An Unlikely Duchess (3 page)

Over the next few days Josephine came to see—with the aid of a kind and sympathetic Mr. Porterhouse—that there was only one solution to her problem. She could certainly not face either Papa or Grandpapa with her reluctance to marry the horrid Duke of Mitford, and Bart was no use at all as an elder brother. Her sisters were all too young. There was only one person in the world who could advise her and help her express her reluctance.

Only one person. And she lived five and twenty miles away. But Aunt Winifred would know what to do. She had herself defied Grandpapa and chosen her own husband. Aunt Winifred would help her. There could be no delaying, of course. The Duke of Mitford might arrive any day and then there would be no way of escaping for what remained of her lifetime.

Mr. Porterhouse was kind enough—he was a very kind gentleman—to offer to escort her to her aunt’s house. It was not quite proper to accept, although the journey could be made in one day, and it was rather cowardly to run away from a home where the only complaint she had was that she was smothered in love.

She hesitated, thanked Mr. Porterhouse, told him that he was too kind in saying that he and his carriage were at her disposal at a moment’s notice but that she would have no need to inconvenience him, dithered, and finally took fright on the day when the duke’s valet and a mountain of baggage arrived.

The valet was so grand that at first everyone mistook him for the duke and flew into a panic. It was a mistake that was quickly put right, and everyone relaxed again when they knew that the duke himself would not arrive for two more days.

Everyone except Josephine, that was. Gracious goodness, if the valet looked and behaved like that, and if all those possessions were merely what his grace traveled with, whatever was she to expect of the man himself?

Her nerve fully broke the day before the duke was to arrive and just after a visit from the younger Winthrops, when she walked alone on the terrace for ten minutes with Mr. Porterhouse. Before luncheon, while everyone was still busy about the house, she stole away to a prearranged rendezvous with Mr. Porterhouse, leaving behind her the message that she would be taking luncheon at the Winthrops’, and a note to be delivered later in the day to say that she had gone to Aunt Winifred’s.

It was just very unfortunate that Mr. Porterhouse’s carriage broke down ten miles from her aunt’s. Something to do with the axle, Mr. Porterhouse explained vaguely. He was very apologetic as he settled her into a room at thee Crown and Anchor Inn on the Great North Road.

Josephine was frantic. She could imagine just what Papa would say to her if he were there now. And Grandpapa. And Bart. They would say that as usual she had acted without a moment’s forethought. And without a thought to ladylike propriety.

But she
had
thought. Very carefully. For several days. She did not want to marry the Duke of Mitford. Aunt Winifred would help her break the news to Papa. It had been a very sensible idea. It was not her fault that the carriage had broken down at such an inauspicious moment.

Poor Mr. Porterhouse. He had been very apologetic about the whole thing.

Chapter 2

The Duke of Mitford was lying on his bed at the Crown and Anchor Inn wondering if he should do something exciting, like undressing and going to bed. He had come upstairs an hour before, when it had become obvious that the taproom was the local gathering place for a large and somewhat rowdy clientele. He had not felt comfortable in such company.

His coat, with his greatcoat, had been thrown over the foot of the bed. His hands were clasped behind his head. His feet were crossed at the ankles. He had for several minutes past been watching his feet in their white stockings, wiggling his toes to make the occupation more interesting. But his eyes had moved upward and his attention had been caught by a crack in the ceiling, one that extended all the way across one corner of the room.

Perhaps the ceiling was about to collapse on him, he thought, yawning until his jaws cracked. This journey was really not turning into much of an adventure after all. Though why he should have thought that after twenty-eight years of very circumspect living he would be able to find adventure merely by leaving home alone and incognito, he did not know.

He supposed he was incredibly naive. Indeed, he knew it for a fact.

Since the age of six, when he had been precipitated into the title of Earl of Newman by a thunderstorm, he had been groomed for the life of privilege and responsibility that was ahead of him at the time, but that had been his now for the past eleven years. And he had always been an obedient pupil. He had almost never stepped out of line.

He would not necessarily say he had been a willing pupil. The spirit of rebellion that he saw breaking loose in almost every lad who had ever been his companion burned just as brightly in him. But he had never allowed himself to rebel or to do anything that would hurt his mother or in any way tarnish all the illustrious names he bore.

The closest he had come to being as other men were, he supposed, was in making Eveline Cross his mistress four years before. But even Eveline had been a perfectly respectable widow of good
ton
, and their three-year affair—she had broken it off the year before when she had finally admitted to herself that the Duke of Mitford was not likely to do anything as improper as marrying his mistress—had been conducted so discreetly that it was doubtful many people even knew about it.

She was the one and only woman he had ever been intimate with.

Mitford sighed and returned his attention to his feet. He tried to make his big toes stand at right angles to his feet. The left one could achieve only an eighty-degree angle. He tried harder. If he cheated and dug his heel into the mattress, he could do it. Perfect symmetry with both toes.

It seemed that all the world had company and was enjoying it except him. The noise level downstairs was rising in proportion to the amount of ale that must have been imbibed by now. And the female in the next room was talking in a loud, excited voice to her companion. He could not quite catch her words. Not that he would want to eavesdrop anyway, of course.

It was amazing really that he had any friends at all. But he did, even though he knew that most of them saw him as a thoroughly dull dog. Indeed, they were not shy about telling him so. He did not gamble or drink to excess or participate in any of the wild wagers of the clubs or squander money or flirt with the ladies or whore with those females who were not ladies. Such activities were unbecoming to his position in life.

Sometimes, he thought with a twinge of guilt, he felt sick of being a duke—everyone and his dog bowing and scraping to his great superiority; everyone and his cat hanging onto every word that issued from his mouth and roaring with amusement at every suggestion of wit; every mama in the kingdom who happened to have a marriageable daughter between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five gazing at him with tense hope and blatant admiration; all those daughters sighing collective hurricanes and whipping up collective tornadoes with fluttering eyelashes.

Yes, he was sick of being a duke.

He could hear now from the inflection of her voice that the female in the next room was displeased about something. Her poor companion, whoever he or she might be, was being given an earful of wrath. Perhaps after all there was something to be said for being alone.

Except that he would not be alone for long. He was within one day of meeting his future wife. A young lady he had never set eyes on and about whom he knew nothing except her name and the fact that she was the granddaughter of one of his maternal grandfather’s friends.

He really did not want to be going there. He really did not want to be getting married, especially to a complete stranger. He did not want to be setting up his nursery yet. He wanted to live a little, as Angie had put it to him. He would have liked just a little adventure in his life before he settled finally into the life he had been brought up to.

What he ought to have done, he realized now when it was altogether too late, was tell Grandpapa that he would meet the girl somewhere—at some carefully organized house party, perhaps—before deciding whether to offer for her. But he had not done so, and so there was no point in teasing his mind with belated wisdom.

That female’s voice had moved up a notch in pitch. And it was a poor male who was at the receiving end of the tirade. He had just laughed—unwisely, in Milford’s judgment. The female would not like that.

The duke chuckled without amusement at his big toes. He supposed that his final and very overdue grasp at adventure and independence had been a rather pathetic one. He had decided to make the journey into Northamptonshire a slow one and a lone one. Rather than travel with his valet and his baggage and all the pomp that a ducal journey always involved, he had decided quite on the spur of the moment to send Henry on half a day ahead of himself and to make his own journey by curricle, unaccompanied. And he had dropped those nine cumbersome titles, including the ducal one, and kept only the one he had been born with.

He was traveling as Mr. Paul Villiers.

The Duke of Mitford jumped suddenly and sat bolt upright on the edge of his bed. A great crashing and smashing had happened in the adjoining room. The pitcher, at a guess, bad been hurled with great force against the wall that adjoined his room and smashed in the process. He wondered irrelevantly if it had been filled with water. It had apparently missed that poor unfortunate male’s head or the sound would have been dulled.

He had made one interesting discovery, anyway. Mr. Paul Villiers was a far less impressive gentleman than the Duke of Mitford. He had not been treated with utter contempt on his journey. He was, after all, a gentleman and he had money. But he had been treated with the next best thing. There was this room, for example, in which he was fitted to spend the night. Whoever had had the idea of covering the walls with wallpaper of such a bilious green? He was quite sure that it must be the smallest and shabbiest room in the inn. Indeed, it could not be much smaller without the bed filling the whole of it.

As the Duke of Mitford he would doubtless have left the inn quite unaware that there was such a chamber within its walls.

Some adventure indeed! The duke smiled ruefully and wiggled his toes again on the floor.

Was he really of so little worth without his titles? It was a sobering thought. His appearance was unimposing, of course. He was not a tall man—and that, he admitted, was a euphemistic way of saying that he was short. And he was slight in build, though years of careful training and exercise had developed that body to its fullest potential. He was not handsome. His hair was brown and curled all over the place, to the despair of every valet he had ever employed. His features were arranged on his face in the most ordinary and unimaginative way. His eyes were gray—just gray, without any interesting adjectives to add to the color name. He was, in fact and altogether, a very ordinary man.

And a dull one too. His friends were right, he thought with a sigh. A dull and ordinary man about to pay his addresses to a dull and ordinary woman. And they would live a dull and ordinary and quite exemplary life for ever after.

Sometimes he could almost envy that beggar in the gutter he had advised Angie to seek.

“I shall scream!” the female from the next room shrieked. “If you do not leave this instant, sir, I shall scream the roof down.”

The walls between rooms were not by any means soundproof.

The male was unwise enough to laugh again. He must be either very young or very silly in the head. Or very brawny.

The noise from the taproom belowstairs was becoming somewhat deafening too. Someone down there must be very witty if the great gusts of laughter were anything to judge by. And someone was singing, though it would be a kindness to everyone in the inn if someone else would just hint to him that he was slightly off-key.

“You will not ravish me!” the female shrieked through his wall. Her voice was a trifle thinner than it had been. “If you try, sir, I shall put my knee where it most hurts.”

The Duke of Mitford was on his feet even as the man laughed again. Did the female not have a brain in her head, giving him fair warning like that? And what kind of a female was she to know about such things? But were matters that serious? Was it possible that it was not a simple domestic quarrel he had been listening to?

“Don’t!” The female’s voice was shaking. There were other words he could not catch. “Stop it! Oh, help, someone. Mmmmm!”

After shooting out through his own door, Mitford tried the handle of the door next to his own, but of course it was locked. The corridor was narrow. He could not take a great run at the door. And doubtless even if he could, he would only shatter his shoulder for his pains. But there was a female in distress inside that room. A voluble and scatter-brained female, it was true, but one in dire straits, nevertheless.

He took his run, hurled his shoulder against the upper panel of the door, and found himself hurtling through it and colliding with a very large and solid object on the other side.

It was a conquest not to be boasted of afterward. Mitford admitted that much to himself in all fairness. The man had been taken totally by surprise. The duke had not even knocked to warn the occupants of the room that there was a concerned citizen outside. There was only a flashing impression of a tall, muscular gentleman with a bewildered expression and a hanging jaw.

And then the duke’s fist connected with that jaw, shutting it with a satisfying crunching of teeth. The gentleman swayed on his feet while his assailant’s other fist bruised itself against his ribs. Doubtless the gentleman would have recovered and given a good account of himself if the female had not recovered far faster and dealt him a finishing blow to the back of the head with the bowl that no longer had a pitcher to stand up inside it.

The gentleman’s eyes rolled in his head and he toppled sideways, hitting the bed and sliding off it to the floor.