And to think he had longed to return home. He had forgotten what a lot of bored, hypocritical, insular snobs his peers were.
“But we’ve promised Montford we’d stop in,” he reminded Marlowe. “I want to see my girl.”
Sebastian was not referring to Montford’s new daughter, his wife, or any member of the duke’s household. He was referring to his only possession in the world besides his wardrobe: his custom-made Broadwood pianoforte, which he had very reluctantly left in the duke’s possession while he was abroad. His fingers were itching to reacquaint themselves with the smooth ivory and ebony keyboard. No other pianoforte had its magic action and sound.
Marlowe whipped his horses into a trot with a sigh, knowing how Sebastian felt about his Broadwood. “At least Monty’s good for his whiskey,” Marlowe said glumly, cheroot dangling carelessly from his mouth.
“What’s His Highness done now?” Sebastian demanded.
“Remember how Monty were always such a demmed stick in the mud?”
Sebastian smiled fondly. “Oh, I remember.”
“Well, now he’s a married stick in the mud. With a brat.”
“I see.”
“No you don’t. Monty’s cracked in the head for his wife. And his brat.”
“You have two brats of your own, remember?”
Marlowe sighed heavily, as if to say, How could I forget? How indeed could anyone forget the viscount’s twins once they had the misfortune to make their acquaintance? Marlowe’s demon spawn were the most ill-behaved, brazen, devious, and cruel eight-year-olds in all of England. Marlowe usually tried to keep them quarantined in the countryside to protect the general populace, but they were currently lurking about in London, no doubt plotting something dastardly. Sebastian adored them.
“How are Beatrice and Laura these days, anyway?” Sebastian asked innocently.
Marlowe glowered at him. “Don’t want to talk about ’em,” he mumbled.
Sebastian grinned at his friend and relaxed back into his seat. The one thing he was not sorry for now that he was back on English soil was the company of his two best friends. He had even missed Marlowe’s pouts during the two years of his exile—a desperate state of affairs indeed.
He just hoped the Blanchards had not ruined his chances for finally establishing a more permanent happiness in England before he’d even shaken the last of the Levantine soil from his boots—a more permanent happiness that he’d hoped, perhaps one day, to share with the only woman he’d ever wanted.
That seemed unlikely now, which shouldn’t surprise him, given his wretched luck. But the inevitability of the situation didn’t make it sting any less. With his uncle dead, he had begun to hope for the impossible.
He would endeavor not to make that mistake again.
Chapter Two
In Which Our Hero’s Hessians Die an Ignominious Death
THE DUKE OF Montford’s residence took up an entire block of Mayfair, so it was not exactly hard to find, even with Marlowe at the reins. The residence was called Montford House, but that appellation was a hideous understatement. Austere, imposing, made of colossal slate gray stones and towering Corinthian pillars, it was more properly a palace, built to shock and awe the onlooker rather than please aesthetically. Inside was housed a museum of antiquities and precious works of art, a library to rival the Bodleian, and enough gloomy portraits of past Montford ancestors to haunt several residences.
In short, it was the sort of place a royal should have lived in—if any of the royals had Montford’s wealth.
And they didn’t.
Montford was the richest man in the country, and Sebastian had no problem having such an influential best friend. Montford, although notoriously abstemious himself, always had the best collection of Scottish whiskey south of Edinburgh, and had even taken to stocking Honeywell Ale, now that he’d married into that family.
Sebastian planned on stopping by Montford’s sideboard as soon as they were ushered into the cavernous, dome-ceilinged front hall by Stallings, Montford’s perpetually dour-faced butler. But Stallings informed them in his scrupulously polite tone that His Grace was not in his library conducting his usual business, but rather on the third floor.
In the nursery.
Montford had never been anywhere other than his library in all the visits Sebastian had made over the years, and the nursery was certainly the last place he would have guessed the duke to be.
“I don’t like the sound of this,” Sebastian muttered as they waved away Stallings’s grudging assistance—Stallings had never approved of them—and began to climb the staircase in search of their erstwhile friend.
“Nor I,” Marlowe muttered back.
Sebastian had a terrible suspicion that more had changed in the two years he’d been away than he’d expected. Of course he knew Montford had gained a wife. Sebastian himself had been somewhat involved in throwing the duke and duchess together up in Yorkshire. And he knew that his friend had also gained a child, some months after Sebastian had left England. Montford’s letters were full of nothing else but his daughter’s latest accomplishments. As she was not yet a year old, the accomplishments that elicited such high praise from the duke included things like blinking, wiggling her toes, and turning over.
Sebastian had assumed the duke was drunk when he wrote such nonsense. That or he’d forgotten he was writing to Sebastian Sherbrook, the Worst Libertine in London, not a spinster aunt.
Montford was by all accounts a model of Christian virtue these days. Considering how much of a hellion Astrid Honeywell once was, she’d done the impossible and managed to convince her once irreligious husband to regularly attend Sunday services with her. Sebastian was secretly proud—and not a little jealous—of his friend’s spiritual restoration, but he hoped Montford had not been entirely domesticated by his wife. Sebastian’s hopes were cruelly dashed, however, as he and Marlowe entered the nursery. The Duke of Montford stood in the middle of a room papered in pink damask, clutching a bald, squalling, naked baby to his chest. His once resplendent silk jacket was suspiciously stained, and his normally stoic face was strained with something approaching blind panic.
He bounced the baby awkwardly on his arm in an attempt to soothe it, but the action only seemed to aggravate the situation. The squalling became out-and-out shrieking.
The baby had clearly inherited its mother’s disposition.
When Montford noticed them at the door, he looked relieved, as if he thought they were prepared to rescue him from his predicament.
Sebastian most certainly was not. He tried to exit the room. The sight and sound of the naked infant, not to mention Montford’s case of nerves, were enough to make Sebastian want to postpone his reunion even with his beloved Broadwood. And the cloying smell of talcum and . . . baby, he supposed—sweet, fresh innocence underscored by the whiff of dirty nappies—made him want to beat a retreat all the way back to the Levant.
But Marlowe grabbed his sleeve and shot him a look that plainly said he would kill him if Sebastian left him alone with this madman and his child.
“Sebastian!” Montford shouted so as to be heard over the baby. “Managed not to get your head blown off, I see!”
“Thank you for your concern,” Sebastian returned, although the irony he intended was rather lost by having to scream his reply.
“Don’t you have a nurse?” Marlowe shouted.
“I did. But I sacked her!” Montford shouted back.
“Sacked her! Dear God, have you gone completely mad, man? Never sack the nurse!” Marlowe cried.
“She was incompetent,” the duke answered haughtily, as the baby caught her breath for another round. “She made Amy cry.”
“And you are doing an ever so much better job,” Marlowe returned.
Montford bounced the baby some more and made some dubious quieting sounds that a dragon might have made with its
young, to no effect.
“I was trying to change her. She was wet. But I couldn’t figure out how to put on her . . . er, garment.” He gestured toward a table where a nappy was laid out. The man couldn’t even deign to say the word, as if by doing so he was retaining his dignity. Sebastian wanted to inform Montford that his dignity was halfway to the East Indies by now and unlikely to return anytime soon.
“Don’t look at me. I never sacked my nurse,” Marlowe said, holding his hands up in surrender.
“Nor me,” Sebastian said. He studied the baby, whose face was beginning to resemble that of an apoplectic Colonel Firth’s. That could not be good. “Maybe it is sick.”
“Do you think?” Montford stared down at his daughter with such a worried expression that Sebastian wished he’d kept his mouth shut.
“Or simply cold,” he suggested quickly. “It is naked. That cannot be pleasant.”
“Right, right. Cold. Gads, she’d better not be sick! Astrid will castrate me.”
Gads? Really? Sebastian couldn’t remember such a ridiculous word ever passing those haughty ducal lips, even when they’d been boys together at Harrow. What had Astrid Honeywell done to the poor man?
The duke cast his eyes around the room frantically as if searching for a solution in the pink walls. He started for a chest of drawers, paused, and turned back to them. “Here,” he said, pushing the squalling brat into Sebastian’s arms, “hold her while I find something to put on her.”
Sebastian was too alarmed to do anything but accept the squirming package, dangling it at arm’s length. It had pink skin, was the temperature of a warm teapot, and was as soft and fragile as a moth’s wing.
He was terrified he was going to drop it.
Then the squalling infant did an amazing thing. It gazed up at him with large, silver-blue eyes and smiled a toothless smile, its horrible mewling ceasing in an instant.
“Demme me!” Marlowe breathed.
Montford, who had fetched a pink blanket—pink!—stared at Sebastian with disbelief. Then he quickly gifted Marlowe with a very familiar irritated expression. “Do not curse in front of my daughter, you bastard.”
Marlowe had the good grace—shockingly enough—not to point out the duke’s own slip of the tongue.
Montford approached Sebastian and the child as if walking on eggshells. “She seems to like you.”
“Not surprising,” Marlowe interjected dryly. “The ladies are always mad for our Sebastian. It’s the hair. And his fine eyes.”
Sebastian rolled those fine eyes.
Montford thrust out the blanket. “Here. Wrap her in this.”
Sebastian shifted the child into the crook of one arm and took the blanket. He wrapped it awkwardly around the baby’s chubby little body until it resembled an overstuffed, uncooked Bavarian sausage and tried to hand it back to its father. The infant immediately started to raise an alarm at the idea of being separated from Sebastian’s arms.
Sebastian was beginning to see which way the wind was blowing, and it wasn’t in his favor. “Oh, no. No, no, no,” Sebastian muttered, silently begging the duke with his eyes.
Montford grinned and backed away slowly. “Oh, yes.”
Sebastian gave a beleaguered sigh and hefted the baby so it sat against his chest. It promptly caught hold of one of his watch fobs and began to twist it in its stubby, moist little fingers. It gurgled with contentment.
Montford and Marlowe watched this charade with stunned expressions.
“What am I supposed to do now?” Sebastian demanded.
“Just hold her, for the love of God,” Montford said. “She’s been screaming for hours.”
The baby began to paw his cravat, pulling it from its crisp folds. He groaned. As if his dew-spotted boots weren’t enough. Crick had spent a good half hour ironing his neckcloth this morning—and grumbling about it—and would not be pleased to see it so abused.
Montford ran an unsteady hand through his hair. “I need a drink.”
“So do I,” Sebastian muttered darkly. It wasn’t as if he’d nearly had his head blown off half an hour ago or anything.
He moved to put the baby in its crib, but Montford stopped him. It just kept getting worse and worse. “You can’t expect me to lug it around with me,” he protested.
“It is a she,” Montford said in a chilly tone. “And you shall lug her around if you want my Scotch whiskey.”
“You’re a cruel, cruel man,” Sebastian protested, but he followed his friends out the door, clutching the squirming little bundle tightly to his chest. It—she—smelled like fresh air and innocence, and her breath was sticky-warm against his neck. He felt an odd pang in the vicinity of where his heart must have once beat, and he could only assume it was from dread. Every step he took he was certain he was going to trip and smash the baby into the hard marble floor. He’d never known a more perilous journey than the one he was now embarked upon, toting Montford’s mewling brat through the grand hallways and stairwells of the duke’s palace.
He almost sobbed with relief when he reached the safety of Montford’s library without incident. He slumped onto a divan, settling the infant on his knee and holding her firmly with both hands so she would not tumble to her untimely death. The pink blanket began to slip off the squirming bundle of flesh, and he tried in vain to rearrange its folds. The baby, however, did not seem to care for her clothing.
Perhaps another thing she had in common with her mother. But Sebastian was not one to judge. Much.
Sebastian longed for the whiskey Marlowe had placed on the table before him, but he was too scared to take his hands away from the baby. All he could do was stare at the amber liquid with frustration and imagine how it would taste. He was beginning to regret being so thankful to be reunited with his friends.
“So if you are still alive, what does that make Sir Oliver?” the duke inquired, settling across from him and downing his whiskey in one gulp. Sebastian’s eyes narrowed. Montford wasn’t even wearing a cravat, and he was drinking spirits before the noon hour. He was rumpled and exhausted and . . . utterly happy with his lot.
Marlowe was wrong. The duchess had finally succeeded where all of England had failed. She had indeed removed the stick from the duke’s arse. It was about time, Sebastian supposed. Yet he could hardly look at the deep contentment and near-giddy joy in Montford’s eyes without wanting to plant him a facer. No one had the right to be so disgustingly happy.
Which was unfair of him. Of course he wanted Montford’s happiness. Of course he was glad that Montford was so unfashionably in love with his wife and the plump little package currently squirming on his knee. Of course he was. If Sebastian couldn’t be happy, and if Marlowe was too oblivious to care for anything other than his drinking habit, then at least one of them should find some satisfaction in life.
But the selfish part of him, that dark part of him, was rearing its ugly head. He saw the joy in Montford’s eyes and was reminded of the horrible barrenness of his own soul.
He was jealous.
He was jealous, because he knew that he’d never have what Montford had, this pretty, nauseatingly perfect little domestic bliss. He couldn’t even touch a woman without self-loathing wrapping around him like a shroud.
Sebastian threw caution to the wind, balanced the baby on his knee with one hand, and took his whiskey in the other. He threw it back, feeling the liquid burn its familiar path down his throat.
He couldn’t remember why he was glad he’d survived the duel in that moment. Much less why he’d returned to England.
Nothing was ever going to get better.
“I deloped,” Sebastian said with a defeated sigh.
Montford arched one brow. “Of course. But he’ll not give up, you know.”
“I know. But what am I to do? Marry the chit? I did not get a brat on her.” He sounded distraught, even to his biased ear
s. And he was distraught. Damned hopping mad. Blanchard was ruining everything. “It’s a matter of principle, at this point. I’d not marry her if Sir Oliver put a gun to my head.”
“I think you’ve demonstrated that quite clearly,” Montford murmured.
Amy chose at that moment to tug at Sebastian’s hair. He looked down into her little wrinkled face, and his heart—what passed for it, anyway—tugged in his chest. She was so exquisitely ugly and innocent and dear that Sebastian thought she must be the most beautiful creature he’d ever seen.
He growled, hoping none of his mawkishness showed on his face. “Where’s its mother, anyway? Shouldn’t she be here, making sure one of us doesn’t bungle her daughter?”
“Her mother is out,” Montford said stiffly. “She and Lady Manwaring are visiting an estate agent, or some such nonsense.”
Sebastian counted to ten before he responded so his voice was steady. “Lady Manwaring, you say?”
Montford studied Sebastian more scrupulously than he would have liked. “Yes. They are fast friends these days, and off on some charitable endeavor.”
Sebastian snorted.
“My wife and the marchioness have taken it into their heads—along with Marlowe’s sister—to open a home for unfortunate women.” The disapproval in Montford’s voice warred with admiration.
“Sounds dreadful,” Sebastian muttered, though inwardly he approved.
“Women,” Marlowe snorted disdainfully from his slouch. “Or rather, women, like m’sister, and the duchess, and your dear Aunt Katherine, are nothing but trouble. Too much going on upstairs, you see.” Marlowe pointed to his own rather magnificent brainbox. “Intelligence in a woman breeds despair for all concerned.”
Sebastian snorted. If Marlowe’s sister had heard her brother’s words, she’d be coshing that magnificent brainbox with a brick. It had happened before, and it would doubtless happen again, for Marlowe was incorrigible.
Montford smiled slyly. “Perhaps.”
Virtuous Scoundrel (The Regency Romp Trilogy Book 2) Page 2