Concern for his father’s health coiled inside him. “Never. But this serves no purpose, Father. I’ve heard this tirade for decades and I’m quite tired of it. Tell us rather more about the finances, please.”
“Very well. I have cut the staff. At Broadmore, two of the maids, one of the footmen. Here, I’ll relieve the seasonal staff at the end of June. Four of them. Two upstairs maids, the second scullery maid and the new footman.”
His mother caught a handkerchief to her eyes. “Disgraceful. The house will be a shambles. How will we manage?”
The old man shook his head. “You could pick up a feather duster.”
“You’re mad,” she seethed.
“Right you are. So then! No more monthly shipments of wine. No refurbishment of the upholstery in the drawing room.”
“Absurd!” his mother objected. “I cannot imagine. How can we attract a proper match for Elanna?”
Julian winced. Leave it to his mother to use Elanna as an excuse to get what she wanted. The woman had no scruples. Few motherly instincts, either.
“Ba!” His father put a hand on his hip. “She turned down two men last year. Old Wayland’s whelp who has a bit of money.”
“He’s not yet out of dresses,” the duchess objected.
He prefers men. Julian shifted. “He’s not right for our girl.”
“And Lord Canfield was—is a rogue,” Elanna added. “With bad breath.”
Julian stifled a laugh. “Marriage is too important to demand that Elanna take whatever comes her way.”
“Like Carbury?” their mother said with the arch of one long brow and a pointed gaze at Elanna. “Why not? He’s eager. Likes her. He’s not bound himself up with debts, and he’s out of mourning.”
Elanna shifted. “He’s very nice. But I dare say I cannot find it in my heart to—”
“Not for you, is he?” the duke asked. “Well, then. Would you be able to find it in your heart to take a position as governess?”
“What?” his mother gaped.
Elanna fell back in her chair.
Julian cringed.
“Or teach in a girl’s school?”
“Surely, Seton,” said the duchess, waving her handkerchief in a frantic beat, “you jest. You do. The girl will not, I say will not lower herself to turn to anyone’s employ. Surely, surely—” She was on her feet, pacing the window, back to face her husband before his desk. “You cannot make her do that. It’d ruin us. Utterly.”
The old man simply crossed his arms and studied her.
“What will people say, good sir?” she beseeched him.
“I applaud your social instincts, my girl. Thought you’d lost them. Sent them out to roost with all our money.”
“Stop.” She hung her head and stomped her foot. “Do. Stop.”
“I cannot. As for doings here, there are enough funds for the ordinary teas, a few dinner parties, a musicale, if you wish. But no balls.” His tone turned maudlin, almost apologetic. So very unlike his normal boisterous self. “I’m sorry, Elanna, but you’ll have to dance at other people’s invitation.”
“What of the sale of Cardiff Shipping?” his mother asked, her handkerchief to her temple. “Will you do it? That could save us.”
“Save us? You think so? Oh, if only that were so. Last winter, we had two offers. Neither of them was worth a prayer on Sunday. The better of the two came from the American. Hanniford.” His father turned to him with a tilt of his head.
“I haven’t seen him since Paris last autumn. And he has not contacted me.” Julian hadn’t wished to open that relationship again. Instead, he’d called upon their London lawyer and estate agent Phillip Leland last week in the City. On official business for himself to monitor his own investment in railroad expansion in the Cotswolds, he’d taken the occasion to ask if any news had come from Killian Hanniford lately. None had and Julian was happy for it. He did not wish to be reminded of Hanniford’s beguiling daughter.
Julian brushed the wool of his trousers. “Leland believes if we hold out for another six months or until the new year, we would receive a better price for the company than is the current offer.”
“How much better?” his father asked.
“Twenty percent more.”
“Healthy.” His father arched his brows. “And why would that be?”
“Leland courts two buyers. One wants the company to expand his own reach. The other wants it to gut it.”
“And the twenty-percent advantage would come from stalling?”
“Exactly. Selling it to the first man who will see over time that the second man would not be favored. Not for his objective.”
The duchess fretted. “Are there no other answers?”
“Certainly, there is only one other asset.” His father arched a sardonic brow at his wife.
“My—my diamonds,” she whispered, touching the base of her throat where her most precious necklace of all her jewels would adorn her on many an occasion. “But King Charles gave them to my great grandmama. I must not, nay cannot part with them.”
“But will.”
Her eyes popped wide. “If…if things are this bad—”
“Never doubt it, madam.”
“No. Would you sell them? I won’t allow it.”
“You have no choice,” his father said to her.
“But I’d have nothing to wear.”
His father scoffed. “However, the sale alone could keep us until—oh, shall we say? January. At most.”
“Oh, George.” Her tears spilled over her lids.
“We are, despite your tears, in dire straits. I have done what I could for the time being. You will abide by my orders to trim your expenses, all of you. Anything else you wish to cut, do. There is no other solution. And know, too, that what I have done will not be the end of it. I cannot change the weather. I cannot improve the crops, not by much in any case. Elanna, you will find a husband. Madam, you will give me your diamonds. Come to think of it, your pearls, too.”
Once more, his mother put her hand to her throat. Her eyes wide, she looked as if her husband wished to cut her throat. “George. They were your wedding gift.”
“What a sorry investment that was, eh?”
Tears cascaded down her cheeks. She struggled up from her chair. With a turn of her heel and a swish of her skirts, she raced from the room.
Silence reigned.
Elanna rose to her feet. “I will do my duty by you, Papa. I will help. I swear to it. I’ll choose a husband. One you will like.”
His gaze was for once paternal and held pity for his only daughter. “Elanna, do me and yourself a favor. Search diligently. But like him for yourself.”
Julian witnessed Elanna thank her father and, for the first time in many years, she rushed to kiss him on the cheek. Then she hurried away, a hand cupping her mouth.
“Help her, can you?” the duke asked him as he watched her leave the room.
“Find a man? Such arrangements are not easily done.”
“Well, I know it. When you’re young, the blood runs hot. Too hot to show one’s true nature. And deception does not build sound unions.”
Julian shifted in his chair. This was his father’s old story about the failure of all marriages, a metaphor for the nightmare that was his union. So he had loved his duchess when first they’d married and then what had gone wrong? From what Julian could ascertain, they had destroyed whatever respect they had, each for the other, with lies and flirtations, excessive gambling and drinking. Julian and Elanna had witnessed the results—and learned from them. He understood marriage to be a prison of mutual love and hate. Elanna, poor girl, thought their parents’ relationship to be unique.
‘The world,’ she’d once told Julian, ‘is not like that.’
Julian had looked for evidence to prove her right. He’d discovered one woman he’d thought worthy of marriage. But he’d valued her more than she him and so he’d put marriage from his mind. He’d marry to get an heir, but not for love.
“Some couples construct a congenial bond,” the duke said, morose.
“Not many.”
“I count four. Four. But they are not exempt from problems. A failed career, a malformed baby, a debilitating disease.”
The sudden tragedies that racked one. “Sad.”
“Carbury’s the only one of my acquaintance who had a complete dash of success with a woman. And what do you know, she up and died. What the hell is that for justice? I’m shocked he’s eager to marry again.”
“Elanna is in his sights. But he would expect a dowry and marriage settlement from us.” Julian had never asked what marriage portion his father had set aside for Elanna. But he had an idea of the amount. If his father wanted him to help her secure a husband, he’d have to know something of the details.
The duke rounded his desk. He sank to his chair, all the bluster of the argument out of him, deflated, diminished. He sat, running his fingers over the edges of his large ledger book—and his fingers shook. Does he have a palsy? “I have preserved some of her dowry.”
“Some?” Anger warmed Julian’s blood. “How much?”
The duke pursed his lips. “It may yield one thousand a year. Perhaps.”
A pitiful sum. And why? There was only one answer. Julian smarted at the thought. “You borrowed against it?”
The old man inhaled, firming his jaw. “I had to do it. We had to eat.”
And gamble. And whore. “I understood it to be five thousand pounds a year.”
“It was. Your grandfather Downey gave your mother such a magnificent marriage portion that I was able to invest it for any daughters soon after we married. It was in South American products.”
Julian made a fist. “Such as?”
His father smiled like a devil, ear to ear. “Bird shit.”
“I’m sorry,” Julian bit off. “Say that again.”
“In the fifties, soon after the marriage, I invested it with speculators. Men who wanted to buy bird guano from Peru and ship it here to spread as fertilizer over the soil.”
Julian knew of it, had met a few men who owned stock in import companies that shipped it in to England and Europe. In the tired soils of Britain and the Continent, the addition had improved yields double, sometimes triple, the norm. “I understood it was lucrative. I wanted to buy some myself, but the stocks were closed accounts.”
“They are. Worse, the money is bound in trust and will be granted to her husband to manage after the ceremony. Even then, he may take only ten percent of the total each year for her welfare.”
“Have you told her?”
“I thought it best she never know. Not the terms. Not the sum.”
“And Mama?”
“Does not know, either.”
“And you won’t tell her,” Julian said with certainty.
“Never. She’d harangued me to change the terms, the law be damned. She’d want it. At first it would be a portion. Then more. She’d risk it at cards or dice, lose it, lose it all. She’s a pitiful gambler, boy. You know as well as I. She’d fritter it away and then what would Elanna have?” His father sighed. “I won’t tell your mother on pain of full war in this house. You won’t tell her, either. And you know, it’s for the best.”
Dear Elanna, without any candidates. “She’s seen the current lot. Danced with them all. Found no one who appealed.”
“There must be someone. An Irishman? A baron, a knight?Or a Frenchman with enough land left to feed himself? What of your friend, the prince, Remy?”
“Elanna likes him. Nothing more.”
“He must have cousins.”
“No one I’d recommend to her,” Julian told him. “But then—”
“What?”
“I have funds. Savings.”
“What?” His father scoffed. “Twenty thousand?”
Julian was shocked his father came so near the mark. “Twenty-two. How do you know?”
“Shall we say, my friends are useful?”
“And unethical to chat about a fellow’s worth.”
“To your father? Not so. I hear what you win at the tables. I also know what you spend at your tailors. I had to find out when I saw no bills for you. And yes, I know you’ve often declared that you’d save Elanna from the marriage mart with your winnings. Good of you. But she must stand on her own. Time is nigh. She must marry.”
“And you won’t give out the sum of her dowry. Say you will not.”
“And kill her chances? I’d lie and declare the sum is grand.”
Julian was aghast. “No! She’ll have every roué from here to Vienna at our door.”
“If she can find a man whom she admires, who’s worthy of her esteem, I’ll gladly hand her to him. Money, title or not.”
Once more, Julian was amazed at his father. If the man had a foul temper, if he berated his wife with joyous vengeance, if he liked his brandy, if he was a feckless manager of the estates, if he had no ingenious methods to improve the crops, he did love his daughter. He did wish her happiness. If when all was said and done, he did not see the error in lying about her wealth to protect her from charlatans, he was wrong.
“Which means we come to you,” the man said matter-of-factly, drumming his fingers on the desk.
Julian blinked, the change in topic a shock. He took a moment to guard himself.
Of course, the old man would come round to him.
“I wish to discuss your own marriage prospects.”
“I have none.”
“You must.”
Julian took a deep breath. “I’ve told you before I will not be pressed.”
“You were always difficult,” his father muttered.
“On this issue, especially.”
“I don’t see why. You’ve always known you must marry.”
“Do the begetting, eh?”
“If you find a comely gel, the experience of begetting is not ghastly. And if rumor serves up truth about your prowess, well you know it, too.”
I won’t marry for money. “I won’t marry for advantage.”
“I did.”
“It’s demeaning.”
“But accepted.”
“Among your set, yes.” Julian gave him that.
“Yours, too. Look at Marlborough’s boy. At Waldron’s heir. It is done.”
“But I won’t,” Julian spat. “They may care for those girls now, but later?” He scoffed.
“Live by pride alone and you will starve,” his father warned.
Pride was not the problem. Fear of a shrew in his house. Irrational, demanding. One who turned on him or worse, turned on their children like Medea. No, he’d not take a woman unless she was malleable. “I’d like to solve my own problems.”
“Good intentions?” his father asked with a strained smile. “Noble. But you cannot eat them. Nor pay our taxes or your mother’s gambling debts.”
“I keep trying.” But my skills at the table are just as bad as my mother’s.
His father shook his head. “I tell you, I married for love. A tender bit, but it passes.”
Julian quelled the urge to laugh. That was how the man explained his and his mother’s screaming matches, the crockery that flew, the insinuations that shook the rafters. “Passes, oh, yes. Falls into—what did you term your relationship with Mama—disrepair?”
“No matter,” the old man said and flung out a hand. “You tilt at windmills. Meanwhile we are soon to become known debtors. And there are options for you. Bright, comely options.”
Julian stared at him. “Let me guess. You have suggestions.”
“One in particular. The American Lily.”
The American Lily, yes. That’s how she’d come to be known in London. The tall, graceful girl with the perfectly oval face, the pile of midnight curls and those uncanny blue eyes that bore right through a man. She’d been photographed, her pictures copied and redrawn, The American Beauty, once maligned by cartoonists, now glorified by anyone who could catch a glimpse of her.
And
Julian had tried not to follow suit. But yesterday, he’d succumbed and gone to tea at the house in Piccadilly.
“Well?” his father asked. “I understand you’ve met her.”
His stomach churned. Julian didn’t want an arranged marriage for himself and he would not wish one on a young woman he liked. Or this one who favored him one minute and not the next. “I won’t marry her.”
“Does she have warts on her nose? No. On the contrary, I understand she is quite lovely. And you like her.”
Who had told him that? Elanna knew his reaction to her. His mother, too, had witnessed the scene at the opera in Paris. He’d been careless to allow anyone to see it. But he’d been entranced.
“You like her quite a bit.”
“And I would predict you have more than one reason to suggest her,” Julian said with bitterness filling his throat.
“She has thousands of reasons to commend her. More than that Van de Putte girl.”
Julian had met the American, Priscilla Van de Putte, last spring and had spent the next few months escaping her clutches. Selfish, spoiled, Priscilla was the epitome of a woman he would never take to his arms, let alone to the altar. “I’ve avoided marriage so far. I intend to extend my run.”
He rose from his chair and headed for the hall.
As he reached for the door, his father called to him.
He paused. “Yes?”
“I must tell you Killian Hanniford sent a request around yesterday to meet with me.”
That spelled trouble. His father had no head for negotiating. “And?”
“He still wishes to buy shares of Cardiff Shipping.”
“I see.” Julian had refused to continue talks with Lily’s father in Paris. He’d informed his father of it as soon as he returned to England.
“I must try because you couldn’t get a decent price out of him.”
And neither can you. “The company is decrepit. It needs new ships, repair of the old ones and new management. It’s nigh unto bankrupt. Give over, sir. I wish to hear no more about it.”
“But his daughter is worth so much more.”
More than you know. Julian ground his teeth. “Sell your shares, sir, if you wish. But do not think you can barter away my marriage bed in the bargain.”
Wild Lily (Those Notorious Americans Book 1) Page 8