The Duke's Disaster

by Grace Burrowes

  “You’ll exact your dread revenge by sneaking up from behind? In the dark?” Noah went to pour himself a cup of tea and found the pot empty. “Hardly sporting. One shudders for your honor.”

  By degrees, Noah bullied, teased, reasoned, and forced Grantley into a semblance of order, then all but dragged him out into the midday air.

  “Where are we going, now that I’ve been tortured to your satisfaction?” Grantley asked as they headed out the town house door.

  Noah snapped off a rose from the trellis near the door and tucked it into the younger man’s lapel.

  “Anselm, are you daft?”

  Anselm as a form of address was a presumption, but—may God have mercy on dukes with marital schemes—Noah and Grantley were family, so Noah tolerated it.

  “You look a fright, your lordship,” Noah replied, which did not directly answer Grantley’s question. “A cadaver has more color than you, smells better, and exudes more charm. A boutonniere will distract the unwary from your ghoulish countenance and provide a hint of scent. We are off to Tatt’s, where you will do as I say, bid as I say, and otherwise impersonate a young man with enough sense to accept a decent influence on his life when it resists the urge to drown him at his bath.”

  Grantley pursed his lips and sniffed at his lapel.

  “Damask,” he said. “Emphasis on the damn. Tatt’s it is.”

  * * *

  Noah wasn’t coming back to Wellspring, not that night anyway. Thea folded the note brought by one of Noah’s grooms, silently congratulating herself on not crumpling the paper and tossing it on the dung heap. Married less than two weeks, and the duke was “delayed by the press of business” in Town.

  Business likely sported an impressive set of bosoms, while Thea had merited two lines of scrawled information.

  “Thank you.” She managed a small smile for the groom. “No reply, but you should take yourself to the kitchen, where you’ll find food and drink.”

  “Thank you, Your Grace.” The groom tugged his forelock, showing Thea a sort of deference she found difficult to accept.

  Harlan would be disappointed Noah wasn’t rejoining them at Wellspring, as would the girls. Thea’s guess was they noted the comings and goings on the property far more intently than the adults around them surmised.

  “We shall have a picnic.” Even saying the words made Thea feel better. “Harlan can take up one little girl, I’ll drive the other in a cart, and we’ll bring blankets, kites, and a storybook. My husband will regret that he was so sorely pressed by his business.”

  A bold claim, and sincere. Thea suspected she’d cry herself to sleep that night anyway.

  * * *

  “At least you have your late papa’s sense of horses,” Noah allowed as he and Grantley mounted up to leave Tatt’s.

  Thea had horse sense too, and she smelled a good deal better than her brother.

  “Hunters were his specialty,” Grantley replied as he clambered aboard his gelding. “Some of my best memories are of being up before him for the family meets. You think Nonie will like her mare?”

  That Grantley would ask was encouraging.

  “She will like that you thought of her,” Noah said, “and Thea will approve as well.”

  “Approve of you?” Grantley bent his head at an angle that allowed him to sniff at the rose in his lapel. “For rousting me out of bed and spotting me the blunt for the pony? Was my morning’s rest sacrificed on the altar of marital politics?”

  Which question also did not merit a response.

  “You’ll have the next quarter’s funds within two weeks,” Noah said. “As loans between family members go, that’s short term enough, I don’t need a note of hand. When we’ve had some lunch, we’ll call on your solicitors. For your information, your sister has no idea how I’ve wasted my morning.”

  But she would. Noah would make a full report within an hour of returning to Wellspring.

  “Meet with the solicitors? And spoil a perfectly good tot of gin?”

  Noah fell silent, because Grantley was serious. Many young men consumed spirits in great quantity, but Grantley was in deplorable condition. His hands shook, he yet smelled of the previous night’s imbibing, his complexion was waxen, and his eyes were bloodshot.

  From a distance, the earl was the picture of the successful young man about town. Up close, he was the image of inchoate ruin. He would have made a fine addition to the Winters line.

  “You have a choice, Grantley, barely.”

  “Now he gives me choices. Be still my joyous heart.”

  Noah tipped his hat to the Duchess of Moreland as she tooled along with her youngest daughter on the bench beside her. Grantley was too busy fussing his posy to notice the ladies, though with a glance, Her Grace had noticed—and disapproved—of Noah’s companion.

  Duchesses had that ability—most duchesses.

  “You have the barest hope of a choice, Grantley. One option is to climb into the gin bottle and pickle away the few years remaining to you. In that case, you will be at the mercy of the solicitors, though they will be free to pilfer your funds, and no one will stop them. You will console yourself with the company of your drinking companions—you will have no real friends, of course—and they will find great sport in goading you to increasingly dangerous wagers, all for their entertainment.”

  Noah drew True up, Grantley’s horse shuffling to a halt as well while they waited for a crossing sweeper gathering horse droppings.

  “To soothe your troubled spirit,” Noah went on, “you will seek the company of the whores willing to service you in your stuporous lusts. One of them will know to turn the lamps down, so you won’t see the evidence of the pox that eats her alive. You will die alone, stinking, penniless, and brokenhearted. If God is merciful, you will also die soon, so your sisters needn’t be humiliated by this debacle.”

  Grantley kicked his horse back into a trot. “You pronounce me dead in the gutter because I want a bit of hair of the dog? God help Thea should she spike her tea.”

  Somehow, Noah knew she’d never do that, and he need never worry she’d abuse spirits. Not ever.

  “If that option does not appeal,” Noah went on, as if Grantley hadn’t spoken, “then the first step you ought to take is to shift your associations. When Corbett Hallowell comes around offering to stake you to a few wagers or buy you a few drinks, you decline.”

  “Hallowell?” Grantley looked genuinely confused. “He’s a friend. He’s the one who found that last position for Thea. She was at loose ends and refusing to come home when old lady Besom or Bosom—I forget which—went to her reward. You suggest I cut him?”

  Noah would have insisted upon it, but his experience with Thea suggested the Collins siblings dealt poorly with ducal insistence.

  “Hallowell’s papa is a viscount. Your papa was an earl,” Noah said. “For Thea to be a glorified governess to Hallowell’s sister was a humiliation for your sister, not a coup. Thea was not respected in that household.”

  Grantley’s gelding slowed to the walk. “Not…respected?”

  There truly was hope. Grantley yet reasoned, and he wasn’t indifferent to his sisters.

  “I will spare you the details, Grantley, because I am the lady’s husband, and her protection falls to me now.”

  What Noah left unsaid penetrated the fog of drink and youthful bluster that passed for Grantley’s awareness.

  “Are you saying Hallowell did not respect my sister?”

  Noah turned True toward the Anselm mews. “More to the point, he does not respect you. He’s a few years older, has had a few more years to acquire his town bronze, and you are a toy to him. He’s broken other toys, but they at least had family to repair them. My guess is he would rather have broken your sister. You’ll join me for lunch.”

  “Couldn’t possibly,” Grantley said. “Not feeling quite in the pink. You said I had a choice.”

  “Live or die,” Noah said simply. “Hallowell has your vowels. I will pay them off an
d deduct installments from your allowance to amortize the debt over, say, a year, without interest. If you incur more debt to Hallowell, I’ll collect the total you owe me in a lump sum. And Grantley, I will find out if you borrow from Hallowell. I will know before you’ve staggered home and fallen facedown, bare-arsed into your bed.”

  Though Noah would not trouble Thea with such a disappointment if he could avoid it.

  “Why bother me like this, Anselm?” The put-upon bonhomie of the young man about town humoring a brother-in-law’s queer starts was gone. In its place was pathetically genuine bewilderment. “I drink, I gamble, I chase skirts. My money is not yet my own, though my excesses are consistent with those of my peers. Why are you intent on scolding me like the schoolboy I no longer am?”

  Noah brought True to a halt and struggled for what to say that Grantley could comprehend.

  What would Thea want him to say?

  In the gathering heat of the day, beneath the aromas of the stables and the garden, the reek of gin rolled off Grantley in subtle waves, and the sweat forming under his arms bore a sour stench. The earl wasn’t an evil man, not yet, but he was…going bad.

  “Your sister would have me believe she went into service to give you the breathing room you needed to leave the schoolroom behind, Grantley. You might swallow that pap, but I cannot. Thea is pretty, she’s an earl’s daughter, and she had no one—not one damned soul—to look out for her interests. Can you imagine the unkindness of the gossip she bore?”

  Noah had shied away from imagining it himself, but he’d seen how Polite Society treated a lady fallen on hard times. He had counted on Thea’s misfortunes to inspire her to accept his proposal, in fact.

  “Thea’s stubborn,” Grantley protested as he half slid, half fell off his horse. “You can’t tell her a blessed thing, Anselm. I know her. You don’t. She gets the bit between her teeth, and she’s off. Will you, nil you. Even Nonie tried to talk sense into her, and Thea was simply…”

  Grantley fell silent as the grooms approached to take the horses. He fiddled with the wilting rose in his lapel, perhaps having lost his train of thought.

  “Come try to eat a little,” Noah said, because arguing Thea’s motivations would get them nowhere. “You at least need to drink something besides blue ruin, and in quantity, given the heat.”

  Grantley fell in beside Noah as they crossed the shaded gardens behind Noah’s town house.

  “Hallowell’s off to some boating party,” Grantley said. “I think that’s what he said. In any case, I won’t be seeing him for some time.”

  God help the women trapped aboard the boat with Hallowell. Perhaps the Endmon heir couldn’t swim.

  “Hallowell’s absence makes your decision easier,” Noah said, “or buys you time to gain perspective. You may nap after lunch, but then we’re for the City.”

  “I’m not a little boy—”

  Noah merely treated Grantley to a slow, head-to-toe perusal. A breeze scented with honeysuckle wafted past, and Noah’s longing for Wellspring, for the fresh air, for Thea’s grousing first thing in the day, cindered the last of his patience with this dreadful excuse for an earl.

  “Perhaps a short lie down,” Grantley said. “Very short.”

  Two hours later, he was snoring soundly when Noah went to rouse him.

  * * *

  “Noah is our cousin,” Evvie explained, sitting cross-legged beside Thea on the picnic blanket. “But he’s really like our papa.”

  Nini nodded emphatically on Thea’s other side. “He really is. Harlan says so too, and so does everybody, but Harlan is only our cousin.”

  Harlan was “only” their cousin, but Noah was their cousin, and “really like” their papa. The distinction did not bother the children, so Thea refused to let it bother her.

  “Cousin Noah is the head of your family, in any case,” Thea said, turning the pages of the storybook that seemed to feature dragons on every third page. “The head of our family.”

  “That’s why he’s never here,” Evvie said, as if repeating a frequently cited conclusion. “Cousin Noah must do things, and see people, and talk to Prinny about his roads, and ride in the park, and deal with the Furies.”

  A bee made a lazy inspection of Nini’s discarded boots, then buzzed on its way.

  “Who are the Furies, dear?” Thea asked as she came upon a story about a troll and a witch. What a delightful variation.

  “Our aunts,” Nini chimed in. “Cousin Noah says they’re better now that they’ve found husbands to occupy them, but they were fear…”

  “Ferocious,” Evvie supplied. “I shall be ferocious too when I grow up.”

  “Me too.”

  While Thea was simply married. Noah, however, could lay claim to a deal of ferocity. His note from yesterday crackled softly in her pocket when she put the book aside.

  “We’d better tend to this ferocious business inside,” Thea said, rising from their blanket and gathering up the detritus of their morning’s outing. “Firstly, I am growing peckish, and secondly, rain could soon be upon us.”

  Thirdly, Thea was lonely for her husband, and a moment resting on his side of the bed seemed like a fine idea.

  “I’m growing peckish too,” Evvie said.

  “J’ai famished,” Nini added, grinning.

  Thea gently corrected the toddling French, and arranged their books, hairbrushes, and sketching implements in the hamper.

  “When will Cousin Noah be home?” The lament, for Thea heard it often enough, came from Nini as she tugged on her boots. Evvie, older and more inured to disappointment, never asked, just as Thea at a young age had understood never to ask for new dresses.

  “I haven’t had a note from him since Tuesday,” Thea said, shaking out the blanket and folding it over. “It’s midday, so perhaps he’ll be home later today, or perhaps not for some time. I simply don’t know.”

  Not that these mornings with the children were unpleasant.

  “You have to break him to bridle,” Evvie said, finding a stray pencil in the grass. “I heard Aunt Patience explain this to Uncle James. She said men take longer than horses to civilize, because men have fewer brains.”

  “You shouldn’t be eavesdropping, Evelyn Winters.” Thea tried to sound stern, but Noah would have made a much more impressive job of it.

  “I wasn’t eavesdropping,” Evvie said, tossing the pencil into the hamper. “They knew I was there, and Uncle James winked at me.” She gave an exaggerated demonstration, which had Nini giggling and doing likewise.

  “What is all this mirth at such an early hour?”

  “Cousin!” the girls shrieked in unison as they pelted across the grass into Noah’s waiting arms. He rose with one girl on each hip, bussing first one then the other on their cheeks.

  Would a mere cousin offer the little girls such an enthusiastic greeting? Thea’s own father had never shown her that warm a welcome.

  “What a pleasure to know I was missed, at least a little. Hullo, Wife.” Noah leaned around Nini and kissed Thea’s cheek too. “You look in great good health.”

  While Noah looked tired and road weary.

  “I’ve been taking the air with the girls,” Thea said. Had the duke’s observation been a question? And if so, how personal a question?

  “Why don’t I let these beauties walk about on their own”—he set them down—“while I relieve you of that bundle?” Noah reached for the blanket, and Thea gave it up rather than deny him this exhibition of manners before the children.

  He slipped his free arm around Thea’s waist. “What have you young ladies been doing in my absence, and tell me the truth, because Lady Thea will peach on you in a heartbeat should you dissemble.”

  Two pairs of guileless blue eyes turned to Thea. “Will you, Lady Thea?”

  “In a heartbeat,” she said solemnly, but she winked too, and the girls were off again, laughing, winking, and giggling in their boundless pleasure at Noah’s return.

  Thirteen

  Th
e rain did start after luncheon, denying the girls the chance to picnic with Noah, but he promised them a picnic later in the week, a story at bedtime, and a visit to the stables the next morning.

  “You think I’m spoiling them,” Noah said as he handed Thea a finger of brandy in the library that night.

  “I think you love them,” she said. “You aren’t having anything to drink?”

  “I would not make you drink alone.” Noah wrapped his hand around Thea’s and took a sip of her drink. “When I’ve been gone, the girls need reassurances on my return. Their earliest years were not settled, and that still shows. The story tonight was because of the storm. They will be inordinately interested in my schedule for the next few days, and they will probably break a few rules to ensure I’m still on duty. I’ve been absent a great deal in recent months, and I’ve brought them an additional adult to figure into the household.”

  Thea’s own mother had read to her on stormy nights.

  “You know a great deal about raising children,” Thea said. Did Noah recall the first thing about being a child himself?

  He ambled over to the sofa before the hearth, sat down, and tugged off his boots. Next, he loosened his cravat, slipped his sleeve buttons free, and rolled up his cuffs.

  How many people saw the Duke of Anselm in his stocking feet? Saw the dark hair dusting his forearms? Did his two-dozen mistresses watch this same process when he called upon them?

  “What mischief have you got up to in my absence, Thea?” Noah patted the place beside him, and Thea sat.

  The moment should have been pleasant, the fire crackling in the hearth, the children tucked up in their beds, the rain pattering softly against the windows.

  “My menses haven’t started, but they’re not quite due.”

  Noah crossed his feet at the ankles. “That wasn’t what I asked.”

  “That was what you wanted to know.”

  “It was what you wanted to tell me. Did you miss me?” He kissed her cheek again, which made Thea want to bolt from his embrace. She could not read his mood, had no idea what he’d been about, leaving her side for nearly a week, and had not the first clue what manner of discussion they were to embark upon.