A Duke's Temptation

by Hunter, Jillian

  Two scullions scrubbed ashes and vinegar in slop pails across the slab floor. The pungency made Lily’s eyes water. Another maid restocked the Welsh dresser with brandy, butter crocks, and imported spices.

  One scullery maid curtsied as she squeezed out the door with a bucket of slops. Another came out of a larder carrying what appeared to be a cloth-covered ham. Lily went forward to help her.

  “Is this ham for our breakfast?” she asked pleasantly, setting the plate on the table.

  The chitchat behind her ceased. Lily looked around and saw Marie-Elaine and Wadsworth coming down the three stone steps from the servants’ hall.

  The valet turned up his nose at the covered plate. “Ham? Only in our dreams, dear. The porkers who live on this estate are kept as pets.”

  “Pets?” Lily said in surprise.

  “Pigs, sheep, chickens.” Mrs. Halford made a face. “They’re all our friends.”

  Marie-Elaine inserted herself between the cook and the table. “His Grace doesn’t eat flesh. So neither do we.”

  Lily sighed. “I thought he was joking.”

  “Afraid not,” Marie-Elaine said.

  She watched Mrs. Halford remove the cloth from a large head of braised cabbage. “How unappetizing. I hope that isn’t for breakfast.”

  Bickerstaff emerged from the pantry and pulled the cover back over the cabbage. “No need to stare at the thing this early in the morning. It’s for lunch. His Grace will have eggs and toast, marmalade, and coffee to break his fast.”

  “In which room?” Lily asked, not having seen a sign of him on her way through the house.

  “He isn’t up yet,” Marie-Elaine answered, sharing a private look of amusement with the cook. “But when he rises, he takes his meals in the east wing.”

  “The east wing? I studied the sketch of the house. The east wing was excluded. It seemed to be closed off.”

  “That is right,” Marie-Elaine said. “For now you are only allowed access to the western block. This is where your bedchamber, parlor, and the kitchen are located.”

  “For now?” Lily wondered at this air of mystery. It made her suspect the duke had a mistress ensconced in a private suite. Her lips curled. Imagine him sneaking between wings from one bed to another.

  “Is that suitable, Miss Boscastle?”

  Suitable? She shook off her reverie and traced the well-modulated voice to the duke standing outside the kitchen window, a moor pony nosing over his shoulder. One of the scullery maids passed the duke a carrot. He looked remarkably well rested for a man of his indecent inclinations.

  “The east wing is reserved for private use.”

  “It’s fine with me,” Lily said. “It’s entirely your business if you have a collection of dead housekeepers who forgot to follow the rules, or even live ones who—”

  She heard one of the maids gasp. Obviously it would take Lily a little time to remember that she was no longer a blithe country lady who could be free to tease at times. She was a servant now. She ought to stitch up her mouth.

  But the duke did not look offended.

  “You’ll find out if you stay here long enough,” he said.

  And, as his laughing eyes might have implied, if you agree to sleep with me. Lily glanced around the kitchen in the hope that no one else had come to the same conclusion. It was obvious from Bickerstaff’s rumbling chuckle that he had read plenty into the duke’s meaning and that she was the only one in the dark.

  Chapter 23

  And so she passed her first day as housekeeper of St. Aldwyn House. And the next. Until nine days flew by, and even though she had never worked as hard in her life, she had also never fallen in so naturally with another group of company before.

  She had soon realized it wasn’t only the duke who kept a close eye on her. Marie-Elaine watched her like a hawk, and Samuel, for all his commanding presence, had virtually disappeared.

  She began to suspect that he regretted his decision to hire her. Not only did he seem to avoid her during the day, but he spent his other waking hours in the forbidden-to-her east wing. This prohibition might have been intended to provoke her natural curiosity and thus catch her out as untrustworthy early in her employment.

  But Lily wasn’t the tiniest bit tempted to explore the other regions of the house. The fewer rooms under her management, the better.

  She had never appreciated the amount of labor it took to maintain an estate this size. Whereas in her frivolous past she had offhandedly admired the numerous paintings, plaster busts, and cut-glass chandeliers that graced her modest Tissington house, she now regarded these objects as distasteful gatherers of dust.

  The duke appeared to be an avid collector of more whimsical pieces than she had seen in any museum, a few garish and ungainly. The Irish wake table in the breakfast room gave her a jolt every time she walked past it. The knight in armor beside the staircase rattled whenever the butler closed a door.

  But the illuminated Flemish manuscript on the prayer table in the screens passage was a work of art. Lily assumed he had inherited these objects until Marie-Elaine let it slip over tea that the majority had been sent from well-wishers around the globe. Strangers. Potentates. Diplomats.

  “Why?” she asked as she and the housemaid restocked the cupboards with linens, soap, and candles. “I know the duke is influential.”

  Marie-Elaine lowered her voice. “He’s different; that’s all I can tell you. And there’s no finer master in the world. People who’ve never met him send him gifts. He keeps every one. Maybe it’s his politics.”

  “But why all these mysterious airs?” Lily asked. “Why all this dramatic nonsense about closing off the other wing? What does His Grace have to hide? I understand it’s not my business to pry, but it’s as if he wants me to ask. I think it’s absurd.”

  “I didn’t say he had anything to hide,” Marie-Elaine replied, suddenly tight-lipped, which only heightened Lily’s curiosity.

  His behavior made little sense. He caroused at will in London. He was a well-known if notorious figure in society. And at home he was a man who not only isolated himself but instructed his staff to do the same. But Lily wished to hide, too. His reclusive ways suited her well. Not that she could hide from the desire that glinted in his eyes when he thought she wasn’t looking.

  And she had to wonder about all the lovers that he allegedly kept dangling and who had yet to appear, a situation that could hardly be helped by the daunting journey to Dartmoor.

  Still, after almost a fortnight in his employ she could no longer deny that something in St. Aldwyn House was amiss, and that whatever it was did not seem to be connected to the duke’s reputation.

  She could not, however, pin down the nature of his clandestine activities.

  Several times she had overheard the other servants laughing behind closed doors, only to encounter a deep silence when she entered the room, hoping to be included in the fun. Was it her upper-class background that ostracized her? Had they been warned she had gone off her head right before her wedding? Or did they disrespect her because the duke had not bothered to conceal his original intentions toward her?

  Perhaps the duke practiced the dark arts. Lily had never forgotten his solicitor asking her if she was afraid of the supernatural. What could he have meant?

  A strange instinct awakened her on the twelfth night of her stay at St. Aldwyn House. She pushed back the bedcovers and sat up attentively, wondering if the wind had blown up while she slept. Its keen gusting across the moor often carried in the stillness. But the branches of the hazel tree she could see silhouetted behind her curtain remained still.

  She did not hear any cries for help.

  Marie-Elaine’s warning, which had sounded ridiculous during the day, now seemed fraught with meaning.

  For your own peace of mind, stay inside your room after everyone has gone to bed. Do not explore the house late at night if you know what is good for you.

  Lily slipped out of bed and went resolutely to the window. She
could not have seen any foul play in the east wing from her proximity, even with a telescope. To her astonishment, however, she could make out a familiar figure dancing lithely about behind the hillside stones.

  Another man—good heavens, it appeared to be Bickerstaff—was holding aloft a lantern and what looked to be a book.

  The ungodly sight raised gooseflesh on her arms. She scrubbed the heel of her hand across the pane of glass. The duke looked agitated, animated, dreamily attractive from her perspective.

  She remembered that he had been engaged in a duel the morning of the masquerade. Surely a man did not challenge his own butler? Another practice swordfight? A society of spies that gathered on a remote moor for their covert enterprises? Perhaps the cries she had perceived in the dark were those of prisoners the duke kept for who knew what purpose. Perhaps she didn’t want to know at all.

  She drew a breath. No one would believe her now. They hadn’t before. Yet the longer she watched, the more it appeared that the duke was not waving a sword in the air but rather some long instrument, as if he were enacting a ritual.

  Was this man sparring or casting a spell?

  She shook her head. Either way, he moved in this mist like fluid steel and engaged like a swordsman’s dream. Even at a distance she had to appreciate his fencing skill—and wonder why on earth he had to practice at this hour. With a stick.

  Riposte.

  Retreat.

  Forestall.

  Lily felt a pang of longing for the times she had watched her brother fencing by the stream. Gerald’s skills could not compete with the duke’s ability, however. Did her brother, her family, miss her at all?

  She sighed, Samuel again commanding her attention.

  His long black hair absorbed glimmers of moonlight. His snug satin breeches and heavy boots molded to his perfect male form in a fashion that stirred not only her female senses but also a memory stuck deep in her mind.

  She could have sworn that she had witnessed this same performance in the past. He might be an amateur thespian. This might be an act from a famous play she had studied years ago. Hadn’t she wondered the night of the literary masquerade if he was an actor?

  Twenty minutes or so later he and Bickerstaff vanished in the light mist that enshrouded the estate. She returned to bed, sleep impossible.

  In the morning she would apply herself diligently to her job. She would remove the stubborn red-wine stain from the marble sideboard in the main drawing room. She would study her cookery books and instruct the under housemaids to carefully remove the cobwebs from the duke’s Staffordshire crockery.

  And she would pretend she had not noticed the duke’s behavior from her window last night. She would not admit she had been spying on him, because, as irrational as it might seem to an outsider, Lily understood that she was safer here than anywhere else.

  Chapter 24

  “All right,” Bickerstaff said, shivering in the mist, “here is the virgin’s grave. Beneath lie the poor murdered bones of Sir Renwick’s sister, Elizabeth Anne.”

  “Why do we have to enact his part?” Samuel demanded. “It was disturbing enough to write. Who would attend an opera about ghosts?”

  “We are doing this as a precaution for your readers, Your Grace. You would not want to print a spell to raise a virgin bride from the dead in the unlikely event it would work.”

  Samuel scoffed. “You are an intelligent person. What do you estimate the chances to be of such an occurrence?”

  “Having worked at St. Aldwyn House for years, I would not underestimate your abilities for one moment.”

  “Stop flattering me.”

  “One never knows, Your Grace.”

  Samuel leaned back against the longest cairn. “Except that in the first place, we don’t know if there is a family buried here from the Dark Ages, or if they had a daughter, and if she was virtuous at all.”

  “That is true,” Bickerstaff murmured, studying the parchment book that crumbled at the bottom corner when he turned the page. “But Lord Anonymous has a responsibility. He does not want innocents disturbed from their eternal rest because he has given away an ancient spell in his series.”

  “Sir Renwick is doing this,” Samuel reminded him. “Not me. He’s trying one last time to resurrect the sister he murdered in the hope that she can save him from the damnation he’s got coming to him.”

  Bickerstaff sighed. “It is quite romantic, Your Grace. We all know that Lord Wickbury will renew his strength to rescue Juliette, and Renwick’s forsaken sister.”

  “I’m not so sure. I don’t know what either of us would do if some lady skeleton stuck her head through the stones and said, ‘Stop trying to resurrect me. I’ve earned my eternal repose.’ I might faint like a maiden myself.”

  “Should I finish reading the spell or not? It will be another month until the next full moon.”

  “I’ll have to write around the scene if we—” Samuel caught Bickerstaff by his coattails and pulled him behind the sheltering stones. “Put out the lantern,” he said in an amused voice. “We’re being watched from the corner of the west wing.”

  Bickerstaff obediently extinguished the lantern, peering up into the mist. “Your Grace is mistaken. The—Ah, the housekeeper’s window.”

  Samuel chuckled. “She saw us this time.”

  Bickerstaff closed the tome of ancient spells, his nose twitching at the moldy effluvium that arose from the fragile pages. “It is obvious that Your Grace has another maiden to worry about.”

  “A live one, too.”

  Lily was snipping flowers in the garden the next morning when she spotted the village reverend at the moor gate. He was obviously angling for her attention. She would have ignored him if he hadn’t called to her until she had to look up and acknowledge his young, friendly face.

  “I missed you at church last Sunday!” he shouted, his hand already unlatching the gate. “I’m the Reverend Cedric Doughty. My wife wants you to come to tea.”

  Lily flushed, embarrassed by her muddy boots and the pigs rooting in her wake. She had not been told to expect company. “I’m just settling in, Mr. Doughty. You’ll have to excuse me. This is a large estate to manage.”

  “It is an estate of undefined evil,” he said without preamble, and he stared Lily in the eye as if she were supposed to break down and give him reason to agree.

  She straightened. “There is evil everywhere.”

  He dropped his voice, looking past her to the peat wagon that sat in front of the barn. Lily wasn’t sure, but it seemed as if she saw a pair of feet standing in the wagon’s shadow. “Have you personally been tempted to participate in any acts of sin that you would like to confess?” he asked.

  Lily stared. “Are you asking me if I spy on my employer’s personal activities?”

  “Should the nature of these activities go against the laws of God, it is incumbent on you to bring them to salvation’s light.”

  “It is incumbent on me to remember to take the eggs out of the sawdust for His Grace’s omelet,” she replied, glancing inadvertently to the hill, where last night the duke had been up to something unusual indeed.

  He blinked, his face bright above his cleric’s collar. “You seem too decent a lady to be led astray.”

  “You would be surprised. For your information, Mr. Doughty, it is my sanity that is in question. The duke took me on because no one else would hire me.”

  “Your sanity.” He looked disappointed. “Then there is little help for that. Give the duke my regards. I shall hope to see his household—you included—at church on Sunday.”

  Lily watched him mount his pony and ride around the hill. “You can come out from behind that wagon now,” she said, turning distractedly and walking straight against the duke’s unmoving form.

  She had not guessed it was him hiding behind the wagon.

  “Your Grace,” she said, shivering at the long, penetrating look he gave her. “I didn’t realize that you were here.”

  He smiled. A
sudden breeze stirred the folds of his impeccably crisp neckcloth. The pure white fabric played well against his charcoal gray frock coat and fitted trousers. “I always make a point of staying out of sight when someone hopes to save my soul.” His eyes searched hers. “You passed his interrogation like a—”

  “Spymaster?”

  “Strange analogy, but, yes.”

  She moistened her bottom lip. “You heard everything?”

  “Yes. I thought I would intervene, but you handled him better than I ever have. I usually confess to some outrageous sin whenever he confronts me so that he’ll grant me forgiveness and go away. This never works, mind you. He knows I’m lying, which is another sin by itself.”

  “No wonder he’s convinced you’re in league with the devil.”

  “You should not have told the pious busybody anything of your past. It is none of his affair. I give money to the parish.”

  Unwilling pleasure stole over her. “I did not give any of Your Grace’s secrets away.”

  “How do you know I have anything to hide?”

  His dark stare filled her with unreasonable happiness. “Whether you do or not is not my affair.”

  He glanced up at the house, his gaze musing. “It will be by tonight.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “We are having a party at eleven o’clock in the east wing.”

  Lily stared up at him as calmly as she could. He could have invited her to inspect the dovecote and made it seem like an adventure. “Eleven o’clock? If you have a request for a preferred menu, that is little time to prepare it properly. I . . .” She had to rein herself in. “I am still learning the rules, Your Grace.”

  “We don’t observe many rules in this house. I suppose it is my fault for being too liberal.”

  “Eleven o’clock,” she repeated, curbing the questions she longed to ask. “In the east wing. I shall do my best to set a proper table. How many guests does Your Grace expect?”