Never Deceive a Duke (12 page)

“Your Grace,” said Metcaff sharply. “Are you all right?”

The duke was blotting away the blood with his napkin. “I snapped my wine stem,” she said. “It is nothing. I—I forget, sometimes, what I am holding.”

“Shall I fetch Waters, Your Grace?” he asked. “Or a bandage?”

“No, leave us,” barked the duke, glancing up.

Something which looked like outrage flashed across the footman’s face. He turned abruptly, then he slammed the door behind. Antonia was glad to see him go.

The duke was still dabbing gently at the cut, which had almost stopped bleeding. “I wonder if that man could possibly make his dislike of me more apparent,” he murmured.

“Metcaff can be insolent.”

“So I noticed.” He withdrew a freshly starched handkerchief from his pocket and applied it tenderly to the wound. “Here, just press this on the cut. Does it hurt?”

She shook her head. “No, really, it is just a scratch,” she said. “I apologize for Metcaff’s manners.”

The duke straightened up, and with him went his reassuring warmth and scent. Antonia felt suddenly cold. “Yes, I begin to believe it is time to give Mr. Metcaff good cause for his bad mood,” he said grimly. “I hate to, the economy being what it is just now. Does the man have a family?”

Again, Antonia shook her head. “I believe he has been spreading tales, Your Grace.” She felt her face heat. “Not about anything we have been—I mean, there are rumors about—well, you. Your background. But that is none of my business. Certainly it is none of Metcaff’s.”

“Well, at least you acknowledge that there might be something to gossip about.” The tenderness had left his face now, and the fatigue had returned. “But that footman’s expression had little to do with gossip. I saw unmitigated hatred on his face just now—and not for the first time.”

Antonia pressed the linen handkerchief to her hand and looked away. “I think”—She paused to swallow—“I think that it is because he does not wish to work for you.”

“A burden from which I can swiftly relieve him,” said the duke. “But what the devil have I done to him?”

“It is not you, Your Grace,” she whispered. “Metcaff is just…ignorant.”

He set his hands flat on the tabletop and looked her straight n the eyes. “Ignorant?” he said, eyeing her appraisingly. “No, it’s more than that, isn’t it? Tell me, Antonia. What is it?”

Her eyes shied a little wildly toward him. “It is because they say…they say you are a Jew.”

The duke looked neither surprised nor angry, but merely disgusted. “Ah, both a murderer and Jew now, am I?” He straightened up and sat abruptly in the chair to her right.

“No one has said that, Your Grace.”
Not since my husband died,
Antonia silently added. Inexplicably, she wanted to know the truth. “
Are
you a Jew?”

The duke looked at her unflinchingly. “Absolutely,” he answered. “In my heart, at the very least. Certainly, my mother was. But my upbringing was unusual.”

“I see,” said Antonia hesitantly. “Was…was your mother frightfully rich?”

Gareth gave a bitter bark of laughter. “Yes, that’s the only reason a blue-blooded English gentleman would stoop to marry a Jewish girl, isn’t it?” he said rhetorically. “A fat marriage portion.”

Almost violently, Antonia shook her head. “No, no, that’s not what I meant,” she said. “I just meant…that you seem…perfectly ordinary.”

His gaze hardened. “Ordinary?” he repeated. “Is that meant to be a compliment?”

Antonia had been bred to handle any sort of social discomfort with ease. How had she bungled this one so badly? “I mean ordinary, like any Englishman,” she continued, her voice stronger. “You seem like…well, like everyone else I know.”

“Only one head, do you mean?” He flashed a grim smile. “And no talons or fangs?”

“You are making a jest of me,” she said quietly. “I meant wealthy, well-bred, and frightfully English. I knew Major Ventnor was a soldier. But I thought perhaps your mother had money? Or are you truly a self-made man?”

The duke gave a muted, inward smile. “No man is self-made, my dear, much as he might like to think it,” he said. “I have had the help of many. My grandparents. The Nevilles. And yes, the Jewish community in which I spent my early years. They were honest, diligent people who influenced me greatly. But if I had come from money, trust me, I would never have come to Selsdon. As a child, I was here because I had no choice.”

“I must apologize for my own ignorance,” she answered. “I have only met a few Jews, you see—like the writer, Mr. Disraeli? I met him and one of his brothers at a literary salon once. They seemed lovely gentlemen. But they are very dark. Spanish, I believe?”

“Italian,” said Gareth.

“Yes, perhaps you are right,” she went on. “But then, they are not Jews, really, are they?”

“The Disraelis are about as Jewish as I am, I suppose,” he answered quietly. “They were born of a Jewess—which some say is the definition. But like me, Disraeli was baptized in an Anglican church, and has likely never seen the inside of a synagogue.”

“Have you?”

“No,” he said softly. “My mother forbade it.”

Antonia was deeply curious. “Why would she forbid such a thing?”

“I am not perfectly sure,” he answered. “My parents were unusual. Theirs was a love match—a very passionate one, by all accounts. And my mother vowed that I would be raised as my father was raised—as a privileged English gentleman.”

“Your father asked this of her?”

Antonia realized she had begun to chatter like a magpie, but she found giving voice to her thoughts strangely liberating. And the duke was amazingly easy to talk to. She felt as if a floodgate had been opened; not just the floodgate to her curiosity, but to something deeper. She wanted desperately to know more about this enigmatic man.

His gaze was focused not on her now but upon the broken wineglass. “I do not know if my father insisted,” he admitted. “I know only that it was what they agreed upon when they married. Perhaps she thought it was her duty, because she was so utterly devoted to him. Or perhaps she simply wished me to have an easier life, free from prejudice. She knew that as a Jew, I could not go to university, or sit in Parliament, or do a hundred other things regular Englishmen do with ease.”

“You never asked her why?”

“I never got the chance,” he answered softly. “I was quite young when she died. She made my grandmother promise to raise me as she and my father had agreed. It was hard for my grandmother. It went against all that she believed in, and my grandfather thought it utter balderdash. But she did it.”

“And your father?”

“He was on the Peninsula with Wellington,” said the duke. “He died there a few years later.”

“And your grandparents continued to care for you?”

“No, my grandfather was gone by then.” His voice was flat. “His business had suffered a setback from which neither fully recovered. Whilst my father was alive, he provided for my grandmother and me as best he could. But when both of them were gone, my grandmother brought me here. She did not know what else to do.”

“I see,” she said quietly. “How…how old were you?”

The duke’s mood had oddly shifted. He sat slightly slumped in his chair now, his shoulders rolled forward as if he was totally at ease in her presence, but a little weary, too. She saw him, suddenly, as vulnerable; as a vigorous, breathtakingly handsome man who should have been enjoying life and all the temptations beautiful men usually enjoyed. Instead he looked weighed down by it all. He was like no man she had ever known; neither a faithless liar, as Eric had been, nor a charming rake, like her brother. And strangely, he seemed neither bitter nor vindictive—and she was beginning to wonder if of all of them, her second husband included, he did not have just cause to be both.

“I don’t recall how old,” he finally murmured. “Eight? No, nine, perhaps.”

Antonia was taken aback. “Eight or
nine
?”

He looked at her strangely. “Yes, why?”

Antonia’s late husband had painted his young cousin as the very embodiment of evil. Antonia had imagined him as some sort of miscreant, wreaking havoc across the countryside. But nine? Nine was just a child.

“How old were you when you decided to leave Selsdon?” she asked.

Gareth looked at her in surprise. “When I
decided?
” he echoed. “I was twelve when I left Selsdon. Is that what you meant?”

“Yes, I suppose.” But she didn’t see. Not precisely. “Might I ask, Your Grace—how old you are now?”

“I shall be thirty in a few weeks’ time,” he said, quietly studying her.

“Heavens,” she said.

The corners of his eyes crinkled softly. “Looking a little worn, am I?”

She allowed herself the pleasure of taking in his face again. “No, frankly I expected someone much older,” she finally said. “But you are only thirty? You seem older in some way which I cannot quite put my finger on—and yet—no, you do not look it.”

Again, he shrugged, as if it did not matter to him whether he looked thirty or sixty. “And how old are you?” he said instead. “Turnabout, madam, is fair play.”

Antonia felt her cheeks warm again. “I am six-and-twenty…I think. I stopped keeping count, to be honest.”

He gave a muted, inward smile, but if one looked deeper, one could see that a warm, masculine appreciation had begun to kindle in his eyes; a lazy, sensual heat which seemed to strengthen as his gaze drifted over her. “You are very beautiful for twenty-six,” he said quietly. “And you have not even reached the prime of womanhood. You have many wonderful years ahead of you, Antonia. I hope for your sake you will not waste them.”

Antonia felt her breath catch again, and a startling memory—his hands on her breasts in the rain, her drenched nightgown, the roughened sound of his breath against her ear, all of it—cut into her consciousness. She felt her skin heat and her toes curl. The memory was both sensuous and shocking. She caught his heated gaze, and for an instant, a question seemed to linger between them. A desire unspoken. She waited on the razor’s edge of expectation, wondering if he would ask. And what she would say in return.

To her dismay, he simply cleared his throat and stood. “Well, I am sure you must wish to have that cut attended to,” he said, offering his hand. “I think dinner was over anyway.”

With a surprising sense of disappointment, Antonia laid her hand in his larger, warmer one and rose. She had misunderstood. Misinterpreted. What did she know, really, about men and their desires?

They stood but inches apart now, and again she drew in his remarkable warmth and scent. He felt rock-solid and steady, and fleetingly she wondered what it would be like to be held close against him when one was thoroughly and completely in one’s right mind.

The duke’s mind, however, seemed elsewhere. “I shall be riding up to Knollwood sometime next week,” he said, his voice oddly emotionless. “After I have done so, I will be able to give you some idea of when the house can be ready for you.”

Antonia stepped away. “Thank you.”

The duke crossed the room and held open the door for her. “Goodnight, then, Antonia,” he said. “I shall see you tomorrow.”

G
abriel watched his grandmother’s gnarled hands close the heavy lid of the trunk, then smooth almost lovingly across the top.
“Bubbe,
that looks old,” he said as she stood.

“Old, yes.” She smiled down at it almost wistfully. “When your grandfather came here as a young man, this trunk held everything he owned. And when they carried it up to the attic a dozen years ago, I thought never to see it again. But life surprises us sometimes, does it not,
tatellah?”

Two servants came in and, at his grandmother’s nod, lashed the trunk shut, then hefted it up between them. Gabriel watched them carry it down the stairs. “Will we like living in Houndsditch,
Bubbe?” he asked. “Is it far away?”

His grandmother ruffled his hair with her hand. “Not far, Gabriel,” she answered. “And we shall like it about as well as we choose to, I think.”

“What does that mean?” he asked. “I like it here,
Bubbe
. I like Finsbury Circus.”

The wistful smile returned. “Grandfather says we have put it off as long as we can,” she said. “A new family is coming to this house,
tatellah.
It is God’s will.
”

Gabriel flung his arms across his narrow chest. “I am tired of God’s will,” he said. “Someday,
Bubbe,
I shall have a home of my own. And God shan’t will it to be anyone else’s. Never, ever again.”

Little more than a week after his meeting with Dr. Osborne, Gareth was in the estate office when Terrence, the second groom, burst in. “Your Grace!” he said excitedly. “Mr. Watson! A carriage!”

Gareth and Watson were bent over one of the estate ledgers. “What carriage, Terry?” said the estate agent absently.

“A great, high-perch phaeton, sir!” he said. “Painted solid black. It just went ripping through the village—right through Mrs. Corey’s guinea hens! Feathers everywhere, sir. You can still hear her screeching from the stables.”

The estate agent straightened up from the table, eyebrows knitted together. “Anyone you recognized?”

The groom shrugged. “Whoever he is, he just turned up the hill on two wheels, and clipped the edge of the gatepost,” he said. “He’ll be up here any moment—if he lives.”

Gareth threw down his pencil and hastened off to greet his guest. Not many men drove with such a callous disregard for their own safety—let alone that of hapless guinea fowl.

As it happened, however, man and beasts survived. Lord Rothewell threw his phaeton up against Selsdon’s front step—a mere inch away—and leapt down with a grace which implied sobriety. The gentleman on the seat beside him, however, was not so sanguine. Mr. Kemble removed his exquisite beaver hat and began to fan himself with it. “I say, Rothewell! If I soiled myself in that last turn,
you’ll
be doing the bloody laundry.”

“My good man, I cannot even spell laundry,” came the reply.

Gareth approached the pair with caution, as one might a loaded gun. “Afternoon, Rothewell,” he said. “And Mr. Kemble. This is indeed a surprise.”

Rothewell’s usually grim mouth turned up into a grin. “I believe we’ve set a record down from London, old boy.”

“Not on my account, I hope,” said Gareth. “I want no one’s blood on my hands.”

Rothewell sobered a bit. “Didn’t hit a thing, old chap,” he said. “As to those hens, I swerved just in time, and—”

“—yes, by God, he swerved!” interjected Kemble. The slender, dapper man was climbing gingerly down from the phaeton’s seat. “Then he hit the gatepost. And tomorrow, I’ll have the bruises to prove it.”

“Have a care, Rothewell,” said Gareth solemnly. “Guinea fowl mate for life, you know.”

“More fool they, then,” muttered Rothewell, surveying the house with his hands on his hips. “Well, this is quite a show, Gareth. I believe they could drop my house in Cheshire into this place twice over.”

“How would you know, never having bothered to see it?” asked Gareth good-naturedly.

Mr. Kemble was critically surveying Selsdon’s façade, window by window. “How’s the chef?” he asked bluntly. “Will he do? Or shall I find you another?”

“How gracious you are, Kemble,” said Gareth speciously. “I should rather you turn an eye to my décor first. It cannot possibly be what it ought.”

“An excellent notion,” said Kemble, oblivious to the sarcasm. He had begun to pace his way along the front of the house, gaze focused on the second floor. “I can tell you right now, Lloyd, that I don’t like what I see in those upstairs draperies. Burgundy velvet is so horridly passé. Is this a south-facing façade? No, more southwest, isn’t it? So you’ll want greens and golds up there, most likely. I shall have a look, and let you know after dinner.”

“Shall you indeed? How thoughtful.”

Coggins had come to the door and was surveying the scene in mild disapprobation. The surly footman stood behind him. “Shall Metcaff get their things?” asked the butler hesitantly.

“It would appear so.” Gareth turned to Rothewell. “What the devil is
he
doing here?”

Halfway down the front of the house, Kemble seemed to be paying them no mind now.

“I have done as you suggested, my friend,” said Rothewell, starting up the steps. “I have brought you some help. A secretary, of sorts.”

“He doesn’t precisely
look
like a secretary,” Coggins remarked, craning his head around the door pediment.

Gareth caught Rothewell’s arm. “A what?” he asked incredulously. “A
secretary
? I didn’t ask you to bring a secretary. I didn’t ask you to bring anyone—not even yourself. I merely asked for your advice. And I casually mentioned that I needed a valet.”

“Fine,” said the baron, “then he’s a valet. Let us discuss this later,
hmm
?”

Metcaff’s disdain was apparent. “Well, which is he then?” the footman asked querulously. “A valet or a secretary?”

“Both,” snapped Kemble, who had silently crept up on them all. “I’m to do both jobs—and yours too, Mr. Metcaff, if you don’t wipe that condescending smirk off your face.”

The footman faltered. “But I have to know where to put him!” he protested to Coggins. “Up? Or down?”

Gareth was resigned to the inevitable. He had already been through this with Xanthia. Once Kemble got a toe in the door and a notion in his head, there was no getting rid of him. “Up,” he grumbled. “He’s a secretary. Put him up.”

“Oh, heavens, no!” said Kemble. “Put me belowstairs, Metcaff, by all means.”

Gareth hesitated. “But if you are to be an upper servant,” he explained, “then I think—”

Kemble laid a stilling hand on his arm. “But that is the very beauty of the situation, Your Grace,” he said airily. “You no longer need to think. I am here to do that for you. I shall go
down
. And that is the end of it. Now let us waste no more of Mr. Metcaff’s incredibly valuable time. I am going to find the study and pour myself something for my overwrought nerves. Cheerio, all.”

“I’m damned glad to see you, Rothewell,” said Gareth after the gentlemen’s portmanteaus had been taken up the stairs and inside. “But to be honest, I’m shocked. What brings you?”

The baron was gazing approvingly about the great hall. “Magnificent!” he said, his eyes lighting on the Poussin to the left of the massive Carrera marble chimneypiece. “Oh—what brings me? Well, boredom, I daresay. Your letter sounded intriguing—after all, you’ve never before asked for my advice. And this duchess of yours—”

“No, no, she isn’t
anyone’s
duchess,” warned Gareth. “She is my cousin’s widow.”

“And widows are fair game,” said Rothewell, sotto voce. “A delicate beauty, you said?”

Gareth felt his expression harden. “Don’t even think about it, Kieran,” he warned. “She is not that sort of woman. Go back to Town and take up with Mrs. Ambrose again, if that’s what you are looking for.”

Rothewell’s black eyebrows went up a notch. “Me?—” he said archly. “I have simply come to the country for a little fresh air, and to see what sort of intrigue my old friend has got himself mixed up in. But what I wonder, Gareth, is this—what are
you
looking for?”

“I can’t think what you mean.”

Rothewell just shook his head. “There was something in your letter,” he mused. “Something written just between the lines. Alas, however, I cannot help you there; you must deal with such emotions yourself. But those other little mysteries—now they do bear a closer scrutiny.”

“I thank you for taking my concerns so seriously, but I still don’t understand why you’ve brought Kemble,” Gareth complained, jerking his head in the direction of the study. “He doesn’t even like me.”

“And he mortally hates me,” said Rothewell. “But I called in a favor, and—”

“What favor?” snapped Gareth. “You’ve never done anyone a favor in your life.”

Rothewell shrugged. “Zee’s favor,” he admitted. “Kemble and his cohorts at the Home Office owed her hugely for that debacle with the contraband rifles a few weeks back.”

“What, those French smugglers?” Gareth was incredulous. “She’s lucky Nash didn’t kill her.”

“Nash turned out to be innocent, you will recall,” said Rothewell.

“Yes, but
she
didn’t know that.”

Rothewell stopped on the landing and set a hand on Gareth’s shoulder. “Look, she read your letter, old chap,” he said in a resigned voice. “And she told me I was to bring him. By the by, Kem has the strangest notion you’ve murdered your uncle. You haven’t, have you?”

“I don’t even have a bloody uncle,” he said. “And I thought Zee was in the Adriatic.”

Rothewell patted his back paternally. “Just a slight delay,” he said. “They will be off shortly. I think you should retain Kemble’s services, old chap. Perhaps an unbiased opinion is in order here?”

“My opinion is not biased,” said Gareth a little hotly.

“Indeed?” The inky eyebrows went up again. “Are you quite sure of that, old chap? Don’t you wish to know the truth about your lovely widow?”

“I know the truth,” he snapped. “What I wish to do is clear her name—though that’s none of my business either.”

Rothewell looked unaffected. “Why not simply use Kemble for what he’s worth, then?” he suggested. “To give the devil his due, the old boy’s sharp as a tack, and just a tad vicious. You might find him of some use as a servant.”

“As a servant?” Gareth looked at him incredulously. “The man is in my study, drinking my brandy. Does he look like a servant to you?”

Kemble was indeed comfortably ensconced in the study, seated in the brown leather wing chair which had already become Gareth’s favorite, and sipping rather tentatively at a snifter of what looked like the good cognac. The man certainly had a taste for life’s most expensive luxuries—and a nose for sniffing them out.

“An excellent and well-aged
eau-de-vie,
Lloyd,” he said, raising his glass as they entered. “So far as cognac goes, of course. My nerves feel much restored.”

“Help yourself, Rothewell,” said Gareth, motioning toward the decanter. “It is too bloody early for me.”

Rothewell, too, declined. He very clearly had something besides drinking and whoring on his mind, a somewhat uncommon occurrence. They took seats around the tea table, and Kemble began to ask questions—pointed, very specific questions about Warneham, his death, and the estate in general. In time, he left his chair and began to pace as they talked. Rothewell, too, was listening. He was taking Gareth’s concerns with surprising gravity—and truth be told, Gareth was damned glad to see him.

After an hour spent sequestered thus, Gareth felt oddly encouraged. He relaxed in his chair and watched Kemble stroll back and forth before the wide bank of windows which overlooked the north gardens. Gareth was beginning to see a decided advantage to Rothewell’s plan. Kemble could be his tool; his eyes and ears in the house and about the village. Kemble would be able to ask questions and elicit information the servants would never volunteer to their employer. He now understood quite clearly why Kemble had insisted on being placed belowstairs.

At last, Kemble stopped and set his brandy glass down on the corner of Gareth’s desk. “Your cousin sounds like a singularly unpleasant fellow,” he remarked. “I daresay any number of people should have liked to see him dead.”

“Myself amongst them,” Gareth admitted.

Rothewell was looking uncharacteristically pensive. “I think you’d best let Kemble take this on, old chap,” he said. “I cannot stay—no one here is going to tell me anything anyway—but I have done the next best thing. I have brought you Kemble.”

“And I am grateful, Kieran,” Gareth replied. “It’s damned good of you. But why did Xanthia think this so important?”

Rothewell hesitated. “Your duchess does indeed have a dark cloud hanging over her head,” he said at last. “It is not your imagination.”

Gareth studied him. “What, precisely, are you saying?”

Rothewell lifted one shoulder. “Zee and I took it upon ourselves to ask a few questions in Town,” he murmured. “Our cousin Pamela, Lady Sharpe, is well connected, you will recall.”

“And?—” Gareth leaned forward in his chair.

“Pamela says there were some unfortunate rumors after the duchess’s first husband died,” Rothewell said quietly. “Rumors that she had a sort of mental collapse. Then this second death…well, it bodes ill for her, that’s all. There have been whispers. People wonder if she mightn’t be a little mad.”

“I think the notion absurd.” Gareth managed to keep his tone calm. “The woman is perfectly sane.”

He neglected to mention, however, his conversation with Dr. Osborne. Nor did he report what had happened between them that night on the rampart, and Antonia’s strange behavior afterward. He should have done so. Even in that moment, Gareth knew he was withholding what might be important information. And yet he said nothing. It was a very bad sign, and he knew it.

Gareth looked at Kemble assessingly. “I should like you to take this on, Mr. Kemble,” he said. “But it will require some time. Can you leave your business unattended?”

Kemble sniffed. “I owe a debt of honor to Lady Nash,” he said a little haughtily. “Maurice can keep an eye on the shop from upstairs, I daresay. Besides, Lloyd, you need all the help you can get. If I cannot clear your lovely duchess’s good name, I can—at the very least—burn those burgundy draperies.”