Christmas in The Duke's Arms

by Grace Burrowes

  When a man was professionally bound to hold close the confidences of all and sundry, he learned to choose his confidantes wisely. Levi’s horse, a stout bay gelding by the name of Thomas, had never violated the trust his owner reposed in him.

  “It’s a good thing those rabbits like the cold, and a better thing a man’s winter attire hides the more vulgar evidence of his interest in a woman.”

  The carnality of that interest had come as a shock, and Levi Sparrow did not enjoy being shocked.

  “I did not know I could be shocked.”

  Thomas took exception to the reflection of sunlight on a puddle, mostly for form’s sake. Geldings were much concerned with form.

  “Ann always said I romanticized my attachments. She was practical.”

  She’d been a touch condescending when she’d offered such observations, amused by her callow swain. She’d also been right. Levi had grown up at a distance from his sisters, and after the age of eight, without a mother. He tended to regard women as not simply another gender, but an altogether different and more worthy species.

  On at least one occasion his bias in this regard had yielded disastrous results. He thrust that thought aside and ran a steadying hand down Thomas’s neck.

  “When Penelope Carrington kisses a man, she does it as if he’s sunlight, air, water and every other necessary element delivered for her personal delectation.” That was before she’d gained much experience beyond kissing. “She knocks a man off his pins. This man, anyway.”

  He’d thought of Penelope as a muse, a lady not entirely of the earthly realm, a woman to be cherished and protected, as he’d cherished and protected Ann. He had not thought of Penelope as a woman whose kiss could part him from his reason and make him adore her for it.

  Worship her in an entirely different and more passionate manner.

  The idea that some other fellow might plunder those riches in Levi’s place was untenable.

  And yet, finding himself embroiled in the kind of scandal that would cost him his livelihood and standing in the community was equally untenable.

  What was needed—what was always needed before any problem could be properly analyzed—was more information. When Levi had turned Thomas over to the groom, taken off his spurs, and passed hat, gloves, and coat to a footman, he made a straight line for the study.

  Gervaise Stoneleigh sat at Levi’s desk, boots propped on one corner, sleeves turned back at the wrists, a journal open on his lap. Odd, how one of the most brilliant legal minds in the realm looked exactly like any other fellow making himself comfortable at his labors.

  “Have you had a chance to read the letters?”

  Stoneleigh glanced up—he did not thunk his boots to the floor and scramble into a different chair, or stand and put his attire to rights. Levi was pleased that the informality they’d known as younger men was yet available to them.

  “You missed luncheon.”

  Levi ambled over to the fire, added coal, and pokered in some air. “I joined Mrs. Carrington for a meal, the better to listen to her evaluate the various candidates for her hand. I’m to have a special license at the ready, send a pigeon before nightfall. All must be prepared for a quiet holiday wedding.”

  “I like a woman with a sense of organization.” The chair scraped as Stoneleigh set the journal aside and rose, bracing his hands on the small of his back and arching. “It’s cold in here.”

  “These things will happen when a man scares the staff away with his imperious demeanor, then forgets that fires do not feed themselves.”

  Stoneleigh blinked at the now roaring blaze. “You were quite a poet as a younger man.”

  “I was an ass.”

  “One can be a poet and an ass, witness Byron.”

  Lawyers and their penchant for evidence and counterexamples. Bother the lot of them.

  Levi took the chair closest to the fire and realized he was hungry. He hadn’t eaten much at lunch, he’d been too busy offering evidence to Penelope, to wit:

  Mr. Fletcher went through a prodigious number of young, pretty maids.

  Mr. Deal went through a prodigious amount of gin—not a genteel wine drunk, or even the more gentlemanly brandy. The man swilled gin.

  Mr. Hammersmith had had seven children in six years with his first wife, there being a set of twins in the litter somewhere.

  Mr. Farrington was regularly seen coming out of a certain establishment in a questionable neighborhood, where it was rumored he took opium.

  They’d been down to the gamblers before Penelope had given up and asked Levi to come by tomorrow to resume the same exercise. Her list had been curiously devoid of the more reasonable prospects Levi could have mentioned.

  But had kept to himself.

  “You’re brooding, Sir Levi.” Stoneleigh lowered himself into the other chair on a sigh. “Or perhaps you’re cogitating. I favor the brooding myself.”

  “Because you’re better looking than Byron, you can call it brooding. For your information, I am considering whether to order a tray. Sorting bachelors leaves one peckish.”

  Kissing Penelope Carrington left one starved for sustenance other than food.

  “I meant what I said about your poetry. Puts one in mind of Wordsworth on a gloomy day.”

  “You’ve read a great deal of Wordsworth, have you? I had lost my wife not three months earlier. All my days were gloomy.” His nights had been worse, and then along had come the ever-so-sympathetic and friendly Miss Amanda Houston, with whom he’d occasionally crossed paths socially.

  A small legal matter, she’d said.

  “You weren’t too gloomy to lose your sense over a woman.”

  “The poems were written to Ann. I sent them to Miss Houston as a sort of confidence, a way to not be alone with my sentiments, to share them with a friend. I was an absolute, utter, unconditional fool. The question is, am I an engaged fool?”

  Chapter Three

  ‡

  An interrogation followed Levi’s question, like a thousand interrogations he’d put his clients through without once considering how the questions felt on the receiving end. He had blithely hammered away, “just to get a sense of where matters stand.” The questioning struck him now as a form of brutality, like surgery without laudanum.

  When did you first correspond with her?

  Did you copy every letter you sent? Why did you copy them?

  Did you keep her letters? Why not?

  What gifts have you given her? How often did you call upon her?

  Then, when Stoneleigh had thoroughly demoralized the witness with the inexactitude of his recollections and the lack of sensible motivations for his actions, the more difficult questions began.

  “Did you advise her to seek another man of business?”

  “Did you correspond with other women?”

  “Why didn’t you break it off?”

  And the one question Levi could answer easily: “Were you ever intimate with the woman?”

  “I was not, not in the sense of copulating with her. I never even kissed her.”

  “Not ever?” The two words whipped out with the metallic ring of a sword drawn from its scabbard.

  “Stoneleigh, do not browbeat me. I am not a client who seeks to send counsel to the assizes with a pack of lies and prevarication. My pride is not that great when the issue affects the rest of my life. I tell you plainly: I bungled egregiously but not entirely.”

  The admission brought no relief, no sense of being unburdened by confession, and yet, more needed to be said.

  “I came undone when Ann died, but a man cannot be undone. In his mourning, he is expected to attend to his business, to run his household, to appear for services, to see his clients. The ladies have a year to recover their balance. A man’s balance is not to falter, except perhaps briefly at the graveside. His coats acquire a black armband, his mirrors are draped in black, little more.

  “I did not cope well,” Levi went on, “and Amanda Houston took shameless advantage. I though
t she was a friend. She was a predator. The one bit of sense I exercised was to remain true to my wife’s memory in intimate terms for two years following her death.”

  “And thereafter?”

  “A couple of discreet liaisons while in London. Nothing more.” And thank God those women had been after nothing more than a little comfort and a fond farewell.

  “No passing encounters in York? A casual afternoon at a midsummer picnic? A tickle-and-kiss on the way to the hunt meets? An accommodating maid with a generous heart and a wandering eye?”

  “Do you ever practice law, Stoneleigh, or is your life an incessant effort to elude desperate women?”

  Stoneleigh crossed his arms and his ankles. “It would go better for you if you’d been fornicating your way all over the Midlands, comporting yourself like a tom-cat under a full spring moon. As it is…”

  Stoneleigh was frowning now, not a good sign.

  “As it is,” Levi said, “I wrote a few pages of mourning poetry and shared some of it with a woman who has used my correspondence to imply that she considers us engaged. She alleges that a poem entitled ‘When We Two Can Remain Together,’ and others of its ilk, entangled me in an offer of marriage—to her. This is why single gentlemen are taught to never, ever correspond with single women, regardless that those women present themselves as confirmed spinsters and friends.”

  He had been such a fool. The very same kind of fool who retained his services regularly.

  A human fool. His Christmas token would be a portion of humility packaged with regret sporting a sprig of self-disgust and a droopy bow fashioned of remorse.

  “You also told Miss Houston that her kindness and charity led you to esteem her over all living women, and you could not foresee a time when her friendship would not be necessary for your wellbeing. Et cetera, et cetera.”

  Levi was still hungry, he did not feel in the least like eating, and damn Stoneleigh for having a near-perfect memory anyway.

  “Had you read her letters to me, you might understand the extent to which she was eliciting my responses. She fretted that I found her company tedious. She worried that a woman of such limited intellectual accomplishment could not be any sort of friend to a man of my worldly education. She appeared good-hearted, self-effacing, and so very, very understanding of my loss.”

  Stoneleigh snorted. “She understood your loss. Understood it better than you did. So why didn’t she lead your meek and unresisting self off to bed?”

  “I hope because I would not have allowed it, and she sensed this—she’s canny as hell—but I’ve come to suspect Miss Houston has lapsed from time to time in her spinsterhood, and she did not want me to become aware of her lack of chastity.”

  Stoneleigh sat up, his attention coiling as Franklin’s did at the sound of rabbit food hitting a porcelain dish in the parlor across the corridor.

  “Lapsed?” Stoneleigh repeated. “As in, suffered the intimate attentions of a man not her lawfully wedded husband? That sort of lapsed?”

  Levi didn’t want to tell this bit, the part that revealed how completely he’d been taken advantage of.

  “I’m invited to any number of social gatherings—hostesses overlook my lack of ready wit because I am single and solvent. Then too, their husbands like to ask me for business advice over the port.”

  “And you”—Stoneleigh waved a hand—“tell them to come ’round the office where there’s greater privacy, and if they’re serious, they will, and if they’re merely trolling for free advice, you’re spared the indignity.”

  Ann had been the one to explain to Levi how that should be handled. Men all over the shire were likely in better financial health because they’d dined with Levi Sparrow.

  “The military sorts are the worst,” Levi said. “Because I trotted around on the Peninsula for a few years, I’ve acquired a literal army of long lost brothers who think it my duty to turn them all into nabobs over a glass of mediocre wine.”

  “One has pitied you, Levi.”

  The last of Levi’s interest in food died. What he wanted was a drink, and for this interview to be over.

  “I observed Miss Houston enter her bedroom at a house party this autumn. Twenty minutes later, Mr. Jefferson Vanderburg entered that same room and closed the door. He remained private with my supposed fiancée for more than an hour, whereupon he left her boudoir, cravat undone, boots in hand, looking in much greater charity with the world. At another house party this past summer, Cheevers Dauntry had the pleasure. Miss Houston is not chaste, but she’s discreet, choosing fellows whose wives would fillet them, not necessarily for straying, but for causing scandal. She’s shrewd.”

  Ann had also been shrewd, though the quality had been a virtue in her.

  Mostly.

  In the considering silence that followed, a seed of despair germinated in Levi’s heart. A lady could misstep, and a gentleman’s offer of marriage still stood. Nothing but the lady’s own demurral relieved the gentleman of his obligation to keep his promise. This was not a fine point of the law. Every bachelor from John O’Groats to Land’s End learned this precept before he’d stolen his first kiss.

  “You could approach her paramours, threaten to bring suit for prostitution.”

  “Legally, I could, and then I would be a man who takes advantage of a woman alone in the world but for some doughty aunt, a woman with only modest financial security, a woman who—it will be said—turned to me for business advice. Six men would also have to admit to paying her for her favors, which in addition to being untrue, would embarrass their families. It’s too sordid. I won’t do it.”

  To put that position into words made the seed of despair grow roots and twine those roots around hopes regarding a wonderful, shockingly passionate woman whom Levi would die to protect.

  “Life can be sordid, my friend. You’re a solicitor. You know that. You knew that a week after you’d hung up your shingle.”

  Stoneleigh was commiserating; his words only felt like a scold.

  “We’re at a stalemate, Miss Houston and I. She says we’re engaged, I say we’re not. She occasionally commandeers my escort to some social function, and I go rather than start a war. I need to not only start a war with her, I need to win one, and do it in less than thirty days.”

  “I could threaten suit,” Stoneleigh mused. “Rattle the sabers, do my impersonation of the Scourge of Temple Bar.”

  “You are the Scourge of Temple Bar. Also a damned decent fellow. There’s nothing to sue her for.”

  Devilment came into Stoneleigh’s expression at those observations, though they were the simple truth. He never represented a client whom he believed to be guilty. The result of retaining Gervaise Stoneleigh to represent one was an advantage in the courtroom before opening statements were even begun.

  “I could propose to the lady, get her to accept my suit.” Stoneleigh lowered his lashes, the resemblance to Bryon uncanny. “I can be very persuasive.”

  “Save it for the jury. I won’t ask it of you—you’d be the one left with the breach-of-promise problem.”

  At that, Stoneleigh shot to his feet. “You’re arguably engaged to a woman who lies, cheats, tricks, and takes advantage of a man’s grief. She’s a damned confidence artist. Unless you’re willing to compromise your gentlemanly scruples, as long as she has your letters, she is in a fair way to become your next lawfully wedded wife. The only solution I can see is for you to decamp for parts unknown.”

  Stoneleigh rarely lost his temper, and when he did, it was usually a display of frosty verbiage designed to flay somebody’s dignity into thin, bloody strips. This outburst was the exasperation of a man who cared for his friend and didn’t see any good options for that friend.

  Despair branched upward to nearly choke Levi’s dream of a future with Penelope. Who knew a man’s soul was fertile ground for such a fast-growing weed?

  Stoneleigh plucked his coat from the back of Levi’s chair. “You could burn her house down, get rid of the letters that way.”r />
  “She keeps them in her reticule, bound with green ribbon. She’s waved them at me on occasion.”

  “You can’t buy her off?”

  “I’ve tried. A pension, a lump sum, a combination of the two, a profitable estate in Kent, and her reply is to ask me why she should settle for crumbs when she can have a baronet and his entire estate?”

  “You were a lamb to slaughter, Sparrow. I am sorry. If I’d kept a better eye on you, this would not have happened.” He slipped sleeve buttons into his cuffs and shrugged into his jacket, so casual, but the words were not what a barrister or solicitor offered a client, and that was an oversight.

  “This is my fault, and I will deal with the consequences.”

  Levi should order a tray. Dinner was hours away, and a man needed sustenance whether he wanted it or not. He rose and considered his now properly attired guest. “Where are you off to?”

  Stoneleigh wrinkled his nose. “My visit to the wilds of Nottinghamshire on this occasion is because the archbishop’s great-niece finds herself in a spot of trouble. Great-Uncle wants to retain my services. I’m making up my mind. Clergy are the very devil as clients. Before the Uncle Right Reverend sends for me, I should look in on Oxthorpe. Our paths have crossed from time to time.”

  “You keep company with dukes now. Oxthorpe isn’t exactly sociable.” But then neither was Levi, if he could help it.

  “Oxthorpe is a fine host, which fact I charge you to hold in confidence. Don’t brood. We’ll talk further. Don’t wait up for me, either.”

  Levi used two fingers to loosen a fold of Stoneleigh’s cravat from between coat and waistcoat. At one point, they’d had a single decent suit between them and had shared it back and forth depending on need.

  “Further talk won’t change the facts.”

  “No, but it might admit of a solution to those facts. I know a number of competent arsonists who are discreet, reliable and work for reasonable rates.” Stoneleigh headed for the door, a man of the law turning his thoughts to his next case.