Bringing Down the Duke

by Evie Dunmore

  The German cuckoo clock on the mantelpiece ticked away strategic seconds as he scanned the facts. The election was in March, little more than five months from now. Hardly enough time to turn things around, not when one had ten estates, policy work, and one unruly brother to manage. The question was, how much did she want him in particular to turn this election? Very much. He was one of her most trusted advisors at only thirty-and-five because he was good at what he did.

  He locked eyes with her. “I’m honored, but I’m not a politician, ma’am.”

  She stiffened. “Leave us, Lambton,” she commanded.

  The scowl on her face deepened as soon as the door had clicked shut. “You are a politician in all but name and no one can contest your leadership,” she said. “Your public endeavors have an unbroken record of success.”

  “I’m presently too occupied to do the task justice, ma’am.”

  “Regrettable,” she said coolly, and, when he did not reply, “pray, is there something that would allow you to change your priorities?”

  She wasn’t asking as much as she was daring him to make demands on the queen of England.

  His gaze didn’t waver. “I spend a lot of my time convincing Hartford to sell me back Montgomery Castle,” he said. “If someone convinced him to return the house, I would be free to advise the Tories.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “To sell you back the castle? And there we had been under the impression it was never properly purchased in the first place.” Below her impenetrable skirts, a small foot was tapping rapidly. “Remind us, Montgomery, how did your family seat come into my nephew’s possession?”

  He supposed he deserved it. “My father lost it to the marquess in a card game, ma’am.”

  The queen’s brows rose in mock surprise. “Ah. That’s right. You see, one would think a castle deserves to be lost, if it is held in such low regard as to be staked in a hand of cards, would you not agree?”

  “Unreservedly,” he said, “but then, I am not my father.”

  The tap-tap-tap of her foot ceased. The silence that ensued was rife with an oddly personal tension. She had watched him for years as he tried to piece his family’s legacy back together, never quite hindering him, never helping him, either. Except once, he suspected, when he had rid himself of his wife and the consequences had been surprisingly manageable.

  “Indeed you are not,” she said. “Hence, I want you to take over the campaign.”

  “Ma’am—”

  Her hand snapped up. “Very well. Hartford will make you an offer after the election.”

  His muscles tensed as if he had been slammed to the ground, making his next breath difficult.

  “Is the offer contingent upon the election outcome?” he managed. One needed to be clear about such things.

  She scoffed. “It certainly is. The final say over the victory is of course in the hands of higher powers, but would that not be all the proof we need that the castle was truly meant to return to you?”

  His mind was already steps ahead as he stood and made his way toward the doors, rearranging his schedule for the upcoming months . . .

  “Duke.”

  He turned back slowly.

  The queen was reclining in her chair, a mean gleam in her blue eyes. “If this campaign is to succeed,” she said, “your comportment has to be exemplary.”

  He suppressed a frown. His comportment was so exemplary, all the lines so skillfully toed, that not even a divorce had managed to ruin his standing.

  “Some people rumor that you are turning into an eccentric,” she said, “but eccentricity is so unbecoming in a man not yet forty, agreed?”

  “Agreed—”

  “And yet you are hardly ever seen at parties. You do not hold dinners, you are veritably unsociable, when everyone knows politics is made over a good feast. And there was no New Year’s party last year, nor the year before.”

  And the year before that only because there had been a duchess to manage the whole affair.

  He gritted his teeth. There was no mistaking where this was going.

  “The Montgomery New Year’s Eve party was famous across the continent when I was a girl,” the queen continued. “Your grandfather hosted the most splendid fireworks. Granted, back then it all took place at Montgomery Castle, but Claremont should do.”

  “You wish for me to hold a New Year’s Eve party.” His voice was dry as dust.

  She clapped her hands together with a cheerful smack. “Why indeed. You are running late with the invitations, of course, but people will change their plans. No one will want to give the impression of not having been invited to the event of the year. So do your duty, Duke. Host a party. Make merry.”

  * * *

  Make merry. The words bounced around him mockingly as the train rumbled back toward Wiltshire. Sebastian dragged his stare away from the darkening horizon.

  Ramsey had just finished laying out his notebook, fountain pen, and ink blotter on the narrow table before him and made to withdraw to the servant corner of the coach.

  “Ramsey, draw up a list of people needed to put together a New Year’s Eve party.”

  Well-trained as he was, the valet couldn’t stop his eyes from widening with surprise before schooling his features.

  “Yes, Your Grace.”

  “There will have to be fireworks; expenses are of no consequence.”

  “Understood, Your Grace.”

  “And a ball,” Sebastian added darkly. “I need a concept for a winter ball by next week.”

  “Of course, Your Grace.” Ramsey reached inside his jacket and produced the slim silver case with the cigarettes. He placed it next to the ink blotter and retreated.

  Sebastian took up his pen. The queen’s retaliation had hit its mark. Hardly a punishment, a house party, but then, she knew how they annoyed him: the stomping crowds, the inane chatter, the stuffy air, the intrusion on his home and his work—and there was no duchess to bear the brunt of the organizing and socializing. He stilled. Was that the queen’s true intention, making him feel the absence of a wife?

  He put the pen down and reached for the cigarettes. He did not need reminding. A man his age should long have a duchess running his house and an entire pack of sons underfoot. And every single society matron knew that, too. They thrust their debutante daughters at him whenever he did make a show—seventeen-year-old girls, all vying to be the next Duchess of Montgomery. All of them too frightened of him to even look him in the face. His mouth curved into a sardonic smile. They would have to bear a whole lot more than look at him if they were his wife.

  Unbidden, a clear green gaze flashed across his mind. The woman on the square. She had looked him straight in the eye. She had talked back at him. Ladies of his acquaintance had yet to dare do such a thing, but women as far below his station as her? Inconceivable. And yet Green Eyes had dared. She had split from the herd, from that faceless crowd that usually just milled at the fringes of his life, and had stepped right into his path . . . Presumptuous wench. Possibly unhinged.

  He flipped open his notebook, and as he set pen to paper, all vanished but the task at hand. Castle Montgomery. Given to the first duke for services rendered during the Battle of Hastings, lost by the eighteenth duke in a hand of cards. He would get it back, even if it was the last thing he did.

  Chapter 4

  You seem distracted, Miss Archer.”

  A marksman-sharp gaze pinned her over the rim of metal-framed glasses, and Annabelle felt a ripple of both guilt and alarm. With his patched tweed jacket, high forehead, and impatient frown, Professor Jenkins looked every inch the brilliant academic he was. Barely forty, he was already a titan in the field of ancient Greek warfare, so if there had ever been a need to pay attention, it was during his morning tutorial.

  She looked up at her father’s former correspondent with contrition. “My apologies, Profe
ssor.”

  He leaned forward over the desk. “It’s the bloody knitting, isn’t it?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “The knitting,” he repeated, eyeing Mrs. Forsyth balefully. “The click-click-click . . . it is maddening, like a furiously leaking tap.”

  The clicking behind Annabelle stopped abruptly, and Mrs. Forsyth’s consternation filled the room. Annabelle cringed. The woman was rightfully offended—after all, Annabelle paid her sixpence an hour to sit right there, because Gilbert, confound him, had been right about one thing: she did need a chaperone. One who was approved by the warden of her college, no less. Female students were not allowed to enter the town center unescorted, nor could they be alone with a professor. Mrs. Forsyth, widowed, elderly, and smartly dressed, certainly looked the part of a respectable guardian.

  But if Jenkins was vexed by the sound of knitting, she had to find another solution. He was the titan, after all. His lessons turned crumbling old pages into meaningful windows to the past; his outstanding intellect lit her own mind on fire. And in order to teach her, he took the trouble to come to the classroom the university had given to the female students: a chamber with mismatched furniture above the bakery in Little Clarendon Street.

  A bakery. That was the crux of the situation. It was not the knitting that was distracting; it was the warm, yeasty scent of freshly baked bread that wafted through the cracks in the door . . .

  A cart rumbled past noisily on the street below.

  The professor slammed his copy of Thucydides shut with an annoyed thud.

  “That is it for today,” he said. “I have no doubt you will come up with an original take on this chapter by tomorrow.”

  Tomorrow? The warm glow following his praise faded quickly—tomorrow would mean another night shift at her desk. They were piling up fast here, faster than in Chorleywood.

  She watched Jenkins furtively as she slid her pen and notebook back into her satchel. She’d been surprised how youthful the professor looked when, after years of dry scientific correspondence, she had finally met him in person. He was lanky, his face unlined thanks to a life spent in dimly lit archives. He was also mercurial, lost in thought one moment, sharp as a whip the next. Managing him could pose a challenge.

  Downstairs in the bakery, someone began banging metal pots with great enthusiasm.

  Jenkins pinched the bridge of his nose. “Come to my office in St. John’s the next time,” he said.

  St. John’s. One of the oldest, wealthiest colleges at Oxford. They said its wine collection alone could pay for the crown jewels.

  “But no needles, no yarn,” Jenkins said, “understood?”

  * * *

  Annabelle hurried down St. Giles with a still disgruntled Mrs. Forsyth in tow. She would have liked to meander and soak up the sight of the enchanting sandstone walls framing the street, but they were running late for the suffragist meeting. She could still feel the withered stones of the old structures, emanating centuries-old knowledge and an air of mystery. She had peeked through one of the medieval doors in the wall the other day, catching a glimpse of one of the beautiful gardens of the men’s colleges that lay beyond, a little island of exotic trees and late-blooming flowers and hidden nooks, locked away like a gem in a jewelry box. Someday, she might find a way to sneak inside.

  This week, the suffragists gathered at the Randolph. Hattie and her chaperoning great-aunt rented apartments in the plush hotel for the term and had kindly offered to host them all. The common room of her college, Lady Margaret Hall, would have sufficed for their small chapter, but their warden, Miss Wordsworth, didn’t allow political activism on university grounds. I shall tolerate the nature of your stipend, she had told Annabelle during their first meeting, but use the university’s trust in you wisely. An interesting woman, Miss Wordsworth—paying for the tutors from her own pocket to give women an education, but seeing no need whatsoever in helping women get the vote.

  “Now what precisely is your group trying to achieve?” Mrs. Forsyth asked, her breath coming in audible puffs. Ah, she sounded so eerily like Aunt May when she said such things. Now, what precisely was my nephew trying to achieve, overeducating you like this? Aunt May had muttered something along those lines daily, during those long winter months they had spent up north together. Was that why she had chosen Mrs. Forsyth from the pool of warden-approved chaperones? She surreptitiously studied the woman from the corner of her eye. She looked a bit like Aunt May, too, with her small glasses perched on the tip of her nose . . .

  “We ask that they amend the Married Women’s Property Act,” she said, “so that women can keep their own property after marriage.”

  Mrs. Forsyth frowned. “But why? Surely all the husband’s worldly goods are the wife’s as well?”

  “But the goods would not be in her name,” Annabelle said carefully. “And since only people with property to their name may vote, a woman must keep her own property if she wishes to have the vote.”

  Mrs. Forsyth clucked her tongue. “It is becoming clear to me why a fair girl like you has been left on the shelf. You are not only bookish but a radical political activist. All highly impractical in a wife.”

  “Quite,” Annabelle said, because there was no way to pretend it was otherwise. She wouldn’t make a convenient wife to any man she knew. It had probably been thus from the moment she had read about men like Achilles, Odysseus, Jason; demigods and men who knew how to navigate the seven seas. Men who could have taken her on an adventure. Perhaps her father should have made her read “Sleeping Beauty” instead of The Iliad—her life might have turned out quite differently.

  At the Randolph, the meeting was about to begin: Lucie was rooting in a satchel next to a small speaker’s desk. A dozen ladies had formed a chatty semicircle around Hattie’s fireplace. A pink marble fireplace, with a vast, gold-framed mirror mounted above, leaf-gold, she guessed as she handed her coat to a maid.

  Hattie was not here, and every seat was taken. Except one half of the French settee. The other half was occupied by a young woman wrapped in a battered old plaid. Annabelle recognized the plaid. The girl had been at Parliament Square: Lady Catriona Campbell. She wasn’t a student; she was the assistant to her father, Alastair Campbell, an Oxford professor, Scottish earl, and owner of a castle in the Highlands. And now the lady startled her by giving her an awkward little wave and sliding over to make more room.

  A gauntlet of covert glances ensued as she moved toward the settee; yes, she was aware that her walking dress was plain and old. Among the silky, narrow-cut modern gowns of the ladies, she must look like a relic from a bygone era . . . not quite as bygone as that tartan shawl, though.

  She carefully lowered herself onto the settee’s velvety seat.

  “We have not yet met, I believe,” she said to Lady Campbell. “I’m Annabelle Archer.”

  The lady didn’t look like the daughter of an earl: her face was half-hidden behind a pair of round spectacles, and her raven hair was pulled into an artless bun. And there was the way she wore that shawl, quite like a turtle would wear its shell.

  “I know who you are,” Lady Campbell said. “You are the girl with the stipend.”

  Her matter-of-factness was tempered by a soft Scottish lilt.

  She seemed encouraged by Annabelle’s smile, for her right hand emerged from her plaid. “I’m Catriona. I saw you lobby the Duke of Montgomery last week. That was very brave of you.”

  Annabelle absently shook the proffered hand. Montgomery. The name brought it all back—the haughty aristocratic face, the cold eyes, the firmness of his hand clasping her arm . . . She wasn’t proud of it, but their encounter had preoccupied her so much that she had read up on him in the Annals of the Aristocracy. Like every duke worth his salt, his ancestral line went straight to William the Conqueror, with whom his forefathers had come over in 1066 to change the face of Britain. His family had only amassed
more land and wealth as the centuries went by. He had become duke at nineteen. Nineteen sounded awfully young for owning a substantial chunk of the country, but recalling the duke’s self-contained imperiousness, it seemed impossible that this man had ever been a boy. Perhaps he had sprung from somewhere fully formed, like a blond Greek demigod.

  “Ladies.” Lucie slapped a thick stack of papers onto her speaker’s desk. Satisfied that she had everyone’s attention, she gave the group a dark glance. “Our mission has just become more difficult. The Duke of Montgomery is the new advisor to the Tory election campaign.”

  Well, speaking of the devil.

  A shocked murmur rose around Annabelle. She understood that some Tories were in favor of giving women the vote, but most were against it, whereas the opposing Liberals had a few members against women’s suffrage and most in favor. The duke had thrown his weight behind the wrong party.

  Lucie emerged from behind the desk with her papers. “Drastic circumstances demand drastic measures,” she said as she handed out sheets, “so I propose we meet MPs in their offices from now on, and we will find out everything about them beforehand: their likes, their dislikes, and most importantly, their weaknesses. Then we tailor our approach to each man. He thinks he’s an expert on justice? Use Plato to argue with him. He thinks his children will suffer should his wife get the vote? Tell him how independent women make better mothers. In short, ladies—know thy enemy.”

  Annabelle nodded. Strategic and manipulative—that usually worked.

  The sheet Lucie had handed her was divided neatly into sections: general characteristics . . . voting record . . . notable scandals . . . botheration. This information was hardly common knowledge in her circles. She’d have to scour scandal sheets and public records—but when? Doing her coursework and tutoring pupils to pay Gilbert already pushed her working hours well into the night.