The Duke

by Katharine Ashe

  August 1822

  Central Highlands, Scotland

  When Amarantha found the Allaways’ farm, dusk was falling. As she tethered her horse, a pair of dogs rushed forward, barking. She offered her hands for them to smell and waited for their cavorting to cease, straining against her impatience.

  From Edinburgh all the way to the mountains that bordered Loch Lomond, she had found traces of Penny’s journey—consistently toward Kallin. But three days earlier she had lost Penny’s trail. This morning her hosts told her that she might retrace the road to where a narrow path along a tributary creek led to a hidden farm. This farm.

  Tucked into a crevice of a hill dipping toward the Fyne, and accompanied by two sturdy outbuildings, the stone and timber cottage with cheerful draperies peeking through the windows looked welcoming, exactly the sort of house Penny would find.

  The door jerked open.

  “Doctor—” The man’s face was red and his farmer’s shirt and trousers stained with drops of blood. “Did the doctor send you, lass?”

  “No. I am seeking a traveler who might have come this way. But I have some medical skills. May I help until the doctor arrives?”

  His eyes seemed to take her in now, her hair and her face. “Be you English?”

  Her heart turned over. “Yes. Is my friend Penelope Baker here?”

  He opened the door wide. “Come now, quickly, lass.”

  Inside, a fire crackled in the hearth and the place was clean. Through a doorway Amarantha could see a bed and a woman’s prone form.

  “Penny.”

  Penny’s eyes twitched open. They were not the shimmering amber that had always danced with liveliness when Amarantha had needed levity most, but dull and shot across with red. Now they filled with tears.

  Amarantha lowered herself to the chair and found Penny’s hand on the coverlet. She grasped it, but no pressure returned hers; the usually strong, lithe fingers of a woman who had labored every day of her life were limp and cold. Her skin was not warm golden brown, but the color of dust, and lay listlessly over her features. There was blood on the quilt tucked up beneath her chin.

  Amarantha had seen women like this before. In an instant she understood.

  Gently cupping Penny’s cheek, she swallowed back the sob clinging to her throat.

  “You needn’t fear. All will be well.”

  A tear crested Penny’s eye and her lips cracked open. But she did not speak.

  “Now, dear, strong friend,” Amarantha said, “I must have one final confidence from you.” Curling both of her hands around Penny’s fingers, pain pressing at her ribs like nothing she had ever felt before, she said, “Give me his name.”

  Amarantha closed the bedchamber door. Mrs. Allaway sat in a rocking chair before the hearth. The cozy little room glowed with lamps and smelled of fresh bread.

  “She is gone.” The words sounded tinny to Amarantha’s ears.

  “May the angels take her into their care.”

  Amarantha finally allowed her gaze to dip to the bundle in the Scotswoman’s arms. Tugging apart the clean swaddling, Mrs. Allaway revealed a tiny nose, miniature pink lips, two tightly closed eyes, and a fluff of silky hair.

  “This be Luke, miss.”

  “Luke,” Amarantha whispered.

  “A fine, strong lad he already be. His mother suckled him thrice before the bleeding stole her strength, but he took to it quick. I told her since my youngest went off the teat only Thursday, this lad’s come just in time. Mother an’ son had a nice long look into each other’s eyes.”

  Penny’s son came into her arms as so many infants had in five years—the children of patients at the hospital and of her husband’s parishioners. And Amarantha’s own tiny son, her perfect gift from heaven who had never suckled and whose eyes had never opened, whom she had held for a few precious minutes before he left her.

  If Heaven did exist, Penny was there now, cradling Amarantha’s son.

  Tracing Luke’s little features with her gaze, Amarantha spoke the promise that had given her friend the peace she needed to slip away.

  “I will find your father, Luke. I will not rest until I do.”

  Chapter 12

  The Dream

  September 1822

  Castle Kallin

  Glen Irvine, Scotland

  “I tried, Your Grace.”

  The girl standing before Gabriel was little more than a child. But the pleats across her pink brow beneath the lemon plaits of her hair and the crisp cap were those of a woman with far too many cares.

  “I commend you on the attempt, Miss Finn.”

  “She attempted it four times, Your Grace,” came a sharp voice at his side.

  “Aye. As your letter helpfully informed me, Miss Pike.”

  “On the second attempt Cassandra swooned. But she tried it twice more.”

  He glanced at the woman standing by his elbow, the entire top of whose head of close-cropped hair he could see from above. Pike craned her neck, and serious brown eyes set in a pale brown face met his with impressive impassivity.

  “Miss Finn showed fortitude,” he said. “Fear o’ heights is nothing to scorn.”

  Now Pike’s brow knit too. “I would have completed the repair of the roof myself if—”

  “If no’ for the splint holding your leg together at present.”

  “Your Grace.” She seemed to snip the words.

  Gabriel drew in a slow breath.

  “I’m no’ chastising you for falling through the rotted floor o’ the attic an’ breaking your leg, Miss Pike,” he said. “Indeed, as they’re my attic an’ my rotten floor, I beg your forgiveness for the incident.”

  “Maggie made an attempt as well,” Cassandra said. “But she couldna grip the trellis ladder securely enough.”

  Good God.

  “While you were inspecting the roof, Your Grace,” Pike said, “a message arrived from the Solstice.”

  “What does Mrs. Tarry have to say?” he said.

  “It was marked to you confidentially. I will fetch it now.” Despite the splint, Pike departed silently, as all exemplary footmen did.

  He returned his attention to the twenty-year-old Edinburgh lass who, a year earlier, had taken it upon herself to join the little colony that resided in his house.

  Buried deep in a ten-mile-long glen with towering peaks on its northern end and easily defensible flats on its southern, Kallin was the ideal retreat for people desperate to hide from the world. He often mused that his rapscallion friend, Torquil Sterling, had chosen him for this project primarily because of Kallin’s remote location and only secondarily because of Gabriel’s ability to captain a ship across an ocean without anyone catching up to him.

  “Now, Miss Finn,” he said, moving to his desk. “Give me your report o’ matters here.”

  She sat down across from him silently. The members of this household all had the uncanny ability to make no sound when they moved, which—he supposed—had been a useful skill for most of them before they had fled their previous residences.

  “Feel free to omit any mention o’ the roof.” He removed the stopper from the inkpot and took up a pen. “I’ve heard as much as I care to about this damn roof—I beg your pardon, Miss Finn—about this blast roof.” He dipped the pen into the pot.

  “Aye, Your Grace,” she said, folding her hands on her lap. “Aside from the roof—”

  “Roof silence, Miss Finn.” He upended the pot and knocked it on the ledger. Flakes of dried ink peppered the page. “What in the dev—where’s the ink?” He dug in the desk drawers.

  “Aside from the leaks in the roof, Your Grace—”

  He forbore growling.

  “—we’ve a shortage of basic supplies—”

  “Such as writing ink?”

  “—such as tea, coffee, sugar, polish, rope, firewood—”

  “Firewood? There are woodlands up an’ down the length of the glen.”

  “—laying hens, candles, lamp oil, lye, paint, glue
, paper, an’ writing ink. Molly also has a list o’ needs from the distillery.”

  “Does she?” It was less question than sigh.

  “Plum’s been harvesting herbs and roots down at the village.”

  “Well, there’s something.”

  “But we’re short on salt. An’ pickling spices. We also lack a suitable harness for the oxen.”

  “Oxen? When did you purchase oxen?”

  “Molly traded five barrels of gin at Inveraray last month.”

  He narrowed his eyes. “Did she?”

  “She didna tell you that last spring she an’ Maggie were making gin, did she?”

  “She neglected to share that wee bit o’ information in the twenty-three—or perhaps ’twas an even two dozen letters the two o’ you sent to me last March alone.” He stood up as the study door opened. “Ah, Miss Poultney, I’ve just been hearing about the experiments with gut-rotting brew that you an’ the mistress o’ my distillery have been making there, despite my instructions to the contrary.”

  “Good day, Your Grace.” The taking little brunette with skin as white as a porcelain teacup dropped a ridiculously deep curtsy for a woman mere days away from bringing a child into the world. “How be the roof?” She had the audacity to dimple up.

  Inhaling slowly through his nostrils—a calming technique he had learned to do before battle—he turned again to Cassandra.

  “Anything more, Miss Finn?”

  “We’re about to have a shortage o’ linens.”

  “You wrote to me about a storage chest full o’ bed linens that you discovered recently, aye?” So many letters. Their concern for apprising him of the use of his land and money was relentless.

  “These be other sorts o’ linens.”

  He tilted his head forward in question.

  “Feminine undergarments, Your Grace.” Her cheeks were now red, but her gaze did not waver. A better man he could not pay to do the work of land steward that Cassandra Finn did for no more than his promise that he would never, ever tell her father where she had gone.

  “Hm,” he said. “I suppose that is what I deserve for asking details.”

  Both girls were blushing now. Not for the first time he wondered whether any of Kallin’s residents were aware of the man he had been until five years earlier. If so, they were remarkably discreet about it.

  “We’re also short o’ nappies,” Cassandra said.

  He made the mistake of glancing at Maggie. Hands resting atop her belly, she was grinning.

  “Dinna look to me!” She giggled. “Yet.”

  “Rebecca is helping at the Solstice three nights out o’ seven, with her wee one, o’ course,” Cassandra explained. “She’s been keeping linens both here an’ there.”

  “I see.” He moved around the desk. “Purchase whatever the house needs, Miss Finn.”

  She followed him toward the door. “Mr. Du Lac wrote that funds from the insurance on the Edinburgh house are finally at the bank in Inveraray.”

  Xavier had written directly to Cassandra? Interesting. Either she had become far more capable than even Gabriel knew, or his partner in Portsmouth wished to spare him further conversation about the pile of ashes in Edinburgh. Or both.

  Good man. Good woman.

  “I’ll drive to Inveraray as soon as I have seen to the roof. Till then, buy the hens on credit, an’ anything else needed.”

  “An’ the firewood?”

  “Woodlands,” he said, gesturing toward the window. “Acres an’ acres o’ woodlands.”

  “Pike usually does the chopping, Your Grace.”

  Judas.

  This girl—his land steward—was so young, so damnably young. So were all the others who kept this estate functioning. Yet they were still older than a girl he had once known, a girl who had thrown herself across an ocean and into a foreign land, and had not balked for even a moment when the world demanded of her what she had never given before.

  A girl who still haunted his dreams.

  “Are you telling me that we are shorthanded, Miss Finn?”

  “Aye, Your Grace. With Plum gone to work for Mrs. Tarry in the village, an’ Sophie sewing morning, noon, an’ night to supply the shops begging for her gowns at Inveraray an’ Oban, ’tis all Rebecca can do to cook an’ clean an’ assist Pike now that her leg—”

  He held up his hand. “All right.” He reached around Maggie and opened the door wide. “I will chop the wood.”

  Cassandra gasped. “You canna chop wood, Your Grace.”

  “I can. Now, go about your business—my business, that is.” He offered her the scoundrel’s grin that had once charmed females from Dover to Tobago.

  With a rare ghost of a smile, she departed.

  He returned his attention to the second of the two Scotswomen who had disappeared from Edinburgh and, in leaving her bloodied cloak behind, established his reputation as a monster.

  “Miss Poultney,” he said firmly.

  “Your Grace,” she said sweetly. “I—”

  “Hush.”

  She bit her lips together.

  “I understand that you an’ my Master Blender, Miss Cromwell—on behalf o’ whom I paid gold to apprentice for ten months with a Master Blender on no other isle than Islay where, Miss Poultney, the gods have blessed the distilleries with peat an’ precious spring waters an’ all sorts o’ other magicks so that the sacred barrels may offer up malted ambrosia fit for kings—you an’ she, I understand, are making pig swill on my land. In my distillery.” The distillery he and Du Lac had constructed with their own hands. “Without my permission,” he added.

  Her grin widened. “Aye, Your Grace.”

  “Stow the dimples, Miss Poultney. I am furious with the two o’ you, an’ with Monsieur Du Lac for apparently approving it.”

  She blinked a few times. “You’re keeping cool for being furious.”

  “I commanded a fifty-six-gun frigate for His Majesty King George, missy. I’m no’ a man to fly off the handle.” He attempted a slight loom. “That doesna mean I canna.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  “If you waste the barrels, which didna come cheaply, an’ the labor, which is scarce, on fermenting bitter juniper berries for drunkards,” he ground out, “there will be no malted ambrosia to sell to kings in several years an’ make the fortune o’ this estate, Miss Poultney.”

  “Gin be a quick cash crop, Your Grace.”

  “I understand the reasoning behind it.” They were impatient for Kallin to bring in income. By the time he had left his family’s estates at age thirteen his father’s steward had taught him plenty about the patience required to husband the land. At sea those lessons in patience had served him well.

  The problem was that his estate was in the hands of children. But he had been a child when he had achieved the rank of officer in His Majesty’s Blue. And he’d been given the charge of much more than whiskey barrels and sheep.

  Yet there was no denying that the women of Kallin were already performing miracles.

  “Where is Miss Cromwell?”

  “In the distillery, hiding behind the chemistry table.”

  He lifted a brow.

  Maggie’s dimples reappeared. “Pacing.”

  “Tell her I will speak with her when I’ve finished patching up the roof. Tomorrow.”

  “’Tis fixing to snow.”

  “Aye.” He would have to make quick work of the repairs. Roofs and ice did not mix well, and these women did not need a man with a broken back laid up in this house all winter. Even when he was here briefly, as now, they barely tolerated him. “Now off with you, lass. An’ no more climbing up trellis ladders, do you hear me? No’ till after the wee one comes.”

  He should start searching for a medical man—a female medical man, if one could be found. As yet only three women had sought sanctuary at Kallin while with child. But more could come.

  “Lass.”

  Maggie paused and turned curious eyes up at him.

  “There are men ap
lenty in this countryside looking for work.” Veterans, traveling laborers, boys who had watched their fathers march off to fight Napoleon who, now grown to manhood, had no war or other prospects. And Kallin needed workers.

  Maggie said nothing, which for her was the wrong kind of miraculous occurrence.

  “No?” he prodded.

  “You’d best be asking Cassie, Your Grace.”

  “She would say no, wouldn’t she?”

  Maggie nodded.

  “All right. Be gone.”

  Kallin’s footman came forward propelling herself now with a shillelagh tucked beneath her arm.

  Gabriel recognized the walking stick. Seamus Boyle, Theia’s surgeon during the three years Gabriel had commanded the frigate, had given him the shillelagh as a gift for his premature departure from the navy, a jest about his youth upon retirement.

  Now, there was a medical man he wouldn’t welcome within leagues of Kallin, an exceptional sawbones but a philanderer of the worst sort. Gabriel had gone to that hospital in Kingston the first few times simply to make certain Boyle was not propositioning the nurses and female patients.

  No. That was a lie. One of the old lies he’d told himself for five years.

  He had gone to that hospital for the girl. Again and again.

  Pike proffered the promised message from Mary Tarry.

  “’Tis a fine crutch, Pike.”

  “I found it in the attic.”

  “Before the floor caved in, I guess. Serendipitously.”

  Her lips remained a line.

  “If you have any needs from Inveraray,” he said, “add them to the shopping list Miss Finn is writing up—without, apparently, any ink.”

  “We make do,” she said shortly.

  “Aye. I know, lass,” he said.

  “If you don’t like me using this stick, I’ll find another in the woods.”

  “’Tis yours, Pike,” he said, leaving off the title, as she had asked him when they had first met. He ignored the instruction whenever others were near. But in private he honored it, though he had no idea why she had made it. Every one of the residents of Kallin had secrets.