Jilting the Duke

by Rachael Miles

  * * *

  Returning to the library some time later, she turned to Tom’s fair copy. Placing the pages next to the proofs, she began to compare.

  Soon it became clear that Mr. Murray did not have a malicious printer: the proofs were set exactly as Tom’s fair copy had indicated they should be, errors and all. She could not imagine why Tom would have made such mistakes. But perhaps as she made the corrections, Tom’s intentions would become clear.

  That left only one task: to recreate the book she and Tom had worked on in Italy, using the messy manuscript pages she’d recently had bound. It would take hours, but it had to be done.

  * * *

  She was only one-hundred pages from the end when Ian’s tutor, Mr. Grange, tapped on the library door. A slight man in fashionable clothes, Mr. Grange was a contradiction, self-important in his speech but self-effacing in his carriage.

  “Her ladyship summoned me to an audience.” Grange stood in the doorway, looking at his shoes.

  “Please come in and sit. I have a favor to propose.” She motioned to the chairs before the fireplace. The tutor flipped the tails of his coat over the sides of the chair, and sat between them as precisely as if he had studied his movements in a mirror.

  Sophia chose the chair opposite him. “My brother has asked me to host a dinner for his political associates next Thursday. My sister-in-law in Kensington has invited Ian to visit her son Nate for the evening of and the day after the party. I was hoping you might be free to take Ian to his aunt’s house and remain at her home supervising Ian and his cousin. In all, two days.”

  “I typically teach other boys when I’m not with his lordship. My days are quite full.” Grange crossed his legs, one ankle to the other knee, his back perfectly erect. His eyes focused on a point somewhere around the tips of his toes.

  “I understand that you might not be able to alter your other obligations.”

  “It will be difficult; my services are highly valued by my patrons across Mayfair. I would not wish to give preference to one child over the others.” Never looking up, Grange rubbed a smudge on his shoe with his thumb until it disappeared.

  Sophia noticed a hole in the shoe’s sole. She looked away.

  “Of course, Mr. Grange, I understand that might be awkward. But if you were able to open your schedule, my sister-in-law and I would recompense you for the loss of the other income, and I would provide a bonus for the additional time spent accompanying Ian to and from her home.”

  “Precisely what services would her ladyship expect? I am not adequate to the task of playing nursemaid.” Grange took a small notebook and stub pencil from his upper coat pocket and began to make small unreadable notations in a crabbed hand.

  “Ian will have Sally for his nurse. He would need his lessons, but perhaps an excursion in the countryside, looking for botanical or mineral specimens, would offer a diversion from his more traditional studies. His cousin might choose to accompany you . . . for an additional fee, of course. My sister-in-law’s son is also somewhat boisterous.”

  “I could provide them with adequate exercise to check their exuberant spirits.” Grange looked up from his notebook only for a moment, blinked, then returned to writing.

  “If you deem it appropriate or necessary.”

  “Excellent. And what arrangements will be made for lodgings?” He paused in his notes, and without looking up, waited until she began speaking, then returned to his scribbles.

  “You will be the guest of my sister-in-law and her husband, the Masons, taking your meals with the family.”

  “I will not be lodging in the nursery.” Grange looked up; his large eyes, owl-like, stared for a minute, blinked twice, and stared again.

  “No, you will be provided with one of the guest rooms.”

  “Excellent.” He returned to his notebook. “I assume we will be traveling in your carriage rather than in a hired hackney.”

  “That can be arranged.”

  “Excellent.” He licked the tip of his pencil and began writing again. “I will need an advance of funds, should any unexpected expenses arise in delivering his lordship’s studies.”

  “Of course. Will you require anything else?”

  “No, that will be sufficient.” Grange snapped the notebook shut. “I will inform you on Monday if I am able to arrange my schedule to suit your request.” He placed both the pencil and the notebook back in his pocket. “With your permission, my lady, I take my leave.”

  “Of course.”

  Grange stood up as precisely as he had sat and walked swiftly to the door.

  She watched Grange go, always surprised at their interactions. But if she knew the tutor at all, she knew he would agree on Monday. As much as he loved teaching, he loved money more.

  She looked up at the clock. She’d already been working longer than she’d hoped, and she was still not finished.

  * * *

  Hours later, Sophia finally finished marking all the corrections to the proofs. She rose from the desk and walked around the library, stretching her arms in front of her and stretching her neck to one side then the next.

  Aidan walked into the library. Unannounced. Again.

  “I looked for you in the greenhouse.”

  “I wasn’t there.” She could hear the irritation in her tone, and it galled her. This morning in his garden had shown her how little control she had in his presence. Her ability to remain calm, a trait that had served her so well in the last year, had deserted her. At the same time, she had been more than generous with Aidan’s lack of propriety, arriving and interrupting as he wished. Perhaps it was time to be less generous.

  “Dodsley said that you’ve been working all day, and it’s after four. Your man has made quite a bit of progress in my neglected garden. We thought you might like to inspect it. But”—his eyes followed her gaze to the papers on the desk—“if you are engaged . . .” He walked behind the desk and picked up a sheath of the pages. Then he leaned back against the edge of the bookcases, turning the pages slowly. Sophia tried to focus on his face and his words, not to look at his body, not to look at his hands, turning the pages slowly . . . not to remember the feel of those hands against her skin.

  “I was working, but I’m just finished, and I’m about to go out.” Her voice was determined and stern. Reaching past him, she set about returning the stack of paper to its former order.

  “Out?” Something in his tone made clear that he expected an answer, and it rankled her.

  “Yes. Out.” Impatient and annoyed, she took the pages from his hands, confirming that he had only the printed proofs from volume one, not any from volume two. “I will be unable to inspect Perkins’s progress today.” She began to rewrap the proofs in their brown paper covering. However, when she reached for the twine to tie it up, Aidan’s hand covered hers, stopped her from wrapping the package.

  She turned, fully intending to ask him what he thought he was doing.

  But she hadn’t realized how close he was. She turned without meaning to along the curve of his arm, into the space before his chest. She could smell the scent of the afternoon rain still on his clothes, feel the warmth of his body so close to hers, and she suddenly longed to lean into him, let his heat once more dispel the chill in her bones.

  He leaned to kiss her, and she realized that after the garden, she would be lost if she allowed it. Instead, she bit her lip hard, recalling herself to sense. He leaned closer. She twisted to face the desk, putting her back to him and pulling her hand from beneath his.

  “No, Aidan. This is not the time.”

  Undaunted, he breathed against her neck, then brushed the hair on the side of her face with his face, and whispered in her ear, “Wait here. I will return.” He was gone as abruptly as he had arrived.

  Sophia stared at the library door, stunned. She felt a complicated mix of emotions: anger, relief, and frustration. Angry that he assumed she would do as he said and wait. Relieved that he had left before she’d given in to her desire an
d responded to his kiss. And frustrated . . . with the errors in the proofs, with the time (and money) it would take to repair them, and most of all with Aidan, for entering and leaving her life as he always had . . . on his own terms. She pulled the twine tight, breaking off the ends with her hands. Then, picking up her cloak, she turned to escape through the long glass door behind her desk.

  “Don’t go.” Aidan’s voice was soft.

  She turned to object, hot words ready to spill out. But she caught them just in time.

  Looking cautious, Aidan stood in the doorway, holding a tray on which he’d assembled a feast: Cook’s sweet Scottish scones, butter and cream, Sophia’s favorite orange marmalade, some slices of apple, and a triangle of cheddar.

  “I thought it was music that soothed the savage beast,” she offered in half-conciliation. How could he, after all these years and her marriage to Tom, be so thoughtful of her needs?

  “In your case, food has always worked best. But since Cook appears to be off for the afternoon, I had to make the tray myself,” he offered with a shrug. “I hope it’s acceptable. Dodsley will bring a pot of tea when it’s hot. But of course, if you must go, I can return all this to the kitchen.”

  It was his acknowledgment that he couldn’t stop her if she chose to leave that made all the difference. That, and the grumble in her stomach. “No, I can stay—at least for some tea.” She made a space on the desk for the tray.

  Setting the tray beside the proofs, he pulled a chair to the side of her desk and stretched his legs into the space beside her chair. “Now, tell me what’s so important about these papers that you haven’t time to see your plans for my garden come alive. Perhaps I can help.”

  “I can’t imagine that you are interested in this.”

  “There’s no way to know until you tell me, and you are clearly frustrated. Ian says you and Tom often worked alongside one another. I cannot replace Tom, but perhaps I can serve as a poor substitute.”

  The thought of Aidan’s helping her was more appealing than she wished to admit, even in her most private moments.

  “These are the printed proofs for volume two of Tom’s last book.” She pointed at the printed pages partially wrapped in the brown paper. “I was about to return them to the publisher with my corrections.” She held her hand over a second stack of paper. “These are the pages of Tom’s manuscript that he prepared for the printer and I delivered to his publisher. And this”—she placed her hand on the third set of pages—“is the bound original manuscript of Tom’s book, the one we finished while in Italy and he copied out fair. Or at least I thought he’d copied it.”

  She explained it all to him, the perfect clarity of volume one, the odd errors in Latin in volume two....

  “And this.” She reached for her reticule and removed the misidentified engraving. She unfolded it. “This isn’t one of my illustrations.”

  “Looks deadly. What is it?”

  “It’s an agave, an American plant. Tom must have drawn it for the engraver, but he wasn’t particularly careful, and this is an odd illustration.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, it’s just wrong for the book. Tom was writing on Mediterranean plants that would do well in an English garden, and so it’s not even from the right part of the world. Even if it was, it’s wrong as a botanical illustration.”

  Aidan raised an eyebrow in question.

  “Let me explain. It ought to show the plant in its various states at once: seeds, fruit, flower. This is just the plant in flower. And the reference in the text to this plate is to a rose.”

  “Would Tom have made such a mistake?”

  She shook her head in disbelief. “Only if his illness affected his memory more than I imagined. But then he died shortly after, so . . .” She shrugged. “I can’t be sure. But the errors I’ve found in the proofs are all in his fair copy.”

  “You didn’t make the fair copy?”

  “No, Tom always copied the manuscript out himself. He joked that I could draw a fine line and sign my name with aplomb. But more than that, and my script turned into a messy scrawl worth neither the ink nor the paper.”

  “Did you use Tom’s regular printer? Perhaps Tom’s printer would have known what to do with these errors you are finding.”

  “Tom always used a subscription printer, a bear of a man named Holst. I always thought that Tom’s books had a big enough market that he didn’t need to publish them by subscription. And Holst was the only bookseller from whom one could order the books. I always insisted that the books needed a wider circulation than Holst could give. So when I returned to England, I contacted Murray, and he agreed with me. This time, at least twenty shops will sell Tom’s book.”

  “Could it be that Holst would have known how to deal with these ‘errors’?”

  “What are you saying? That Tom added gibberish to his fair copy and added plates that make no sense, just so that the publisher had to take them out before printing it?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m saying. You say that Tom wasn’t affected mentally by the illness.”

  “No, not even at the end.”

  “Then there’s something else going on here. May I escort you to Mr. Holst’s?” He held out his arm.

  Despite knowing she might regret it later, she took his arm.

  But Holst wasn’t in. In fact, his shop was closed up entirely. A sign in the window indicated he was on a provincial tour distributing books. He would return in a fortnight. Or a week after they left for Aidan’s estate. But there was something here; Aidan could feel it. He might have just found the very information Walgrave needed.

  Chapter Nineteen

  It was the night of Phineas’s dinner party; his guests would be arriving in only an hour.

  Sophia and Aidan waited in the library for the Hucknalls and the Masons to arrive. She’d invited them to come earlier than the other guests. In part because their presence would give her courage for her first dinner party without Tom, but it also ensured that Phineas’s guests would find ready conversation when they began to arrive. Ian was on his way to Kensington to visit Nate—he didn’t like Phineas either.

  Sophia’s dress was the blue one Tom had made for her and Phineas had approved. Madame Elise had been unable to finish any of her dresses in time. Sally had taken special care with Sophia’s hair. A halo of soft curls surrounded her face, and more curls were tied up with dark string around the beads she wore in her hair.

  Aidan amused himself browsing through her books, picking up one, flipping through its pages, then turning to another. It was odd, really, for a man with a rich collection of his own to spend so much time examining her books. But, he was doing no harm, and due to his coming and going through the garden entrance, no one knew how much time he spent in her house.

  Almost no one had refused her invitation. She wondered if that had more to do with the fact that the Duke of Forster had let it be known he would be in attendance or if Phineas really had so many friends. Either way it was the largest party she’d held in a very long time. For years in Italy, she’d hosted a salon, bringing together local Italians of good birth, representatives of the Austrian government, the occasional English travelers living in Naples, and every itinerant artist whose work she’d found intriguing. Tom had named their villa il museo, the home of muses. But with Tom’s illness, the salon had proved too taxing, and she’d let it go. To find herself back in the role of hostess after so much time was daunting.

  A tap at the door signaled Dodsley’s presence. “My lady, the Masons and the Hucknalls have arrived.” Ophelia and Audrey entered with arms intertwined, already laughing over some joke. Both women embraced Sophia, greeting her with kisses on both cheeks. Their husbands followed, debating a parliamentary vote to be held on the Bank of England’s monetary practices. After kisses and handshakes, Sophia noticed that Dodsley remained.

  “The modiste has sent round your dress for this evening, my lady. I’ve placed it in your dressing room. The seamstress is waitin
g in the kitchen if you need her.”

  “Thank you, Dodsley. As for the seamstress, let her go. I’m already dressed, and Phineas will prefer this gown.”

  Aidan intervened. “Sophia, why not look at the dress?”

  Suddenly suspicious, she nodded assent to Dodsley.

  * * *

  Sophia didn’t bother to close the door to her dressing room. She didn’t intend to wear the dress, only to look at it.

  It was lovely. The smoke-gray silk made half-mourning beautiful. The bodice was scooped from her shoulders to her décolletage with a narrow black-trim border, a design repeated in the black sash at her waist, and in the black border at the bottom of the skirt. Dark red vertical stripes, so narrow as to be imperceptible at more than a small distance, gave the fabric depth and richness.

  But it wasn’t one of the dresses she had ordered. Only Aidan could have convinced Madame Elise to ignore her requests and make this . . . this beautiful dress. Sophia let the fabric run through her fingers. So soft.

  She held the dress up before the full-length mirror.

  “You must wear it.” Aidan spoke from the doorway.

  “Why?” She hadn’t realized he’d followed her.

  “Because it’s beautiful. Because it suits you.”

  “No, I meant why did you . . .”

  “It seemed the right thing. Phineas forced you into having this party. No woman should have to reenter society in a gown her guests have already seen.”

  “There isn’t time. I’ve sent the seamstress away, and Sally has left for Kensington with Ian and Mr. Grange.”

  “Knowing Elise, the dress will fit perfectly. But the seamstress is still here. I’ve called for her.”

  Shaking her head, Sophia looked at the dress once more. “Phineas will not approve. . . .”

  “Phineas never approves. Accept it . . . as a gift to the mother of my ward. No one will ever know. Or if you prefer, Elise can send you the bill. But wear it.”

  She was torn. She hadn’t had a dress so beautiful in years—not even Tom’s cerulean blue one—but to accept such a dress as a gift . . . After the tryst in his garden, she should be wary of taking gifts, of suggesting he might think of her as a mistress. She was saved from deciding by the sound of Ophelia’s and Audrey’s voices.