Her equine friend seemed to agree with her, for he snapped at the first groom who approached him.
“I’m sorry,” she said to the boy. “Sampson, remember your manners or no more sugar for you.” She led the horse into his stall and petted his forelock. “Thank you for caring for him,” she said to Charlie. “Let me know if he misbehaves again.”
The boy seemed surprised when Sampson let him step into his stall. “Yes, miss,” Charlie said, smiling shyly.
She winked at him before turning back to her brother. “Is Catherine in the house?”
“She’s at breakfast,” Alex answered. “Carriage travel makes her hungry.”
Mary Elizabeth almost laughed at the blush that came into her brother’s cheeks, and she knew what had really made her friend hungry, and it hadn’t been the jouncing ducal coach.
She winked at Alex, too, and took herself off to the house, with only one glance behind her, to see if Harry had come down from the beach. When she saw no sign of him, she did not hesitate again but moved on. She was a bit hungry herself.
There was no duchess in evidence at table, nor was the fat duke lurking about, though the butler Billings gave her an evil look as she entered wearing breeches. She ignored him and wrapped her arms around Catherine.
“You’re blooming like a rose!” Mary Elizabeth said.
Catherine smiled, her pink cheeks pretty against her soft, blonde curls. “Marriage agrees with me.”
Just at that moment, Mary Elizabeth saw Harry stalk by the window and enter the house through the servants’ door. She was staring after him when Catherine caught her eye.
“And who was that?”
“No one,” Mary Elizabeth said, filling her plate with bacon and ham from the sideboard.
“He didn’t look like no one to you.”
“Well, he is,” Mary Elizabeth said, sitting down to pour herself a cup of tea. There wasn’t a decent bannock or a pot of porridge to be found, but there were French rolls and plenty of butter. Mary Elizabeth took two and started eating, while her slender friend sat down beside her and stared at her.
“Aren’t you eating?” Mary asked, starting on her second rasher of bacon. Kissing was hungry work, it seemed.
“Not until you tell me who that man is.”
“He’s a stable boy,” Mary Elizabeth said at last.
She would have said it was impossible, but the fancy ducal butler seemed to choke at his perch beside the door.
She looked at him quizzically, but when Billings would not meet her gaze, she went back to eating her breakfast.
“He seems quite handsome for a stable boy,” Catherine said.
Mary Elizabeth could feel her friend’s eyes on her, as if she were sizing her for a new gown. She reached for more butter. “Harry’s good-looking enough, I suppose. For an Englishman.”
Mary Elizabeth was certain this time. Billings did choke. The butler then fell into a paroxysm of coughs, so that Mary was on her feet in the next minute, offering him a glass of water.
She could tell that he was too high-and-mighty to accept, but he was choking too hard to refuse.
“Take it, man, for the love of God,” she said. “I don’t want you dead on the floor because of me.”
He drank the water down as if it were whisky and managed to hide the glass from her once it was empty, refusing to hand it back to her. “No, miss,” he said. “I shall not expire.”
“Will you take breakfast with us, then?” she asked. “It seems mad for you to stand about, choking, when a bit of good bacon might set you to rights.”
She was not sure, but she thought she saw a fleeting smile cross the staid butler’s face.
“No, miss, but I thank you. I have already eaten.”
Mary Elizabeth knew the ways of the English were queer, so she got herself more bacon and went back to her breakfast. Catherine had not been diverted by her chat with the butler, but was staring a hole into Mary Elizabeth’s head, waiting for some answer she had yet to give.
“And how do you know this Harry?” Catherine asked, trying to sound nonchalant and failing.
“How does anyone know a stable hand? He helped me saddle a horse.” Mary Elizabeth smiled, knowing she was not being completely forthcoming. “They’ve a wonderful horse, Sampson, who used to bite everyone in sight before I reminded him of his manners.”
“And this stable boy saddled a biting horse for you?”
“No, he refused to. I rode out bareback.”
The butler made another strangled noise when she said that, but Mary Elizabeth ignored him. “As much as I like that horse, I like Harry better.”
After she made that confession, both Billings and Catherine were as silent as a tomb. Mary Elizabeth shifted uncomfortably and looked down into her empty teacup.
“Mary,” Catherine said, “you are a lady. You can’t be canoodling with stable boys.”
Mary Elizabeth sighed, thinking of the way Harry’s lips had felt on hers just that morning. “You’re right, Catherine. I know it.”
She pushed back from the table, not wanting to think about Harry anymore. “Let’s go throw knives in the ballroom.”
Catherine still looked worried, but she smiled a little at that. “Alex brought the board.”
“Is Cumberland still on it?”
“His outlines might need a going over, but the good duke is still there.”
Mary Elizabeth laughed out loud. Before they left, Mary Elizabeth decided to confess a little more, since there was only Billings nearby to hear. She lowered her voice, as if speaking of a conspiracy.
“I’ll tell you one last thing,” Mary Elizabeth said. “That stable boy is a good kisser.”
Mary thought that her friend might chastise her for her behavior, but Catherine only squealed.
Catherine finished her breakfast, and then the girls went off to explore the great house. Mary Elizabeth kept an eye out for the fat Recluse Duke, but did not see him anywhere. She wondered what he got up to all day, but since it was not an interesting subject, she thanked her stars he was hiding somewhere and got on with her own business.
Mary Elizabeth had hoped to throw knives at Cumberland in the ballroom, but there was too much going on, as the duchess was hosting a dance for her come-out the next night, so Mary Elizabeth set up the outline of the evil Duke of Cumberland in the picture gallery, where no one seemed to come but the mouser who had escaped the kitchen. The little white cat washed her paws delicately while Mary went over Cumberland’s edges with a charcoal Billings had helpfully provided for the purpose.
Catherine opened the knife case like the experienced caster she now was. Mary Elizabeth had taught her sister-in-law all she knew, which was a lot. Despite being a sweet girl from Devon, Catherine had taken to knife throwing like a fish to water.
For all her enjoyment of casting steel blades at a cork board, Catherine would not let the matter of Mary Elizabeth kissing a man go.
“When did you kiss him?” she asked.
“This morning, on the beach.”
Catherine gasped. She was always a wonderful audience. Mary Elizabeth gave up feeling shy about her own foolishness and began to warm to her tale.
“And last night, while I was practicing my swordplay in the rose garden, he kissed me.”
Catherine sighed, even as she let the short knife in her hand fly. She struck the board in her favorite place, the duke’s black heart. Mary cast her own knife then, only to hear the sound of someone shuffling at the end of the hall.
“Hello?” Mary Elizabeth called. “Is anyone about? You can come out. We only throw knives at Cumberland here.”
For a long moment, there was nothing but silence. Before Mary Elizabeth could go and investigate, intent on discovering which housemaid was eavesdropping with the hope of carrying tales to the duchess and, thus, to Mary Eliz
abeth’s mother, a man stepped out from the shadows.
* * *
“Ah,” Mary Elizabeth said. “It’s only Harry.”
With a shrug, she turned back to the board and threw another wicked knife at the strange, top-hat-wearing gentleman drawn there. Her blade buried itself to the hilt in the effigy’s throat.
“Not fond of dukes, are you?” Harry asked.
“I’m indifferent to them on the whole,” Mary Elizabeth said. “I’ve never met one. That blighter there is Cumberland.”
“The Butcher of Culloden,” Harry said, grateful that the outline was not meant to represent anyone currently living—namely himself.
“You’ve heard of the bastard, then,” Mary Elizabeth said, throwing another knife with deadly accuracy. Had the Duke of Cumberland been standing there, he would have been taken down by this particular Highlander.
“Once or twice.”
Mary Elizabeth was as cool as ever, not the least bit discommoded that he had discovered her pursuing unladylike ends with her friend, telling tales all the while. The fact that those tales were true—save for the salient point left out that he was the Duke of Northumberland—did not make him less annoyed with her.
Her friend—another of his mother’s guests, he assumed—was struck dumb at the sight of him. He was dressed in a coat for once, along with a clean, pressed shirt, fine waistcoat, and a well-tied cravat. Much to his chagrin, the girl seemed to have an inkling—unlike Mary Elizabeth—of who he was. She curtsied deeply, as if to the king himself, and Mary Elizabeth cocked an eyebrow at her.
“Now, then, Catherine, no need to mock the man. Horses are decent work and worth a man’s time—a good way for a man to earn a wage.” Mary Elizabeth nodded to him, as if to congratulate him on having the good sense to care for horses. “Which makes me wonder, Harry, what are you doing in the house dressed like an undertaker?”
“I’m not a stable boy,” he said.
Mary Elizabeth did not bat an eye at this revelation, but took aim at the corkboard figure again, this time with her dirk. She had drawn it from some secret pocket in her gown, and even now hefted it by the blade, as if testing its weight.
He thought with all certainty that she would drop it or that it would fall short of its mark, but in spite of it being a heavier blade, it flew straight and true, directly into the duke’s throat.
Harry winced to see it.
She turned to him then. “Are you a gardener, then?” she asked. “You seem more at home among the horses.”
“I’m a jack-of-all-trades, you might say,” Harry answered.
Mary Elizabeth snorted at that, not seeming to notice that her lady friend and confidante had gone deadly pale. “And master of none,” Mary Elizabeth said.
He flinched at her apt description, and she did notice that.
“I’m sorry, Harry. That was rude of me. But you being a man-of-all-work does not explain why you’re at liberty to wander through the house at midday.”
“I’m a member of the family,” he said.
Mary Elizabeth raised one eyebrow and turned to face him, even as her friend tried to catch at her hand, as if to hold her back.
“So you’re Her Worship’s cousin, then, or some such?”
“Some such,” Harry answered.
“Mary,” the girl beside her said, her voice a bit choked.
He smiled at the girl to put her at her ease, but it seemed he failed, for she looked even more as if she might faint.
“Don’t fret, Catherine,” Mary Elizabeth said. “Whoever Harry is, he’s harmless.”
Henry Charles Percy, Duke of Northumberland, wanted nothing more in that moment than to dismiss her friend and draw Mary Elizabeth under him there and then. He would make love to her until she called out his name in ecstasy. That demonstration might show her exactly who was harmless. But even as unreasonable, almost insatiable lust shook his frame like a sudden storm, Harry remembered that he was a gentleman.
“I bid you both good day.”
Retreat was the better part of valor. And he knew that his self-control, if not his honor, was suspended before him by a very thin thread. He bowed to them, giving the girl Catherine another small smile. Mary Elizabeth turned from him again to survey her knifeboard.
“As you will, Harry. Perhaps we’ll see you at dinner, since you’re some kind of poor relation.”
Harry almost strangled at that, and saw that Catherine was strangling with him. Still, the girl showed admirable self-possession and did not blurt out his title. With Mary Elizabeth’s back to him, he raised one finger to his lips and winked.
The lady clearly could not have been more shocked had he disrobed. But she was a lady, so she rallied and only curtsied again. She even managed to offer a small smile.
Confident that his entreaty for her silence would be obeyed, Harry left the girls in the portrait gallery and went to take a swim in the cold, bracing sea.
Nine
Harry had always thought of himself as lord of his duchy. At the very least, as someone whose authority would never be questioned in his own house. But that day, he had discovered that there were limits to what his staff would do for him.
Such as keep his identity a secret.
When Billings had given the order belowstairs that all must pretend that their duke was merely a poor relation, even the housemaids had rebelled. It seemed that they all prided themselves on serving the duchy, as he did, and that, as he was the latest embodiment of said duchy, they wanted all and sundry to know exactly who it was they served.
One housemaid had even cried.
Billings had reported back that he had all in hand, and that the household would confine themselves to referring to him as my lord, though everyone was displeased. Including Billings.
So that afternoon, Harry hid in his father’s library, playing chess against himself and making a botch of it. He could not concentrate on any of the three books he was reading either. One was a treatise on the latest scientific developments in botany, another in astronomy, and the third on sailing. None of his usual pursuits pleased him that day, however, just as his staff did not, all because of one girl from Scotland who only came up to his breastbone and who no doubt weighed less than Sampson’s saddle.
Harry was not certain what he was going to do about her family. With the help of her friend, Catherine, they had very likely puzzled out who he was by now. He hoped none of them had mentioned it to her.
He moved the white bishop, only to curse his own folly for falling into his own trap, when the door to his father’s library opened and then just as quickly slammed shut. A man stood in the doorway, glaring at Harry.
“I’ve run you to ground,” the man said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“It’s not my pardon you need, Your Worship.”
The hulking man crossing the vast, book-filled room did not look like a London fop, though he was dressed like one, in black superfine and a silver-gray waistcoat. He looked like a warrior. Something in Harry woke up, and he stood, smiling, not giving a thought to his father’s stricture that smiles were not proper for a duke, especially with strangers. He liked the man on sight.
“I’m afraid we haven’t been introduced,” he said.
“My name is Alexander Waters. I’ve been living in your London house for the last two months, Your High-and-Mighty Lordship. With my sister.”
Waters stopped short of throttling Harry where he stood only because the massive ducal desk was in his way. He looked likely to vault over it next, and while Harry would enjoy a good fisticuffs after the frustrations of kissing a girl he couldn’t have, his mother would be extremely displeased if he got blood on the carpet.
“Mr. Waters,” Harry said.
“Aye. The eldest Waters but two, which makes me the man to call you out.” He tossed a black leather glove on the d
esk, in the middle of Harry’s chessboard. “Name your weapons.”
Harry could feel the fury rolling off the man in waves. Harry was a cool man himself and never understood passion in others. At least, he hadn’t until Mary Elizabeth had climbed out of that traveling chaise and started treating him like her bootboy. Clearly, someone had been telling tales, and that someone was this man’s wife.
“Mr. Waters,” Harry said again. “I apologize.”
The dark-haired man blinked, shifting his wide shoulders in his tight black coat. “You apologize for what?”
“For kissing your sister without benefit of marriage.”
Waters’s eyes narrowed. “You don’t mean to marry her, do you?”
“No,” Harry answered. “I don’t.”
The tension drained slowly out of the room, and Harry felt as bleak as midwinter on the moors, without a grouse in sight. He sighed and moved out from behind the desk, so that the Waters man might strike him, if he chose.
“I have certain obligations as Duke of Northumberland that require a great deal of me. I have been shirking those obligations, and as of tomorrow night, that shirking must come to an end.”
“That doesn’t explain why you won’t marry my sister.”
Harry could see that the gentleman was well on his way to working up a new fit of fury and knew that he had best explain himself.
“Your sister is a little bird,” he began, then frowned, for what he had said made no sense. But for some odd reason, the other man’s anger seemed to be in check.
“Go on,” Waters said.
“I have seen birds caged,” Harry went on. “Their lives are not worth living.”
There was a long silence, and it stretched on while Harry thought of Mary Elizabeth. Harry had not known the girl long, but she was one of the most vibrant women he had ever met, that he would likely ever meet. He thought of her on Sampson’s back, racing away from him, and knew that was where she belonged—on horseback, with a dagger somewhere hidden about her person, living her life with joy.
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