The Secret Duke

by Jo Beverley

  “No! And I certainly would never meet you at night.”

  “A word of warning, sweet nymph: night is not necessary for sin.”

  Bella knew her eyes had widened. Knew she should run away. Now. Yet she seemed glued. Rooted.

  “You would enjoy my sinful skills, Kelano. That is a promise.”

  Bella took another step back and came up against something. She hoped it was the door. “I would never be so foolish,” she said, groping behind her for the handle.

  “Yet you are here. Did you truly come to retrieve a few pennies’ worth of ornament?” When she had no reply, he smiled. “If you return tomorrow at noon, I will be here awaiting you. As will be the bed.”

  He gestured toward it with courtly grace and an extraordinarily beautiful hand. The strength of that hand shook her conviction that he was an aristocrat, but everything else about it said wealth and pampered high birth. . . .

  Temptation almost drowned her, but the very power of the danger threw her into a panic that allowed her to break free. Unwilling to take her eyes from danger for a moment, she found the handle, pressed it and escaped.

  Bella ran down the corridor, but managed to halt before turning into the entrance hall. To run through it would be to invite seizure as a thief, but her heart was galloping even if her feet weren’t. She looked back, fearing pursuit, but the corridor was empty.

  She hurried, but attempting to hide her urgency, and emerged onto Pall Mall, alert for lurking danger there. Might he have people on guard?

  Once outside, she looked around, fearing some sort of trap or pursuit, but no one stopped her, so she turned into a side street and paused a moment to collect herself.

  She’d escaped. That man didn’t know who she was, and she certainly wouldn’t return tomorrow. Strength allowing. She’d thought she’d encountered attractive men, and even some wickedly appealing ones, but she’d never encountered anyone like him. At the revels and again today he seemed able to overcome her will, to entrance her like a fey prince.

  Her steps sped as she hurried home, hurried back to the safety of Bellona Flint, whom no man would attempt to seduce into a sin-drenched daytime bed. She was still clutching the box. She tossed it in the gutter to see it immediately snatched by a street urchin who appeared out of a crevice and darted back again like a spider.

  Bella pitied the child, but there were so many like him. She realized she hated London. She hated its dirt, its overwhelming mass of people, many of them penniless, its politics and scheming. . . .

  A man called out something lewd, and she realized she was near St. James’s Street, where men had their clubs. She turned again, trying to get her bearings for Soho, looking around for a hackney cab or chair stand. She knocked against a man, or he knocked against her. She flinched away, but he was already stepping back, bowing slightly in apology.

  Bella nodded to the fashionably dressed gentleman, but then stared. She knew that rough-skinned, pock-marked face. “You!” she exclaimed.

  He retreated even more. “Ma’am?”

  Bella opened and shut her mouth, fighting for coherent speech. On top of everything else today, this.

  “You,” she said again, low and fierce now. “You stole me from Carscourt and carried me to Dover.” She stepped forward, the question that had tormented her for years boiling out of her. “Why? Why!”

  As she advanced, he retreated, hissing, “Not so loud, dammit.”

  Bella stopped, aware of people nearby pausing to pay attention. She no more wanted attention than he did, but she wanted answers—she wanted to know why her life was such a disaster—and it seemed fate had placed answers before her. Perhaps she should be afraid of Coxy, but at this moment she felt like a wolf with prey in its sights. All the same, she tried to relax, to look as if this were some sort of normal conversation.

  “What a surprise to encounter you, sir,” she said.

  He also relaxed, looking her up and down with a sneer, as if he were the wolf. “I heard you’d fled your family, Miss Barstowe. I confess to being pleased to see a Barstowe brought low.”

  He too thought her a whore, but she couldn’t care for that. “If I am, it is your doing, you worm. Tell me why you abducted me.”

  “Why should I?”

  Bella stepped closer. “Because if you don’t, I will throw a scene here that will never be forgotten. I will ruin you just as effectively as you ruined me.”

  He saw the wolf now. He said, “You wouldn’t. . . .” But his eyes shifted around to see who was nearby.

  “I will,” Bella said. “What have I to lose?”

  “You want to know?” he snarled. “I’ll tell you then, and willingly, but not here.”

  “If you imagine I would go anywhere with you . . .”

  “Not private,” he muttered, looking around again, “but just walk with me. And try to look less like a clawed Harpy.”

  Bella laughed at that, a harsh laugh, but she turned and walked down the street, attempting a normal air for those who were curious. Her heart had been pounding for so long she felt light-headed, but one clear thought obsessed her: in a moment, she’d know. It wouldn’t repair anything—nothing could—but she would know.

  “It was your brother’s doing, Miss Barstowe.”

  Bella stopped to glare at him. “Don’t lie to me.”

  “ ’Pon my word, it’s the truth. The cause of your ruin was Augustus Barstowe, now Sir Augustus Barstowe, pillar of the community.”

  Bella walked on, struggling with the idea. “What could he have to do with you?”

  “Everything. He lost a great deal of money to me at cards. And refused to pay.”

  Bella managed not to stop, but she scoffed. “Saint Augustus? Gaming? You must think me a complete fool.”

  “He hoodwinked you too, did he? Believe me or not, as you like.”

  In a day of extraordinary things, here was another, but for some reason she believed this hated man. Looking fiercely ahead, she said, “Tell me.”

  Chapter 10

  “Your brother lost money to me and refused to pay. Do you know that gaming debts are not legally collectible?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “You see why I had to take measures. I threatened to tell your father. That usually works with young men one way or another. Your brother insisted that even if informed, your father would never pay gaming debts, and that he simply didn’t have the funds. A sneaky specimen, your brother. He pointed out that if I told his father about his gaming, Sir Edwin would stop his allowance, which would make it even less possible for him to pay, and also that his father was a stern magistrate who might bring charges against me for illegal dice games. In effect, he claimed there was nothing I could do, and smirked about it.”

  “That,” said Bella, “I can believe. But . . . gaming. I had no idea. I don’t think anyone did. Or does now. Does he still play?”

  “He’s an addict, Miss Barstowe, so yes, he plays. He avoids me, however, and I him.”

  Bella walked on, trying to absorb this extraordinarily different view of reality. Augustus had always been the virtuous one, grieving sorrowfully over every little sin of his sisters, but especially over Bella’s, because she was the one who wasn’t afraid of him.

  Clearly she should have been.

  To imagine him a secret gamester was difficult, and yet it fit with her deeper knowledge of him and his heartlessness.

  “But why did you punish me?” she asked.

  “Not punishment, Miss Barstowe. Trade. I’m not a man to be brushed aside, but inquiries revealed that your brother had told the truth about your father. Sir Edwin was so opposed to gaming that he’d see his son known as a man who didn’t pay his gaming debts rather than give me a penny.”

  “Then why didn’t you ruin Augustus instead of me?” Bella demanded.

  “Because that wouldn’t have produced my money. Abducting you, I thought, would.”

  “I think you’re mad.”

  “Bad, Miss Barstowe, but not mad,
except in thinking that any parent would pay the fairly modest sum of six hundred guineas to have their daughter safely returned to them.”

  “The ransom amount,” she said. “But how did Augustus contrive to lose so much?”

  “Very easily. As I said, a quite minor debt at the gaming tables.”

  Bella knew that was true, for gaming losses lay beneath some of the tragic stories that came Lady Fowler’s way. Men had lost their entire fortunes in a night. She’d always had trouble believing it, but apparently she was a victim of gaming herself.

  “So you abducted me to get the ransom? Why, then, did my family know nothing of a ransom? They were convinced that I’d run off with a man and been abandoned.”

  “There, I made a serious miscalculation,” Coxy said. “I used your brother as my intermediary.”

  “Augustus knew of this plan?”

  “Miss Barstowe, he was the designer of it. He told us where to make the assignation, and he was to find the note left there, and give it to your father. I assumed your brother would see that the plan served his interests. Instead, he destroyed it and said nothing.”

  Bella stopped to stare at him. “He did what?”

  The man met her eyes, and though he was a hard-bitten, wretched individual, she saw truth. She also understood why he was telling her this. Even after all these years, he was still angry over the way Augustus had twisted his plan.

  Anger churned in her too, and more than anger. Her innards lurched with revulsion, and she covered her mouth, fearing to be sick. She realized they were on a quieter street now with no one about, but she wasn’t afraid. She was too consumed with horror and fury.

  “Dear heavens, why? I never liked Augustus and he never liked me, but . . . how could he abandon me to such a fate?”

  “He’s never explained his actions to me, Miss Barstowe. At the time, he convinced me that he’d delivered the note and your father had torn it up, which is why I was compelled to act on the alternative and carry you south with a mind to selling you.”

  Bella turned her back to stare at black railings in front of a brick house. “I can’t believe you. No one can be so vile. More likely that he gave the letter to Father, and Father refused to pay.”

  “Your father was that callous? But even if so, why did your father treat you as he did when you returned?”

  Bella swallowed acid bile. “Guilt?”

  But she didn’t believe it. She’d disliked her father for his rigid morality and unforgiving nature, but he would never have done anything so obviously wrong. He’d have punished her for her folly in agreeing to a clandestine meeting, and done his best to have her abductors hanged, but he would have paid her ransom.

  Augustus.

  Augustus had left her to her ruin. She remembered the way he’d treated her all the years of her confinement, as if he were the long-suffering saint and she the dreadful sinner. She’d learned that he’d even cast her leaving Carscourt in the worst possible light, letting slip to neighbors that his poor sister had run off with another man. She wanted to wrench one of the spear-tipped railings free and drive it through his rotten heart.

  She turned back, eyeing the man beside her. “I’m to believe that you let him get away with this? That you never received your money?”

  He smiled, showing a broken tooth. “I see you understand me, Miss Barstowe. Your brother paid me when your father died.”

  “You waited for three years after my escape? When you could have gone to my father with the whole story? Which would have exonerated me!”

  “You were never my concern, and Sir Edwin was not a man I wanted to tangle with. In addition, I’d been warned off.”

  “By Augustus?”

  A curled lip showed he had the same opinion of that.

  “By your rescuer. Captain Rose left a message telling me to leave you alone. I learned that he too was not a man to tangle with.”

  Captain Rose. The hazy image of Bella’s nightmares and her dreams. A tall, dark man in an old- fashioned frock coat, a scarlet neckcloth, and with a skull for an earring. A man who had produced knife and pistol as if by magic, and faced down five murderous wretches, not to mention Coxy.

  She’d long since locked away that period of her life, but how extraordinary that he’d tried to protect her, even after she’d stolen his horse.

  Thinking it through, she turned back. “Did you have anything to do with my brother’s broken hand?”

  A sour smiled twisted Coxy’s lips. “I have a reputation to protect. He had an unpleasant encounter with some ruffians one night.”

  Bella remembered when Augustus had been attacked and had his purse stolen. She’d still been protesting her innocence and refusing to marry Squire Thoroughgood when Augustus had returned from a visit to London with a bruised face and a broken left hand. The bones hadn’t healed straight, creating that slightly clawlike appearance. He’d turned even more vicious toward her then, though he’d cloaked it in sanctimonious condemnation.

  “After that,” the man said, “he was positively eager to pay me a small amount every month, and as I said, he paid the whole amount with interest when he inherited. It was a pleasant surprise to have to wait only three years to be done with it all. Did your father truly die of an intestinal rupture?”

  Bella stared at him. “You think . . . ?”

  “I merely wonder. When a death is so very convenient . . .”

  She put a hand to her mouth, finally accepting the full horror of it all.

  Augustus was a gamester.

  He had always known she was innocent.

  He had always known that her plight was entirely his fault, and yet he’d been so harsh to her.

  And he might have killed their father. That was mere speculation, but after what she’d learned it seemed possible.

  When her brother had inherited, he could have set her free. Instead, he’d tightened her restrictions, and she now saw why. It had been spite, because he held her responsible for his pain and deformity.

  She turned to ask another question, but the man—Coxy—had gone. She saw him in the distance, pausing to speak to some other gentleman. She could pursue and make the threatened scene, but he was no longer her worst enemy.

  Her worst enemy, the cause of her destruction, was her brother, Augustus.

  She hurried home, the ramifications swirling in her mind, then halted when she saw a new horror. Augustus planned to marry, and to marry a sweet, young innocent.

  Peg received news from a friend in Cars Green, and the latest letter had been all to do with Sir Augustus’s wooing of Miss Langham from Hobden Hall. Bella had felt uncomfortable with the idea, but only because her brother was cold. It would be a good marriage for Miss Langham in the world’s eyes, for her father was a new-comer to gentry circles, having made money in trade. Fine imported leathers, Bella thought.

  When Bella had been seventeen, Charlotte had still been in the schoolroom, but she’d attended some casual social affairs with her parents. She’d seemed shy, quiet, and eager to please, and even now she couldn’t be older than eighteen.

  She saw a rank of sedan chairs and summoned one. As it carried her back to her Soho house, she made herself consider that Coxy had been lying, but his casual honesty about his own villainy made him credible, and his version of events did make sense. Even her father, harsh and rigid though he had been, would not have left his daughter in the hands of bad men for lack of six hundred guineas.

  On the other hand, Augustus would go to desperate measures to hide his sins. If Father had found out, Augustus, not she, would have ended up limited to Carscourt without a penny of his own. Their father might not have told everyone in the neighborhood the nature of his heir’s sin, but everyone would know it had to be terrible. Word would spread and he’d never be able to claim moral superiority again.

  Why he should care so desperately about that, she had no idea, but he did. Some men lived easily with scandalous reputations—like the Duke of Ithorne, for example, and his cousin,
the Earl of Huntersdown. The Marquess of Rothgar and his family were the same, and it wasn’t simply a matter of high rank. They didn’t care what lesser mortals thought of them.

  Augustus wasn’t of that type. Without his moral superiority, he’d be naked. For the first time, she appreciated the rakes for their lack of hypocrisy. Her brother, her vile, deceiving, hypocrite of a brother, was a far worse man.

  And she was going to have to do something about him. She was going to have to prevent the marriage, but it couldn’t stop there. He must never ruin another young life.

  But how?

  She was home. She climbed out of the chair, paid the men, and entered the house, brushing by Kitty’s anxious questions.

  Kitty pursued. “But where are the stars, miss?”

  Bella came fully to the present. Stars? “Oh, the ornament. Ah. I threw it away. It was crushed.”

  Because she’d been in such a panic about Orion.

  Orion Hunt, whoever he was, was nothing.

  “Shall I try to find them, miss?”

  “What? That trinket? No. Stop chattering, Kitty. I need to think. Tea in my room, now.”

  Bella hurried upstairs, unpinning both hat and wig as she went.

  When she glanced in the mirror, she realized that Coxy would never have recognized her if she’d not accosted him, but she didn’t regret the encounter. At long last she knew the truth.

  No wonder he’d sneered at her. The red of her lips and the dark of her brows had smudged. She grabbed a cloth and tried to wipe it all off, but her attention was still fixed on Augustus and the necessity of action.

  As she cooled and came back to reality, she flinched from that; she couldn’t live with this knowledge and do nothing.

  She wished she had the courage to simply kill him. She did own a pistol, and knew how to use it.

  Buying the pistol had been one of her first acts when she’d been set free. She’d always remembered the feeling of holding the gun back in the Black Rat. She hadn’t known how to use it then, and it had been heavy and awkward in her hands, but she’d felt its power. She’d seen the way rough, dangerous men backed away when she was armed, and she’d wanted that power again.