the roses, but my passion is herbs.”
The earl, his tone smooth, said, “I’m delighted to hear you have a passion. All beautiful women should.”
Kittie gazed at him in alarm. This was not how she had imagined this morning. She stuttered into speech. “I . . . I th-think breakfast is ready, gentlemen. I’ll just have Prissy lay two more place settings.”
Sir John gazed at her and then at Lord Orkenay. “I think we were not expected, my lord.”
Orkenay huffily said, “I should think we would be. We are Alban’s guests too, after all.”
Kittie interjected, “My apologies, my lord, Sir John; I think it was my misunderstanding, not his grace’s. I was somewhat scattered yesterday. We don’t often have the favor of company here.”
The moment passed, the earl’s indignation soothed by her reply. She led the way into the dining room, noting that Mr. Norton was so attentive in his care for Lady Eliza. It warmed her heart. He was a good man, she thought.
The men were clearly ravenous, with Sir John heaping his plate high in the informal atmosphere of family dining. The earl, she noted, was a fastidious eater, picking the most ornate dishes, while the duke ate heaps of eggs, rashers of bacon and racks of toast. Mr. Norton, Lady Eliza’s self-appointed aide, filled her plate and then his own. They held a murmured conversation, no doubt catching up on all that had happened during the years they had not seen each other.
In watching the men Kittie ate hardly at all, but suddenly remembered, as a maid filled the water pitcher on the sideboard with well water, what she had intended originally. “Oh,” she said, leaping up. “I entirely forgot, my lady. I had intended the gentlemen to sample the ale I made this summer. It is just ready now.”
“Oh, yes, by all means, give the gentlemen some of your ale,” Lady Eliza said.
Kittie shot her a suspicious look, for the dry tone gave away little, but it was often evident when the woman was laughing at someone. “Prissy, will you bring out the sweet cicely beer for the gentlemen?”
“Sweet cicely beer? What is that?”
Kittie turned to the duke, who was her questioner. “I found in the attic a box of old receipts from a long-past housewife. It’s fascinating, really,” she said, as Prissy brought out the brown glass bottles and tankards. “For it is a glimpse into the past. Sweet cicely beer is said, according to the receipt, to be especially good for the digestion.”
“Is that so?” the earl said. “I shall certainly have to try it, then, for I suffer from dyspepsia.”
The bottles were unstoppered and decanted. The beer was an odd greenish color, but Kittie had supposed that was merely because of its herbal origin. The gentlemen, as one, held up their glasses and the duke said, “To your health, my friends, and to that of the ladies, more especially.”
They all downed hearty gulps and one second later there was a tumultuous response.
“Faugh,” Sir John said. “That is . . . pardon me, ladies, but I must say it is the most foul stuff I have ever tasted.”
“Foul doesn’t begin to describe that,” the earl said, wiping his mouth with his sleeve and grimacing horribly. “It is loathsome, disgusting, poisonous!”
Kittie stared and Lady Eliza began to chuckle, then roar with laughter.
The duke blinked, swallowed and blotted his lips. Kittie gazed at him. What would he say?
“It is . . . not the finest brew I have ever sampled,” he said quietly, pushing his pewter tankard away as Mr. Norton did the same without comment.
Tears welled up in Kittie’s eyes, but Mr. Norton’s words dried them in an instant.
“Tastes like what I would expect a cure for dyspepsia to taste like,” he said with a shrug.
Struck by the humor, finally, Kitt
ie giggled, then laughed out loud, joining her employer, and most of the men.
Five
In the drawing room after breakfast Kittie felt that the laughter had broken the tension, for her anyway, of unfamiliar gentlemen surrounding her, though she still found strange all of the male attention after three years at Bodenthorpe Cottage in virtual isolation.
Mr. Norton was devoted to Lady Eliza and spent the morning at her side. Sir John, after sitting for a while over coffee, bowed and said that if his hostess did not object, he would like to walk the grounds. He had never been to Yorkshire and would like to enjoy the scenic views. Lady Eliza graciously acquiesced, but with a thoughtful expression.
The duke and the earl, though, seemed, strangely, to be vying for Kittie’s attentions, albeit in differing ways.
“How did you come to be my aunt’s companion, Mrs. Douglas?” the duke asked.
“I have a distant relation in Richmond whose daughter was attended, at her lying-in, by a midwife who is from Loxton, and she knew that Lady Eliza was considering a companion. She helped us contact each other.”
The duke glanced across the room at his aunt. “Why did she not tell me she needed a companion?”
Kittie, knowing how assiduous the duke was in his attentions in the past, and how that still had continued, even though by mail, simply shrugged. She couldn’t speak for Lady Eliza and couldn’t say why she had not gone through her nephew for help. Except that it seemed to her it may have been tied into why she didn’t tell him how badly her sight had deteriorated. “She’s a very independent woman. Maybe she wanted to do this for herself. If you had chosen a companion, she would have felt obligated to keep her even if they didn’t get on. If she did the choosing herself, she could find what suited her best. I came, we seemed to be compatible, and she hired me.”
“And why would you become a companion?”
Kittie stiffened. It was akin to asking her about her past, her finances and her motives, she thought. If she had not known from reading his letters that he only had his aunt’s benefit on his mind, she would have considered him very rude.
The earl strolled over just then. “Now, Alban, you must not dominate Mrs. Douglas’s valuable time. She is too pretty a woman for the grilling you appear to be giving her.” He sat down beside Kittie on the divan and moved closer.
Kittie would have moved away, for the earl was pressing his thigh to hers and it was a disturbingly intimate attention from a stranger, as well as embarrassingly familiar behavior on first meeting, but there was no room for a retreat. She adjusted her skirts and said, “His grace was not grilling me, Lord Orkenay. He is within his rights to ask me a few questions, given his concern for his aunt.”
“Wasn’t questioning you that closely, was I?” the duke asked, shifting in his seat, his large frame overwhelming the delicate Sheraton chair.
She felt his annoyance, but whether it was at her or the earl, she could not be sure. “I believe I said as much just now, sir.” Kittie felt a wave of exhaustion pass over her. Her days were normally passed in pleasant boredom, and this amount of socializing was tiring and filled her with an uncertain anxiety. The two men were shooting dark looks at each other and she didn’t understand how she had become some bone to be pulled at by them both.
“My dear,” the earl said, patting her hands where they were twined on her lap, “do not let this one bully you.”
He left his palm in place, the heat of it damp on her clasped hands.
“He has a morose cast of character lately, you know,” Lord Orkenay continued. “I found him on the beach at Brighton—at night, mind you—staring out at the ocean. Just . . . staring. One would have thought he had lost his best friend.”
Did the earl not know that the duke had lost his wife at sea a few years before? Kittie thought that he must not know the details, or he would surely not make such a tactless statement. She shot a glance at the duke, hoping the earl’s remarks did not raise old specters.
Alban stood and bowed. “I had not realized I was interrogating the young lady, Orkenay. Thank you for pointing out to me the error of my ways.” He strolled away and stared out the window.
How resentful a temperament he seemed to have, Kittie thought. It made her wonder afresh about his duchess’s last letter to him, and her contentions of cruelty. She watched him absently, noting the fine shape of his muscular legs and his commanding height and breadth. It would be overwhelming, she thought, to be loved by such a man in every sense, but certainly the physical. His duchess was a dainty woman, Lady Eliza had told her, fine-boned and delicate, and the miniature of her bore out that description, and added large gray eyes, jet hair and a look of romance. She was lovely, though there was a hint of sadness in those fine eyes; whether that was the artist’s invention, Kittie could not know.
A wider contrast between the woman in the picture, now lost at sea, and her own self could not be imagined. Though why it should even occur to her to compare his duchess to herself she did not know. No, that was a lie. She did know. She had imagined for so long meeting the duke and had supposed him to be some perfect paragon of male virtue. And had pictured herself as his ideal mate, the woman who could soothe his agony over his lost faithless wife.
How foolish and romantic she had become in her isolation. Yorkshire had done that to her, for she didn’t think she had ever been such a daydreamer before.
“What a bear he has become,” the earl said in a pleasant undertone.
“Is he not generally like that?” Kittie asked, turning to her companion on the divan, overjoyed that he had removed his hand. She surreptitiously wiped the dampness off against her skirt.
“Mmm, I would not say he is never like that. Does he have a resentful temper? Yes. But is he gloomy or generally ill-tempered?” He shrugged. “I can only say that in the prince’s company he is often gay and occasionally even witty. One must be one of those things for Prinny’s sake, you know.”
“No, I don’t know. I do not travel in those circles.”
“Ah, but you should,” the earl said, pressing her hand again with an expression of fervent admiration. “You are beautiful, you know, quite out of the ordinary.”
“You should not say such things, my lord,” Kittie said, aware of the flush rising to her cheek. It almost seemed that the earl was saying she should be a countess, for surely one must be of that stature to be included in the prince’s court, she thought. The duke, to her consternation, was gazing intently at her from across the room. She was not accustomed to male attention, and had not experienced such sensations since the death of her husband many years ago. Then, male attention from Roger and his friends had been her due. Roger Douglas was merely the younger son of a baronet, but a bon vivant who enjoyed living beyond his means. To do so he had to gamble, and to do that he had to find new people to gamble against. She was young and happy then, thoughtless and carefree. She had been raised to leave such worries to her husband and so she had, to her ultimate detriment.
If he had been a better gambler, they might not have become so destitute, or if Roger had lived longer he might have recovered from the debt he was in at the moment of death, which occurred because—it was suspected though not proven—he was in his cups and did not give way on a dark road, and so his carriage was run into a ditch.
But the past was the past. She had put that life behind her and felt that she was a different person now, wiser, stronger and certainly older. Though “wiser” was in doubt, given her foolishness over the duke this last while, for she realized she had idealized him through his kind letters. No man was perfect, and to expect it was absurd.
“I should say it,” the earl protested. “And you should hear, often, that you are a vital, beautiful woman worthy of adorning the highest society in the land. Your embarrassment is delightful and your blush gives you fresh beauty.”
Kittie took in a deep breath. Would she ever again enjoy the physical aspects of a male companion? Not if she didn’t marry, she supposed. It was somethin
g to think about. Lovemaking had been a very enjoyable part of her union with her husband, and there were times . . . but she would turn her mind away from that for now. Right now, there was the earl and his kind words. She would relax and enjoy the attention. There was no sin in that. And one could not condemn a man for having damp hands. “You are very kind, my lord.” He had said nothing outrageous or rude, and she would unbend enough to enjoy his compliments.
• • •
Alban, bored and at loose ends, weary of watching Orkenay flirt with Kittie Douglas, drifted over to his aunt. She and Norton were informing each other of all that had happened since his last visit, many years before. The third son of an earl, Bart had often been shunted aside in his family, ignored, virtually forgotten by a horse-mad father who was only interested in his first son, the heir, and his second son, the dashing military officer. Bart, with no particular talents aside from a fine mind, a tender heart and an acute sense of justice, was considered their inferior in every way.
But Lady Eliza Burstead had recognized, in the lonely little boy who came to her home often with Alban on school vacations, a spirit that desperately required a woman’s soothing company. Their friendship was cemented one summer when Alban, infatuated with a local maiden—an older woman at nineteen to his tender fifteen—spent all of his time waiting for her, talking to her and watching her, and drifted away from Bart for a while, obsessed with the new sensations he was experiencing.
Alban later learned that his aunt took Bart under her wing. That summer they spent hours together walking the fells, exploring caves, and talking. When Alban finally recovered from his infatuation—after achieving his objective, which was to lose his virginity, though he did not, to his surprise, actually have to take the maiden’s—it was to discover that Bart had become a far different person. He had, in fact, grown up and become a young man of deep feeling and clever intellect, uniting with that a tender heart. He was calm and inflexible in his determination, and when they both finished at Oxford he took orders. Very soon after that he inherited a rather large independence, and so never needed to find a living, which was, perhaps, a good thing since his father had sold the living in his power in exchange for a particular hunter he was avid to own. But Bart had ever since exhibited the rallying effect of Lady Eliza’s good sense and inner strength. Even when in one of his gloomy patches he was philosophical and calm.
The Duke's Secret Seduction Page 5