The Most Dangerous Duke in London

by Madeline Hunter

  She pivoted and strode out of the drawing room and down the stairs. She retrieved her package from the footman and headed outside. She sensed the duke on her heels the entire way.

  Her hackney coach waited behind the duke’s carriage.

  He gazed hard at that hackney. “Why are you not using the family’s equipage?”

  “I chose not to.” She descended the stone steps and aimed for her coach.

  He walked alongside her. “You are going to a secret assignation, I assume. One that you prefer the family servants not know about. There is no other explanation for using a hackney instead of a family carriage.”

  She truly wanted to hit him with her package for saying that within hearing of the footman waiting to hand her into the coach.

  She settled herself on the seat while the footman closed the door. The duke rested his forearm on the window’s edge and waited while the servant walked away.

  “I will not demand an explanation now,” he said. “However, if you are going to meet a man, that liaison must end immediately, now that we are engaged.”

  She stuck her face to the window. “We. Are. Not. Engaged.” She was almost yelling by the end of it, but the coach had rolled away by then, and only the air heard her.

  * * *

  A half hour later Clara stood at a library’s desk in a house on Bedford Square. Spread out on the desk were stacks of papers and one blank sheet.

  “I think we have enough for another issue of Parnassus, Althea,” she said. “We can talk to the pressmen this afternoon about the schedule.”

  Althea bent her blond head over the stacks. She fingered one very small one. It consisted of the poems that their journal would publish. “You have included Mrs. Clark’s sonnet, I see. I am glad.”

  Clara served as the anonymous publisher and benefactor of Parnassus. She had conceived the journal two years ago and begun building toward it at once. The first two issues had been fledgling efforts, but they garnered enough subscriptions to encourage her. Now, with her legacy, she could afford to attempt a regular schedule of publication.

  Modeled on men’s journals, Parnassus contained political news as well as reviews of theater performances and travel memoirs. She liked to fill it with information and facts but allowed a few sharp thinkers like Althea to write essays. Feminine interests were hardly ignored. Clara loved fashion herself, and Parnassus included a column devoted to it.

  The journal’s most distinctive feature was the mixture of writers. A viscountess and a baroness sometimes contributed, although the former used a pen name. However, Mrs. Clark was the widow of a merchant who now ran a millinery shop. Mrs. Clark had a gift for poetry that rang clear and honest and made no attempt to copy any other poet on earth.

  Ladies of the ton, women of the City, mothers, sisters, and, yes, even bluestockings had subscribed. The secrecy of the project might have contributed to its success, she knew. The who and the where of Parnassus remained a tantalizing mystery.

  Right now the where consisted of this house Clara had bought with her legacy, three months after her father’s death. Memories of him had filled her when she signed the deeds, along with profound gratitude that he had arranged for her to have her own property and substantial income and not be beholden to Theo in any way. Theirs had been a rare bond. In truth, he had treated her like a son. He had taught her to ride and shoot and even said once that he regretted she could not inherit his estate and title. Theo would never forgive her for how she received the best of their father’s love, she supposed.

  She had mourned him deeply. Totally. The grief had undone her as nothing else ever had. She drowned in it to where she did not recognize herself. Finally, one day, she began to fight her way to the surface.

  Parnassus had been her lifeline. Purchasing this house was her first clear step forward in her life. The journal’s needs forced her to visit London periodically too. Until now those visits had been brief but now, at six months after his passing, she finally had resumed lengthier ones.

  “The fashion article has not yet come in from Lady Grace,” Althea mentioned.

  Lady Grace Bidwell was the most recent addition to the contributors. The sister of an earl, she had never married. Clara felt a natural affinity for her, and Lady Grace had a clear eye when it came to fashion.

  “I will write her a reminder, but not wait forever.” Clara spoke with decisive firmness of the sort she had not long ago used on the Duke of Stratton, to little avail. That encounter kept invading her mind, and it soured her humor whenever it did. The more she thought about that proposal, the more outraged she became.

  Althea turned her pretty blue eyes on Clara. A head shorter than Clara, and delicately boned, Althea had a presence that sometimes made Clara feel monstrous in comparison. Not that she was very tall herself, or stout. It was just that Althea was so exquisitely small. The widow of Captain Galbreath, an army officer, Althea lived with her brother, Sir Jonathan Polwarth, a baronet, and his wife. Althea had the life of a dependent relative now, the sort Clara’s father had saved her from with that legacy.

  “You are out of temper today,” Althea said. “Is your brother annoying you again? Insisting you come back down to the country?”

  “It is not that. Not entirely.” Clara was not given to confidences, but she did want to share some of the recent, strange occurrences in her life. Not the proposal. No one would ever learn about that. “Both Theo and my grandmother have gotten the idea in their heads to end a long feud our family has had with that of the Duke of Stratton.”

  “I would think that is a good thing. Such long wars have little benefit.”

  “Grandmother never does things simply because they are good things, Althea. She has a mind like a poacher’s trap, and her strategies would have put Napoleon to shame. She is determined, however, and Theo is as well. They even received him. My father always swore that Stratton would never darken his doorstep, but there he was.”

  Althea began stacking the articles, sliding clean sheets between each one as she did. “On your doorstep here in town, at Gifford House? I have heard he came up recently.”

  “Did you now?” It seemed a good way to avoid admitting he had indeed darkened her family’s doorway here in town.

  “There has been some talk about him. You would not have heard it because you were sequestered at Hickory Grange for so long after your father passed, and were not here when he returned from France.”

  Althea carried the big stack of papers over to another table and proceeded to wrap the whole thing in linen. Clara strolled in her wake.

  “What sort of talk?”

  Althea tied string around the thick package, finishing with a rustic bow. “Vague talk. The kind where you hear bits of things when you come upon people, but they stop talking once you are seen. Serious talk, from the looks of the dour faces. Whispered, secret talk. Mostly among those of our parents’ generation.”

  “Surely those bits must have given you some idea of why he has garnered that kind of attention.”

  Althea shrugged. “I believe I heard my brother refer to him as dangerous. Something about duels in France.”

  “I heard about the duels. Theo told me. I think he fears if he does not sue for peace, Stratton will challenge him. What nonsense.”

  “I also interfered with some talk about him in a drawing room after a small dinner party. The hostess could not contain herself despite ending mid-sentence. She mouthed a final word of whatever she had been saying to her confidante.”

  “What word was that?”

  “I am quite sure it was the word revenge. Now, if we are going to speak with the pressmen today, we should be on our way before it gets too late.”

  They donned their pelisses and bonnets. Clara envied Althea her celadon green and lemon yellow ensemble. She did not resent wearing mourning clothes. She would wear them forever if that would honor her father. She did miss ensembles with more color and style, however, and sometimes plotted incredible excesses at the shops once s
he could dress fashionably again.

  With the manuscripts firmly tucked in her arms, Clara joined Althea while they walked to a hackney stand around the corner from the square. Her nose all but itched from the tantalizing information Althea had just fed her. Stratton might be high-handed, annoying, and arrogant, but he had just become interesting too, especially to the publisher of a journal.

  Revenge? About what? It seemed a few in London knew, but it was not gossip for general consumption.

  Once in the hackney and on their way to the printer’s, Clara spoke her thoughts. “I find all of this provocative, Althea. If Stratton is bent on revenge, one wonders why and against whom. He is no ordinary man, after all. He is a duke. Who could have wronged a duke so badly that he seeks revenge? And to be considered dangerous . . . There is something very curious about all of this.”

  “I suppose I could ask a few questions, to see if I can gather more than bits.”

  “I will as well. Let us see what we can learn about this man. There may be a story for Parnassus in it.”

  She neglected to mention that more information might enable her to end Stratton’s inexplicable and discourteous courtship too.

  Chapter Four

  Dust covered him. It rose from the pages when he turned them and settled on his coats like iron shavings on a magnet.

  Adam forged on, reading the old newspapers, more interested in what was not reported than what was. An allusion here, an offhanded reference there, a name mentioned in passing—such were the pieces of evidence he sought, because he already knew there would be no outright discussion of the events he investigated.

  He had come to the Times last, after turning other pages at the offices of other papers and journals. They all kept examples of their old publications somewhere. It might be in an airy library or a damp cellar, but with time and patience he had read every word published about the Duke of Stratton in the few years up to and through his father’s death.

  The death notices were the most useless, although a few in less respectable journals vaguely implied it might have been a suicide. The Times would never tread in that direction on a duke, so its notice extolled his father’s accomplishments and taste. Reading it, one would never guess at the extreme provocations that had made a man take his own life.

  Clues regarding the details and sources of those provocations were what he now sought. It had all been a very secretive business, so the bits he uncovered were all between the lines. No publisher would ever openly air those rumors. No man would speak about it except behind closed doors in the lowest voice.

  And yet, words had been spoken, and they took to the air like pollen, so while no one made accusations, all had been known by the people in government who mattered.

  He closed the tome of bound copies of the Times. He had hardly found the direct evidence he wanted, but he also found nothing to convince him he was wrong in his beliefs about how the tragedy had played out.

  At the highest reaches of the government, questions had been raised about his father’s loyalty. Things had been said to him by ministers and other lords. Someone had been collecting evidence. It went on a while, growing, perhaps a year or so. Isolated and friendless as the hounds closed in, he had taken his life so he might not face the kind of disgrace that stained a family’s name for generations.

  The final act and its reason were the only parts not under question, however.

  I think Marwood is behind it all. That was what his father had written on the only note he left. Did he have proof of that? If so, he did not leave anything to indicate it. Was it an irrational conclusion, born of his state of mind and the long enmity between the families? Adam did not know. If his father thought Marwood was behind it all, however, then Marwood was at the top of Adam’s list of men to investigate.

  He left the Times building and made his way to his carriage. Deep in thought, he almost did not notice the woman across the street until something familiar about her pulled him out of his reverie.

  She walked with a determined stride, as if on an important mission. He noticed the brilliance of her eyes, which implied so much about her. Intelligence. Spirit. Passion. Trouble. He did not mind the last quality. One rarely found the first three in a woman without the fourth. His time with her thus far had been brief, but none of it had been dull.

  Although her reddish chestnut hair, visible as a frame to her face beneath the brim of her bonnet, looked stunning against the black of her ensemble, he suddenly wondered what she would look like wearing soft, pale green.

  He pictured her thus while he crossed the street and approached her. As soon as she saw him, her expression fell. He wanted to laugh at the way she struggled to maintain a composure fitting for an earl’s daughter. He imagined the impolite thoughts jumping into her mind.

  “Lady Clara. What an unexpected delight to see you today.”

  “Yes. Delightful.” She angled her head to the left, eyeing the path to freedom. “It is a day of errands for me.”

  “For me as well, although I am well done. What errand brings you here?”

  She did not reply at once. He had asked an awkward question, it appeared.

  “I am not on an errand here. I am simply walking down this street after attending to an errand elsewhere.” She stepped to his side and scrutinized him with a frown. “Were you in an attic? You are covered in dust.” Her hand went out and she brushed at his sleeve, producing a small cloud of dust.

  He thought her gesture charming. “My valet will groan when he sees it.”

  “Hold still.” Again her hand swept his coat. More clouds rose. She brushed him off like he was a child who had fallen in the dirt. Not that gently, however. Her hand slapped at his shoulders and chest.

  “There. You are almost presentable. Now, I must be on my way.”

  “Will you be so ungenerous with your company? I have not seen you in almost two weeks. It was my fault, I know. I have not called on you. Due to all those errands, you see.”

  “Has it been that long? I had not noticed. In fact, I did not expect you to call at all. There was no reason to.”

  “We both know that is not true. However, here we are now. At least allow me to accompany you safely back to your carriage.”

  “That will not be necessary. I will be quite safe on my own.”

  “Please. I insist.”

  She stood silently, looking much like a little girl caught doing something naughty.

  “Do you have your carriage here?” he asked.

  “No.” The answer came after a long pause. She bit her lower lip.

  “A hackney again?” He glanced up and down the street. “Does he live near here? Your friend, I mean.”

  “There is no friend. Not the way you insinuate.”

  “Of course not.”

  “I am serious.”

  “Please understand that I am not shocked. I am half French, after all. I do not mind. I merely request that you end it.” He lied smoothly. He did mind. Any man would once he set his sights on a woman.

  “A request, is it?”

  “I am being polite. A request for now. Eventually, of course, it will have to be a command.”

  Her eyes blazed. Hell, she was exciting when she was angry. Just as well, since he expected she would be angry often.

  “You are deliberately provoking me, I think,” she said.

  “I promise to stop if you agree to a short visit to the park. We will keep the landau open so you will not worry about me imposing. Then I will bring you home.”

  “And if I refuse your offer?”

  “I will probably follow you around, asking indiscreet questions about your mysterious doings in this area of town.”

  She heaved a sigh of exasperation. She removed a pocket watch from her reticule. “There will be hardly anyone at Hyde Park at this hour. Let’s take a turn there, if we must. A very short visit, please. I have an appointment this afternoon.”

  “More mysterious doings? How intriguing you are.” He offered h
is arm. She did not take it. Together they walked to his carriage.

  * * *

  The Duke of Stratton was becoming a serious inconvenience. Part of the joy of being an older woman known to be uninterested in marriage was that people tended not to notice what she did. Clara had enjoyed that freedom even before her father’s death and now did so even more because she occupied Gifford House alone.

  Stratton’s curiosity about her complicated that. Now here she was, sitting in his carriage when she should have been visiting the decorator she had hired to make some changes at her house on Bedford Square. Since no one knew about the house, she could hardly have the duke trailing her there.

  She did not care for how he maneuvered her into spending this time with him. She resented that he had won a little contest.

  “Do you prefer town? You spend a good deal of time here,” he said once they were seated across from each other and the coachman had opened the carriage to the air.

  From anyone else she would think it small talk. From this man, she heard an intrusive question. “I like both town and the country. I spend time in both places. However, after all the months at Hickory Grange after my father’s funeral, it was time to see some friends here and dip one foot into society again.” Even as she said it, she worried that she gave him too much information.

  “Your bluestocking friends?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you do when you are not talking letters with them?”

  “If I told you, I would no longer be intriguing and mysterious.”

  It was a mistake to say that. She knew it as soon as she said it. His dark eyes settled on her, amused and too confident that he saw more than she wanted. That gaze unsettled her. She found it stark, almost naked, in its demand for her attention. It implied intimacies of the spirit that she did not want to have or acknowledge.

  She hurried to brush her own provocation aside. “You will find my interests very boring and feminine. I visit drapers and feast my eyes on the fabrics I cannot wear now. I stroll through warehouses and covet silk cords and laces.”