How to Dance With a Duke (31 page)

“Just that you have been speaking of him, and how wonderful his last expedition was. Indeed, when I told him about your kind offer to write us a catalog of the items that were found in the final tomb, he squeezed my hand.”

“Did he? Did he indeed?” Brighton’s arrested expression sent a pang of sympathy through her. As her father’s oldest and dearest friend it was probably difficult for him to see how Lord Hurston’s fine mind and strong body had been affected by his illness.

She reached over and patted his hand. “He did.” She nodded. “Furthermore, I know how much you have done to ensure that my father’s legacy be preserved with the Egyptian Club. And do not doubt for a moment that we are not grateful for all your assistance.”

Lord Geoffrey nodded. “It is little enough, my dear,” he said, turning his hand over to squeeze hers.

Cecily caught a glimpse of Lucas watching them from across the table, and hastily removed her hand from Lord Geoffrey’s. Why she should feel embarrassed about the moment, she could not say. However, when Lady Shelby announced that dinner was finished, she rose to her feet with relief to follow the other ladies into the drawing room. Leaving her husband and Lord Geoffrey to work out that conflict between themselves.

*   *   *

After dinner, because the party was small enough to make it manageable, Juliet suggested that the younger couples engage in some parlor games. Lucas allowed himself to be cajoled into participating, though he felt foolish in the extreme. As a married couple, he and Cecily could just as easily have bowed out, but he could see that Cecily wished to play along, and where she was concerned, he found it almost impossible to think of his own wishes.

“The first game,” Juliet said, once card tables had been set up, “is to be one of transpositions.” She and Madeline, who was clearly her cousin’s cohort in this scheme, passed out slips of paper and pencils to each of the eight couples.

“I will name the category, and then the ladies will have one minute to write down a word fitting that category, only rearranging the letters to make it unrecognizable. Once it is done, the gentleman will have to guess what word the lady has given him. If he cannot guess before two minutes have passed, then he will have to pay a forfeit. Then we will switch to gentlemen, then ladies and so on, until one half hour has passed. At which point, the couple who have paid the fewest forfeits wins.”

“But first,” Madeline said, “we must break into pairs. I have written down the numbers one though eight and put them into two piles. Each lady and each gentleman will choose a number from the appropriate pile. The lady with the number one and the gentleman with the number one will form a pair and so on.”

Trying not to be a poor sport, Lucas duly waited his turn and chose a slip of paper. He unfolded it and looked. Seven.

The others were all milling about calling out their own numbers and finding their partners.

“Seven,” he said dutifully, scanning the ladies who were not yet paired up. “Who has number seven?”

To his surprise and delight, Cecily, who had also been scanning the others, met his gaze.

“Seven,” she said with a rueful smile. Her slightly exasperated expression seemed to indicate that she suspected her cousins of playing matchmaker. Though as they were already a match it seemed a bit beside the point.

“Everyone to their tables,” Juliet directed them, following her own partner, Lord Christian Monteith, to the table with a place card reading “7/8.”

Lord Geoffrey had been pressed into service as timekeeper, and had taken up a position at the head of the room with his pocket watch and a small sand-filled hourglass.

“The first category,” Brighton announced, “in honor of our hostess and her sisters, is to be flowers. Each lady must rearrange the letters in a flower name with more than seven but less than ten letters.”

He took the hourglass, and held it up. “Your time begins…” He turned the glass. “Now!”

Lucas watched with fascination as Cecily looked at some unknown point in the air as she searched her brain for a flower name. Finally, having arrived at something she found doable, she began to write, scribbling the letters as quickly as she could, then passing the slip of paper over to him.

He looked down at the paper and sighed. XATLODFA.

Next to him, Christian let out an audible sound of displeasure.

“Do you wish us to lose?” he demanded of Juliet.

“My thought exactly, old fellow,” Lucas said.

Clearly the cousins were enjoying themselves, for they both gave shrugs of indifference and sat back to watch their partners struggle to solve the puzzles.

The room was silent as all the males in the room got to work. One by one, cries of flower names rang out as gentlemen began to solve their puzzles.

“Daffodil!”

“Harebell!”

“Primrose!”

“Daisy” was disqualified as being composed of fewer than six letters, which annoyed Madeline greatly. The same fate befell Lucy Huntington’s choice of “pasqueflower” for being too long.

Ignoring the din around him, Lucas got down to work and arranged the letters of his clue into some semblance of order. In the end he was only able to guess because he had just been conversing about this particular flower with his mama last week as it was also a bit of a nuisance and had taken root in the back garden at his London house.

“You are running out of time, Your Grace,” Cecily warned in a singsong voice.

“I had no idea what a competitive creature you are, my dear,” he returned as he quickly made sure his answer was correct. Finally, he looked up into her eyes and slapped his answer onto the table.

“Toadflax,” he announced.

Though she had teased him, he could tell that Cecily was pleased that he had solved the puzzle.

Thinking to give her a taste of her own medicine, for his first clue to her, he gave her what he thought was a moderately difficult one: ECADNLAINE.

But she had solved it in seconds. “Celandine!”

When his next turn came around, he chose an even more complex flower name: OKDCSAYLM.

“Lady-smock!” she said with even less time remaining on the clock than before.

Again and again, Lucas tried to stump his wife, having long ago given up the restraints of the game and giving her clues that involved many more letters than ten, and again and again she unraveled the letters like a child pulling a thread in a scarf.

“How do you do it?” he demanded. He assumed it had something to do with her facility for languages, but was interested in knowing whether there was some sort of process she employed.

“I’m not quite sure,” she said with a shrug. “I look at the letters and somehow I am able to see them forming the word, even when they are jumbled together without rhyme or reason.”

“She’s always been like that,” Juliet added. “Maddie and I were always loath to play at any sort of games with her in the nursery, since she was always sure to win. Not that we minded, but there’s not much sport in playing when you know you’ve no chance of winning.”

“I did try to let you win sometimes,” Cecily protested. “Many times!”

“Yes, but you were never very patient about it,” the other girl said, her grin taking the sting from her words. “I know it cannot have been very pleasant for you to be forced to play with us, when we could never offer you any competition.”

Lucas watched his wife and her cousin’s exchange and imagined what she must have been like as a child. A grave, serious girl with an intellect that separated her from her peers. The very thought of it made his chest constrict.

As if sensing the mood had become too serious, Christian spoke up. “Well, I suppose Winterson knows what it’s like to always lose to a superior opponent. The story of his whole childhood, he and Will being forced to bow to my overwhelming prowess at every possible sport. It’s a wonder he survived at all.”

Lucas flinched at the mention of Will, though he was grateful that his friend had drawn the conversation away from Cecily’s difficult childhood. Still, the mention of his brother in that context reminded him that Will had always been a dab hand at word puzzles as well. Which triggered another memory—of Will’s letters home from his last trip to Egypt, which were crossed and recrossed to conserve paper, but had seemed illegible to both Lucas and his mother. What if the letters weren’t illegible? What if they were written in a cipher of sorts? Lord Hurston had been careful enough to write his journals in code. Well, what if Will, as his secretary, had employed a similar technique for recording his thoughts about the expedition? Only he sent them home to his mother rather than recording them into his personal diaries.

It made sense.

Perfect sense.

The party was breaking up, and as soon as it was possible he and Cecily said their good-nights and made their way to the waiting carriage.

“What was the hurry?” Cecily demanded once they were in the privacy of the carriage.

Lucas gathered her into his arms and gave her a thorough kiss.

“You’ll see,” he said with a grin.

*   *   *

The ride was maddening—mostly because though Cecily tried, she could not convince Lucas to tell her why he was so excited.

When they finally arrived at Winterson House, he bounded out of the carriage and bodily lifted Cecily down before the footman could even get the step down.

“Lucas,” she said, struggling to keep up with him as he pulled her by the hand behind him into the house and up the stairs to his study. “What on earth is the matter?”

“I should have done this from the beginning,” he said. “I see that now, though at the time I didn’t make the connection between your father’s journals and Will’s letters. I was a fool not to consider it, though. Especially since you told me that very first day that you were able to interpret his blasted code.”

Cecily shook her head in wonder as she watched him hunt through his desk drawers, clearly searching for something in particular.

At last, he extracted a bundle of letters and tossed them onto the desktop.

“Here,” he said, gesturing for her to come and sit behind his desk.

She complied, but it felt odd to be seated in the place from which the Dukes of Winterson ruled. Metaphorically, at least. Still, she did as he asked, if only to see what he meant about Will’s letters.

“These are all of them, I believe,” he said, untying the dark ribbon that bound them together, leaning over her so that she felt the warmth of his body where he pressed against her. “There are only four in all. I forgot the bloody things existed until tonight when you raced through the flower names. Absurd that I should have, but there it is. If this turns out to have endangered his life in any way…”

He stopped there, shaking his head. Cecily glanced down at the papers on the desk. They were letters, from Will, she presumed.

“What does this mean?” she asked, needing some context for her husband’s odd behavior.

Lucas took a deep breath, and as if needing to keep moving, he stepped around to the other side of the desk and began to pace.

“They’re Will’s letters to my mother, written during the damned expedition.”

She did not take offense at his characterization of the dig, or the swearing. He was clearly overset by the idea that by forgetting about the letters he had somehow endangered his brother’s life.

“And?”

“And they have some chicken scratch crossed through them. I thought at first that it was the foolish code we made up when we were boys. I was never very good at it, but I supposed that he might want to tell me something that he didn’t want Mama or Clarissa to know about. But it was like nothing we’d ever worked on together. And it’s certainly not any language I’ve ever studied. When I met you, I thought about asking you to look at them, but at first I wasn’t sure if you were trustworthy enough to translate them—especially given that they might contain information that implicates your father in something unsavory. And then we became so focused on finding the journals that Will’s letters fell by the wayside.”

Cecily stared down at the letters, his mother’s direction scrawled across them in Will’s bold hand.

“Go ahead,” he said to her, stopping his pacing before the desk. “See if you can figure out what it means.”

The gravity of the situation hit Cecily just then. What would she do if they contained accusations against her father? Her father, who was even now bedridden and insensible. Could she learn damning information about him and convince her husband to keep the matter secret? Or worse, would her conscience compel her to reveal whatever it was Will Dalton had to say? She hoped against hope that the message was simply some confession of an indiscretion from one brother to another. But given the trouble Dalton had taken to encode the message she doubted it.

“Why would he send you a message in a code you did not know how to decipher?” she asked, picking up the first letter and opening the folded pages.

“I suspect he thought I’d be able to ask someone at the Home Office. Being a celebrated war hero has to be good for something,” he said, with a rueful smile. “But I dared not take it to them without knowing what they actually say. If it contained something that would embarrass him, or worse, England, I would not be able to keep the news from becoming public knowledge. And whoever I asked to translate them would feel duty-bound as well. I assumed that he sent the coded messages to me for one of two reasons: either he was desperate to get the message out of Egypt and hoped I’d figure out a way to decipher it, or he thought I’d seek you out. He thought very highly of your language skills, you know. He even mentions you in one of these…”

He gestured to the letters.

Cecily nodded absently as she looked down at the page and began to examine the letters crossed through the actual text of the first letter.

“Do you have a slate?” she asked. “Or perhaps some sheets of foolscap and a pen and ink?”

Lucas gathered the items for her, and soon she was silently working through possible substitutions for the letters in the first of Will’s missives, losing herself in the beautiful patterns of letters.

*   *   *