by Sara Ramsey
Thorington drummed his fingers on the table again. “That’s no longer true.”
Rafe led himself to the obvious conclusion. “So your curse is truly broken? Allow me to say I’m disappointed.”
If it were anyone else, Thorington would have laughed and called it a bit of superstitious nonsense. But Rafe was the only person in his family who knew exactly where their unlimited funds had come from over the past decade. And it wasn’t just luck. Nor was it from Thorington’s own efforts — he had no illusions about his business acumen. Dukes were bred to rule countries, not count shillings. It made them singularly ill-equipped for modern life.
All the luck he’d had over the past decade could be attributed, solely and completely, to an ancient curse. He’d thought it was a joke at first. How could it not be a joke? He had been so sure that he and his friend Alex, the Earl of Salford, were having a lark when they had found that ancient Egyptian dagger, cut their palms, and made their wishes.
Thorington had wished for wealth, as any man would who faced inheriting a bankrupted estate. And his wish had come true. Sure, his father had died immediately, which had stopped the old duke from draining the last of his coffers. And Ariana had tricked him into marriage — not the bride he would have wished for, but she brought with her a fortune as the heiress of a City merchant. Those consequences were bad enough that he’d never been happy about his wealth, even as it had made life easier for his siblings.
The curse had a dark sense of humor. He never forgot it; never let himself be lulled into a false sense of security, since it could kill anyone who threatened his finances too completely. But the money had flowed. His family had been beautifully clothed and sumptuously fed while idling around his house.
Until Alex, his former friend, had broken the curse three months earlier. And as quickly as Thorington’s wealth had arrived, it abandoned him.
“I am disappointed as well,” Thorington said. “Much as I’m relieved that the curse won’t find another bored, unhappy heiress for me, I can’t say I’m pleased that the books won’t balance anymore.”
Rafe steepled his fingers together and rested his chin on them. “The duchy is in better financial shape than it’s been at any time in the past two centuries. Don’t gamble or do anything particularly stupid, and you should be fine for years. There’s more than enough time to retrench and plan for an estate that isn’t held up by this curse of yours.”
When Rafe was sober, his mind was sharper than anyone’s. But he didn’t know the extent of Thorington’s woes. “I would assume the same, if I didn’t know how fast everything is slipping away.”
If the curse had had a dark sense of humor during its existence, it was positively diabolical in its absence. Every investment, every business venture — all of it had failed, or was sliding over the precipice.
Rafe couldn’t believe him. “You have thousands of acres of farms and forests,” he said. “That’s never going to change.”
“The land is poor,” Thorington said. “The rents cover the cost of improving the ground and staffing the manor house, but not much else. Why do you think no previous duke was as rich as our peers?”
“Our forbearers were all idiots,” Rafe said. “No surprise they couldn’t manage anything beyond drinking and wenching.”
Thorington laughed. “You’re descended from the same stock, unless you’d rather claim bastardy.”
Rafe shrugged. “Wouldn’t mind it if Mother had gotten me from someone with a bit more soul than Father.”
Of all their mother’s children, Rafe and Gavin were the only ones whose parentage had never been questioned. “You’re out of luck there,” Thorington said.
Rafe sighed, as though that knowledge was worse than anything else Thorington had told him. “The old man left you with a damnable mess. But you have the coal mines, even if you don’t have arable land.”
Coal had been miraculously discovered near Fairhurst, his country estate, a few weeks after the curse had begun. He shrugged. “They ran into a wall of solid granite the day after the curse ended. I doubt they’ll find coal there again, even though they’re blasting for it.”
Rafe frowned. “Factories, then. You have a host of them making supplies for the war…”
“They’ve all decided to strike,” Thorington said.
“At the same time?”
“Indeed. My agents are trying to find strikebreakers, but it is proving difficult.”
Rafe’s frown deepened. “What about your ships? They can’t strike — the sailors would be whipped for it.”
“I’ve had word that the whole of the Caribbean fleet was captured by American privateers.”
“All five of them?” Rafe asked. “Those damned Americans have grown bold.”
“Quite bold. Crescendo almost made it to Jamaica, but some incompetent Navy captain cost me her as well. The rest are no doubt being sold or scrapped as we speak.”
“You still have your Asian fleet.”
Thorington shrugged. “They’re weeks overdue. I wouldn’t pin my faith on their return.”
He ticked off his misfortunes as though they were a list of minor nuisances, not major losses with hundreds of lives attached to each. Rafe whistled. “I’ll grant this doesn’t sound promising, Gav.”
Thorington snorted. “Any other piercing observations from that intellect of yours?”
“Only that I’m glad you never got into the whisky trade, or we might be facing a shortage. I may need that drink after all.”
Thorington gestured at the bottle he’d bought from the innkeeper. “Be my guest.”
“As always,” Rafe said, reaching for the whisky. “I suppose I must find some other means of supporting myself if you can’t keep me.”
“You can stay at Thorington House. It will be incommodious when the creditors strip its furnishings, but no worse than what you lived through on the Peninsula.”
Rafe shuddered, an exaggerated motion that Thorington might have found amusing if it weren’t for the brief, haunted look in his eyes. “The back gardens will make a suitable pasture for goats — I got quite handy at roasting them during the war. Promise you won’t infest the place with lice, though.”
“You can fumigate it as often as you wish. Once Anthony and the girls are safely settled, you will have it to yourself.”
Rafe had finished pouring his drink, but with that comment, he tipped the bottle again and added another finger of whisky to his glass. “And where are you going? The Duke of Thorington belongs at Thorington House.”
Thorington shrugged. “Europe, most likely. I’d planned to go to Egypt after Ariana died, but I don’t have the funds now. And I won’t have people laughing over my changed fortunes. Thorington House can rot. It would have rotted already, were it not for the money brought in by the curse. We were always doomed.”
Rafe sipped his whisky. Some of the tightness around his mouth relaxed, then disappeared. Thorington averted his gaze. Rafe was a problem he couldn’t fix.
“If you think you’re doomed, you likely are,” Rafe said. “You, of all people, should know that prophecies come true.”
Thorington retrieved the bottle. It was expensive stuff — more than he should have spent when there was nothing left, but he had to keep up appearances. The extravagance of renting the entire inn less than five miles from their destination was part of his plan. If Anthony seemed to come from riches, he’d be seen as a better candidate for a lady’s hand.
Perhaps he was doomed. Perhaps he was destined to be the last in a sad, sorry line of idiots and miscreants. But his siblings wouldn’t — couldn’t — be punished for his failings.
He took a swig straight from the bottle, welcoming the burn.
Rafe raised an eyebrow. “That looks like something only an ill-mannered wretch such as I would do.”
“I should practice desperation,” Thorington said. “Wouldn’t want to look out of place on the Continent.”
His brother’s smile wasn’t comforting.
“You aren’t good at desperation, much as I’d like to see you desperate for something.”
“Unkind,” Thorington said. “You know I will not enjoy being impoverished again.”
“It isn’t poverty that I wish for you. I just…think it would be good for you to care for something.”
“I thank you for the judgment, Saint Rafael. As though you care for anything.”
Rafe shrugged. “No judgment. No sainthood.” He sipped his drink again. “No caring, either. But you should try caring, at least once, before you give up the notion.”
“I’ll find an Italian shepherdess to keep me warm,” Thorington said.
“Such a romantic. That plan will never work.”
“My plans always work.”
“Be sure to save enough money to post a letter detailing your escapades. I’d wager your Italian shepherdess will toss you out to pasture as soon as she realizes you’d rather arrange her life than lift her skirts.”
Thorington gestured rudely, then pushed the bottle away and stood up. “Don’t get too foxed. I’m going out, but we will make our entrance at Maidenstone by mid-afternoon.”
Rafe gave him a mock salute before pouring more whisky into his glass. “Yes, Mother. I’ll have the nursemaid wash behind my ears as well.”
Thorington waited until he’d left the room before he let himself grin. Rafe would find a way to provide for himself. Whether he would live another decade was uncertain, but he would go his own path without ever asking Thorington for help. The others, though, were too young and too sheltered to make their own fates.
His trunks were already packed. He ordered the servants to finish making his family ready. Then he set out on the road from Salcombe to Maidenstone Abbey, veering off into the forest before he reached the house. He didn’t want to listen to his siblings’ mutinous rumblings, not when he needed to stay focused on the task at hand.
There was nothing left to reconnoiter between Salcombe and Maidenstone — he had seen it all in the last three weeks as he rambled over the countryside and considered his options. He had stopped walking in London years earlier, traveling as a duke should with glossy carriages and priceless horseflesh. But Gavin, the man he had once been, enjoyed walking. And he’d enjoyed walking again over the past three weeks, even if the beauty of Maidenstone Wood and the dramatic sea cliffs beyond it was marred by his endlessly churning thoughts.
He’d delayed as long as possible. But there was nothing for it.
He would find an heiress for Anthony. It was the only option that would keep the boy safe. If he could find husbands for his sisters at the same time, even better.
And once they were settled, he would leave for Europe and let his siblings curse what he had done to them. Better for them to hate him in safety than to miss their only chance at security.
CHAPTER TWO
Callie refused to believe in omens. But she could admit that it was a trifle…discomforting when her stolen mare stopped at the very edge of the circular glade Callie had spent half an hour looking for and refused to take another step.
“Go on, you stupid thing,” Callie muttered. She tapped her booted heels against the horse’s sides, glad that her divided traveling skirts were suitable for riding astride.
She would have rather taken a bath than a ride. She had spent several long days in a carriage with Mrs. Jennings, who seemed to grow more cheerful even as Callie turned surly. They had spent the previous night dozing upright against the walls of their hired coach. The journey from Baltimore to Havana to London had taken so long that she was in danger of missing the start of the party. Callie had planned to have at least two months in London to refresh herself, buy a new wardrobe, and learn how British society behaved.
Instead, her ship from Havana had been captured twice — first by Americans, then by the British. They’d nearly gone down in a storm near the Azores. She was sure the coachman had gone out of his way so he could charge them extra. And so a journey that should have taken three months had cost her almost six.
Mrs. Jennings hadn’t spoken to her for nearly a week after the storm. They’d been reduced to eating moldy bread and drinking watered rum. Callie hadn’t starved, drowned, or come down with scurvy. But she was feeling distinctly bedraggled and bedeviled.
She should have stopped somewhere the night before and rested. But she had been impatient. And in her impatience, she had miscalculated. Maidenstone Abbey’s butler had sniffed as though she had dragged herself out of a gutter. Her cousin Lucretia had looked down her aquiline Briarley nose and stated, flatly, that Callie should have sent warning.
The way she said it made it sound like Callie shouldn’t have come at all.
There wasn’t a warm welcome for her at Maidenstone Abbey. She hadn’t expected one, although she hadn’t realized how much she had hoped for one until she realized that it would not be forthcoming. Her father had hated his brothers as much as he’d hated his father, and it seemed that the animosity was both mutual and generational.
Still, she wasn’t going to sit in a back parlor and wait meekly for a room. She was a potential heiress, not a beggar — even if she smelled like one. And one of the only worthwhile lessons her father had taught her was to brazen out a bad situation as though she was still in control.
So she had turned on her heel, gone to the stables, and stolen Lucretia’s horse.
Her father had left a map of the estate, and she’d studied it often enough to memorize it. She’d ridden straight for the last remnants of Maidenstone Wood, now little more than a charming forest separating Maidenstone Abbey from the small village of Salcombe. The abbey had been built two miles from the sea cliffs, far enough back to stay hidden from the seafaring raiders who once plagued the coast. That hadn’t stopped the raids, but the abbey had survived them all.
Until one of Callie’s ancestors had used Henry VIII’s persecution of the monasteries to steal the abbey and turn it into his private estate. The fact that his own brother had been the abbot hadn’t been enough to stop the slaying.
But when she finally found the clearing where that bloodshed had happened — a place that had been protected by a flag of truce before becoming an ambush — it wasn’t as impressive as she had expected. And it shouldn’t have scared the horse. The mare stayed still, right at the edge of the clearing, tense but not yet attempting to bolt. The horse hadn’t balked when entering the woods, and it hadn’t shied when rabbits and birds had crossed their path.
It was a relief that Callie wasn’t superstitious. All of the stories her father had told her of the Maidenstone — both the stone itself and the grand Maidenstone Abbey that had been named after it — had involved omens, curses, or worse. If his horse had balked at this point, he would have turned around and never returned.
Instead, she slid off the horse and looped the reins loosely around a nearby tree. Then she stepped into the clearing.
She held her breath as she did so. But lightning didn’t strike. Phantoms didn’t descend upon her. She took another step. If she had let herself be ruled by the same superstitions that ruled her father, she would have sold all their ships after he’d gone down in one of them.
And besides, the illogical part of her that took her horse’s balking as an omen likely wanted it to be an omen.
You should turn back, it whispered, seductively. You should return to Baltimore, where you belong.
But that voice wasn’t a dark spirit or ancient ghost. It was her own heart. And her heart had no place making decisions.
She took a step, then another. The clearing was as perfectly manicured as Maidenstone’s vast lawn. Lucretia must have ordered a gardener to tend it regularly. It took twenty paces to cross to the center. She stopped in front of the ancient granite pillar — the original Maidenstone. Her father had kept a drawing of it in his study in Baltimore, but the artist’s pencil hadn’t captured the encroaching moss or the weathered, pock-marked texture. It was taller than she was, perhaps six feet in height. But it was its shape tha
t compelled attention. It curved in, then out, like an hourglass — or the curve of a woman’s waist.
There was no face and nothing else to suggest humanity. Still, she understood the superstition now. The legend was that a girl had fallen in love with the devil there. But when he had come to take her away forever, she had repented at the last moment, and God — or whatever pagan idol the original inhabitants had worshipped — had turned her to stone to save her. The Briarleys had built upon that legend, believing that whichever one of them deserved the favor would see their sins washed clean there.
She removed her glove and reached out, tracing three fingers over the ancient symbols carved into the stone.
It was just a rock, but in the perfect stillness of the clearing, she suddenly felt sad. She hadn’t expected to feel anything at all. Despite her father’s stories, she had developed no special love for the place. All she cared was that her grandfather had treated her father poorly — a family tradition, it seemed. As a child, that knowledge had been enough.
But seeing Maidenstone Abbey for the first time that morning — standing now in the place her ancestors had thought was the center of all their good and bad fortune — gave her a twinge of possessiveness.
The Briarleys were on the verge of dying out. Centuries of murder, treason, debauched living, and poor decisions had nearly wiped them from the earth. There would never be another Earl of Maidenstone. The title had gone extinct with her grandfather’s death. Either she, Octavia, or Lucretia would inherit the house — through making the best marriage, this time, unless one of them turned to the old Briarley ways and killed the others.
Callie was more interested in finding a willing pawn to make her husband than she was in winning the estate. But seeing Lucretia’s condescending smile, hearing her slow her speech as though Callie was a blithering idiot instead of an American…
Callie was enough of a Briarley to find pleasure in the idea of stealing Maidenstone from Lucretia.
And anyway, she would need it if she was tossed out of Baltimore by whoever won after the war. If she won it, she would have it forever. Maidenstone Abbey had survived Viking raids, wars, fires, and any number of other calamities. Unlike all the other houses she’d lived in, it was solid. And it would remain solid.