Oh, this really was too much. Good looks and a mother who loved him?
Raymond Allen had neither of those things.
Raymond heard Benedict say cheerily, “Sleep well, Mother!” and then, although Raymond immediately twisted the knob and pushed the door open, before he could slide inside, Benedict turned and caught him standing there.
Now Raymond was in for it. The other man would probably demand to know what he was doing standing there, maybe even accuse him of snooping.
Which he hadn’t been doing. Not really.
“Oh, hello!” Benedict called in a genial tone of voice. He began walking toward Raymond, lightly gliding his hand along the pink marble railing of the balcony, the gallery overlooking the entry hall far below. “I didn’t see you standing there! Were you waiting for me? Perhaps you’d like a glass of sherry? I have some in my room.”
As the other man drew to within inches, Raymond studied his face for any signs of the sarcasm he expected to find, either that or some other form of guile, but there simply wasn’t any. If forced to describe Benedict’s expression, Raymond would have to say it was open, honest, and overwhelmingly pleasant.
So on top of everything else, blasted good looks and a mother who genuinely loved him, Benedict Clarke was also nice? Oh, this really was too much.
“No, thank you for the offer,” Raymond said hurriedly, entering his room now, “but we all have an early day in the morning—the hunt, you know—so I’ll just retire now.”
“Very well, then! I’ll see you in—”
Raymond shut the door.
It wasn’t so much that he didn’t want to be friendly—in truth, it would be nice to have a friend—but it had already been such a long and trying day and night. And then there was the hunt in the morning. In these early postwar years, people as a whole were more reluctant to kill animals for sport. But it was still the done thing in big houses like this. Raymond didn’t care much for hunting, didn’t care much for guns in general really, but he’d heard Lady Katherine was a crack shot. Even if he felt his chances with her were greatly diminished since the advent of Benedict—probably hardly greater than zero, if he were truthful—he had to at least show up. He had to at least still try.
And they had said it was to be just birds and maybe small ground game; there weren’t even supposed to be any horses involved, so that shouldn’t be too bad. Not too bad.
But something that was bad?
“Parker?” Raymond called for his valet when he realized there was no one besides him in the room. He quickly strode to check the adjoining bath area, but there was no one there, either.
Like all good guests, Raymond had brought his own valet with him, so as not to place any undue strain on the household staff. While Raymond was at dinner, Parker would have spent that free time in the servants’ hall or perhaps in the kitchen courtyard, enjoying a smoke, but he should have been up here by now. He should have been waiting for Raymond so he could wait on Raymond.
He began removing one of his cuff links but then thought, This is preposterous—I’m a duke!
Immediately, he crossed the bedroom and yanked on the bell pull cord to summon the butler.
While he waited, he regarded his reflection in the long, standing mirror over in one corner. Well, he reflected, at least he was tall. Not for the first time, however, he found himself wishing that he’d been born into biblical times, when long hair on men had been the fashion. At least then he could have used it to cover his unfortunate ears. But as it were…
A discreet knock came at the door, followed by the entry of Mr. Wright.
“You rang, sir?” Mr. Wright said.
“Yes,” Raymond replied. “I wondered if you might send up my valet, Parker?”
“He’s not here with you?”
“Clearly,” Raymond said, stating the obvious. “Otherwise, why would I have called you?”
“I don’t know, sir, but I haven’t seen Parker since this afternoon, not long after your arrival and his seeing you settled in. I assumed you’d sent him into town on an errand or something.”
“Well, I didn’t. And even if I had, surely he’d have returned for his dinner.”
“It is odd, sir.”
“Yes, very,” Raymond agreed.
Except it wasn’t. Raymond had a history of not being able to keep valets for very long, a tendency he’d inherited from his mother, a woman who could lose a member of staff as easily as another person might lose a lace handkerchief. So the only thing remotely odd about his valet’s disappearing was that none of the previous ones had seen fit to quit without notice, departing without even asking for any money still due. And yet apparently, Parker had done exactly that, simply walking off into the sunset.
“I can send up one of the footmen to attend to you for the rest of the weekend,” Mr. Wright offered.
“Oh, but that will take time. Couldn’t you just…” Raymond held out a shirtsleeve wrist and jiggled it a bit so that the cuff link shimmied in Mr. Wright’s general direction.
“Oh no, sir. You’d be much better off with one of the footmen. And I know just the person for the job.”
Before Raymond could object further, Mr. Wright was gone.
So now, on top of everything else, he would be subjected to having a footman act as his valet. Oh, this was too hard. Everyone knew that footmen were handsome creatures. The finer the house, the more handsome the footmen—and Porthampton Abbey was a very fine house indeed.
If Benedict Clarke hadn’t made Raymond feel insecure enough about his looks, now a footman was going to come and finish the job.
In his frustration, Raymond sought again to remove one of his own cuff links. But he soon gave up, in even greater frustration.
He wasn’t supposed to have to remove his own cuff links.
He was a duke!
Chapter
Seven
The first footman, Jonathan Butler, and Daniel Murray, the second, were enjoying a late-night game of cards in the servants’ hall when Mr. Wright entered.
“I’m afraid that the duke will need one of you to act as his valet for the remainder of the weekend,” Mr. Wright announced. “It would appear that his own valet has gone missing.”
“Who can blame him?” Daniel said, not bothering to look up from his hand.
“I’ll go,” Jonathan said, throwing down his cards and starting to rise. He’d been losing anyway.
“Thank you, Jonathan,” Mr. Wright said, “but I think Daniel would be better suited to this particular job.”
Isn’t that just like old Wright? Daniel thought, tossing his own cards down. Someone else volunteers, so of course Wright would pick him instead.
“All right, Mr. Wright,” Daniel said, knowing the butler hated it when he put it like that, slowly rising, slowly moving across the room.
“And don’t dawdle!” Mr. Wright called after him. “The duke is waiting!”
Daniel just kept walking at his own pace, up the servants’ stairs and through the green baize door at the top of it, moving through the house that he knew better than the home he’d grown up in. Now seventeen, he’d arrived at Porthampton Abbey when he was just twelve. He’d always been tall for his age, and so he’d lied about it, claiming he was sixteen in order to get the job of hall boy. His early duties were mostly scut work, all the odd jobs no one else wanted and Fanny was too small to do, and delivering Mr. Wright’s breakfast. But he’d watched and learned, with an eye toward becoming a footman whenever a job opened up.
A few years after he started, it was easy enough to lie again about his age, for an entirely different reason, an entirely different sort of job.
For the past two years, Daniel had been second footman, and that suited him just fine.
His duties included greeting guests with the family, answering the front door, delivering messages to the village, serving in the dining room, and keeping the fires lit in whatever rooms the family were currently using. He also cleaned, ironed, laid out and pack
ed clothes, did some mending, and removed change from pockets so Lord Clarke’s clothes would hang better.
He liked that last duty.
What he didn’t like so much was being assigned now to be the duke’s stand-in valet.
Daniel considered his job, as a whole, to be not dissimilar to that of a great actor. A footman needed to act a certain way at all times whenever on duty and could relax, and even then just a bit, only when he was backstage with the other servants.
Oh well.
Daniel could act with the best of them.
He’d been doing it long enough.
Daniel knew that some of the other servants were always dreaming of life outside the big house; Fanny in particular. Daniel had once shared those dreams, but he’d seen enough of the world now, and he didn’t anymore. If he could remain at Porthampton Abbey for the rest of his life, perhaps finding love and marriage with one of the female staff, that would suit him just fine. Maybe they could even live in one of the small cottages that peppered the farther reaches of the estate, those cottages reserved for tenant farmers and married staff.
Daniel liked the idea of marriage in general and liked the idea of females in particular; at least females didn’t start wars and go around killing one another, which seemed a huge feature to recommend them. In addition to the female staff he knew from Downstairs, there were also the three daughters of the house, whom he glimpsed from time to time while carrying out his duties. But from what he’d glimpsed? Lady Kate was horrible and Lady Elizabeth was silly. Lady Grace appeared to be the best of the lot in that, if she was neither here nor there in the way her sisters were decidedly here and there, there seemed to be something downright decent about her. Some might find “decent” to be an equivalent to “boring,” but Daniel had seen a lot that wasn’t decent in the world, and for him it was anything but. Daniel would give a lot, he’d give everything he had, for a world populated with more decent people like Lady Grace. Still, when a person grew up with everything provided for her—money, a grand house, safety, love—it wasn’t so much a wonder that Lady Grace was decent but that the rest of them weren’t. Shouldn’t they have been? Shouldn’t they have been more grateful?
But now it was time for Daniel to leave off daydreams of a future and stray thoughts about the ladies of the house and get back on stage as he raised his fist to knock on the duke’s door.
He needn’t have knocked quite as sharply as he did, but Daniel liked to take his pleasures wherever he could find them.
“Enter!” a voice called.
Daniel did so, only to be greeted by the duke’s surprised face.
“But you’re so young!” the duke said. “I was hoping for someone more senior.”
Immediately, Daniel bristled inside. No one else ever told him he looked young. As far as the rest of the household was concerned, he was something like twenty-one now. Besides, the duke didn’t look much older than he was supposed to be himself.
“I’m old enough to have fought in the war,” Daniel said, still bristling. “Were you there, sir? I feel like I may have seen you. Perhaps we shared a trench one time? It’s always so difficult to remember who was with one and who was not, while one was being shelled. Don’t you find that to be true?”
Daniel knew it was a low blow, just as he was sure he knew the answer, but he hadn’t been able to stop the words from coming out of his mouth.
“No, I was not,” the duke said. “I needed to stay at home to mind the family affairs.”
“Of course, sir,” Daniel said, just shy of snidely, but then he felt a touch of guilt upon seeing the blush of embarrassment color the duke’s cheeks.
Of course the duke hadn’t served in the war. A soft man like him would have died there. And a soft man like him would have been wise to not go.
Daniel hadn’t been wise.
Three years ago, just fourteen years old, he’d gone, just in time for what would be the final year of the war. You had to be eighteen to sign up, nineteen to fight overseas. But if you didn’t have a birth certificate, as many poor people didn’t, a large sixteen-year-old could fake it. Or a large fourteen-year-old. The minimum height requirement was five foot three—Daniel cleared that easily, by ten inches. The minimum chest measurement was thirty-four inches—Daniel cleared that easily, too. Like the two hundred and fifty thousand other underage soldiers, Daniel had figured that he’d get some fresh air and good food and a bit of adventure.
He got more than he bargained for.
What had been embarked upon with great enthusiasm and dreams of glory had ended when he’d been forced to face grim reality.
He learned how to build trenches and use sandbags and toss a grenade, and he became all too familiar with the sight of death.
If he never saw another trench in his life, that would be fine with Daniel.
And if he wanted to make sure that never happened, that he never lost his cushy job at Porthampton Abbey, perhaps he’d better stop being so rude to this duke.
“What would you like for me to do first, sir?” Daniel offered solicitously. “Lay out your night clothes? Run you a nice warm bath? Perhaps I could help you with those cuff links?”
Chapter
Eight
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern waited with little patience for the door to be opened.
“Off you go, then!” Fanny said, opening a pair of French doors to let them out into the still-dark morning and its mist, the mist made colder by it being November. “But don’t forget to come back—you know that the master likes to see you first thing!”
They were already too far away to make out Fanny’s words, not that they would have understood them anyway. And not that they even thought of Fanny as Fanny. To Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, she was just another one to be grouped among Them. The only two they made any exception for were The Man, who seemed to run the whole show and who spent more time with them than anyone else, and The Girl, who seemed to run The Man.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were cats, Persian cats to be exact, Persian cats having grown popular in Britain after being exhibited at the first cat show at the Crystal Palace in 1871. Not that they knew that, either, being cats and all.
What they did know was that sometimes Them tried to call Rosencrantz “Rosencatz,” which they seemed to find very funny, but it had never stuck.
And they also knew they had the run of the place, the whole estate inside and out, unlike that poor unfortunate house cat who seemed to spend his entire existence in the kitchen, never getting to go anywhere. The house cat wasn’t beautiful like they were, either. They were white from the mouth area down through the chest area and front, and gray in the upper face, back, and tail. They were also the very definition of the word “fluffy.” The poor house cat had short hair by comparison and was just a tabby, a mackerel tabby—too common. Why, it wasn’t even a real breed!
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern thought no more of the house cat, though, as they exercised their free rein, gamboling over the verdant lawns, the pleasure gardens, the rockeries, lakes, and croquet lawns. With the exception of the occasional pause for a little on-the-spot grooming, they only stopped long enough to take a piss by the tennis courts.
It was there, while they were doing that, that they saw the man.
Not The Man.
This man was one they had never seen before.
Or at least they didn’t think they had.
So many of Them looked alike, particularly the men, like the ones with their similar suits who spent a lot of their time in the kitchen area of the house. Come to think of it, this man appeared to be dressed like they did.
But Rosencrantz and Guildenstern had never seen any of Them out here in the early morning, unless it was the one who always smelled like horses, and certainly not stumbling around so awkwardly like this.
Not unless they included the way The Man got on rare occasions very late at night.
The man lurched past them, almost as though he didn’t see them standing right
there, and toward a stand of trees. Such peculiar behavior, even for a human. Immediately, their hairs stood on end, their backs arching, as though a grave danger were present. But then, humans got up to all sorts of behaviors that made no sense to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, like using utensils to eat. And then there were the things you never saw humans doing, like chasing mice. It was a puzzle.
Oh well.
It was time for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to head back to the house for their morning chin scratch. If they were lucky, The Man might give them some of his kippers.
Chapter
Nine
Kate sailed into the drawing room, pleased with herself, past the two footmen lining the wall to wait attendance as if they were no more than wallpaper. The footmen might be extraordinarily pretty wallpaper, even she would acknowledge that, but still: wallpaper. She was pleased because immediately after breakfast, she’d hurried up to her bedroom so Agnes could help her change from breakfast clothes into her hunting costume, and further pleased with how she looked, a vision in black with just a touch of white: black veiled hat, a black jacket slit up the back, a white cravat at her neck, and even black jodhpurs under her skirt, although she wouldn’t be riding today, wouldn’t get to ride her most precious and favorite horse, Wyndgate, more’s the pity—with this group, they’d be walking. She also had black leather boots and, clasped in one hand, a pair of black leather gloves.
Kate loved hunting, and with a little luck, she’d bag a fat pheasant for Mrs. Owen in the kitchen to dress and serve later. If she relished anything more than shooting things, it was enjoying the fruits of her efforts.
What did not please Kate at the moment was that with the exception of Father—who stood there ready for her in his scarlet coat and white breeches, black top hat and leather boots, white cashmere scarf and gold pin—none of the others had changed yet.
“I’m astonished!” she pronounced, hands on hips. “Why are none of you ready? We’re losing the best part of the morning!”
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