How to Lose a Duke in Ten Days

by Laura Lee Guhrke

  Dedication

  In loving memory of

  Michel Loosli

  March 15, 1949—March 10, 2013

  Rest in peace, my friend.

  Contents

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Also by Laura Lee Guhrke

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  Kenya, East Africa

  THE CHANTING WOKE him, a primitive, repetitive melody that brought him slowly to consciousness. As he awakened, his first sensation was pain, and he tried to draw back, to return to oblivion, but it was too late for that.

  The chanting was the reason. It went on and on, and the more he tried to ignore it, the more deeply it seemed to grind into his brain. He wanted to cover his ears and obtain some blessed silence so he could sleep, but he could not seem to lift his hands. How strange.

  His head was aching fit to split. His skin prickled as if he were being pierced by thousands of white-­hot needles, yet, inside his body, there was a deep, bruising cold, as if his skeleton were made of icicles. And his leg—­something was wrong with his leg. The pain he felt seemed centered there, in his right thigh, and radiated outward to every other part of his body.

  He wanted to open his eyes and look, see what was wrong with his leg, but once again, he could not seem to make his muscles obey his will. His mind felt dazed, unfocused. What was wrong with him?

  He strove to think, but thinking seemed to take far too much effort, and when the chant quieted to a low murmur, he began sinking back into sleep.

  Visions and sounds danced across his mind, so quick that he wasn’t sure if they were a dream or an explanation. A tawny blur, searing pain, and the sharp rapport of rifle shots echoing across the Ngong Hills.

  The picture in his mind shifted, and he saw a girl in a blue silk frock, a tall, slim girl with a freckled face, titian hair, and green eyes. She was looking at him, but there was no flirtation in her glance, no come-­hither smile on her pale pink lips. She stood so still, she might have been a statue, and yet, she seemed the most alive, intense creature he’d ever seen. He caught his breath.

  She couldn’t possibly be here, not in the wilds of Kenya. She was in England. Her image faded, receding into a mist, and though he tried to bring her back, he couldn’t, for his brain felt thick, his wits like tar.

  Something cold and wet touched his face, a compress that brushed across his forehead, then over his mouth and nose. He shook his head from side to side in violent protest. He hated having anything over his face; it always made him feel as if he were smothering. Jones knew that. What was the fellow doing?

  The wet cloth brushed against his face again, and he managed to shove it away. His body was shaking. He could feel it, involuntary shudders deep inside. He was so cold.

  That perplexed him. This was Africa; he was never cold here. England, now, England was cold, with its constant dampness and drizzle, its standoffishness and class-­conscious snobbery, its frozen traditions.

  Even as those disparaging thoughts went through his mind, another rose up right behind them.

  It’s time to go home.

  He tried at once to dismiss the notion. He still had work to do here in Africa. He was in Africa, wasn’t he? That pang of uncertainty impelled him to open his eyes and lift his head. The moment he did, everything spun violently, and he thought he might be sick. He squeezed his eyes shut until the nausea passed, and when he opened them again, he saw things that were blessedly familiar—­a canvas roof and walls, his battered ebony trunk desk, piles of skins, his rolled maps shoved in a basket, his black leather traveling trunk—­things that had comprised the elements of his home for half a decade. Inhaling deeply, he caught the scents of sweat and the savannah, and he felt a rush of relief that reason had not utterly deserted him.

  Two men with skin of coffee black stood by the entrance to his tent. Two others knelt on either side of his cot, still mumbling that infernal chant, but there was no sign of Jones. Where the hell was Jones?

  One of the men kneeling beside him reached out to press a hand against his chest, urging him to lie down. Too weak to resist, he sank back onto the cot and closed his eyes, but when he did, he saw the girl again. Her green eyes glittered like peridot jewels as they looked into his, and her bright hair seemed to glow with incandescent fire beneath the gaslights of the ballroom.

  Ballroom? He must be dreaming, for it had been years since he’d last been in a ballroom. And yet, he knew the girl. Her face again receded, and checkerboards took her place in his mind, checkerboards of pale green fields and golden meadows, their squares framed by darker green hedgerows. These were Margrave lands, and they spread out before him as far as his eyes could see. He tried to turn his back on them, but when he did, he saw the Wash, and beyond it, the sea. The scent of the savannah was gone now, replaced by one of green turf and meadowsweet, of peaty fires and roast goose.

  It’s time to go home.

  That thought came again, bringing with it an inevitability that overrode the chanting in his ears.

  The fields, the hedgerows, the ocean, the eyes of that girl—­all the images in his mind melted together into a brilliant viridian carpet, then faded, not receding into a mist but falling away beneath him like a fissure opening in the earth, and then he saw . . . nothing. All around him was the blankness of a void, and he felt a throb of fear, the same sensation that raised the hairs on his neck sometimes when he was in the bush. Danger, he knew, was very close at hand.

  Suddenly, the chanting stopped. Voices flowed over him in rapid bursts, anxious and fretful voices, speaking Kikuyu. But though he was fluent in most Bantu dialects, including this one, he could not seem to comprehend what they were saying.

  The voices rose to a higher, almost frantic pitch, and suddenly, he felt his body being lifted from the cot. The movement sent a fresh wave of pain through his already-­aching bones. He cried out, yet no sound came from his ravaged throat.

  They were moving him now, carrying him somewhere. The pain was excruciating, particularly in his thigh, and he felt as if his bones would snap like sticks at any moment. It seemed an eternity before they stopped.

  Dry grass rustled beneath him as he was laid down, and then he heard the rasp of metal cutting through turf and dirt. What the bloody hell was going on?

  He forced his eyes open again and found that directly above him was the outline of a silvery crescent moon, but its lines were blurry against the night sky. He blinked, shook his head, and blinked again. Suddenly, the moon came into focus.

  It was the African new moon, lying on her back, surrounded by all the glittering diamonds and black velvet of the night sky, a familiar sight to him. Every night, when everyone else was asleep and the fire was low, he would lean back in his canvas chair, his legs stretched out and his muscles still aching from the day’s safari, and he would stare up at these constellations as he drank his evening coffee. In Kenya, nights like this were commonplace.

  It was far more rare to have such a clea
r, beautiful night sky back in England. There, day or night, the sky was usually misty, the air damp and chilling. But in summer, on a clear day, England had its moments. Punting, and croquet, and picnics on the lawn at Highclyffe. Good champagne. Strawberries.

  The sharp sting of saliva hit his mouth at the thought of strawberries. He couldn’t remember when he’d last had strawberries. It seemed like a lifetime ago.

  It’s time to go home.

  The girl’s face came to him again. Thin and resolute, with a square jaw and a pointed chin, pale with translucent, luminous skin under a dusting of freckles. With its sharply angled auburn brows and high cheekbones, it wasn’t a soft face, nor was it beautiful. Instead, it was arresting, riveting, the sort of face you saw across a ballroom and never quite forgot.

  But she wasn’t just a girl, he realized with sudden clarity. She was his wife.

  Edie, he thought, and something hard and tight squeezed his chest, something painful, like a hand around his heart. How strange, he thought, to become sentimental about a woman he barely knew and a place he hadn’t seen for years. Even stranger that they should be beckoning him from thousands of miles away, pulling him with forces too strong to deny, and he knew he couldn’t stay here any longer. It was time to go home.

  The voices came again but still too low for him to make out words, and thoughts of home were forgotten. He turned his head, and, between blades of savannah grass, he was able to discern the same four men he’d seen in his tent, but he was still unable to see Jones anywhere. The men were a short distance away, but though their dark skin made them barely visible in the dim light, he was able to recognize them. They were his men. He knew them, knew them so well that even in the dark, their movements told him their identity.

  They were digging with English shovels, another curious thing, for the Kikuyu had no use for most En­glish implements. As he watched them, awareness came slowly, like dawn breaking, and everything that had seemed incomprehensible until now suddenly made perfect, terrible sense. These were his men, his best, most loyal men, and they were according him an honor usually reserved only for tribal chiefs, the highest honor the Kikuyu could bestow.

  They were digging his grave.

  Chapter 1

  TEA AND SCANDAL, as writer William Congreve so shrewdly pointed out, have always had a natural affinity, and every season, the matrons of British society developed very decided preferences as to which scandals would be served with an afternoon cup of Earl Grey.

  The Prince of Wales was a perennial favorite, for obvious reasons. A prince, the ladies felt, ought to be scandalous, particularly one whose parent was so deadly dull. Bertie could always be counted upon to provide many delightful tidbits.

  The Marquess of Trubridge had been another reliable source of gossip until he’d settled down to domestic married life and become disappointingly lax in that regard. His wife, however, still held a bit of interest for the ladies of the ton, for though the initial shock of her marriage to Trubridge had worn off, many still found it fascinating that the former Lady Featherstone would wed another rake. Hadn’t she learned anything from her first marriage? Assurances that she was quite happy with Trubridge a full year after their wedding were usually greeted with a disbelieving sniff and a cautionary tale or two about fortune hunters in general and why any girl with sense ought to stay away from them.

  At which point, discussion invariably turned to the Duchess of Margrave.

  Everybody knew the duke had married her for her money.

  After all, what other reason could there be?

  Not her beauty, the more attractive ladies were quick to point out. With that tall, thin figure and that unruly ginger hair? And my dears, those freckles!

  And it certainly wasn’t her social position that had caught the duke’s eye. Before coming to England, Edie Ann Jewell had been Little Miss Nobody from Nowhere. Her grandfather had made his money in trade, selling flour, beans, and bacon to hungry gold miners on California’s Barbary Coast, and though her father quadrupled the family fortune by shrewd investing on Wall Street, that fact had made little impression on the New York society, and when a scandal compromised her reputation, any chance of social acceptance had seemed lost. But a move to London and a single season sponsored by Lady Featherstone, and Little Miss Nobody had snared the most eligible—­and most indebted—­bachelor in town with all her Yankee millions.

  The press on both sides of the pond had touted it as a love match, and it had certainly seemed to be so, but less than a month after the wedding, it was publicly demonstrated that love, if it had ever existed at all, had gone awry. Having cleared his family’s many debts with his new wife’s dowry, the Duke of Margrave had departed for the wilds of Africa, and he’d been there ever since, with no apparent intent of coming home again.

  Abandoned and alone, the duchess had turned her attention to managing all the Margrave estates herself. Granted, she had competent stewards and plenty of money, but still . . . many ladies shook their heads with heavy sighs . . . what a burden for a mere woman to have to bear.

  And was it really comme il faut for a duchess to manage estates on her own? Matrons of the ton debated the point over endless plates of cucumber sandwiches and seed cake. The younger ladies tended to defend the duchess and put the blame on Margrave, pointing out that he was the one who went away. If the duke were at home and not exploring his way across Africa, his wife would not be forced to act in his stead. Those of the older generation usually inserted a withering reminder at this point of the existence of the duke’s younger brother, Cecil. He was the one who ought to be managing Margrave affairs in the duke’s absence, and the fact that he wasn’t being given his rightful opportunity to do so only served to demonstrate the duchess’s ignorance of the way things ought to be. But, then, what else could one expect from an American?

  Breeding tells in the end, one of the ladies was wont to say at this point in the discussion. Gadding about the estates, digging up gardens, tearing down follies, moving fountains that had been in place for over a century . . . this was no way for a duchess to behave. And what about the interior changes she was forever making? Gaslights, bathrooms, and heaven only knew what else—­such modern devices could only serve to tarnish a house’s beauty, intrude upon its harmony, and play havoc with its domestic routine. Think of the poor servants, the ladies told each other. What would a chambermaid do all day if there were no chamber pots to be cleaned?

  And what did the family think of it all? The Dowager Duchess put on a brave show, of course, though she couldn’t possibly approve. Lady Nadine, on the other hand, told everyone she liked the changes made to the ducal residences, but of course, she would say so. The duke’s sister was one of those amiable, empty-­headed girls who never seemed offended by what anyone did. Cecil, though, surely he must resent the situation. No wonder he spent so much time in Scotland.

  Some said the duchess enjoyed wielding the powers that were the special privilege of the sterner sex. Others did not see how that could be so, for what woman could enjoy the coarse and burdensome duties of men?

  The one thing most of the ladies did agree on was that the duchess was to be pitied, not judged. There she was, poor thing, the ladies said, their unmistakable relish thinly veiled by a pretense of concern. She filling her empty days with masculine responsibilities, with her husband off in Kenya, and without even children to comfort her. Yes, poor, poor thing.

  The duchess’s reaction to these discussions, whenever she chanced to hear of them, was to laugh. If only they knew the truth!

  Her marriage was perfect. It wasn’t the sort of marriage the British approved, for there was no heir. And it wasn’t the sort Americans approved, because it wasn’t based on love. And it certainly wasn’t the sort of marriage she’d envisioned as a young, romantic girl. But Saratoga had succeeded in stripping her of any romantic notions she’d ever had.

  Just the thought of that
place and what had happened there still made Edie slightly sick. She turned her face away so Joanna wouldn’t see her expression as she struggled to blot out the dark day that had changed her life forever.

  She concentrated on the warm sun that washed over her in the open landau and breathed deeply of the fresh English air, working to shove away the smell of a musty Saratoga summerhouse and Frederick Van Hausen’s hot, panting breath on her face. She listened to the clatter of carriage wheels so she wouldn’t hear the sound of her own sobs or the whispered titters of New York society about that hussy Edie Jewell.

  Like a phoenix rising from ashes, she had created a new life for herself out of the wreckage of the old one, and it suited her down to the ground. She was a duchess with no duke, a mistress with no master, and much to the bafflement of society, she liked it that way. Her life was comfortable, safe, and as predictable as a finely tuned machine, every aspect within her control.

  Well, perhaps not every aspect, she amended ruefully as she looked at the fifteen-­year-­old girl seated across from her. Much like herself, her sister Joanna was not amenable to being controlled.

  “I don’t see why I have to go away to school,” the girl said for the fifth time since the carriage had left Highclyffe, and for perhaps the hundred and fifth time since the decision had been made. “I don’t see why I can’t continue to live at home with you, and have Mrs. Simmons, like I’ve always had.”

  More than anything, Edie wished that were possible. Already, she was missing her sister, and the girl hadn’t even boarded the train yet. Still, she knew it wouldn’t be good for either of them if she showed how she felt. Instead, Edie pretended a staunch indifference to Joanna’s arguments. “I couldn’t possibly subject dear Mrs. Simmons here to another year of you,” she said with a cheer she was far from feeling. “You’ll be the death of her if I do.”