by Eloisa James
“Oh, ugh!” Merry cried, wiggling. “I shall run all the way back to the house and take a bath.”
They left the greenhouse on a bellow of ducal laughter, and walked around the house, following an uneven brick path. George ran ahead of them, occasionally crouching and pouncing at something only he could see.
“I had no idea that the gardens had been allowed to deteriorate into such a wilderness,” Trent apologized.
“I shall enjoy restoring them. Do you see that section over there?” Merry waved toward a stone wall overgrown with vines and lined by gnarled rose trees. A semicircular recess in the wall held the remains of a moss-covered stone bench, which had cracked into two pieces and fallen over, though flower urns on either side remained upright.
“Those rose trees aren’t dead,” she said, beaming. “Mr. Boothby and I went about with a penknife, and he proved to me there’s life there still. The strongest roses have actually thrived on neglect.”
Trent asked the obvious question. “They look half dead to me. Why not plant new ones?”
She tugged him off the path and led him to a great tangle of branches hanging over the wall. She pointed to a fresh green patch where Boothby had scraped away the bark.
“Come summer, this will be a fountain of roses,” she told him. “My uncle’s head gardener, in particular, had very fixed notions and wouldn’t listen to me half the time.”
“Whereas Boothby is well under your thumb,” Trent said, yielding to impulse and pulling her snugly against his side.
Merry couldn’t argue with that; she already knew that Boothby and she would be great friends. He didn’t care that she was American, and he didn’t particularly care that she was a duchess, either. “Your only gardener hasn’t been able to do more than keep a small kitchen garden going,” she told Trent, “but we have great plans.”
“You may hire however many gardeners you like.”
“I should like an architect as well, the sort of man who works in landscape gardening. I adored Humphry Repton’s work in Kensington Gardens, for example; perhaps we could lure him here. I could use my money—”
“No. Your inheritance will go into a trust for our children.”
She stopped. “But—”
“I will support my own wife,” Trent said, suddenly looking very ducal indeed. “Your inheritance will ensure that our second son has an estate of his own, which,” he added with a touch of ruefulness, “might prevent the sort of resentment that Cedric has always felt. Last year I stopped paying his bills, which just made him angrier.”
“You were trying to force him into financial prudence?”
“If Cedric were to decide to live within his means, he would live comfortably, and support a wife. If he were to marry an heiress, he would be extremely well off.”
Merry digested that. “Yet he has extravagant tastes.”
“He might do better away from England. The constant comparison with my estate was galling. It ate at him.”
“Where did you say that he went?” Merry asked.
“He left for the Bahamas,” Trent said. “I hope he will thrive there.”
Merry wasn’t so certain, and given the reserve in Trent’s eyes, neither was he, but the last thing she wanted to do was ruin their afternoon by talking about Cedric. “I do not have extravagant tastes,” she promised, leading him back onto the path. “The greatest expense in a garden is the head gardener, and I wish to perform that role myself. Mr. Boothby doesn’t mind,” she added, a bit defiantly.
“You are the Duchess of Trent. You may do precisely as you wish.”
Sunshine glinted on her husband’s hair, lending the strands surprising depth and revealing hints of amber here and there.
“May I infer, then, that you have so much money that you don’t need my inheritance?”
He gave a crack of laughter, his eyes lighting up. “I suppose I shall grow accustomed to your American bluntness.”
“I hope so,” Merry observed, slipping her hand through his elbow.
“Men of my rank are supposed to live on the income from the estate. But when I inherited, I saw that fields alone could never take us out of debt, and I invested the income rather than putting it back into the estate. Only in the last two years have I been able to put money into the land.”
“Of course.”
“There’s no ‘of course’ about it. My brother was furious.”
Merry briefly considered how Cedric would have greeted her gardening plans: with fury, most likely. She intended to get her hands dirty every single day. Yet Trent didn’t seem to mind. He was like some sort of dark melody that she couldn’t quite place: unpredictable, unknowable. Fascinating.
“I imagine that you appalled your brother on a regular basis. Cedric told me that no one but shopkeepers wear brass buttons, and here you are with just those buttons.”
He responded to her teasing glance instantly, pulling her into his arms and not bothering to answer before he ravished her mouth.
When he finally stopped, her breath was coming in little puffs and she was trembling again. She managed to push him away. “You mustn’t . . . in public!”
“‘Public’ would be the town square,” he pointed out. But he drew her off the path again, to another, duplicate alcove in the wall. The stone bench in this one, though equally mossy, had not collapsed. He sat and pulled her onto his lap.
“Trent!” she gasped. “This is so improper.”
“The seat is less than pristine,” he said, shifting backward so he was leaning against the wall and she was snug in his arm. He tilted her chin and said, “I have two demands for our marriage—no, two requests. Will you grant them?”
“Your Grace, I’m sure you know as well as I that one should never agree to a demand without first hearing the nature of it,” Merry said, giving him a mock-severe look.
“Make that three requests.”
She sighed. “You English are terribly inclined toward rules. I had to make up a list just to survive the season.”
“A request is not the same as a rule,” Trent said.
“It will be once I have agreed to it.”
He thought about that. “What if I told you that if you were ever to address me again as ‘Your Grace,’ I will resort to violence? Would that be a demand, a request, or a rule?”
“Violence? You?” She wrinkled her nose. Obviously, she knew that he’d sooner cut off his right arm than inflict violence on any woman, let alone his own wife. “You’d have to give me an idea of the kind of violence . . . Your Grace.”
He moved as swiftly as any wild animal, bending her back over his arm like a bow, kissing her until she was gasping. Her three hairpins gave up the fight and her hair fell down again.
“That kind,” he growled.
“I’ll take it into consideration,” Merry gasped.
“My second request is that you never fall in love with anyone else.”
The words hung on the air and in the interval she heard the twitter of birds and the distant sound of a horse clopping down a dirt road.
He thought she might be unfaithful? He was of the opinion that she was that sort of woman?
But her own lamentable history flashed through her mind. She had never given anyone reason to trust her constancy, so she could scarcely be insulted by the hard truth of it.
“I shall not,” she promised, keeping hurt out of her tone. “I may not have known to whom I gave my wedding vows, but I did make them, and I never break my promises.”
His smile eased the awkwardness between them. “Oh, I know that. I do not refer to your bedding another man; rather, I don’t want you to give your heart away.” His lips smiled but his eyes were wary. “Our friendship means a great deal to me.”
“I shall not fall in love,” she promised. “It seems to me that you feel love when you are expected to, in other words, when a handsome man kneels at your feet and recites parts of a Shakespearean sonnet.”
“If I see any man dipping toward the
ground in your vicinity, I shall punt him out the door,” Trent promised.
“I have no intention of ever falling in love again,” she said flatly. “So far, I think your requests reasonable. What is your third?”
“When you have a new greenhouse built, I would like a daybed in one corner.”
“For goodness’ sake, why?”
He bent his head close and his teeth tugged at her earlobe for a moment, sending a stab of sensation down to her belly. “I have the distinct impression that my wife will be spending considerable time in the greenhouse, will she not?”
“She will,” Merry whispered, tipping her head up so his lips skated across her jaw to her mouth.
“I’ve had a cockstand all morning, Merry. Have you any idea how uncomfortable that is?”
She shook her head.
“I want you to walk into the greenhouse and glance at the daybed, and remember being there with me. I want you to crave me, the way I craved you all morning. Perhaps the memory will drive you into the house in search of me.”
“I would never interrupt you for such a motive!” she cried, feeling her face warm.
“Even if I request you to?” he murmured in her ear.
“Intimacy belongs in a bedroom,” she told him. “Whereas you . . . on a daybed?”
He swooped in and kissed her, whispering about how he’d like to make love to her in a field of daisies, and on a riverboat. Merry was quite certain that she was as red as an apple by the time he drew her to her feet again.
But he held out his elbow to escort her back to the house as if they’d been engaged in nothing more indecorous than discussing how to prune a rosebush.
“George!” she called.
There wasn’t even a yip in reply.
Trent hardly raised his voice. “George.”
The puppy erupted from some overgrown grass, looking even dirtier than he had before. He headed straight over to the duke and began trotting more or less obediently at his heels.
“I find that very annoying,” Merry observed. “Snowdrop has completely fallen in love with you, and now George obeys you.” She bent down and scratched the puppy’s ear. “Don’t you understand, George, that Americans never obey the English?”
Arms wrapped around her waist and a wicked voice said, “Never, ever?”
By the time they began walking again, George had disappeared.
“Speaking of riverboats, I am considering investing in another canal,” Trent said, as if those kisses hadn’t happened.
Merry scarcely heard him; she was trying to pull herself together sufficiently to reenter the house. It was becoming clear that married life meant one had to accustom oneself to storms of desire. “Why would anyone dig a canal?” she asked, willing the flush in her face to go away. “Is it for moving goods, like a river? The Charles River, in Boston, has some ships sailing up from the harbor, but I believe that most goods are sent by mail coach.”
“Rivers don’t always flow where the merchandise must go, and the mail requires carriages, drivers, horses, exchange of horses, places to stop along the way, food for the horses. A canal, on the other hand, can go directly between two points and carry much heavier goods than can a carriage.”
“Uncle Thaddeus is quite interested in the development of steam engines,” Merry said. “Did you know that the first steam engine was built back in 1698 by an English engineer? My uncle has invested in an engine being designed by an American, Peter Evans; Thaddeus is certain that goods will be moving all the way from Boston to the Carolinas in carts pushed by steam rather than horses.”
“I have read something about them,” Trent said slowly. “I believe steam is already powering boats.”
They had reached the house and later that day—after Merry had startled the household by taking a second bath—they enjoyed their first supper as a married couple. They ate at a small table in the morning parlor because Trent told Oswald that the dining room was all very well when they had four or more, but it was entirely too gloomy for an intimate meal.
They spent the first course discussing the particularities of steam engines. Because Thaddeus talked of little else than inventions that might or might not become important, Merry turned out to know considerably more than her husband about the new engines.
By the time the third covers were taken away, Trent had pulled out a screw of paper and was jotting down notes.
“Do you know what I like about you?” he asked sometime later, stowing the paper away.
“I have no idea,” Merry said sedately, but then she laughed, and added, “but as you will guess, I am longing to know.”
“You are as intelligent as you are beautiful,” Trent said matter-of-factly. “I intend to take your advice. I will not back that canal; I’ll investigate who is working on steam engines in England instead.”
“My uncle and aunt arrive tomorrow for a short visit,” she reminded him.
Trent looked up swiftly. “In case you’re wondering, Duchess, you are not free to return to Boston. This marriage has been consummated several times over.”
Merry broke into laughter. “What I meant was that my uncle will know precisely who is working on steam engines in this country. But you should expect him to urge you to invest in Mr. Evans’s American engine.”
Trent had never before considered investing in an American invention, but now that he had an American wife . . . why not?
Chapter Twenty-eight
Following breakfast the next morning, Merry arranged with Mrs. Honeydukes to review the state of the household linens in the afternoon. Then she set out for a ramble around the estate, with George at her heels. Or rather, scampering ahead of her.
She kept to the gravel path that wound from the bottom of the formal gardens, over a gentle hill past a wheat field, where she nearly bumped into a portly man in homespun. He introduced himself as Mr. Goggin, one of her husband’s tenant farmers.
Goggin was clearly horrified to find his mistress—the duchess!—in his field, but he recovered enough to invite her to his cottage.
“I’ve milk from the cow this morning,” he said, ushering her to a chair placed next to the door before he nipped inside.
Merry stretched out her legs and tried to convince George that he wanted to sit when she instructed him to do so.
George rolled over a few times, and then stayed on his back, begging to be scratched. Just then a woman wearing a cap tied under her substantial chin ran out of the cottage, stopped short, and threw her hands into the air. “Why, I never!” she cried.
Merry was rubbing George’s plump tummy, but she came to her feet, smiling. “I do apologize for arriving unannounced, Mrs. Goggin. I met your husband in the fields and he insisted that I return with him for a glass of milk.”
Mrs. Goggin bobbed so low that her knees creaked. “I never imagined the honor of it. If only it weren’t washing day!” she cried, looking with agony at the drying undergarments spread over the shrubbery surrounding the cottage.
Merry took her hostess’s hand and squeezed it. “I would have known without this evidence that you are a superb laundress, Mrs. Goggin, merely from the snowy cap you wear.”
The farmer’s wife stared down at their joined hands, her eyes wide. “I’ll fetch some milk!” she cried, running back into the cottage.
“We never met the auld duchess,” Mr. Goggin, who had reappeared in his wife’s wake, explained. “Please do sit down, Yer Grace.”
“Have you lived here long?” Merry asked.
“I’m a tenant of yern—of the duke’s,” Mr. Goggin confirmed. “As was my father and his before him. We’ve always worked this land.”
Merry was still getting used to the idea that most of the people she met in and around Hawksmede had been linked to the duchy in one way or another for the whole of their lives. Mrs. Goggin returned with a jug, from which she filled a mug with cool, frothy milk. Merry sipped it while they discussed the weather, and the fact that wheat production could fall by a third in t
he event of too much rain.
Mrs. Goggin was interested to learn that Merry’s uncle maintained that a raised bed could protect cabbages from drowning in rain. She knew nothing of wheat, but she’d discovered that lettuces loved rain and cabbages did not.
Back at Hawksmede, Merry clambered down from Mr. Goggin’s dogcart with the help of a footman. She banished George to the stables until he could be bathed and entered the house, where she discovered her husband loitering in the doorway of his study, Snowdrop at his feet.
“I gather my wife has been out driving with another man,” Trent said, suppressing a smile. Merry’s hem was dirty, her bonnet was in her hand, and her hair had fallen down yet again, but she was radiant. Happy.
It gave him a peculiar feeling in his gut. Pride, maybe. Yes, definitely pride. He was damned lucky.
Merry danced over to him. “Mr. Goggin told me stories of you and Cedric as small boys,” she said, reaching up to kiss him, disregarding the three footmen milling about in the entry and pretending not to watch.
Trent drew her into the study. “Goggin is a very good man. I must apologize for this room, by the way.”
Merry looked around the room. “What’s the matter with it?”
“No attention has been given to its appearance in decades.”
“If you are nurturing the hope that I shall redecorate the entire house in the best Egyptian style, I fear you’ll be disappointed. I have very few opinions about furnishings.”
“Yet in the garden, you intend to examine every bulb before it goes into the earth.”
“That’s about the size of it,” she said cheerfully.
“Would you prefer to stay here year-round, rather than live in London during the season?”
“I suppose you have to be in London for the Parliament, isn’t that right?”
“I do my best to follow events from here, with the help of a secretary,” Trent said, “but yes, I do have to attend on occasion.”
“Well, then, I shall be wherever you are,” she said, walking over to examine the mantelpiece.