Forever and a Duke

by Burrowes, Grace

  Mrs. Hatfield’s eyebrows were her most interesting feature. Most people’s eyebrows were not perfectly symmetric. Hers were two exactly matched swoops that added elegance to the intelligence in her gaze.

  Why had such a woman—competent, well mannered, even pretty—no husband? She hadn’t said she was widowed, simply that she had no husband.

  “Your Grace, please attend me.”

  He glanced up to find her gaze had grown quite severe. “You have my undivided attention.” And you have eyes that should not be hidden behind a pair of spinsterish spectacles.

  “You observe that you have no privacy, and yet, if I asked you which clubs your cousins belong to, could you tell me? If I asked you which tailors, modistes, or bootmakers they use, would you know?”

  “Not in the usual course.” Howell and James favored Hoby boots, but then, most of fashionable London did. Rex had sponsored James for membership at some club or other—the Explorers, or was it the Charitable Knights?

  “Nonetheless,” Mrs. Hatfield said, “those cousins all know your movements, your preferred merchants, your schedule, your clubs. Your servants know details far more personal than those. People who have less, who are less, keep a close eye on people who have more. Children are more observant about adults than conversely. Women are vigilant regarding the actions of men because we have to be. The same is not true in the opposite direction, not in any flattering sense.”

  Her words resonated with Rex’s experience and, more than that, organized a vague sense of frustration into cause and effect. He had responsibility—he had power—but not privacy. When had he chosen to strike that bargain with life? Had he even had a choice?

  “You are saying whoever is fleecing me has had long acquaintance to learn my habits. That describes most of my staff.”

  She folded her arms. “And all of your family.”

  Rex sketched the curve of her jaw, which angled cleanly, then flowed into a firm chin. “There, I must protest, madam. You will not impugn the honor of my family again, lest you inspire me to a display of temper.” Not that he’d had any such displays since the age of about, oh, six?

  “I would at least raise my voice if a family member betrayed my trust,” she retorted. “I’d not be sitting on my elegant backside, swilling tea, and doodling. I’d throw fragile objects, provided they weren’t worth much. I’d kick the wall and curse. To entrust another with money is an intimate act of faith. One’s security, one’s future, one’s…I needn’t tell you.”

  She thought his backside elegant. He could venture a similar opinion about hers, except that he sought to live to a vigorous old age.

  “Don’t forget that my dignity will also suffer when I find out which employee has been dipping a hand into my coffers. Dukes are supposed to have endless reserves of dignity.”

  “Dukes are people,” she said, taking up her pencil of doom. “I thought that condition applied only to His Grace of Walden, a rarity among his peers. My theory no longer fits the available facts, for you are nearly as stubborn as he is.”

  Rex took a moment with her nose. Noses were easy to get wrong, easy to relegate to an afterthought, but a whole countenance could be rendered either noble or ridiculous by an artist’s handling of the nose.

  “Did you just pay me a compliment, Mrs. Hatfield? I daresay you did. You admitted me into membership in the human species, a very exclusive club indeed. I cannot recall when last I was so cleverly flattered.”

  He finished the tea and realized he’d finished the shortbread as well. Mrs. Hatfield put her glasses back on, but Rex decided not to draw her wearing them. The lady on the page was intriguing, even beautiful, but she was not smiling. Glasses would make her look too severe, too unhappy.

  “We must consider your family members among those responsible for mishandling your funds, sir.”

  “Who is stubborn now, Mrs. Hatfield? Do you think I wouldn’t notice if my sisters were padding accounts? Am I so oblivious to my own cousins that they could steal from me, abuse my generosity, and have me none the wiser?”

  Rex might resent his family, find their company tiresome, and even nip out to Ambledown occasionally to escape them, but he knew them well enough to trust them.

  “You need not feel ashamed, Your Grace. Your holdings are vast, your family large. We’ll find the source or sources of the irregularities and then you can decide what to do about them.”

  Sources, plural? “My family is above suspicion, Mrs. Hatfield. I’ll grant you that errors occur, miscalculations can be carried forward, but I pay sufficient attention to my loved ones that the misbehavior you suspect them of could not happen. Give me that much credit, at least. We limit our investigations to retainers, employees, and factors.”

  She drew another arrow that ended in a question mark and then two more. One for each sister? Preposterous.

  “We can start with your staff, Your Grace.”

  A prudent cease-fire on her part, and doubtless not the last time Rex would have to limit her zeal with an application of common sense.

  “I applaud your thoroughness, Mrs. Hatfield, and your diplomacy. More tea?” The brew, the shortbread, and the passage of time had apparently routed his megrim.

  She drew another outward arrow on his money chart and labeled it with yet another question mark. “Will you purloin my next cup too?”

  What in creation was she—? Rex looked at the cup in his hand. Hers, the one he’d fixed with milk and sugar. Empty. He’d drunk from her cup and finished her tea without even noticing his error.

  * * *

  “What do you suppose Elsmore’s real problem is?” Lord Stephen Wentworth asked. “The situation must be serious, if he’s come to us for aid.”

  Quinn passed his younger brother a glass of lemonade, an unusual choice for a day when autumn had turned up chilly, but then, for Stephen to navigate across Quinn’s family parlor with a cane in one hand and a hot drink in the other was perilous to himself and the carpets.

  “His Grace did not come to us,” Quinn replied, pouring himself a glass. “I’ve sung Mrs. Hatfield’s praises from time to time, and Elsmore asked to hire her temporarily. I merely brokered the arrangement as a courtesy.”

  Stephen hooked his cane on the arm of his chair. “Does Elsmore think she’ll share particulars about how you and Penrose run the bank?”

  Stephen’s intellectual appetites were prodigious, a polite way of saying that he was curious about everybody and everything, sometimes obnoxiously so. That lively curiosity had saved his life, in Quinn’s opinion, and resulted in any number of mechanical inventions.

  “Elsmore will soon learn better if he thinks to compromise Mrs. Hatfield’s loyalty, though I don’t take him for the underhanded kind. How was Paris?”

  “Paris is redolent of cat piss, as usual. The French can create marvelous roads, exquisite art, and incomparable ladies’ fashions, but they cannot eradicate the stink of the alley from their fair city. What did darling Eleanora make of this temporary assignment?”

  Only Stephen would dare refer to the lady so familiarly. “She was reluctant at first, but she cannot turn her back on sloppy account books. Enforcing order and accuracy are her passions.”

  Stephen drew his finger around the rim of his glass. “A bloody boring ambition, if you ask me. Have you never wondered how she came by it?”

  Quinn took the opposite armchair and weighed his obligation to a loyal employee against his obligation to an equally loyal—if inquisitive—brother. Stephen on the scent of a conundrum was a force of nature.

  “I knew Eleanora Hatfield in York,” Quinn said. “She was Ellie Naylor then.”

  Stephen had been eight when John James Wentworth had finally perished from too much gin and not enough decency. Quinn hoped that his brother’s childhood memories were dim and few, though nobody could forget what having a monster for a father had been like.

  “Naylor rings a bell,” Stephen said, sipping his drink. “I recall an old chap with a white beard, ink-stai
ned hands. Not a bad sort. Mrs. Naylor once gave me a slice of bread with jam. I knew from that moment on that should I survive to adulthood, I would enjoy bread and jam three times a day if I had to commit hanging felonies to have it.”

  So much for dim memories. “The Naylors were no more respectable than we were, but Mr. Naylor certainly lacked our father’s violent nature.”

  “Hard to be less respectable than we were, Quinn.”

  What to say? “We were destitute, Stephen, but we weren’t criminals. Papa was a lazy, mean drunk. I never regarded that as an excuse for his children to break the law.”

  Stephen shot Quinn a wry glance. “Just the opposite. You once spanked my lame little backside for stealing a currant bun.”

  He would recall that. “The only time I raised a hand to you. You could have been transported for stealing that bun, Stephen. At least give me credit for waiting until you’d finished eating the damned thing.”

  No matter how wealthy Quinn became—he was scandalously wealthy—the sheer terror of being a poor lad in the back alleys of York would never entirely leave him. For a younger brother with a bad leg, transportation would have been a death sentence, and at the time, Quinn would have been powerless to intervene.

  “You watched me eat that whole bun before you dressed me down, Quinn?”

  “The treat would be just as stolen if you ate it or not, and you were starving.” Too proud to beg, too infirm to work, Stephen’s lot as a child had been heartbreaking. How hungry had he been, to risk thieving when he could never have outrun pursuit?

  Stephen shifted in his chair, pulled a pillow out from behind him and laid it on a hassock, then propped his foot on the pillow.

  “I wish to hell it would just damned snow,” he said. “This rain is a misery.”

  “You’ll stay in London for the winter?” Quinn put the question casually, but Jane fretted over Stephen, and preferred to have him near when winter set in.

  Stephen traveled for months at a time, then circled back through London for long, unannounced visits. He no longer bided in the Wentworth town house when he was in Town, which was a blessing—mostly.

  “I have to remain long enough to look over the bank books, don’t I?” Stephen replied. “Mrs. Hatfield has spoken, and I reject the great honor of being her understudy at peril to my well-being.”

  “Jane likes her.” Quinn’s duchess was friendly to nearly everybody, but her genuine liking was a precious rarity.

  “I like Eleanora Hatfield, when I’m not terrified of her, and I have raised misanthropy to a mythical quest. Why were Naylor’s fingers ink-stained, Quinn? I know that’s a significant detail, but I can’t recall the particulars. Was he a printer?”

  Damn Stephen’s voracious curiosity. “He was a talented artist fallen on hard times after some sort of scandal. More than that, it has not been necessary for me to recollect. Eleanora never judged me for being the offspring of a foul-mouthed, gin-drunk fiend. I do not judge her for her antecedents, and we’ve both benefited from that arrangement.”

  A footman came in to light the lamps and build up the fire. Soon, the children would be turned loose from the nursery, and Quinn’s favorite hour of the day would arrive. He suspected Stephen called later in the afternoon because that meant a chance to visit with his nieces, upon whom he doted.

  “Naylor was an artist fallen on hard times after a scandal,” Stephen murmured. “His hands were always ink-stained, and even living in the most rotten neighborhood of devil-begotten York, his missus could afford to share bread and jam with my thieving little self.”

  Like tumblers in a lock clicking into place, Quinn could feel Stephen’s prodigious intellect closing in on a deduction.

  “We are a long way from York, Stephen, and it was a long time ago.”

  “Naylor was a forger,” Stephen said, saluting that conclusion with his drink. “Apparently, a successful one. Eleanora the Incorruptible has rogues and scalawags for family. I’ll bet that makes for a very interesting Christmas dinner.”

  Quinn brought the pitcher of lemonade over from the sideboard. “Conjectures like that can get a man called out and leave a bank without the finest auditor in the realm.”

  Stephen used his walking stick to snag the afghan draped over the back of the chair Quinn had vacated.

  “Give it up, Your Perishing Grace. Word of a gentleman, honor of a Wentworth, solemn promise of a reformed stealer of currant buns, I’ll never mention this to anybody outside the family. If anything, my regard for Mrs. Hatfield swells to even more impressive proportions when I think of how far she’s come. A man might shed a dubious past with hard work and good luck, but a woman’s reputation can never be rehabilitated.”

  “And yet,” Quinn said, as the soft thunder of small feet reverberated from the corridor, “Mrs. Hatfield is formidably respectable. Prepare for an invasion.”

  Stephen set his drink aside just as the door burst open, and three small female whirlwinds all attempted to climb into his lap at once.

  * * *

  Ellie’s life was a constant balance between appreciating the comforts of her station and warning herself not to grow attached to them.

  The Duke of Walden, for example, had sent his town coach back for her at the end of the day, a courtesy he observed in nasty weather often but not always. Instead of spending her evening with chilly feet, her boots stuffed with old newspapers, her cloak steaming before the fire, she could curl up with a book and a bowl of good, hot soup from the chop shop.

  Those luxuries were not yet to be hers, for His Most Inconvenient Grace of Elsmore had handed her into the Walden carriage and climbed in after her. She automatically took the backward-facing seat, which resulted in being seated beside him.

  “A gentleman yields the forward-facing seat to a lady,” he said, rapping on the roof.

  “An employee yields the higher station to nearly everybody.” Ellie reached past him to pull down the shades. Darkness had fallen and the interior lamps were lit. Anybody peering through the windows would see her seated inside with a gentleman other than her employer.

  She should be in high dudgeon about that, but in her present mood, she was mostly hungry and tired.

  “Do you suppose we can argue over seating for the entire journey?” Elsmore mused. “I think we could. We’ve taken each other’s measure, thrown out a few exploratory punches, and can have a proper set-to now that we’ve warmed to the challenge.”

  That analogy flattered nobody. “I do battle with dirty books, Your Grace, not with peers.” Grandpapa had attempted that folly and come off much the worse for it.

  “We could wager the choice of seat on a coin toss.”

  “I never wager.” Ellie’s entire life was a risky bet, and she’d lately wondered if that would ever change.

  “We could both take the forward-facing seat.”

  “Regardless of which bench you occupy,” Ellie said, “you will be at my figurative elbow until this auditing exercise is completed.” He’d intruded into her dreams and accompanied her on her noon ramble, too, more cause for a sour mood. “Where you choose to seat yourself is of little moment, but you will not tell me where I—”

  He switched seats. “I can compromise, Mrs. Hatfield. I can refrain from arguing with a lady. Your devious turn of mind will conclude that I yield this point for the sake of conserving my shot and powder. Notwithstanding your suspicions, my objective is to lighten our discourse with occasional frivolity rather than to vex you.”

  The coach pulled away from the curb, the horses at a walk.

  “You seek to be silly?” Ellie did have a devious turn of mind, no need to take offense at that truth when the same quality kept a roof over her head.

  His Grace’s expression remained utterly serious. “Dukes are never silly.”

  This duke was. “Good to know. Auditors are never frivolous.”

  Ellie shared a smile with Elsmore, which felt both silly and frivolous, also slightly dangerous. She smiled at the bank’s messe
nger boys, but never at the clerks, tellers, managers, partners, or directors. For Jack, she mostly attempted expressions of indifference, though they often eluded her.

  Traffic in the early evening was horrendous, and thus the coach moved at the barest crawl. The rain drummed on the roof while Ellie explained what her first review of the Ambledown books had revealed.

  “You make many of the entries yourself,” she said. “You are on the premises frequently enough to note whether what you see in the books matches what you experience when you dwell there.”

  “I’m in London more often,” Elsmore countered, his smile nowhere in evidence.

  “The London household is much larger, and I daresay you are distracted from its functioning most of the time. At Ambledown, how do you spend your days?”

  He took off his top hat and set it atop the pile of ledgers on the seat beside him. “I ride out in the mornings and visit with tenants if the weather’s fine. I call on my neighbors, I work in the library or the conservatory—the conservatory is warm and has excellent light. I frequently walk the home farm and the home wood. I attend services with the neighbors. At Ambledown, I sleep well, probably a result of greater physical activity and cleaner air.”

  “You see? You ride your acres personally, you occupy the public rooms, you don’t reserve them for company. You take all of your meals at the manor rather than breakfast, lunch, and dinner at your clubs or among your social acquaintances. You live at Ambledown while you’re there, you don’t squat.”

  Elsmore lowered the lamps on either side of the coach. “I come to life at Ambledown. I can think there, I can go for three consecutive days without dressing for damned dinner. I know the domestics by name, and the menus are the plain fare I prefer, not six removes of French ridiculousness drowning in overly rich sauces.”

  And yet, he’d offered to transfer the estate to her? “We all need a safe place, a place where we can be ourselves. I’m glad you have Ambledown.” She was even gladder that of the entire tangle of ledgers, wage books, and tallies, Ambledown’s accounts had been honestly kept.