At the Duke's Wedding (A romance anthology)

by Caroline Linden

  “In all that extra time you have between TAing, grading, graduate student union organizing, and finishing your dissertation?”

  “And the article for the American Historical Review.”

  Cyndi tossed the button back in the box. “I thought you already turned that in.”

  “Revisions. The editor wants me to include a detail that I haven’t figured out yet. But I will.” Angela leaned against the bookshelf and squeezed her sore eyes shut. All the coffee in the world couldn’t make up for a week without sleep. But she wouldn’t get a job after graduation by dreaming away the nights. And her empty bed didn’t mind. It never did. Never had.

  Lately, though, she hadn’t even been sleeping when she did go to bed. The Michigan winter was wind-chill five below but she was sizzling beneath her skin.

  Just excitement over the article, probably. “I’m going to nail it, Cyndi. I’m going to discover the clue no scholar ever has. I’m going to finally break open the biggest mystery in the history of British insurance fraud ever.”

  “Wow, Ange. That’s super duper.” Cyndi whistled low.

  “Come on,” Angela laughed. “It’s a big deal. I’ll be short-listed for every job I apply to and I’ll have a subject for my next book.”

  “Next book? The first one isn’t even finished yet. You haven’t even graduated.”

  “I will.” Despite her Evil Advisor who’d made her write a chapter that her dissertation didn’t even need—thereby forcing her to live in graduate-student poverty for another year. She’d had good interviews at the American Historical Association meeting last week. One of the interview committees had flipped over her discovery of Arnaud Chappelle’s memoir. If she could just find in that memoir the clue to why Chappelle had revealed the crimes of a particular Englishman, Sir Richard Howell, she’d be golden.

  “And of course I’ve got my second book planned already. It’s one of the first questions they ask in interviews,” she said, running her fingertips along the bindings of the graphic novels. A little sizzle zinged through her. “Maybe my third book will be on how American authors are rewriting the history of Britain to include zombies and vampires. I really should read these.”

  Cyndi shook her head. “It’s not like you’re in American Culture or even Literature. You’re a historian, for Chrissake. You don’t have to read this crap.” She gestured dismissively at the display.

  “Yeah, but this—” Angela pulled the zombie graphic novel from the shelf again and flipped through it. “—this is what a lot of my students first think of when I mention Jane Austen. Or the Brontës. Or Byron. Keats. Nelson. Wellington. King George. Queen Victoria. You know, all of nineteenth-century British history. I need to inform myself.”

  “You’re way too conscientious. If you’re going to spend time doing anything other than studying it should be going out, relaxing, dancing, having a drink.” Cyndi yanked the novel away and shoved it in the shelf, smashing a thin comic book back behind it.

  “Cynd.” Angela reached for the ruined comic book in the crevice. “Have a little respect for the printed word.”

  “There aren’t enough words in there to deserve respect.” She gave a saccharine smile to the guy behind the counter. He ignored her.

  Angela pulled out the smushed comic book. It looked like an accordion. “You’re a literature snob.”

  “You’re killing yourself.” Cyndi cocked a pierced brow. “Angela, you need a life.”

  “Okay.” Her tingling fingertips worked the bent edges of the paper. For a cheap comic, it was thick, high-quality stock. “I’ll get right on that, chief.”

  “No. I mean it. You work like a sled dog.”

  “The job market is so tough now, Cynd. It’s what’s expected.”

  “It’s an excuse.”

  She flattened the comic book against the side of the shelf and smoothed it with her palm. “Your point?”

  “You need a man.”

  “Oh my God, I can’t believe people still say that to single women.” The wrinkles wouldn’t straighten. The smashing had permanently damaged it. “You’re a dismal feminist.”

  “I’m post-feminist. Maybe I wasn’t clear enough. Angela, you need to have sex.”

  The clerk’s scruffy head came up.

  Angela blew a drape of hair from in front of her eyes, but it dropped forward again. She tucked it under her wool hat and looked at the clerk. “I’d like to buy this.” She placed the ruined comic book on the counter. “And no, she wasn’t suggesting you.”

  “Why not?” Cyndi said. “He’s cute. Put a clean shirt on him and you wouldn’t even know he works at a comic-book shop.”

  “Cynd.” She pulled money out of the tattered wallet she’d bought in London eight years earlier during her undergraduate study abroad semester—the same day she’d first visited the British National Archives. The first visit of many. She gave a bill to the clerk. “Sorry about her. She just switched medications.”

  He dropped change into her palm. “Hey, I’m available if you change your mind.” He grinned.

  “Good to know. Thanks.” She slid the comic book into her satchel and went to the door. “I’m going home, Cyndi.” She glanced at her friend’s brother still blissfully immersed in his dark, rockin’ universe. “Alone,” she added in a stage whisper. “Without a man with whom I will have sex. Because I am a post-post-modern feminist who makes choices and is happy with them.” Not really the truth. She was ... sizzly. “You, on the other hand, despite your nipple rings, are a relic of the 1950s American suburbs and a pain in my ass. Good night.” She pushed the door open and with a jingle of the bell a blast of frigid air swept in.

  “Angela, I’m just—”

  The door slammed shut. Wind sheered horizontally along State Street, nearly knocking her boots off the icy sidewalk. She secured her satchel on her shoulder, tucked her chin into her collar, and headed up the street.

  Cyndi was a nag and totally indiscreet. But she was right.

  Angela wasn’t satisfied. She was doing well in grad school, and if she kept working her butt off, she’d probably get a job as a horrifyingly overworked junior professor that paid about as much as a hostess at Chucky Cheese. On the other hand, she was intellectually fulfilled.

  But she wasn’t happy. If she needed any proof of that, she could find it in her best friend after five-and-a-half years in Ann Arbor. The university was huge, with an international faculty and graduate students in every discipline under the sun. Yet her closest friend in town was a tattoo artist who moonlighted as a barista at a local café.

  Three months ago she’d let Cyndi give her a tattoo of a golden eagle soaring across her right shoulder. When her mom had dragged her out of school midyear to follow a horse wrangler to Colorado, she’d been ten. One day she’d looked up into that endless sky, seen the eagle, and cried, longing to be that free.

  Her tattoo looked exactly like the way she remembered that eagle.

  No one would ever see it.

  Maybe she’d gotten some weird infection from the tattooing, and the zingy sizzling thing was from that.

  But it wasn’t just that. Something felt wrong. Missing. Not stimulating conversation or invigorating debates. Not friendship. And not a man, though she’d like one of those someday, and sex. But she’d gone without sex for twenty-seven years and she was still alive.

  Something else.

  Honor, maybe. Decency.

  “Try to explain it to me,” Cyndi had said a few days earlier over cups of tea at the café.

  “Okay, take my specialty, the British Empire,” she’d said. “There was nothing decent about it.”

  “Violence, racism, elitism, sexism, colonialism, slavery, war,” Cyndi counted off on her fingers. “Bad stuff. So?”

  “So it’s not like I want to go back to some golden era when people were more honorable and decent than they are now.”

  “It’s a pretty appealing fantasy.”

  “Sure, but it’s historically inaccurate.”
<
br />   “So what do you want?”

  “I want ... I don’t know.” Her fingers had tightened around the cup. “I want that feeling I get when I see some lanky undergrad give old Mr. Grady on the corner a hot meatball sub. You know, that feeling like there’s more good in the world than bad, like you get all filled up with emotion and weep because there’s just so much untapped possibility.”

  Cyndi shook her head. “Ange, you think too much.”

  “Maybe I just know too much about how awful people can be. I mean, look at this guy Arnaud Chappelle I’m working on. He was a Class A slime. Hundreds of people, maybe thousands, died because of his greed, yet he ended up a miserable old parolee anyway.”

  “I don’t think the problem’s that you know too much. I don’t think it’s your head at all,” Cyndi said. “What did Goethe say? ‘All the knowledge I possess everyone else can acquire, but my heart is all my own.’”

  All my own.

  The brick apartment building that was the height of architectural fashion a century ago loomed in the cold before her. She dug her keys out of her pocket, and her gloved fingers fumbled for the building key on the ring. She found it and reached for the lock, then started back.

  A man stood just on the other side of the thick glass door. His dark golden hair was tousled. His eyes were like slate. He looked directly at her and flattened his bare palm against the windowpane.

  Then he was gone.

  Just gone. As if he hadn’t been there at all.

  Angela blinked. She blinked again.

  Still no man.

  Her breaths were fogging up the windowpane. She unlocked the door.

  The entryway was vastly overheated, and empty. She stood still, listening for footsteps on the stairs, but there were none.

  She shook her head. Too much caffeine, obviously. Or maybe too little.

  She pushed her gloves into her pockets, unbuttoned her coat, and opened her mailbox.

  Water bill. Phone bill. Both of which she couldn’t pay. Postcard from her mother in St. Kitts, the make-it-yourself kind with a picture of her on the beach in a bikini, arms around her latest boyfriend, Ron. Or Roy, maybe? It’d been eight months since her mom had last written or called. It could be four boyfriends past Roy by now.

  Cyndi teased her about being the Oldest Virgin in America. If she knew her mother, she’d understand why she’d adamantly taken the opposite path.

  She started up the stairs to the fourth floor.

  Her apartment was underfurnished but cozy. She shed her coat, hat, scarf, and boots, threw her satchel onto the couch, and went to the kitchen. She filled the teakettle in the 1920s sink and set it on the gas burner, then opened her tiny fridge and pulled out a box of leftover Thai chicken and stuck it in her minuscule microwave.

  She liked her place and it was affordable. But Ann Arbor still didn’t feel like home, not even after almost six years of grad school. London had a little bit, but not entirely. Cambridge, Massachusetts, during college definitely hadn’t. Neither had Philadelphia or LA or Louisville or any of the other places her mother had dragged her to, following loser guy after loser guy.

  She ate standing up at the stove. When the kettle whistled she packed the tea infuser with loose-leaf jasmine, then went to the couch, slung her satchel onto the table, and turned it upside down. The accordionized comic book tumbled out with her laptop and files. She pushed it aside and opened her laptop.

  “Okay, Arnaud,” she mumbled, flipping open a thick folder and rummaging through photocopies. “Tell me why you spilled the beans on Sir Richard Howell when you kept your mouth shut ‘til the day you died about everybody else who did dirty dealings with you. I know you want to, you scoundrel.” She transcribed a line from the diary she’d photocopied at a private archive in Dorset six months ago, translating from Arnaud’s native French as she typed. She’d already read it through, but she’d missed something. She must have. Her sizzling blood told her she was on the edge of a discovery. “Or should I say, you coquin?” She grinned. “Or maybe I should just stop talking out loud to a guy who’s been dead for two centuries.”

  The twining steam from her teacup dissipated. She reached for the cup, and her eyes strayed to the comic book on the edge of the table. The bent cover caught the lamplight. In scrolling script resonant of Parliamentary deeds, the title read Lady Angela.

  “Well, what do you know?” she mumbled.

  There was no author name on the book, only the title. The cover was plain, the calligraphy original. She ran her fingertips over the lettering to feel the subtle texture of the ink. It didn’t just look historical; it felt authentic, the sort of fine-quality stock she’d seen plenty of in English archives.

  She set down her teacup and opened the book.

  The art was rough, the style suggesting sketches swiftly drawn, all done in black ink on off-white matte paper. There were no dialogue bubbles, only captions every few frames. Like Arnaud Chappelle’s two-hundred-year-old diary, it seemed to be a memoir narrative.

  In the simplest terms, this one recounted the birth, youth, and young manhood of a guy with light hair wearing garments that pointed to the early nineteenth century—a lacy gown at birth, short pants as a boy, then tail coat and cravat and breeches. As comic book protagonists went he was pretty typical: chiseled features, impossibly broad shoulders, narrow hips, long legs with lots of cut muscles to which the breeches inaccurately clung. Nineteenth-century English stockinette could stretch pretty well, but it wasn’t Lycra.

  He was a sportsman. In one frame he played cricket, in another he was hunting, in another boxing, in another rowing. A whole page was given over to a carriage race that resulted in him sprawled on his back in the road with an awful grimace on his face.

  Angela leaned in closer.

  His face ... it looked like ...

  She clamped her eyes shut. She really needed sleep. Or a whole lot more caffeine.

  She stood up and went to the kitchen with her cup to refresh her tea, grabbing up her scarf and wrapping it around her neck as she returned to the couch. Her turn-of-the-century apartment was poetic with its arched windows and theater-tiled bathroom, but the quaint old radiators were useless against the Michigan winter. Then again, she always felt cold these days, as if winter had penetrated her bone marrow but summer wasn’t long or hot enough to heat it back up before fall came again.

  Except for the sizzle lately. The deep sizzle.

  She settled again before her laptop, but her fingers strayed to the comic book. Pretending she wasn’t curious, she casually flipped the page.

  Drawn in a completely different style with such exquisite grace and delicacy that even in black and white they seemed alive were two images: on the left, a trio of summer flowers indentified in the caption as Oxeye Daisy, Cornflower, and Poppy; and on the right, a majestic bird with lethal talons. A golden eagle.

  A little shiver ran across her shoulders, directly through her tattoo.

  She turned to the final page. It was a close-up of the man’s back. His shoulders brushed either side of the frame and he’d turned his head to look around at the reader. His mouth was rendered as a sensuous curve and his eyes were beautiful: warm and dark and sparkling with confidence.

  Then he winked.

  At her.

  Tea leaped in tiny splashes from the cup in her shaking hand. She’d had some pretty weird dreams because of exhaustion, but she’d never before hallucinated.

  Her gaze dropped to the caption. It was three words: ANGELA, COME BACK.

  Chapter Two

  The picture didn’t wink at Angela again, though she stared at it until she fell asleep and again the following morning while coffee brewed. Sleep deprivation did scary things to the brain, which of course was why torturers used it.

  She packed up her laptop and files and left Lady Angela on the kitchen counter.

  Cyndi had texted her overnight: “Sorry. U have to b who u r, and I’m ok w that.”

  Angela typed with her thumb, “
Ur a pain but I <3 u” and dropped the phone into her coat pocket.

  The sky was frigid blue, with wispy clouds that made the sun look gray: a typical January morning. Her blood was zinging more than usual from all the coffee. She started toward campus, then halted and retraced her steps along the salty-white sidewalk to her car.

  In a miraculous event greater even than a comic book hero winking at her, her ancient Toyota started on the first try. She pulled onto State Street and headed north.

  It didn’t take her many minutes to get to the dam over the Grand River. Leaving her satchel in the car, she walked up the path from the gravel lot toward the river, taking deep breaths of the freezing air. She coughed, and clouds of smoke haloed her.

  She reached the dam and headed toward the bench closest to the structure. The path hadn’t been well cleared, and black ice crossed it in strips as she picked her way along. But sitting on that bench and listening to the winter birds and watching the river never failed to clear her head.

  Today she needed head-clearing in a big way.

  It wasn’t until she slipped that she realized how close she’d veered toward the bank. The slope from the bench was shallow, but ice had formed in a slick ramp.

  She fell, scrabbling at the ground for purchase, her gloves useless as she slid into the water. It wasn’t even dramatic, the absurd thought occurred to her as she sank, her peacoat and boots like anchors. She’d always figured drowning would be dramatic.

  Her lungs gave out.

  She’d figured wrong.

  o0o

  “Treason?” Trenton Cambridge Ascot, Viscount Everett, swung around to his father.

  The Earl of Ware’s face was drawn as he stared out the window at the game of cricket on the Duke of Wessex’s lawn. “And fraud.”

  Trent scowled. “What’s a little fraud when you’re already hanged for treason?”

  “At least it will be with a silken rope.” The earl turned his attention from the men cavorting about with bats and balls and wickets. “The peerage still enjoys a few privileges.”

  “Not including immunity from blackmail, apparently.” Trent raked his hand through his hair. “Good God, Father, how did this come about?”