“Are we speaking of Lady Araminta or her sister?” Montford interjected.
Sherbrook stopped pacing and blinked. “What?”
“You said she. That you wanted to take her by the shoulders and…”
“Yes, yes, I know what I said,” Sherbrook bit out. He glanced around the room with a haunted expression, then stalked over to the desk and retrieved his port, swallowing its contents in one thirsty gulp.
Montford suspected that Sherbrook had no idea what he had said, or what he had meant. And he knew as well that Sherbrook was referring to Lady Katherine, not her sister. Sherbrook had taken an immediate and bone-thorough dislike of the Marchioness of Manwaring, his estranged uncle’s new wife, upon their first encounter at a ball some years ago. And Montford knew that the feeling was mutual.
“Oh, bugger it,” Sebastian muttered after throwing back his drink. “Enough about bloody females.”
“Hear hear,” Marlowe chimed in.
Sebastian saluted Marlowe with his empty snifter, then turned back to Montford. “I know you hate traveling, Montford, but you just might have to go to Yorkshire.”
Montford more than hated traveling. He physically abhorred it. “Not a chance.”
“It sounds just the thing.”
Montford grew suspicious. “Why do I not trust you in this moment?”
Sebastian quirked his lips. “Well, it seems to me you need to clear your head. And Yorkshire, what with all of the countryside and sheep and such, seems a good place to do it in. I hear the air in Yorkshire is lovely this time of year.”
“No doubt reeks of manure.”
“You can take out some of that pent up anger out on these Honeywells. Turn them out of house and home. Shut down the brewery.”
“I shall never speak to him if he does,” Marlowe threatened from the chaise. “Tell him, Sherry. If he shuts down the brewery, I shall cease to be his friend.”
“Maybe you could at least spare the brewery,” Sebastian said with a wink. “Unless you wish to alienate the entire male half of the country.”
Montford snorted. “How can anyone drink that waddle?”
“Have you ever had a pint?”
“Well, no, but…”
“Do not judge, then. Now where was I? Oh yes, hurl your thunderbolts at the Honeywells. Spare the brewery. Take in the fresh air. And perhaps come to your senses about this atrocity at the end of the month …”
“You mean my wedding,” he said flatly.
“What other atrocity were you planning?”
“I can think of several at the moment, involving you and that beached whale over there and the business end of my…”
Sebastian chuckled and wriggled his eyebrows suggestively. “I just love it when you flirt, Your Grace.”
“I should burn down the brewery for that comment alone.” He strode towards the door.
“Where’re you going?” Marlowe cried, sitting up.
To bash my head in. “To bed.”
“You are such a bloody stuffed shirt, Monty,” Marlowe replied laconically.
“I’ve told you, don’t call me that.”
“Or what? You’ll break my nose again?”
“Don’t tempt me.”
“Pleasant dreams,” Sebastian called, long after Montford slammed the door behind him.
Their conversations often ended up this way. And he knew when he came down in the morning, he’d find his sideboard emptied of its stock, evidence of the fun his friends had had in his absence and at his expense.
Usually, Montford never begrudged his friends their fun. He knew for a fact that both of them were perpetually skirting dun territory and bumbled their way through life dining at their friends’ tables and drinking their liquor. He didn’t mind it when they took advantage of his largesse, for they never asked for loans or importuned him in any other way … well, besides wheedling sandwiches from his cook and drinking his port. But tonight he was seriously considering taking them by their collars and kicking them to the curb.
Which was insane. They were his best friends, after all. His only friends, now that he thought about it.
And this realization made him feel even worse. His only friends in the world were a pair of leeches who used him for his sandwiches and sideboard, and who would not even do that should he deprive them of their goddamned ale.
His life, he thought bleakly as he trudged up the grand marble staircase in the cavernous gilded foyer, was as empty as this house.
Maybe he did need a holiday.
Chapter Three
IN WHICH THE DUKE VENTURES FORTH INTO THE WILD
BESIDES HIS sundry well-documented compulsive behaviors, Montford’s inner demons manifested themselves in two distinct aversions: riding in carriages and the sight of blood. He couldn’t explain these phobias any more than he could explain why he hated to let different foods touch each other on his dinner plate. But he had become an expert at disguising his fears, for it would never do to let people discover that the Duke of Montford tended to vomit in coaches and faint when he got scratched.
He avoided extended journeys that would require a carriage and rode his mount when at all possible. When he was fencing, a sport at which he excelled, he made sure his foil never came loose, thus avoiding nicking his opponent. And if he was nicked, which was not often, and usually only at Sebastian’s expert hand, he never looked down at the wound. Fortunately, only one of the duels in which he had stood second for Marlowe had ended in bloodshed, when his friend had taken a ball to his shoulder. No one noticed his light-headedness, however, in the drama that had followed.
Nonetheless, three days after speaking to his friends, Montford arrived at Rylestone Hall after an excruciatingly long and messy journey northward. His agitation over the situation had at last overcome his aversion to travel, and he decided to put up with a miserable few days traveling rather than let this Honeywell business go unresolved.
As he couldn’t abide putting up at a vermin-infested roadside inn, and as he owned no other residences between London and Rylestone, he had made his driver stop only long enough for him to vomit, for Coombes to retie his cravat, or for the horses to be changed out. The journey, even at such a rate, should have only lasted two days, but the second day, one of the horses went lame, and it had taken the entire afternoon for a replacement to be located.
On the third day, by his calculations, which were always precise, he should have been on the estate by midmorning. But Rylestone proved as elusive as an oasis in the desert. The Yorkshire dales were hardly made of sand, but they certainly qualified as wilderness to Montford, who had little love of pastoral life. He had to suppress a shudder every time he looked out the window and saw beyond him nothing but endless stretches of farmland and timber forests, interspersed by the occasional cow or sheep. It all looked unbearably rustic … and dirty.
By noon, it was clear that they were lost, and he ordered his driver to stop in the nearest village to ask directions. The village, which looked to have more ovine occupants than human, proved to be little help to them. Clearly, the human occupants of the village were as little impressed by the ducal crest upon his carriage as the livestock, and unwilling to offer much assistance. The directions they finally wrenched out of one man, who had just tumbled out of the village tavern three sheets to the wind, were spoken in a thick Northern brogue that was as unintelligible as Chinese to Montford’s ears.
Newcomb, his driver, more exhausted from the journey than Montford – as drivers could not sleep – sent the man on his way with a few shillings, and turned to Montford, who leaned out of the carriage window, weak from the traveling sickness.
Coombes cowered back in his seat, handkerchief covering his sensitive nose, eyes widened on the fragrant patch of mud in which the driver stood.
“What the devil did he say?” Montford demanded.
“Haven’t a clue, Your Grace. But he made some gestures with his hands I think I can make some sense of.” Newcomb’s brow furrowed. “Th
“Let’s pray it is the former.”
“East, I think he meant,” Newcomb said, shrugging in the manner of one who was simply too weary to care much where they were going any longer. Then he climbed back on the perch and whipped the team to a trot, putting them on a muddy road that looked like every other muddy road they had taken in Yorkshire.
A few minutes later, Montford made Newcomb pull over so that he could lean out of the window and retch for the fifty-first time in forty-eight hours, even though there was nothing in his stomach.
When Montford managed to pull himself back in the carriage, Coombes stared at Montford’s less-than immaculate cravat with a faintly accusing expression.
“Don’t say anything,” Montford growled. “We may restore ourselves to rights when we arrive.”
Coombes looked extremely doubtful about that. “But Your Grace,” he said in a whisper, as if afraid of being overheard by the carriage walls, “I don’t think they bathe this far north.”
Montford bit back a retort to this ridiculous statement, but it was a ridiculous statement that reflected Montford’s own fears. Who knew what dreadful fate awaited them at Rylestone Hall? Outside privies? Garderobes? He shuddered.
He half expected to find poor Stevenage done in, or at the very least mired in the thick Yorkshire mud, put there by a vengeful Honeywell.
He was beginning to doubt his own judgment in undergoing this journey alone with naught but Newcomb and Coombes, but he always traveled light when he had to, thinking the fewer who were privy to his weak stomach the better. Newcomb was a solid enough man – an ex-boxer from Liverpool, and extremely loyal to Montford. Montford didn’t doubt Coombes’ loyalty either, but unless it had to do with waistcoats, cologne, or bootblack, the man was completely at sea.
Montford had expected to sweep into Rylestone Hall and have everyone under its roof kowtowing to his will. Even the Prince Regent tended to follow his directives. But in this case he was not so sure. The further they journeyed, the further removed he felt from the civilized world. Rylestone Hall was more remote than he had assumed, certainly more remote than any of his other estates – besides the one on the Isle of Mull he had no intention of ever visiting.
It would take days to reach something even resembling a city. And if it was so difficult for him to locate the Hall, how in blazes would anyone else find it, should something befall him…?
Dear God, he was not paranoid, he had to remind himself. He didn’t actually think anything sinister had befallen Stevenage – well, he hadn’t much more than the tiniest of niggling suspicions. But judging from the welcome he had received from the few human inhabitants of this godforsaken wilderness, he didn’t expect he would have a warm reception at Rylestone Hall.
Not that he expected one. But as the Duke of Montford, he preferred a certain amount of deference. Even from Honeywells.
Somehow he thought that would not be forthcoming. He wondered if the inhabitants of this remote section of the world even realized they were the Crown’s subjects.
Montford’s mood momentarily lightened when at last, late in the afternoon, they rounded a bend in the lane and saw something other than fields and sheep in the distance. It was an old gray castle, settled strategically on a hillside and surrounded by gardens and orchards. It looked like something out of Mr. Constable’s paintings, with the slanting sun bathing the gray, slightly crumbling walls in a warm honey glow, the trees in the orchard heavy with fruit, the garden tangled with late summer blooms.
Montford’s stomach clenched with an unfamiliar, uncomfortably warm feeling, and for once, it was not the preface to a bout of vomiting. The castle looked like some place out of a fairy tale, to be honest. The sort of place families lived in, for instance. Perfect, picturesque, slightly ramshackle and quaint. The sort of place the Duke of Montford would never visit willingly. He did not do ramshackle and quaint. He prayed that this wasn’t Rylestone Hall, while at the same time some small, hidden part of him he refused to acknowledge hoped to God it was.
He leaned out of the window and ordered Newcomb to proceed, keeping his wary eyes fixed on the approaching castle. And as they grew closer, he found himself becoming more and more disoriented. Something was off about the castle, and he couldn’t figure out quite what. He was perfectly aware of its crumbling edifices and the seemingly haphazardly, slightly overgrown quality of the gardens in front. These were imperfections he had noted and dismissed with an annoyed toss of his head. But something more fundamental was wrong with the castle, which was making his head spin and his palms sweat, as if the ground beneath him was tilting…
“Coombes, the castle is crooked,” he declared.
Coombes studied the castle, pulled out his handkerchief, and wiped his brow, which had broken out in a very untidy sweat. “I do believe you’re right, Your Grace. Good heavens. We aren’t staying there, are we?” the man practically howled.
“Calm down, Coombes,” Montford said, feeling anything but calm himself. He couldn’t take his eyes off the castle, especially the north tower, which listed dangerously towards the southern tower, like an old woman’s back, defying all the laws of Newtonian theory. It was like looking at a grizzly road accident, or a hideous facial disfigurement. One just couldn’t look away.
Now he truly wished with all of his heart for this to be some place other than his final destination. Although he knew deep down that they had arrived at Rylestone Hall. Who but the Honeywells would live in a crooked castle?
They pulled up to the castle keep and waited for several minutes for someone to greet them, as was customary. When that didn’t happen, Montford ordered Newcomb to knock on the large, pitted oak door. No one answered except a flurry of squawking crows, who seemed to have a nest in the battlements above.
Newcomb turned to him and shrugged.
“For the love of …” Montford muttered, throwing open the carriage door and stepping down the steps, right into a mud puddle that came up to his ankles. He looked down at his boots, looked up at Newcomb, who was very wisely not smiling, and cursed.
He stalked up the stone steps to stand beside his driver and pounded on the door. And pounded and pounded until the oak frame shuddered and the crows squawked another protest.
“Perhaps no one is at home?” Newcomb suggested, which was obviously not the case, for a cacophony of sounds arose from behind the door, many of them human. Someone was at home. Someone was avoiding answering.
He began to knock again, despairing over the stains to his gloves.
At last, when he was about to throw up his hands in defeat, the door groaned inward. He looked downwards and found himself staring at a small child. Seven or eight at the most, with shaggy brown hair, a dirty face, and an even dirtier outfit that resembled a Roman toga. It was impossible to tell if the child were a boy or a girl. He – or she – stared up at him with wide eyes.
“Is this Rylestone Hall?” he demanded gruffly.
The child just gawked at him blankly.
“Where are your parents, child?” he asked. “Or a servant?”
The child shook its head.
“An adult, then. I am looking for a Mr. Stevenage. Or an A. Honeywell. Do you know either of them?”
The child nodded a bit warily.
“Then this is Rylestone Hall,” he said.
The child looked reluctant, but it nodded.
At last they were getting somewhere. He would have been relieved, had he not just discovered he was in the possession of a crooked castle.
He began to ask the child something else, but when he looked down, the child was gone. He cursed again and turned to Newcomb.
His driver just sighed, took off his hat, and ran his hands through his hair, which was so dusty from the road it stood up on end. “What do we do now, Your Grace?”
“I haven’t the foggiest,” he said in all honesty.
“May I suggest you go inside, Your Grace? And perhaps I … and Mr. Coombes, of course …” he rolled his eyes “… could attempt to find a stable? The team is quite tired.”
“Fine. Send in Coombes later. I have no idea what lies on the other side, but I should like some time. I don’t want Coombes fainting on me.”
“Of course, Your Grace.”
Montford sighed and stepped past the oak door into the dim corridor. He traced the path of the toga-clad child into another corridor off to the right, then found himself in a parlor cluttered with shabby furniture, books, and the sort of meaningless paraphernalia – porcelain statues, decorative vases filled with flowers, and collections of enameled gewgaws strewn haphazardly across tabletops – that made him want to blow his head off.
He strode past one massively untidy table, stopped and backed up, unable to bear it. He rearranged a collection of small snuffboxes so that they all lined up precisely with the edges of the table, equidistant from each other. His pulse calmed, and he continued on his way, stopping at a desk and glancing down at the book that lay facedown in the center, opened to the middle. His eyebrow flew up at the title on the spine.
Sir Thomas More’s Utopia. Not the sort of book he would have expected to find in a room with an enameled snuffbox collection. He picked up the book and was startled when another smaller volume fell out from between its pages.
He rather guiltily recognized the volume at once, having just received a copy from Sherbrook a few months ago. Christopher Essex’s latest collection of poetry, so shockingly scandalous it made Lord Byron’s seem like nursery rhymes. But he did not own every single one of Essex’s banned publications because he was in the least titillated by the contents. Not at all. He just thought Essex’s writing and wit was considerably better than other poets of the day.
But whoever was reading this volume clearly was doing so on the sly and for pure titillation. Thomas More indeed!
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