Four Nights With the Duke(11)

It would not have occurred to her brother that she, Mia, could undertake  the repetitive and boring work of estate management. He and her father  had always dismissed her airily, calling her books "scribbles."

Her scribbles earned more than the Carrington estate did last year, but  she hadn't shared that fact with her father, not since her first book  came out and he magnanimously granted her the right to keep her pennies  to herself.                       
       
           



       

In his words.

"I wish he hadn't left," Charlie said, voicing the obvious. "Mr. Reeve  promised to buy a sleigh next winter and pull me over the snow, and he  was going to teach me how to invent things."

Mia's arm tightened around him. When her brother died, Sir Richard had  promptly tried to retain guardianship of his nephew, on the grounds that  Mia's betrothed was illegitimate and consequently not a man of  "substance and worth." That had come to nothing, mercifully.

Sir Richard often won his lawsuits-which were legion-but he lost this  one. Instead, Edward's solicitors had promptly launched a counter-suit  for slander. Edward may be illegitimate, but he was the son of an earl.  What's more, he was an Oxford professor who had made a fortune  perfecting various machines, including a new type of paper-making  machine that was used by printers.

Mia had actually met him in the office of her publisher, when Lucibella  Delicosa was visiting London. For a moment she thought wistfully about  the heady first days of their romance, when her father and brother were  still alive, and she had believed she'd finally met a man she admired.

Then she shook herself. Ironically, Sir Richard had been proven right:  Edward was not a man of "substance and worth," or he never would have  jilted her.

"You will learn how to invent things on your own," she told Charlie. "I  have to marry someone other than Mr. Reeve. Luckily for us, the duke has  offered to step in." She pressed a kiss on his forehead. "I will not  let you go to Sir Richard, Charlie O'Mine."

He leaned his head against her shoulder and she wrapped her other arm  around him as well. She could feel his bones, thin and birdlike, against  her body. He may be on his way to becoming a man, but for now he was  still a child, and a frail one.

"I don't like being Sir Richard's ward. He looks at me as if I had three fingers, or two noses."

"We needn't worry about your uncle ever again. You'll be a duke's ward. What do you think of that?"

Charlie looked heartbreakingly uncertain. "I've never met a duke. Do you know him well?"

"Of course I do," Mia said. "I've known His Grace since we were  children, which is why he is being generous enough to do us this favor,  on the basis of our old friendship."

If only that were the truth. "After this marriage business is over, I  thought we might take a trip, the two of us. What do you say about  making a tour of Bavaria?" Bavaria had always struck her as a most  romantic place with castles that she could use as the setting to future  heroines' adventures.

The sooner she left England after the marriage contract was signed, the  sooner Vander could file for divorce on grounds of desertion or  annulment on the grounds of non-consummation, whichever he pleased. As  she'd explained to him in the letter he hadn't bothered to read.

It was rather sad to realize that although she would miss her horse,  Lancelot, there was no one and nothing else to keep her in England-not  if Charlie was with her. Just at the moment, her life seemed oddly thin.

"Yes, please!" His voice rose with excitement. "I should like that above all things."

"Then that is what we shall do."

"I might have trouble walking on board ship."

Mia shuddered at the very thought of Charlie on a slippery deck. "We'll  stay in the cabin and find ourselves across the Channel before you know  it," she said, trying to sound gay.

And failing.

His slight arms wound around her neck. "It will be all right, Auntie,"  he said, putting his tousled dark head, so like her brother's, against  her shoulder.

"I love you," she whispered.

Charlie's voice was only a thread of sound. "I love you too."





Chapter Seven




NOTES ON PLOT





~ All London at Flora's feet.

~ Flora unsure of Count Frederic: Could it be that the count, so  assiduous in his intentions, was in reality naught but a Cruel Betrayer?





Frederic: "Who could behold such a picture of Feminine Grace and Sweetness, and not recognize one of Heaven's Perfect Works?"





~ should he declare himself immediately, at the first ball?





"My heart is madly devoted to you," the count cried. (Ugh. Exclaimed? Protested?)



"By all that is most sacred to my soul, I swear that my heart is madly  eternally devoted to you," exclaimed the count, his heart beating with  love the agony of his emotion he felt.



Not bad.





Rutherford Park

Three days later

The morning of Mia's wedding was clear with the promise of unexpectedly  sultry late summer sunshine. She woke, disoriented, at five, thinking  that it was almost time to see if Charlie was awake.                       
       
           



       

But as she blinked at unfamiliar wallpaper, she remembered that she had  kissed her nephew goodnight the day before and traveled to Vander's  estate. It was only a matter of an hour between their houses, but the  duke had ordered that she spend the night at Rutherford Park, and she  didn't think it politic to bicker over such a trivial matter.

Her rebellion was to arrive very late at night, whereupon she was  ushered-without a welcome from her husband-to-be-straight to a  bedchamber, one she presumed had belonged to the late duchess.

Mia looked around with a twitch of distaste at the lustrous gold tassels  hanging from the bedposts, the Lyonnaise silk hangings along the  dressing table, the silver urn engraved with the ducal seal poised on  the mantel.

The urn was surrounded by a clutter of small animals made of china and  lacquer and jade, a collection that was beginning to feel desperate to  her. Could it be that her father had given his lover china animals  because he could not give her children?

It was a morose thought. The duchess had had a sad smile, like a woman  with a secret. Perhaps the secret wasn't her adultery but something  sadder. More intimate.

Mia shrugged and hopped out of bed. She would be gone by midday. There  was no need to antagonize Vander with her presence more than absolutely  necessary. He would be overjoyed to hear that she had no intention of  remaining under his roof, and that the marriage was in name only.

Her maid, Susan, popped her head in the door with a smile. "Good  morning, miss!" She ushered in footmen carrying cans of steaming water  that they took into the adjoining bathing chamber.

For the life of her, Mia couldn't stop thinking about the late duchess.  Why, for example, would Her Grace have wanted a bathtub surrounded  entirely by mirrors?

She herself always did her best to not look at her own figure or,  indeed, any part of herself. It was impossible not to catch sight of  distressing expanses of pink flesh when the walls were adorned with  silvered glass wherever one looked.

She refused to soak but washed, climbed out, and wrapped herself in a  length of toweling as quickly as she could. Really, she wanted  everything about this trip to be got through as quickly as possible.

"What does the household think of this marriage?" she asked Susan.

Her maid's eyes met hers in the glass and then moved back down to the  comb she was drawing through Mia's long hair. "They daren't say aught to  my face."

They'd been together for three years, and Susan knew almost everything  about her, even the story of that benighted poem. Susan being Susan, she  had hooted with laughter over the "pearly potion," though she agreed  that it was fiendish of Oakenrott to tell the world about her  infatuation for Vander.

"You'd think they'd be glad to see their master married," she continued.  "But they seem to think that His Grace is making an enormous mistake.  It was all I could do not to give Mr. Nottle a piece of my mind last  night." Her cheeks turned pink and she started combing a bit faster.

"The butler?"

"It's that formal downstairs, my lady, you wouldn't believe it. Mr.  Gaunt would fall about laughing if we bowed and scraped to him the way  that Mr. Nottle demands. And yet he didn't stop the servants from  chattering about the upstairs in a way that Mr. Gaunt would never  allow."

"I doubt that my father was very popular in this establishment," Mia  pointed out. "I made myself notorious with the love poem, and after my  father and the duchess died together, the scandal flared up again."