* * *
Though she had hoped the Egyptian Club would help her prove that her father had no hand in Will Dalton’s disappearance, its members had been strangely distant since her father’s return. Not a single member had visited her father since news of his illness had spread through town. Thinking to ask for the club’s help directly, she and her stepmama, Violet, had called on Lord Fortenbury, the president now that her father was unable to perform his duties, but his welcome had been lukewarm. When they beseeched him to speak out against the rumors, Fortenbury had refused, saying he did not wish to involve the club in scandal. Directly addressing the rumors, he said, would merely give credence to them.
Never one to sit by and wait for things to happen, Cecily, who already wanted her father’s journals to transcribe them, suspected they also held clues that would clear her father’s name. But to her consternation, they were nowhere to be found. Not in his rooms and not in the library of Hurston House. Which left two options: the Egyptian Club, and the bags of his secretary, Will Dalton.
She and Violet and their other friends would do what they could to stifle the gossip, but for real proof that her father was innocent of causing harm to his secretary, she needed those journals. And to get the journals she needed to get into the Egyptian Club.
Having the Duke of Winterson attach blame to her for her father’s actions was hurtful, but having him accuse her father of murder was worse. If she had not been so overset by her ejection from the club, she might have been better prepared to deal with his accusations. She was used to being ridiculed for her bluestocking tendencies, which was a badge she wore proudly since it implied she had more on her mind than flounces and ruffles. But the whispers about her father were still a new enough occurrence to sting. Outright accusations were rare, but, as this morning’s encounter had proven, infinitely more cutting. Especially given her sometimes tumultuous relationship with her father.
* * *
From her earliest years, Cecily had pestered her father to teach her to read Latin and Greek as he did. But fearful that she would become obsessed with the subject he blamed for her mother’s death when Cecily was only a small child, Lord Hurston had attempted to dissuade her from her intellectual pursuits.
Though she had little recollection of the event herself, Cecily knew that her mother had been quite a gifted scholar in her own right when she’d been found dead on the moors surrounding the Hurston country house. Speaking about the incident had been discouraged, but from what Cecily gathered from the servants’ gossip, the first Lady Hurston had been struggling with her own translation of Homer’s Odyssey at the time, and it was speculated that she had developed a brain fever from the overstimulation.
The only reason she knew anything at all about Egyptology, or Latin and Greek for that matter, was thanks to her godmother, Lady Entwhistle, who had been a great friend of Cecily’s mother, and who had endowed the motherless girl with a thirst for knowledge equal to her own. Now Cecily was able to speak and read several languages with ease, and in addition had a remarkable facility for unraveling codes and ciphers.
It was odd, she supposed, given the number of times Lord Hurston had discouraged her interest in his travels, that she even considered ensuring that his accounts of his final voyage were included as part of his legacy as a scholar. But for all of their arguments and difficulties, Cecily loved the man. Their relationship, aside from his feelings about her scholarly activities, was a strong one. And, intellectually at least, she understood just why he did not want her to become involved in his work. His fears that her interests would turn into the kind of obsession that had precipitated her mother’s death were unfounded, but came from a place of love. And there was something about seeing him now, a shrunken shadow of his former self, which made her long for one last conversation to set things right between them. Because there was little hope of that, she would settle for ensuring that the account of his final expedition was told, truthfully and in his own words.
Then there was the matter of Will.
If she could get her hands on the journals themselves, she would prove that her father had nothing to do with his disappearance. She was sure of it. But how to get them? That the Egyptian Club did not allow female visitors to examine their library was a hurdle, one she had hoped to avoid this morning by explaining the situation. But clearly, as the guard’s actions had shown, the club was adhering to the rule her own father had imposed. If she could not break the rule, she would be forced to go around it.
As she had told Winterson that morning, there was one particular set of ladies who were allowed into the club: the wives of club members.
She thought about her cousin Rufus and his vile wife, who were even now encamped in Hurston House in hopes that Rufus would soon be the new Lord Hurston. She thought of what her life would be like if her father died, and she was forced to live on the crumbs of their charity. And how much worse it would be should he die without being exonerated of William Dalton’s murder.
It was a sobering notion.
Being whispered about because of one’s intellectual pursuits was an entirely different thing from being blackballed because one’s father was a killer.
Cecily had hoped she would be able to avoid marriage. The one time she had considered it, it had ended badly. Very badly.
But she was older now. And, she hoped, stronger. And perhaps marriage would not be so very difficult. Though her brief engagement had never afforded her more than a few kisses, she had read enough ancient texts to know that the marriage bed could offer pleasure.
Unbidden, the image of the Duke of Winterson locking eyes with her when she stepped out of the club rose in Cecily’s mind. Her stomach gave a little flip as she recalled how exhilarated she’d been for that one glorious moment.
Focus, she told herself. The duke wasn’t even a member of the club. And even though marriage to him might give her access to Mr. Dalton’s papers, the thought of seducing his brother to get them was more mercenary than she would consider. Much better to arrange a marriage of convenience to a club member. She had skills and connections to bring to such a match that would make it—on the surface at least—equitable. She doubted the Duke of Winterson had a pressing need for Greek or Latin translations, and he certainly could do better on the marriage mart than a viscount’s daughter with bluestocking tendencies.
Closing her mind to the tantalizing duke, she gave a brief knock on the ceiling of the carriage, alerting the coachman that she needed to speak with him. Enticing a member of the Egyptian Club to marry her would take serious planning with the fashionable equivalent of Wellington. Her stepmother fit that description, but before she could approach Violet, she needed to sound out her scheme with someone who knew the workings of the ton from the edges of the dance floor, where she spent most of her time.
She needed her cousins Madeline and Juliet.
The Ugly Ducklings.
Two
Lucas returned to Winterson House in a foul mood, still berating himself over his flight from Miss Hurston in front of the Egyptian Club.
He was a bloody soldier, for pity’s sake. And he’d tucked tail and run from her like a damned raw recruit in his first battle. It was galling.
His temper was not improved when he found his sister-in-law waiting for him in his study. Uncomfortable with the opulence of the Winterson town house, Lucas had been relieved to find that the study, at least, had escaped the interfering hand of whoever had furnished the rest of the house. It was still richly appointed, true, but its polished wood paneling and darker tones were a relief to a man who had spent the better part of ten years living in a military encampment.
Mrs. William Dalton’s presence in the room could have been no more jarring if Prinny had popped over in the night and had had the place remodeled in the image of his pavilion in Brighton.
“Clarissa,” he said, noting the teapot at her elbow that indicated she’d been seated here for quite some time. “I take it you wish to speak to me.�
� It had never been clear to Lucas why his brother had married Miss Clarissa Livingston. She was passably pretty but of a cool disposition that brought to mind icebergs and snowdrifts. Certainly she was not the sort of woman who inspired passion. He’d sooner embrace one of Elgin’s marbles. But Will had ever danced to his own piper, and by the time he’d introduced Miss Livingston to the family, they were already betrothed.
Clarissa stood and curtsied as he entered the room, her cherry-colored morning gown striking a festive note, out of keeping with the household’s somber tone since Will’s disappearance. She might follow the rules of etiquette, but always to the rule rather than the spirit.
If anyone could make a curtsy insolent, Clarissa could. “Yes, I do have a matter to discuss with you, Your Grace,” she said, her thin lips pursed so tightly they all but disappeared.
Lucas stepped behind the massive mahogany desk, and waited for her to be seated before he sank into his chair, thankful that she hadn’t insisted upon standing. His leg hurt like the devil after this morning’s brisk walk.
“So, what is it you wish to say?” he asked her, knowing it was not something he wished to hear. Clarissa always manipulated situations to suit her need for control. And bearding the lion in his den was a classic maneuver.
“It has been nearly three months since William’s disappearance,” she began, her gaze firm, no glimmer of sorrow in her eyes. “I believe it is time for us to conclude that he will not be coming back.”
He could hardly be surprised by her words, or her lack of emotion. There had been no indication, even from the first, that his sister-in-law felt anything at all about his brother’s disappearance.
Her arrival on the doorstep of Winterson House, her belongings in tow, had come hard on the heels of Lucas’s elevation to the dukedom. She had assumed, she told him, that he would not wish, as the duke, to see his brother’s wife living in squalor in a questionable area of London. The questionable area of London was actually a quite respectable street in Bloomsbury, but he had chosen not to point that out. As the head of the family, he did feel a responsibility to look after his mother and sister-in-law. And though he had never really warmed to Clarissa, he had promised Will to look out for her before his younger brother departed for what might turn out to be his final trip ever.
“We have had this discussion before,” he said, his voice even despite his anger. “And I do not believe I have indicated that my opinion on the matter has changed in the interim. My investigator has not yet reported back from Alexandria, and until I hear more from him, we will continue with the assumption that William is still living, but was separated from his party before they departed for England.”
His tone was harsh, but he was damned tired of Clarissa’s fight to declare dead the little brother he’d taught to fish and ride and flirt with pretty girls.
Either not noticing or not caring how he received her words, Clarissa pressed on.
“No one has heard from him,” she persisted. “He has not been in touch with anyone from the expedition. The British consulate have conducted their own search and come up with nothing. There is no reason for us to believe that William will come back. Ever.”
Lucas had requested help from the Foreign Office as soon as he learned of his brother’s disappearance, but they were just as flummoxed by the situation as everyone else was. He’d even applied to Lord Henry Shelby, who, coincidentally, was both Lord Hurston’s brother-in-law, and a top official in the Foreign Office. He had no reason to expect the truth from Shelby, but he was the next in line to the foreign secretary, and had to be consulted—if for no other reason than to gauge his sincerity. But upon meeting the diplomat he was confident the man was telling the truth when he claimed to have no further information. He’d learned to read people in the army and was seldom wrong. Which left Will’s loved ones with exactly nothing.
Even so, Lucas was not prepared to simply give up. He knew from his own experience that there were times when you had no choice, when the odds were simply too great to overcome. But he did not yet think this was one of those times.
No matter what this brother’s not-so-grieving wife said.
Clarissa’s expression was hard, her cheeks flushed with anger, as she defied him to contradict her assertions regarding Will’s death.
“Why are you so determined to stop the search for your husband, Clarissa? Are you so eager to be a widow that you would abandon the fight prematurely? Perhaps to leave him, if he is injured or ill, to die before we have an opportunity to save him?”
She flinched at his accusation. It would appear that even she was not immune to all emotion. Good, he thought, let her feel what the rest of us do.
“Pray tell me, madam,” he continued, “because I have endured your constant pessimism these past weeks with the understanding that your dire predictions stemmed from a fear that they might come true. Now, however, I begin to suspect you are indeed wishful of seeing William return to England in a wooden box.”
If eyes could fling knives, Lucas would be sporting several holes in his chest.
“How dare you!” Clarissa hissed, her back ramrod straight with anger. “I am merely being levelheaded in the face of hardship. I would welcome his return. But I do know that he loved that godless, lawless foreign land and all its heathen trinkets far more than he ever loved me. If he died in a mistress’s arms it could not be more shameful to me than knowing he chose to abandon me time and time again for that fiendish place.”
Lucas had known Clarissa bore some resentment for William’s dedication to Lord Hurston’s work, but he’d never known how deeply she despised and even disapproved of it. Like the Dalton brothers, she’d been raised in a country vicarage, but now Lucas had some idea of how different their respective fathers’ sermons must have been. Despite her appreciation for material wealth—he had the modiste bills to prove it—she harbored an almost puritanical disgust for anything that might smack of idolatry.
“However you might dislike my brother’s occupation, Mrs. Dalton,” he ground out, “as the head of this family I will choose when we give up the search for William. So I will thank you not to come to me again with this request.”
Clarissa’s chin came up in defiance. “I see now that you are just as stubborn as your brother. Rest assured that I will trouble you no further in this regard.”
Not even bothering to bow, much less curtsy, she bid him good day, and left the room, closing the door with a resounding thud.
With a sigh of frustration, he rose gingerly on his wounded leg and poured himself a glass of claret from the decanter on the sideboard. He’d just returned to his chair when a brisk knock sounded on the door. Steeling himself for another round with his sister-in-law, he bade the visitor enter, and was relieved to see not Clarissa but his mother.
He stood, careful to hide his fatigue. “Come in, Mama, but I warn you that I am not in the best of tempers, so do so at your own risk.”
“Never let it be said, my dear,” his mother said, closing the door behind her, “that I am such a wilting flower that I cannot endure a temper tantrum from one of my boys.”
Still handsome in her mid-fifties, Lady Michael Dalton had managed the vicarage on the Winterson estate with the same determination and good humor that infused all of her endeavors. When her husband, the Reverend Lord Michael Dalton, had succumbed to a putrid fever while Lucas was still up at Oxford, she had overseen their removal from the home where she had spent the whole of her married life to a cottage on the Winterson estate. She had made no complaints about their reduced circumstances, but had answered all of her brother-in-law’s, the duke’s, little slights with a quiet dignity that put her husband’s family to shame. His admiration of her notwithstanding, Lucas found her tendency to make him feel like a lad in the schoolroom more than a little disconcerting.
“A grown man of my advanced years does not indulge in tantrums, Mama,” he reminded her, gesturing for her to take the chair recently vacated by Clarissa. “Though it is das
hed difficult to remember that when you are forever making me feel like I’m still in short coats.”
“I am sorry, Your Grace,” she said, a rare twinkle in her blue eyes so like his own. “But it is difficult to remember that you are a war hero and a peer of the realm when I can still remember your dear little baby voice asking for another sweet.”
“Pray, do not say that outside this room. If word of that gets out, no amount of bravery will save me from the scandal sheets.”
Their shared laugh faded when she turned her attention back to her reasons for seeking him out.
“I couldn’t help but overhear your conversation with Clarissa,” Lady Michael said neutrally. “You are very hard on her.”
Lucas heaved a sigh and thrust a hand through his hair in frustration. “She wishes to call off the search for him. Which is something I am not yet willing to do. It’s as if she’s already decided he’ll never come back and just wishes to begin her life without him.”
His mother smiled sadly, the wrinkles around her eyes more prominent now. “Lucas, I know it is difficult for you to understand, but you must remember that Clarissa and William, though they have been married for five years, have spent more time apart than they have spent together. She never shared your brother’s enthusiasm for Egypt, and the idea that he might have done the unthinkable and chosen Egypt over her is a worse fate for her to contemplate than the notion that he might have died there.
“It is a hard thing for a woman to compete with an abstraction, another culture, another land.”
“You speak as if you’ve done so as well,” he said, trying to imagine his parents’ marriage as something other than the idyll he’d always fancied it to be. “Surely you never had to compete for Father’s affections with an ‘abstract idea,’ as you call it.”
She bit back a laugh. “What do you suppose the Church of England might be called?” Lady Michael stared off into the distance as if seeing another place, another time. “There were days when I would cheerfully have marched to London and challenged the Archbishop of Canterbury to a duel, I was so fed up with the demands he made on your papa. There was always some other family, some other mother, some other child who seemed to need him more than we did.”
How to Dance With a Duke Page 2