"You are trying to fob me off. But I shall have you! I adore you!”
Miss Alyssa Eliot's heart sank as she listened to the Marquess of Stanwood's fervent declaration. At nineteen he was far too young to think of marriage, particularly when Alyssa, six years his senior, considered herself on the shelf. Quite apart from the fact that his daunting father, the Duke of Carlyle, would never countenance such a mésalliance.
Carlyle's reaction was even more violent then anticipated and Alyssa found herself labelled a scheming strumpet! Who would have thought, whatever the provocation, that his antipathy would lead the Duke into indiscretion?
THE DUKE’S REVENGE
By
Marlene Suson
Chapter 1
An elegant curricle with a crest that proclaimed nobility stopped in front of one of the narrow, modest houses that lined a respectable but far from fashionable London street
, causing a sensation among the neighbours. Even after the equipage’s occupant, a young gentleman dressed in the first stare of fashion, disappeared into the house, curtains at several windows along the street continued to twitch. Bolder neighbours found reason for a sudden walk past the curricle drawn by two matched greys and guarded by a groom in resplendent livery. The street had never before enjoyed a visit from the aristocracy, and curiosity about the young man and his identity was intense.
Very little was known about the family that he was visiting, for it had moved into the neighbourhood only a few days before. The household consisted of a mother and two daughters. The younger, a vulgar, voluptuous creature of eighteen with smouldering eyes and pouting lips, favoured her mother. The elder, in her mid-twenties, was tall, with a lovely, delicate face and a regal carriage. She had about her an unconscious dignity that proclaimed quality. So different were the two daughters that several of the neighbours questioned whether they could truly be sisters.
In fact, they were half sisters. The elder, Alyssa Eliot, was born of her twice-widowed mother’s first marriage, while the younger, Rosina Raff, was a child of the second.
Ten minutes after the young gentleman left the house and drove off in his splendid curricle, the elder daughter, smartly dressed in a striped green bonnet, green spencer and white kid gloves, was seen returning home.
As she entered the house, her mama’s agitated voice screeched from the drawing-room, “Come here at once, Alyssa. It is urgent.”
Without taking the time to remove her bonnet or gloves, Alyssa hurried to her mother, who was reclining on a long mahogany settee, three chairbacks wide, covered in a flowered needlepoint of many colours. It was part of a suite of two matching settees, twelve oversize armchairs and four stools, all crammed into a small room that could have held only a third of the furniture comfortably.
“What’s wrong, Mama?” Alyssa asked, her alarm reflected in her expressive face.
“You odious creature,” Mrs Fanny Raff replied petulantly, “why did you not warn me that the Marquess of Stanwood would be calling today? I had no notion that you were even acquainted with him.”
“The marquess came here!” Alyssa’s appalled accents proclaimed that she was as shocked as her mama had been.
Mrs Raff studied the only child of her first marriage critically for a long moment before saying, “I must declare, Alyssa, that I never thought you would make such a brilliant match. Nor, for that matter, any match at all! As long in the tooth as you are, I was quite certain that you were on the shelf.”
Alyssa stared at Mrs Raff as though she were speaking gibberish. “Mama, what are you talking about?”
“The marquess asked my permission for your hand in marriage.”
The horrified look on Alyssa’s face was not at all the reaction that one would have expected from a woman who had just received a most illustrious and advantageous offer. “Surely, Mama, you did not grant it!”
Mrs Raff regarded her dismayed daughter with sincere astonishment. “But of course I did! Why, he is one of the richest prizes on the marriage mart. And such a pleasing young man, too.”
“He’s not merely young,” Alyssa cried. “He is very young! Scarcely nineteen, and I am twenty-five.”
Mrs Raff winced at Alyssa’s blunt declaration of her age. It was just like the odious girl to remind her poor mama that she had a daughter of such advanced years.
“Furthermore,” Alyssa was saying with considerable feeling, “you are quite mad to think that the haughty Duke of Carlyle would allow his son and heir to marry a woman so far beneath his touch as I am. His Grace would never permit such a shocking mésalliance.”
Even so bold a woman as Mrs Raff shrank from the thought of incurring the wrath of the formidable duke, but she said defensively, “You, too, are of noble blood.”
That was only half-true. There was nothing noble about Mrs Raff’s family, merchants all. But Alyssa’s Late father had been a descendant of one of Britain’s most distinguished families, and her paternal grandfather was that noted historian and peer, Lord Eliot.
“Stanwood’s blood is more than noble; it is royal,” Alyssa reported. “His papa is the king’s cousin and his mama was a grand-daughter of King Louis XV.”
Mrs Raff, dazzled by the prospect of having a daughter aligned with royalty, cried, “Oh-h-h, I shall be so proud.”
Alyssa’s speaking green eyes were sad. “Proud of a daughter who would be justly branded a brazen cradle-robber?” she asked softly.
“The age difference is a trifle awkward,” Mrs Raff conceded.
“What the marquess feels for me is naught but calf love that he will quickly outgrow,” Alyssa said firmly.
“Then you must leg-shackle him at once,” her mama said, much alarmed that such a rich prize might slip away.
“Mama, I will not marry a codling too young to know his own mind,” Alyssa said, once again displaying that lamentable stubbornness that she undoubtedly had inherited from her odious paternal grandfather.
Mrs Raff wondered angrily why she had been cursed with a daughter so vexingly mutton-headed that she could consider rejecting a marquess’s offer. Her darling Rosina, the daughter of her second marriage, would never be such a sapskull. Furthermore, any man who did not have windmills in his head would prefer her younger daughter’s sensual face, voluptuous form and glorious profusion of tumbling black curls that made Alyssa’s neat auburn locks look quite insipid.
Rosina was a beauty, the image of her mother at the same age, while Alyssa was, in Mrs Raff’s critical opinion, too tall, too thin and too proper. Men’s interest was piqued by a little naughty promise in a woman. Worse, Alyssa’s regal carriage accentuated her height, and she had an off-putting dignity about her. Instead of being flirtatious like Rosina, the impertinent chit had a disconcertingly blunt tongue and a lively sense of the ridiculous that Mrs Raff, who had none at all, found deplorable.
Not even Alyssa’s delicate face, which the most jaundiced observer would have to concede was lovely, pleased her mama, for the teasing green eyes, laughing mouth, and charming dimple in the cleft of her chin were all legacies from her father, who had been a severe disappointment to Mrs Raff. She had manoeuvred the son and heir of old Lord Eliot into the parson’s mousetrap, thinking that she would enter the polite world and eventually become My Lady Eliot. Instead, His Lordship, as mean and cantankerous a man as ever lived, in Mrs Raff’s opinion, had disowned his son for his unpardonable folly in marrying the vulgar daughter of a Cit. Her husband’s toplofty family and friends had had nothing more to do with him or his bride. When young Eliot died, he left his widow only debts and a daughter not yet out of leading strings.
Even now, more than a score of years later, Mrs Ra ff was still bitter that she had been denied what she considered her rightful place in society b
y the vindictive Lord Eliot. But a son-in-law who was a marquess would surely secure for her and Rosina that much-coveted, long-denied position. Mrs Raff was certain that the incomparable Rosina would immediately snare a duke. As for herself, she thought complacently, if inaccurately, that she was surely still beauty enough to capture a widowed lord as her third husband.
Alyssa, jerkily untying the strings of her striped bonnet with shaking fingers, said, “I will not marry the marquess.”
“I declare you are the most vexing, pea-brained girl I have ever met,” her mama snapped. “Only think you will be the Duchess of Carlyle some day and so very rich.”
“And so very unhappy wed to a man who will soon hate me for having taken advantage of his youth and inexperience.”
Mrs Raff shrugged complacently. “Once you have him riveted, you may go your separate ways. It is quite the acceptable thing among the aristocracy.”
“It is not the acceptable thing with me,” Alyssa retorted. “The thought of such a charade of a marriage chills me to the bone.”
Mrs Raff said scornfully, “So you want love. I declare that for a girl who was supposedly so well educated, you entertain some peculiarly silly notions. I cannot believe that you mean to reject Stanwood’s suit.”
“I mean to do exactly that!” Alyssa said resolutely, turning to leave the room.
Mrs Raff, her dreams of a widowed lord for herself and a duke for Rosina crumbling, lashed out petulantly, “Oh, was there ever a more unnatural, unfeeling, ungrateful child! And after all I have done for you.”
Anger flashed in Alyssa’s green eyes as she paused in the doorway. “All you have done for me! Oh, Mama, that is doing it up too brown. What you did was abandon me upon my grandfather Eliot’s doorstep when I was still in leading strings.”
Although that was precisely what Mrs Raff had done, she had long since managed to rationalise this action as a great sacrifice to assure her daughter’s future, forgetting that it had been only her own future that had concerned her. After Jack Eliot’s death, she had tried to get his father to take her in by mendaciously writing him that she and his grand-daughter were in imminent danger of starving if he did not. He had replied that he would be overjoyed to see her suffer such a fate. However, if she would relinquish claim to his granddaughter, he would reluctantly agree to adopt and raise Alyssa. Her mother, who clearly saw that a squalling little brat would be a serious handicap to merry widowhood, was delighted o be relieved of her.
Upstairs, in the bedchamber that Alyssa shared with her half sister, she paced the floor in great agitation, horrified that the young marquess had so misread her friendly teasing manner as to think that she had a tendre for him and disgusted that her mama would approve such a singularly unsuitable match.
Alyssa knew that her mother had not loved either of her husbands. Her only consideration in marrying them had been for what they could provide her. She had badly misjudged what she would gain by marrying Jack Eliot, who had been no older than Stanwood when she had riveted him. But Mrs Raff’s second marriage had been more fruitful. Although the late Elias Raff had been a Cit who lacked the title and social position that his bride so coveted, he had been wealthy and had indulged her every selfish and extravagant whim.
But Alyssa was as different from her mother as the sun from the moon. If ever Alyssa married, it would be for love, even though she was not likely to find it at her advanced age. And she did not love the marquess. They had met a month ago at the house of Charlotte and Oliver Hagar, the only friends from Alyssa’s former life who knew that she was in London.
Charlotte had been Alyssa’s best friend since the two had attended the same select seminary for the daughters of Britain’s most elite families. Even Charlotte’s marriage two years earlier to Oliver Hagar, an aide to the first minister, had not weakened the friendship.
The Hagars were a lively couple, and their unceremonious household had been a haven for Alyssa since she had left Ormandy Park, her grandfather Eliot’s country estate in Northumberland, to come to London to live with Mrs Raff six weeks earlier. How Alyssa rued having agreed to do so, for those weeks beneath her mother’s roof had been the most miserable of her life. She did not know what she would have done without the Hagars, who had been kindness itself to her. Oliver, knowing how she loved to ride, had even insisted that she use one of his hacks. So she rose early each morning, while fashionable London was still abed, to ride in the park when no one she might know would be about. It was always the high point of her day.
The Marquess of Stanwood had been introduced to the Hagars’ house by his uncle, Lord Sidney Carstair, friend of Oliver’s. Stanwood, in his first season on the town, had been excessively lonely and blue-devilled since his father had returned to Beauchamp, his country estate in Berkshire, leaving his son alone in London. The stripling’s concerned uncle had brought him to the Hagars’, thinking that the amusing company there would surely cheer the boy.
Feeling sorry for the young marquess, Alyssa had set about rescuing him from his fit of the dismals. He had confided to her that he had never been to London before and that he was not finding it to his liking. When she expressed astonishment that the heir of the worldly Duke of Carlyle had not been to the capital, the marquess confessed that be and his younger sister, Ellen, had passed their entire lives at Beauchamp because their papa did not think the city healthy for children.
“He was reluctant for me to come to London even now, although it was he who said that I needed town bronze,” the youth confessed. “He predicted that I would prefer the country, and as usual, he was right. I did not mind the city so much before he left London, for he took me everywhere, and he is lively company.”
By all accounts, His Grace was indeed that. In his seventeen years as a widower—and, rumour had it, well before that—he had sampled a wide and varied array of female delights. In light of his notorious reputation, even A1yssas blunt tongue lacked the courage to enquire what “Everywhere” encompassed. Yet the marquess was so naïve and innocent that she quickly surmised the duke must have given his son an expurgated introduction to London.
“Why has your papa abandoned you?” Alyssa asked, certain that he had gone off for a few days with one of his ladybirds.
“My little sister took ill, and Papa went back to Beauchamp to be with her. I miss him so!”
Alyssa, uncertain which caused her greater astonishment, given the duke’s reputation, his concern for his daughter or his son’s obvious love for him, stammered, “Is your sister’s illness serious?”
“I don’t think so, but Papa worries so about her. You see, she has been an invalid and very frail since she was born.”
From that evening on, Alyssa had frequently enjoyed the young marquess’s company at the Hagars’. He was possessed of such amiable disposition, generous nature, quick humour, naïve candour and impetuous enthusiasms that it was impossible not to like him. It quite amazed Alyssa that the Duke of Carlyle—whose reputation was that of a harsh, haughty aristocrat who did not scruple to freeze a man with his consequence or destroy him with his power—could have produced such an unassuming, sweet-natured son. The only flaw that she had detected in the boy was a streak of passionate obstinacy, most likely a legacy from his father.
A knock at the bedroom door and the maid’s voice calling, “Miss Raff,” intruded on Alyssa’s rumination, and she answered absently, “She isn’t here,” before she remembered that she was now Miss Raff. Her own surname had been forbidden to her as long as she lived with her mother, and in the six weeks that she had been with her parent, Alyssa had not yet fully adjusted to being called by her late stepfather’s name.
“But, ma'am,” the maid protested, “I know your voice.”
“I’m sorry,” Alyssa apologised. “I thought you wanted Rosina.”
“There’s a young swell, the same one that was to see your mama earlier, awanting you in the drawing-room. He calls himself a marquess,” the girl said in an voice of awe tempered with scepticism. Lor
ds did not come calling at such modest houses as this.
“Is Mama here?” Alyssa asked anxiously, not wanting to see her suitor in her mother’s presence.
“No, she’s been agone ten minutes or more now.”
Alyssa gave fervent, silent thanks.
When she entered the small, overcrowded drawing-room a few minutes later, the marquess greeted her with a shy smile on his lips and adoration in his brown eyes. Unlike so many young men of the day, he had not adopted the extravagant dress of a pink of the ton or even of a dandy. Although subdued, his clothes displayed an elegant taste that was unusual in one so young. His face was pleasant, although it was too round, and his lower lip too protruding for him to be truly handsome, but one ceased to notice after a few minutes in his sunny company.
“Did your mama tell you?” he asked, a blush tinging his young face.
Alyssa smiled reassuringly. Although she had no intention of marrying the marquess, he was such a dear youth that she could not bear to hurt him. She knew how easily and severely the heart and pride of an ardent boy in the throes of first love could be wounded. Alyssa, feeling like a protective older sister toward an innocent little brother, was determined, if at all possible, to spare him any pain.
Furthermore, a stripling of his age doted on a challenge. A flat rejection of his suit, especially given the marquess’s stubborn streak, would most likely only make him more determined to win her. She would have to employ another, more subtle, way to discourage his tendre for her.
She began gently, “I was quite taken by surprise. It has been less than a month since we met at the Hagars’ and...”
“Twenty-seven days, eighteen hours, and I think’—he paused to consult his fob watch—”thirty-four minutes. I knew before that evening had ended that you were the only woman for me,” he concluded passionately.
“But you scarcely know me.”
“I know you well enough to love you as I have never loved another woman,” he declared still more passionately.
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