The Gypsy Duchess

by Nadine Miller

  The change in the pair was remarkable. Elizabeth’s usually neat brown hair lay tumbled about her ears in careless disarray, her eyes were shining, her cheeks flushed, and her lips had the bee-stung look that suggested they had just been thoroughly kissed. The sophisticated marquess, on the other hand, wore the dazed expression of a man who in ten minutes had gone from beggaring in the streets to the place of honor at a lavish banquet table.

  Moira glanced across at Devon to find the same stupefied expression on his face she felt certain must be on hers. She watched, fascinated, as Elizabeth cast the marquess a scorching look, then taking his hand in hers declared. “You may wish me happy, your grace. The Marquess of Stamden has offered for me and I have accepted.”

  It was apparent the prim and proper daughter of the village vicar had unplumbed depths that no one viewing her plain countenance had ever imagined. But, if the silly grin on the marquess’s face was any indication, he had already begun to realize just how much he was going to enjoy exploring those depths.

  Devon stepped forward to give Elizabeth a brotherly hug and to shake Stamden’s good hand. “Congratulations, my friend,” he said with a chuckle. “I have a suspicion the term ‘quiet contentment’ has just taken on a whole new connotation.”

  Moira, in turn, hugged Elizabeth and took the marquess’s hand in both of hers, too moved to put her feelings in words. Instead, she rang for John Butler and had him bring up some bottles of the duke’s finest champagne from the cold-cellar, then assembled the entire staff to toast the couple’s happiness.

  Cook shed a few sentimental tears, as did the little maid Moira had brought down from London, and John Butler, cheeky fellow that he was, went so far as to give Elizabeth a quick peck on the cheek, then whispered something in her ear that made her blush more furiously than ever.

  Blackjack immediately followed suit and Moira held her breath, afraid he’d see the occasion as an excuse to launch into one of his more ribald stories. But, surprisingly enough, he behaved admirably. Or at least Moira thought he was behaving until she caught him sneaking champagne to Charles and Alfie while John Butler was still pouring the rest of the glasses.

  At Moira’s request, Devon offered the toast, “To two people whom fate has kindly brought together and who truly deserve each other. May their joy never be less than this moment.”

  Everyone cried, “Hear, hear!” and Elizabeth promptly took a healthy swallow of what Moira was certain was her first champagne. Wrinkling her nose when the bubbles tickled, Elizabeth declared breathlessly, “A most appropriate toast, my lord. For indeed it was through fate that I found my true love”—she beamed at the marquess—“fate in the form of her grace.”

  She hiccupped softly. “According to the squire, the name Moira means fate in the old language and any woman so named will change the lives of all about her.” She smiled beatifically. “And she has, just like he prophesied.”

  “Moira means ‘fate’ in Gaelic? How intriguing,” Devon said, turning to the squire.

  Blackjack gave Moira a broad wink that nearly stopped her heart. “Well now, I suppose it could mean the same in Gaelic as in other old languages,” he said with a wicked grin. “I’ve no way of knowing, for I never did learn to speak it proper-like.”

  Devon’s brows drew together in a perplexed frown, but though he gave Moira an inquisitive look, he didn’t pursue the subject, much to her relief. Only later, when under cover of the happy chatter all about them he toasted her privately, did she realize she had not heard the last of the latest hornet’s nest her incorrigible parent had stirred up.

  “To fate,” Devon said in a voice only she could hear. “Whatever her national origins…may she always look kindly on scoundrels.”

  The following week passed in a frenzy of activity, with the first banns for Elizabeth and the marquess scheduled to be read on Sunday in the village church, despite the vicar’s protest that people would think the worst if such a hasty marriage were arranged.

  “Let them think what they will,” Elizabeth said. “I care not. Neither the marquess nor I are in favor of a lengthy engagement.”

  “A good thing if you ask me,” Cook confided to Moira when she stopped by the kitchen to watch the nuts and currants and spices and brandy stirred into the wedding-cake batter. “Just last evening I caught the lovebirds sneaking into my kitchen garden to do their billing and cooing.”

  A mischievous smile wreathed her plump face. “Three weeks is scarce enough time for the brandy to mellow as I’d like, but it will have to do. If we let the cake age as it should, I fear we’ll be serving it at a christening.”

  Reluctant as she was to entertain, Moira felt compelled to offer White Oaks for the wedding breakfast to be held for family and close friends only. Devon obviously felt no such reluctance. He insisted on inviting all the local gentry to a betrothal ball on Saturday evening at Langley Hall, and instantly set his staff to working around the clock on the preparations.

  One look at Elizabeth’s glowing eyes, and Moira knew she had no choice but to agree to attend. Though, in truth, she dreaded the thought of having to appear at such a function—almost as much, she suspected, as the marquess did, and for similar reasons. They were each, in their own way, misfits who had chosen to live as near-recluses rather than subject themselves to the avid scrutiny of polite society—an attitude extroverts like Devon and Elizabeth would find hard to understand.

  Moira had met the local gentry but once, when Blaine had taken her to one of the monthly assemblies that were the mainstay of country social life. She could not remember ever having endured a more unpleasant evening, due in no small part to the efforts of the Countess of Langley to see that the insignificant nobody who had caught her youngest son’s eye was roundly snubbed by all present.

  As a result, the only person who had spoken a word to Moira had been the vicar’s kindhearted eldest daughter. Blaine had led her out in the one country dance he had taught her in the privacy of their secret grove, then grimly acquiesced to her plea to take her home.

  He had never suggested taking her to another of the local social events. Nor had she ever attended any as the Duchess of Sheffield. On the rare occasions when the duke had been well enough to leave his London doctors and travel to Cornwall, they had stayed entirely to themselves.

  Yet here she was, four years later, helping address invitations to the very people who had done their best to humiliate her—and praying all the while she would develop some convenient malady that would confine her to her bed before the day of the ball.

  “Hold your chin up and show the stiff-rumped bores a Reardon is as good as the best of them,” Blackjack said when she confessed her reluctance to mingle with her neighbors. Then, true to form, he promptly declared he was heartbroken at the thought of missing Elizabeth’s ball, but felt obliged to spend the week in Penryn with an ailing friend.

  All too soon, Saturday arrived and as if on cue, Moira developed a miserable headache which should have served nicely to keep her safely at White Oaks—except that when it came right down to it, she hadn’t the heart to cast a shadow on Elizabeth’s bliss. Which was why, just as the sun was setting in the west, she found herself dressed in the one fashionable black dress she owned and riding beside Elizabeth in the duke’s coach on the road to Langley Hall.

  Heretofore, her only glimpse of the historic manor house had been from atop a distant hill where Blaine and she had ridden one sunny afternoon during the last week they’d spent together. Up close it looked even more elegant than she had imagined the. Smaller and younger by a least a century than White Oaks, its cupola-topped main structure and gracefully angled wings gave it symmetry of line that was lacking in what the duke had called his “ancient pile of stone.”

  Moira was well acquainted with the history of Langley Hall. Blaine had talked of it at length, boasting that it had been designed and built somewhere around 1680 by a youthful John Vanbrugh, who in later life had designed Blenheim Palace. In truth, Moira decided as she v
iewed it now, it did look more like a miniature palace than the usual country manor house. Even its many chimneys had been constructed in such a way as to resemble turrets.

  Row upon row of delicately arched windows, all ablaze with light, cast a golden glow in the gathering dusk as her coach came to a stop at the foot of the shallow stairs leading to the main entrance. “A golden palace for a golden warrior,” Moira murmured, remembering the gypsy myth, then chided herself for letting such a fanciful notion quicken her pulse and turn her knees to water.

  Footmen in green-and-gold livery waited at the foot of the stairs to hand them down from the coach, and the Earl of Langley and Marquess of Stamden waited at the head of the stairs to escort them to the ballroom where the guests were gathering. Like two life-sized chess figures, the marquess was dressed in his usual elegant black, while in stark contrast, Devon wore white brocade with a gold satin waistcoat and gold lace edging on the sleeves.

  “Welcome to my home,” Devon said, waiting until after Stamden had claimed Elizabeth to offer his arm to Moira, “and may I say I have never seen you looking more beautiful. How is it, madam, that you can appear so ravishing in black, when it makes every other woman who wears it look as sallow as if she were suffering from the ague?”

  Without waiting for an answer to his preposterous question, he escorted her into the great entrance hall, the floor of which was composed of three-foot squares of black-and-white marble. Moira felt a bubble of laughter rise in her throat. “How remarkable. I had just decided you and the marquess looked like two opposing chess figures; now this bears a striking resemblance to a giant chessboard.”

  “It is a giant chessboard, as you’d readily see if you climbed the stairs to the balcony above,” Devon said. “My illustrious ancestor who commissioned the building of the manor house was an avid player, and he often entertained his guests by setting up a game with footmen and maids dressed as chess pieces. I’m told the King of England once traveled all the way from London to Cornwall just to play one game—which, naturally, he won.”

  Moira laughed. “Naturally.”

  “Are you by any chance familiar with the various strategies employed in chess?” Devon asked in an oddly husky voice.

  Moira nodded. “The duke taught me to play.”

  “Then you are aware that under certain circumstances the white knight can claim the black queen.”

  He was doing it again—playing his silly games that she found so annoying. Moira raised her chin defiantly and look him straight in the eye. “Only if the queen is foolish enough to leave herself unprotected. And no queen worth her salt would be so careless.”

  “So, madam, you think the game will end in a draw?”

  “I am certain of it, my lord.”

  Devon laughed softly. “And I find myself remembering my father’s wise advice the first time I faced him across a chessboard. ‘Never be too confident too soon. Remember, no game is ever won or lost until the last move in made.’ ”

  Moments later, still arm in arm, they descended the stairs into the vast candlelit ballroom just as the musicians played the first notes of a lively quadrille. It sounded strangely familiar, and an eerie sensation crept over Moira when she realized why. It was the same quadrille she remembered dancing with Blaine at that illfated assembly four years earlier. She froze in her tracks, haunted by memories of the sweet-faced boy she had so cruelly wounded.

  “What’s wrong?” Devon asked anxiously. “You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”

  Moira closed her eyes briefly, willing the painful memories to disappear. “It’s nothing. Just a slight headache. If you will escort me to a chair, I shall leave you to entertain your guests.” She managed a stiff smile. “I’m certain the local belles are eager to partner you in a dance.”

  “I would rather dance with you,” Devon said, smiling down at her with a lazy, provocative smile that made her heart race wildly. “With or without shoes.”

  “I am wearing shoes,” Moira declared indignantly. “But there is no question of my dancing tonight. In case you have failed to notice. I am still in mourning.”

  Devon drew her out of the path of a couple hurrying to join the three couples making up the square nearest to where they stood. “Oh, I have noticed and while, as I’ve already mentioned, black is most becoming to you, I confess I can scarcely wait to see you in the vivid colors that I somehow sense you were meant to wear.”

  Moira’s breath caught in her throat. “Why are you purposely trying to provoke me?” she asked somewhat breathlessly. “You gave me your solemn promise you would never again say such things if I agreed to…”

  “A ‘congenial acquaintanceship’ was as I recall, the specified term.” His slumberous eyes raked her face. “But let us set the record straight, my dear. I promised I would never again ask you to be my mistress, and I never will. I did not promise to refrain from telling you that I find you both the most beautiful and desirable woman I have ever met. Better to ask me to stop breathing, for it would be far easier to do. But that is a subject we shall pursue at a more appropriate time.”

  He glanced past her to where Stamden stood with Elizabeth, while she chatted happily with a group of the local squires and their ladies. The grim look on the marquess’s face made him appear even more demonic than usual. “I think we should rescue Peter,” Devon said. “Elizabeth seems totally oblivious to the fact that he is ill at ease in public.”

  “That’s because she sees no reason for him to be so.” Moira smiled. “She loves him; in her eyes he is perfect.”

  “Ah yes, I’ve heard that old saw ‘love is blind.’ Yet I can personally attest that in certain instances it has been known to strip the veils from a blind man’s eyes,” he said obliquely. Then, raising her fingers briefly to his lips, he turned her over to the marquess’s care while he claimed Elizabeth for the next country dance.

  The marquess promptly made his excuses to the squires and offering Moira his arm, led her to where a carved pillar at the edge of the dance floor hid them from the view of most of the occupants of the room. “Devon is in a strange mood tonight,” he said thoughtfully.

  “Devon is always in a strange mood to my way of thinking,” Moira snapped, then was instantly sorry for her petulance. “Forgive me, my lord,” she said contritely. “I’ve no call to take out my frustration with the earl on you.”

  “Frustrates you, does he?” The marquess’s slate-gray eyes held an unaccustomed twinkle. “If it is any comfort to you, dear lady, I believe you have the same effect on him. If the truth be known, I have never seen him so…so intense about any woman as he is about you.”

  Embarrassed by the marquess’s strange remark, Moira concentrated on the nearby dancers. Her eyes were instantly drawn to Devon, who executed the intricate figures of a Boulanger with the rhythmic grace of a powerful feline. Next to him the rest of the men on the floor looked like clumsy country bumpkins, and every woman he momentarily partnered in the convoluted pattern of the dance came glowingly alive the moment his hand touched hers.

  He made a graceful turn and over the shoulder of his partner, his eyes sought Moira’s in a brief, searing look. She felt a flush creep up her neck and into her cheeks. “I wish he would take his intensity back to London and expend it on his opera dancers and the incomparables from whom he will choose his countess,” she said without thinking.

  The marquess gave her an odd, piercing look. “Devon told me he had blotted his copy book with you; I see now he was right.”

  He glanced toward the open French windows at the far end of the room. “I believe I could do with a bit of fresh air, and this seems the ideal time to seek it since Elizabeth will not require my services until the set is finished. Would you care to join me in a stroll on the terrace, your grace? Or would you rather greet your friends among the local gentry? I doubt any of them will approach you as long as you converse with me.”

  “I have no friends among the local gentry,” Moira said. “I have only met then once before, at w
hich time every one of them except Elizabeth cut me dead.”

  “Ah, but your status had changed, ma’am. The same people who snubbed Moira Reardon will fall all over themselves in their eagerness to toady up to the duchess of Sheffield.”

  Moira frown. “Which is precisely why the gates of White Oaks will remain closed as long as I am mistress there.” She smiled into the grave, gray eyes of the tall man at her side. “But to answer your question, I believe I should find a stroll on the terrace most refreshing. It appears every lady in the room has taken advantage of the Corsican’s defeat to order some of the French perfumes currently flooding the market. The cumulative result is a bit overpowering.”

  The air was cool, but not unpleasantly so, and bright moonlight bathed the flagstone terrace onto which they stepped a few minutes later. The marquess was the first to speak. “He won’t, you know.”

  “My lord?”

  “Devon won’t go back to his opera dancers. Nor will he seek his wife among the pretty children offered up for bidding each Wednesday evening at Almack’s.”

  Moira’s pulse quickened as an inexplicable relief coursed through her at the marquess’s words, but she strove to keep her voice normal. “What the Earl of Langley does or does not do is of no concern to me, my lord, except as it affects Charles.”

  The marquess stopped walking. “Not even if you are the reason for his change of heart?” he asked, peering down at her from his great height. “Forgive me for overstepping the bounds of polite conversation, your grace, but Devon is the brother I never had…and my heart tells me you could be the sister. Perhaps it is because I have found my own happiness that I am so anxious two people I care about should find theirs.” He smiled. “And if any two people were ever right for each other, you and Devon are those two.”

  Moira stared at him, mouth agape. “You cannot mean that, my lord. We rub each other raw at every turn.”