She looked at him as if she’d rather swallow poison than consider anything he might have to say, but he forced himself to wait, and after a moment, her curiosity seemed to overcome her resentment. “And what is that?”
“I should like you to consider what impact your decisions may have on the lives of other people. If my mother suffers ridicule and condemnation because of you and your publication, what responsibility do you bear? If her life is ruined, what consequences should there be for yours? Given the part you will have played in her downfall, what punishment will you deserve?”
She inhaled sharply. “Is that a threat?” she asked, her chin tilting up in defiance. “There is nothing you can do to me, sir.”
“You think not?” He gave her a pitying smile. “Oh, my dear Miss Deverill.”
His words, soft and dangerous, caused a flicker of concern in those tawny eyes, a reaction he found quite satisfying under the circumstances. “If my mother corresponds with you in future,” he went on as he donned his hat, “I doubt you will inform me of the fact, but I hope you will have the courtesy to tell her that her family is worried about her and would like news of her. And by the way,” he added as he opened the door, “I am not a ‘sir.’ That title is reserved for knights. I am a duke, and properly addressed by a commoner such as yourself as ‘Your Grace.’” With that, he walked out and closed the door behind him, leaving her no chance to reply, which he could only deem a very good thing. In dealing with a woman like Miss Deverill, any man would be wise to ensure to always get in the last word. Otherwise, she’d devour the poor sod for breakfast.
Chapter 3
In all her twenty-six years, Irene had never known she possessed a hot temper. She’d always considered herself a levelheaded sort of person: calm, steady, and reasonably good-natured, but as she watched the door swing shut behind the Duke of Torquil, she felt anything but calm and steady, and she realized she had been quite mistaken in her own character.
She wanted to go chasing after him and tell him just what he could do with his pointless forms of address and his condescending manner, but she could not seem to move. Her feet felt embedded in the floor, her body burned as if on fire, and her blood seethed through her veins like lava. All in all, she felt like a mountain in the full throes of a volcanic eruption. If smoke had started billowing from her ears, she would not have been surprised.
“Oh,” she said, a huff of air that seemed dismally inadequate to the situation, but there was no other satisfactory outlet for her feelings. The knowledge that her outrage was of the impotent variety only served to increase it. “Oh!” she said again, her hands balling into fists. “What an awful man!”
The door opened, and Clara came in, a tea tray balanced on her forearm. She stopped by the door, glancing around in surprise as she shifted the tray back to both hands. “He’s gone already?”
“Unless he’s lingering in the outer office like some harbinger of doom,” Irene muttered, scowling, “then, yes, he’s gone. Thank goodness.”
Her gratitude at the man’s departure did not seem shared by Clara, who looked inexplicably let down. “And I fetched tea from the kitchen and everything,” she said, lifting the tray in her hands a bit higher as she came into the room.
“He wasn’t worth the trouble.”
“Irene, how can you say that? He’s a duke.”
“A duke. Well, my word and la-di-da.” She pressed the back of her hand to her forehead. “I shall need my smelling salts in a minute. I’m that overcome.”
Before her sister could reply, there was a tap on her open door, and she looked up to find Annie, their parlor maid, standing in the doorway.
“If you please, ma’am,” she said, dipping her knees in a quick curtsy, “Mrs. Brandt’s compliments, and I’m to tell you tea will soon be ready for you and your guest in the drawing room.”
Irene and Clara exchanged bewildered glances at this message from their housekeeper, but it was Clara who spoke first. “Annie, I already had Mrs. Gibson make tea for us. As you see,” she added, nodding to the tray in her hands, “I’ve brought it here.”
“Begging your pardon, Miss Clara, but Mrs. Brandt what says I’m to take that away and have you bring His Grace to the drawing room. She’s ordered Mrs. Gibson to make him a proper tea.”
“A proper tea?” Irene echoed, her anger fading into a sort of amused irritation. “Heavens, does that mean we’ve been having improper tea all these years? Who’d have thought?”
Clara laughed, but Annie didn’t. Jokes were wasted on their parlor maid, who took everything said to her at face value. “Mrs. Brandt says a duke what comes to call ought to be given a proper tea. She promises she’ll bring it in once you’ve brought His Grace upstairs to the drawing room.”
“The duke is gone, Annie,” Irene explained patiently, gesturing with her hands to indicate the lack of that august presence in her office.
“Oh, ma’am, Mrs. Brandt will be ever so disappointed. She told Mrs. Gibson to put sugar icing on the cakes and told me not to worry about serving. She’d wait on the duke personally, she said.”
“Wanted to see him for herself, no doubt,” Clara murmured.
Annie nodded, looking sorrowful. “It was a right disappointment to me, Miss Clara, I don’t mind saying.”
“There is no need for disappointment, Annie,” Irene assured her as she came around the desk. “You are more fortunate than you could imagine. Please go back down to the kitchens and tell Mrs. Gibson she doesn’t need to put icing on the cakes—”
“Now, Irene, let’s not be hasty,” Clara cut in, shoving the tray into Annie’s hands and hooking her arm through her sister’s. “It seems Mrs. Brandt and Mrs. Gibson have gone to a great deal of trouble. I should hate their efforts to be wasted.”
Irene sniffed, but she allowed her sister to propel her out of her office, out of their former library, and along the corridor to the stairs. “In any case, I doubt even Mrs. Gibson’s sugar icing would have impressed Lord Insufferable.”
Clara laughed. “Oh, dear, he seems to have gotten under your skin all right. But, Irene, you can’t call him Lord Insufferable. He’s not a lord. He’s a duke.”
She waved a hand, not needing another lecture about proper forms of address. “A minor quibble, Clara. Lord Insufferable is a title that suits that man admirably.”
“Still, it’s a shame for poor Annie,” Clara said in a whisper.
Both of them glanced back, but the parlor maid had already vanished behind the baize door that led down to the kitchens. “I wouldn’t want to be the one who has to tell our temperamental cook and grenadier housekeeper that their efforts to impress a duke have been in vain,” Clara went on as she and Irene continued up the stairs and entered the drawing room. “Now, Irene, you must tell me everything.”
She gave her sister a rueful glance as she sat down on one end of the horsehair settee. “Must I?”
“Was he so very horrid?” Clara asked, sinking down beside her.
“Worse.”
“Did he come about his mother?”
“Yes. She’s eloped with the Italian, apparently.”
“So she did follow your advice? You weren’t sure she would, if I recall. Oh, won’t this make a sensation for the paper?”
“Yes,” Irene agreed, but the word was barely out of her mouth before the Duke of Torquil’s question rang in her ears.
If she suffers ridicule, disgrace, and pain because of you and your publication, what consequences should you face?
The question was nonsense, of course. A mature woman like the duchess would surely appreciate all possible consequences of the choice she was making. Irene could not be held accountable for those consequences.
“But why did Torquil want to see you?”
She had no chance to answer, for Mrs. Brandt arrived at that moment with a laden tea tray, and Irene shoved the duke’s accusatory words out of her mind.
“Tea, miss,” the housekeeper announced as she entered the room. “Mrs. Gibson’s made so
me lovely iced cakes today. A pity His Grace won’t be able to enjoy them,” she added, making no effort to hide her disappointment as she set the tray on the tea table beside Irene’s chair.
“A great pity,” Irene agreed with cheer as she reached for the teapot and the strainer. “But please thank Mrs. Gibson, and assure her we shall enjoy the cakes enormously.”
The housekeeper didn’t seem at all gratified to hear it. Still looking quite let down, she left the room.
“Well?” Clara asked the moment the housekeeper was out the door. “Why did the duke want to see you?”
“Why does it matter?” Irene countered as she strained tea into two cups and added sugar.
“I can’t believe you’d even ask me that,” Clara said as she took the cup and saucer Irene held out to her. “Of course it matters! He’s a duke.”
“So?”
“Irene! You know I read about the doings of the aristocracy in Society Snippets every day. So do you.”
“I read our paper because, as the editor, doing so is one of my responsibilities. It’s different for you. Your job as my secretary doesn’t require you to read what we publish.”
“But I like to read it. I like gossip.” She lifted her round chin a notch as she sat back with her teacup. “Especially about handsome dukes and their scandalous mothers.”
Irene wrinkled up her nose in distaste at her sister’s description of the duke. “Handsome is as handsome does.”
“Oh, stop! You sound like Papa’s Cousin Martha.”
She did, a fact she found terribly disheartening, but she turned away, pretending vast interest in the cakes Mrs. Gibson had taken such pains to decorate. “Either way, I didn’t think him particularly handsome.”
“Tell it to the marines! You know as well as I do he was handsome as sin.”
Irene made a face. “I doubt that man would know a sin if it bit him. He’s so stiff-necked, he ought to be a vicar, not a duke.”
“If he was a vicar, no woman in his parish would ever miss services.” Clara sighed, fanning herself with her free hand. “So splendidly tall, and with such wide shoulders.”
Irene groaned. “Oh, Clara, don’t be mawkish.”
Clara was undeterred. “Beautiful eyes, too. You must have noticed that much, at least.”
Beautiful or not, the thing she’d noticed most about his eyes was how disapprovingly they’d studied her. Everything about her appearance had been dissected, judged, and no doubt found wanting. Just the memory of his disdainful gaze made her feel hot and angry and thoroughly stirred up all over again.
“As for the rest,” Clara said, her voice intruding on her elder sister’s thoughts, “you enjoy hearing gossip about him and his set as much as anybody, Irene. I know it, whatever you say. Why, changing the newspaper to a scandal sheet was your idea.”
“I’m glad so many people enjoy reading about the doings of dukes, believe me,” she answered, relieved her sister had abandoned talk of the Duke of Torquil’s eyes and shoulders. “But for my own part, I couldn’t care two straws. And why should I?” she added, feeling prickly all of a sudden. “It’s not as if they care about us. Lilies of the field, all of them, and so I said.”
“Irene, you didn’t call him that to his face?”
She wriggled a little at her sister’s appalled expression. “I might have done,” she muttered, tugging at one ear.
Clara stared at her, shaking her head. “The Duke of Torquil is wasted on you. If a rich, handsome duke ever came to call upon me, I’d die of happiness.”
“No, you wouldn’t, for you’d be forced to listen to the horrid things he says,” Irene countered and took a cake from the tray. “You should have heard him today, talking about how his mother’s marriage to Foscarelli would be beneath her, and such a horrible blow to her family.”
“Well, that sort of thing is bound to cause a scandal and have an impact on all her relations.”
If my mother’s life is ruined as a result of your advice, what responsibility do you bear?
Heavens, she had to stop that man’s words from rattling around in her head. Irene suppressed an oath and took a bite of her tea cake. “Still,” she said after taking a moment to savor Mrs. Gibson’s lemony sugar icing—if not the reason for it, “the duchess is capable of deciding for herself who to marry, isn’t she?”
“The duke is no doubt displeased over the match. And he’s obviously concerned that his mother is being taken advantage of by Foscarelli.”
“Perhaps, but when I wrote back to her, I did point these things out, and I advised her to consult her solicitors, draw up a marital settlement, and tie up the money. I don’t know if she did so in the end, but I was very clear about it in my correspondence. And from her words to me, it was obvious she is fully aware of the impact her choice will have upon her family. As for her son, I don’t see how his disapproval is of any concern to us.”
“It isn’t, I suppose, but still—”
“She’s a grown woman, and seems to have sound judgement and plenty of good sense. Yet her own son seemed to think her incapable of choosing for herself what man to marry. Would you truly want a man as overbearing as that paying you his attentions?”
“Well,” Clara began, but Irene gave her no opportunity to answer.
“It’s understandable he would want to know where his mother had gone, but even after I explained that our paper must keep such matters confidential, he still expected me to tell him. No, wait,” she corrected herself at once. “He commanded me to tell him.”
“Then it’s obvious he doesn’t know you,” a long-suffering male voice uttered from the doorway, and both Irene and her sister looked up as their father was wheeled into the drawing room by his valet. “For my part,” he added as Sayers maneuvered the wheeled chair into a place by the settee, “I gave up ordering you about long ago. I recognized it as a futile effort about the time you learned to walk.”
“Very wise of you, Papa,” Irene assured him. “Wouldn’t you agree, Sayers?”
The servant, whose countenance Irene had always likened to Lewis Carroll’s Mock Turtle, bent to secure the brake of the chair before he answered. “I would not presume to say, Miss Deverill,” he told her as he pushed a stool forward and eased his master’s foot onto the padded velvet surface, an action that solicited a growl of pain from the older man. “Sorry, sir.”
Mr. Deverill waved aside apologies. “Just bring me the brandy, then you may go.”
Irene frowned a little, watching him as his servant moved toward the liquor cabinet. “Papa, you should be having tea at teatime, not brandy. And anyway, Doctor Munro has forbidden you the brandy. It makes the gout worse, he said.”
“Nonsense. Munro is a sour old goat, and a teetotaler besides. Of course he’d try to keep me from the brandy. Now then,” he added before she could argue, “would it be the Duke of Torquil who’s ordering our Irene about?”
“The same,” Clara said. “How did you know?”
“How do I hear anything in this house?” Mr. Deverill gestured to the valet approaching with the brandy. “My daughters never tell me anything, that’s certain. Servants, thankfully, feel that the master of the house, even if he’s in his dotage, should be informed when a duke comes to call. Put it there, Sayers,” he added, taking up his filled glass and gesturing for the valet to put the bottle on the table.
“Papa, really,” Irene began, intending to remind her father again of the doctor’s orders, but he cut her off.
“No lectures, my girl. I’m sixty-two years old, and I’ll have my brandy if I want it. Like your duchess, I don’t need my children making my decisions for me.”
“And Papa wonders where I get my stubborn streak?” she said to Clara, earning herself a glare of disapproval from her parent.
“So where is His Grace, then?” Papa asked, glancing around. “Surely you invited him up for tea?”
“Surely I didn’t,” she countered breezily as she settled back in her seat with her teacup and cake.
“Really, Irene, where are your manners?”
“My manners are perfectly acceptable,” she countered, feeling a bit prickly still. “The duke didn’t come to pay a call or have tea.”
“Given our social position, and the fact that I’ve never met the man, I already concluded that much,” her father answered, downed the contents of his glass, and reached for the bottle to refill it. “So why was he here?”
Irene explained, but her father didn’t seem any more enlightened. “So his mother’s gone off with an artist? But why would he come looking for her here? What makes him think you’d know her whereabouts?”
“Because she’s one of Lady Truelove’s correspondents and her letter was in last evening’s edition,” Clara explained. “But Irene sent him off with a flea in his ear, apparently.”
“Lovely.” Papa set aside the bottle and took another hefty swallow of brandy. “Now we’re insulting dukes and turning them out of the house. That will certainly not bode well for my efforts.”
“What efforts are you talking about?” Irene demanded, sitting upright on her seat. “Papa, what are you scheming?”
Her father shrugged, trying to seem nonchalant. “I have been in correspondence with the viscountess, that’s all, hoping to interest her in you and your sister.”
Irene groaned. “Really, Papa! What do you hope to achieve?”
“She might be able to persuade her husband to bury the hatchet. They’re both nearing eighty, you know, and your mother was their only daughter. We might be able to broker a peace.”
“Peace? With Viscount Ellesmere? Not likely. My maternal grandfather, I daresay, would like nothing better than to see our lot at the bottom of the sea.”
“The viscountess seems open to the possibility of a truce, and she thought she might be able to exert some influence with her husband. If so, it could mean a world of difference to both of you. You could perhaps have a season, go to balls, find husbands.”
At twenty-six, Irene knew she was most decidedly on the shelf. Clara, four years younger, might have a bit of time left, but it didn’t much matter. Without dowries, neither of them was likely to find a respectable husband, regardless of how many balls and parties they went to, but her father spoke before she could point that out.
The Truth About Love and Dukes Page 4