The Most Dangerous Duke in London

by Madeline Hunter

  He swallowed the impulse to tell him to get on with it and suffered the final efforts. Finally done, he took his leave and went below to the morning room.

  No one else was there. He ate some breakfast, then asked the attending footman if Lady Clara had come down yet.

  “She arrived some time ago, Your Grace. Almost an hour, I would say. She broke her fast, then went outside.”

  How like Clara to decide to tour the garden on her own. He went out to the terrace and looked for her.

  He could not see her. He peered, waiting for her to emerge from behind a shrubbery or one of the gentle swells of the landscape. Finally a movement caught his eye up on the little hill at the back. Clara stood between two trees on its crest, looking down from that prospect. She did not seem to see him. While he watched, she turned and disappeared.

  She had descended the other side. The gardens ended there. At least the formal ones did. Nothing much could be found where she headed, except a little wilderness.

  He waited for her to realize that and reappear. Only she didn’t.

  Cursing her stubbornness, he set off after her. Had he not told her to wait for him? Had he not commanded that she stay in the garden? He strode on. His rancor grew more than it had a right to, but he could not help it. He did not want her straying into that damned wilderness. He sure as hell did not want to have to go in after her.

  At the top of the low hill he looked down on the gentle slope toward the trees and brush. This rustic patch was no more than a quarter mile square, but it lacked many clear paths. He could navigate it blindfolded, since he had played here as a boy. A stranger, however, could get turned around.

  Cursing again, and thinking that instead of caressing her round, pretty bottom he should have better smacked it less playfully, he went down the slope and entered the trees. He paused to spy for that hydrangea-hued dress she was wearing. When he did not see her, he called her name.

  “I am over here,” she called back. “By a little pool.”

  She would have found her way there. Hell and damnation.

  * * *

  Clara watched the water bubble at one end of the pool. It must be a spring. She rested on her big rock and admired the little clearing. She thought it one of the loveliest places she had seen in years.

  She heard Stratton coming. He thrashed closer while she debated removing her shoes and sticking her feet in the water. Then he was there with her. She felt him to her left while those bubbles fascinated her.

  “Isn’t this beautiful?” she asked. “So peaceful and serene. It must be perfect in summer.”

  “Come with me, Clara.”

  His tone startled her. She looked over. He stood there, a much different man than she had seen the last few days. Dark. Hard. He reminded her of how he had been at their first meeting, when he was angry that she had cut him.

  She could not imagine why he was angry now. “Why are you in such a bad humor?”

  He did not look directly at her, but more to that pool. “I told you not to leave the garden if you ventured out on your own. You might have gotten lost.”

  She wanted to laugh. “There is a rough path that brought me here. I think I would have found my way back.”

  “All the same, I told you not to do it. Now I have told you to come away with me, and you have disobeyed that as well.”

  “You can hardly be surprised. You already knew I am not much given to obeying commands, especially ones that are not rational.”

  He abruptly looked at her then. No, not at her. At the boulder on which she sat. His gaze locked on it. He said nothing. While she watched, something else emerged in him and mixed with his anger. It did not replace it. If anything, it made it worse. She could not ignore the change in him, however. His eyes no longer blazed only with fury. They also deepened with sorrow.

  She looked down on her boulder, then back at his concentration on it. In the next terrible moment, she thought she knew what had changed him so, and what he saw in his mind while he stared.

  She hopped off the rock. “Yes, let us leave. Thank you for finding me. I may have become lost despite my belief I never would.”

  She walked past him to the edge of the clearing and the start of that path. He remained where he was, far from her in his mind.

  She walked back and embraced him, for what little good that would do. That brought his gaze down on her. Her heart twisted at the pain she saw in him. She took his arm with a smile, as if she had not noticed. She urged him out of the clearing.

  They walked back to the house in silence. She dared not speak. She had intruded on something private in that clearing that she had no right to see. She wondered if he would ever forgive her for that.

  * * *

  The road from Epsom to the racetrack was only about a mile long, but Clara concluded they could have walked and arrived in half the time it took her carriage.

  She had traveled back to the town to rejoin with Althea. The only good thing about the slow journey amid hundreds of other vehicles was her confidence that many eyes saw her with her friend on this Thursday morning.

  People of all stations jammed the road. From the finest coaches to the most humble carts, all aimed for the race that would take mere minutes to complete. She looked out her window and realized walking would not have been a good idea at all. Those who used feet instead of wheels had been forced off the road completely and trod in the wet fields and grass alongside.

  “I do not mind helping you disguise your true whereabouts, Clara,” Althea said. “I think that it means I get to hear whether your tryst is going well, though.”

  “It went very well. At least until this morning after breakfast.”

  “Did you argue?”

  “We barely spoke at all before I left.” She told Althea about her stroll in the woods and finding that pool and rock. “His anger made no sense, until I realized where I was. I think that his father did it there. Shot himself.”

  “Oh, dear. No wonder he did not want you wandering off on your own.”

  “I managed to wander exactly where he did not choose to wander himself. I think it evoked memories that remained in him until my carriage rolled away.”

  She would never forget that look in his eyes in the clearing. Vivid anger and that deeper, soulful sorrow. Her heart knew that grief and recognized it in him. How much worse to have lost a parent the way he had.

  “Are we still going to join him in the stand, as he planned?” Althea said.

  “I suppose we will find out soon. He said a footman would come for us when we walked down below. If none does, or it is claimed we were not seen . . .”

  “We will still see the race, just with a less advantageous prospect.”

  Clara did not have the heart to tell Althea that seeing the race, about which she had been so excited since Stratton proposed this outing, no longer mattered very much. A sick worry had lodged below her heart. After being so close last night, Stratton’s distance this morning unnerved her. Cold formality tinged every word he said. It had been as if they had shared those intimacies in a different world.

  Perhaps they had, and entering that clearing had brought him back to earth.

  The carriage had not moved in some minutes. Now Mr. Brady opened the door. “We will get no closer.” He set down the steps and handed them out. He pointed to the end of a fence along the road. “I’ll be right here when you need me. Look for that last post and I’ll be standing nearby, no matter where the equipage ends up. I’d not dally much after the race if you want to reach Epsom before nightfall.”

  Clara thanked him, then she and Althea made their way through the tangle of other carriages and the streams of people.

  “I don’t see how anyone will see anything,” Althea said.

  “It appears that they are spreading out near the racecourse. It is over a mile run, so better views will be had away from the finish.”

  Of course, they needed to go to where the race would finish, so that did not help them much. Final
ly, after considerable dodging and weaving, they found themselves below the large stand where the royal family watched in comfort from on high.

  That grandstand was the only permanent building, but other stands set up temporarily flanked it. A few large tents in turn surrounded them.

  Clara forced herself not to look up at those stands. One belonged to Brentworth, who had a horse running. It would be his footman who came to invite them up, if anyone did at all.

  “Do not look so glum,” Althea said. “I am sure that you have put more weight on his mood this morning than is warranted. Should the worst happen, you and I will enjoy the day, and you will stay with me in that very nice house tonight. It is so charming that I am becoming spoiled. I am sure he had to let it for more than two days. Perhaps you and I will stay there for a week before going back.”

  Clara hooked her arm through Althea’s. “That sounds heavenly. We can spend the time plotting out the next three issues of the journal between visits to the spa for long soaks.”

  They found a spot where they might see something other than men’s top hats and ladies’ bonnets. No sooner had they elbowed their way there than a liveried footman approached to inform them that the Duke of Brentworth requested their company in his stand.

  “See,” Althea said while they followed the footman back through the throng.

  Clara thought she would not see anything until she looked in Stratton’s eyes again.

  Chapter Nineteen

  “We should put forth a bill to have the road from London improved,” Langford said. He stood beside Adam while they gazed out over the crowd to the ground that the horses would run. On Langford’s other side stood the fashionable and lovely Mrs. Harper. From the way she and Langford traded smiles, Adam assumed Mrs. Harper was a new and accommodating mistress.

  Brentworth watched on Adam’s other side. Brentworth had left his mistress back in London. Adam assumed that most of the ton did not even know he had one.

  Others milled in the stand. As the owner of one of the horses, Brentworth had created a celebration here and invited at least twenty guests to join him. At the back of the stand a table set with silver, tableware and fine cloth held enough food to feed fifty.

  Langford and his new lover drifted away to sit on the comfortable chairs provided. They turned their attention solely on each other.

  Brentworth glanced over at Mrs. Harper. “I daresay Langford will be much the poorer before she is done with him.”

  “They both appear euphorically happy, so I doubt he will mind the cost.”

  “Langford has looked like that at least a dozen times in my memory. We are all euphorically happy in the first blush of passion. Except you, apparently. You are brooding, despite your efforts to hide it.”

  “It is passing.” And it was. The effect of seeing that place again had been soul shaking, and much worse than he expected. As he stood there it had all come back. The shock and the grief, and also the rage. He had known all of that waited for him out there. He had avoided returning for a reason.

  “Perhaps when Lady Clara joins us, it will pass completely. Here she comes.”

  “I don’t know how you can see anything in that horde.”

  “I have my servants wear livery so I can spot the gold braid on their tricorner hats. Whenever I think of casting off the antiquated traditions, I think of that gold braid and how handy it is for occasions like this.”

  Adam spotted the hat and the two women behind it. Clara looked up as she started up the stairs. She saw him immediately. Her smile appeared tentative.

  He had behaved badly this morning when he found her at that pool. He had spoken too sharply. He had allowed the past to govern his reaction.

  She had guessed why. He could tell she did from the gentle way she spoke to him and the manner in which she had urged him away from that place.

  He watched her come, her lovely eyes glistening with humor while she laughed at something Althea said. He had been a chaos of dark emotions this morning, but her mere presence had provided what comfort he knew.

  She and Althea entered the stand. He and Brentworth went to them, and Clara introduced her friend. They both thanked him for his kindness in inviting them to watch from this elevated spot.

  Adam lured Clara aside. He could see the signs of her hesitation with him. The deep intimacy of the night seemed far away.

  “Are you displeased that it took so long to find you and bring you here?” he asked.

  “Not at all. With such a crowd it is a wonder the footman managed it.”

  “Then why the tight smile and hooded glances, Clara?”

  She remained silent, subjecting him to a long examination. “I am wondering which Stratton I will be with today. The one from last night, or the one from this morning.”

  “I am always the same man.”

  “Are you? I was a stranger in that house this morning after we returned from the garden. A stranger to you. In turn, you were a stranger to me. I think I know why, and how finding me at that pool affected you badly. However much I sympathize, I did not care for being packed off this morning with less ceremony or kindness than some whore you found at a tavern.” Emotions other than anger colored her little scold.

  “You exaggerate. I was not so cold as that.”

  “I doubt you remember well enough to know. You were thoroughly immersed in your thoughts, and none of them had to do with me.”

  “Of course you were in my thoughts.”

  She cocked her head. “Not in a good way, then.”

  He did not want to have this argument, here of all places. He spoke the words needed to ensure that would not happen. “Then I ask you to forgive me for this morning, Clara. You did not deserve the way I spoke to you when I found you at the pool and the way I then spoke little afterward. My distraction had nothing at all to do with you.”

  Only that was not entirely true. It was all of one piece, wasn’t it? What had happened in that clearing had sent him away from England and brought him back, and she was not totally separate from it even if he tried to tell himself she was.

  She knew that too. He could see it in her eyes.

  “Familiarity, even passion, does not change who we are,” she said.

  It sounded like a condemnation of who he was, and an epitaph for their love affair.

  “Althea has suggested that I stay in Epsom with her tonight. Actually she wants us to take advantage of that house for several nights at least.”

  “You can do that if you choose. However, I hope you do not.”

  From the smile she gave him, he could not tell what she would do. She turned her attention to the grandstand beside them. “If we stroll near that wall ever so casually, do you think I can ogle the royal dukes without being too obvious?”

  “I will introduce you to some of them, so you don’t have to ogle at all.”

  He escorted her over and did so. The royal dukes each had a fine eye for women, and all had known her father. A few appeared surprised to see her in the company of the Duke of Stratton. They chatted for a while and were only interrupted by the shouts from the crowd indicating the race had started. They returned to the front of the stand.

  Clara watched the race with a rapt expression. Brentworth shouted his horse on, and all around them a din of excitement grew. When the horses moved out of view, Clara steadied herself by grasping Adam’s arm and bent out of the stand as far as she could to keep them in view.

  It ended within minutes as the horses charged to the finish. Money began changing hands.

  “Almost,” Adam said to Brentworth, who scowled mightily at the results.

  “That does not save me from this.” He felt in his pocket and extracted a stack of banknotes. Peeling off a hundred, he handed it over to a waiting Langford.

  “You bet against his horse but ate his food and enjoyed his hospitality?” Clara asked.

  “I knew Moses would win. I have been watching him for a year. I even tried to buy him from the Duke of York.” Langfo
rd grinned down at the banknotes. “It is much like finding money lying on the street. It begs to be wasted on decadent behavior.”

  “You will think of something appropriate,” Brentworth said.

  Langford looked over his shoulder at the lovely Mrs. Harper. “I think I will at that.”

  Down below, the crowd shifted like a huge animal coming to life. It grew tentacles as people walked away in streams. There would be entertainments on the field for those looking to make a day of it, but the main performance had ended.

  Still flushed with excitement, Clara peered around the stand. “Ah, there she is.” She waved to her friend, who sat near the rear, talking with a woman.

  Althea excused herself and came to join them. “Should we look for Mr. Brady?” she asked Clara.

  “I suppose we should. I will take my leave of Brentworth.” She walked away.

  Althea remained. Short, fine and blond, she smiled serenely. “I should explain something, Your Grace.”

  “What is that?”

  “She has trusted you with little reason to do so and much reason not to. If you misuse her in any way, if you bring hurt and humiliation down on her, you will answer to me.”

  Never had a person so small threatened him so mightily. He would have laughed except she meant it. For all her smiles, she was dead serious.

  “I will not do that.”

  Nodding, she walked over to join Clara. He watched until they both left.

  * * *

  In the stand, the ladies sat to dine at the table. The gentlemen gambled at a makeshift bar set up in front. One of the footmen dealt the cards for vingt-et-un.

  “This is far better than fighting one’s way through all those carriages,” Langford said while he eyed his cards.

  “I am glad to oblige. Also, the longer you stay, the more certain I am to win back that hundred,” Brentworth said.

  “We are not playing each other, but the bank.”

  “And who do you think provided the bank?” Adam asked.