The Duke (49 page)

“I wasn’t bluffing!” Griffon pulled away, rubbing his forehead, looking young and tormented. “I promised Juliet I would never tell a soul. . . but if you are to be her husband, then perhaps it is best for you to know, in case you ever need to protect her.”

“From what?”

“From the truth. Hawkscliffe, will you be sworn to secrecy?”

Hawk just looked at him in warning.

Wearily Griffon shook his head. “Lady Coldfell’s death was no accident. Juliet was there. She has been frightened out of her wits since the woman died. We have been writing to each other secretly since the day we met, when I went to Coldfell’s house with you. I suppose I won her trust. She poured out her heart to me in her letters. She’s so frightened of anyone finding out. Do you swear you will not use this information against her?”

“Yes, damn it, tell me! You have my word.”

Griffon glanced over his shoulder uneasily. “When a fire started at the earl’s Leicestershire estate, Juliet suspected that her cousin, Sir Dolph Breckinridge, Coldfell’s heir, had set it. Dolph was supposed to have been in London, but she smelled his awful cologne on the air in her room and in the hallway before the smoke overcame the scent. She woke her father and they both escaped the fire, then she told her father she suspected Dolph had been in the house.”

“Go on,” he said, recalling how Dolph had admitted to setting the fire before he had died.

“In the meantime,” Griffon went on, “Coldfell had learned that his wife had been having an affair with Dolph. His suspicion of Dolph setting the fire led him to suspect that his wife might have somehow been in on it. About a week after the fire, they all returned from the ancestral pile to Coldfell’s South Kensington mansion. Merely sordid up to this point, here is where the story becomes bizarre. According to Juliet, Coldfell took Lucy into the parlor and confronted her. At first Lucy tried to deny everything, but Coldfell kept badgering her until finally, when he asked her point-blank if she and Dolph were trying to kill him, she said yes and picked up the fire poker and swung at him with it.”

“You’re not serious.”

“Oh, yes I am. Juliet said Lucy followed him around the parlor with the fire poker like some kind of madwoman until she had struck him in his bad leg. The old man was on the floor and Lucy could have killed him with one blow, but Juliet came up behind her and struck her out cold with a vase.”

“Juliet killed her?”

“No, Juliet’s blow didn’t kill her, it only knocked her unconscious,” he said hastily. “Coldfell ordered Juliet to help him drag Lucy out to the garden. Neither of them are very strong, but between the two of them, they threw her into the pond. Since she was still unconscious, she drowned. It was self-defense, Hawkscliffe. I personally find Lord Coldfell a reprehensible schemer, but Lucy and Dolph would not have stopped until the earl was dead. Even worse, Lucy’s plan for Juliet was to lock her in an asylum once her father was dead.”

Hawk stared at him in amazement, barely able to absorb it. His heart pounded impossibly fast. He felt something inside him breaking free of its shackles—a power, a rightness, an audacity such as he never had possessed. He knew in an instant what he was going to do.

He gripped Griffon’s shoulders. “Listen to me. You must marry Juliet.”

His eyes widened. “What?”

“You love her. She belongs with you.”

“Your Grace!”

“Don’t argue. It’s what you both want.”

“But her father has forbidden me from going near her! I’m not going to resort to blackmailing him with this knowledge. I promised Juliet—”

“You won’t have to. Come with me.” He let go of him and pivoted, striding out to the front of the building, where he sent for his town coach.

Griffon hurried to keep up. “I don’t understand.”

“Just wait.”

In a state of quivering exultation, Hawk waited for William to bring the coach. He turned to Griffon. “I’m going back inside. When I come back, I’ll have Juliet with me. You must take her away and marry her before her father can send anyone after you. Once you are married, there’s not a thing he can do.”

Griffon let out a wordless exclamation of wonder.

“That is what you want, isn’t it?”

“Yes! With all my heart! But—it’ll never work. And Coldfell will sue you for breach of promise! You hate scandal—”

“Never mind that. Come and stand below the window of the mezzanine. I’ll bring her out that way.”

“Your Grace, if you help us run away together, Lord Coldfell will surely take the Vienna Congress appointment away from you! The Prime Minister takes his word as gospel—”

“It doesn’t matter. Just take your place and be ready.”

Griffon nodded anxiously and slipped back into the shadows around the side of the building, while Hawk jogged up the stairs and went back inside, drawing a deep breath. His heart pounded wildly with thrill at his own mad recklessness.

The truth shall set you free, he thought. For the first time in his life, he would shake off the tyranny of his class.

The moment he walked in Coldfell greeted him, all apologies. “Your Grace, I am most humbly sorry for this scene that young rapscallion has made. It is really unpardonable. He has plagued my house since he first laid eyes on my daughter.”

“Why, then, that young Romeo has been a plague on both our houses, I daresay, hasn’t he, Juliet?”

Juliet stared at him, wide eyed, looking quite terrified that he had done something dreadful to her true love. Hawk grasped Juliet’s hand as he turned to Coldfell feigning a look of regal displeasure. “If you don’t mind, I would like a brief private word with your daughter to sort out this most embarrassing predicament,” he said in his stuffiest, most paragon tone.

“Of course,” said Coldfell. He poked his daughter’s arm in stern reproach and pointed for her to go with Hawk.

Hawk coolly offered her his arm, playing the affronted bridegroom. Even her father seemed to feel he was entitled to sit Juliet down and chasten her. She looked frightened and overwhelmed as she put her hand on his arm and walked slowly by his side.

“No need to gawk, my good people,” Hawk declared, still in a high and mighty countenance, but he felt a gigantic, secret laugh building inside of him. How shocked they would be at his final, ultimate defection! By God, he’d go over to the Whigs, to boot! How delicious the scandal was going to be! He could almost taste the air of freedom, climbing toward it. “This way, Juliet.”

He tugged her by her hand toward the modest doorway and small staircase that led down to the mezzanine. The moment they were out of everyone’s sight on the stairs, he pulled her more firmly, hurrying her. He turned and mouthed the word to her, “Come!” She furrowed her brow in question, but he shook his head and led her toward the arched French window that overlooked the King’s Place courtyard to the back of Almack’s. He opened it and pointed below. Obediently she peered out, then her face lit up with joy as she saw Griffon waiting down there for her. She waved.

Hawk turned her by her shoulders to face him, willing her to understand. He enunciated each word as clearly as possible. She stared at his mouth, waiting. This time they were determined to communicate.

“Juliet.”

She nodded anxiously.

“Do—you—love—Griffon?”

A dreamy look came over her face and she nodded with her young heart sparkling in her eyes. Then she gave him a wince of pure apology, but Hawk laughed.

“It’s all right. Do you want to marry him?”

Her eyes widened. Another breathless nod.

“Climb up and I will help you escape.”

Her eyes widened. She hesitated—stole another glance down at her beau—then nodded eagerly.

He whistled for Griffon then helped Juliet climb out the window. Hawk slowly lowered her by her hands into the young man’s waiting embrace. He followed her out the window, dropping from the ledge by his hands. He landed agilely on the cobblestones below and turned to the beaming young couple, beckoning them impatiently. They ran out to the front and Hawk rushed them both into his coach, but Griffon turned back to him and shook his hand, pumping it in both of his.

“I’m sorry for my outburst, Your Grace. I don’t know what to say.”

“There’s nothing to say. I trust your judgment—I trust your situation that you can provide for a wife.”

“She shall want for nothing.”

“Good. Now I’m going to trust you with my coach, as well, so mind you don’t scratch it. Go. William—Gretna Green!” he ordered. “And drive these bloods as fast as they can run! It won’t be long before Coldfell’s on your trail.”

“Yes, sir!”

“Hang it all!” Griffon said suddenly. “What about my stallion? You remember him? The big white one? He’s tied up in the Rose and Crown yard!”

“I’ll see to the horse. Inquire at my house when you get back—”

“No, you must take him as a gift for what you’ve done for us tonight.”

Hawk waved off the generous offer. “Just go! You’ll never get a second chance, Griffon. Coldfell will never let you near her again. Her son will be an earl with four seats in the Commons, and you will be his father.”

“Your Grace,” he whispered in awe, holding Juliet near him, “I don’t know how to thank you.”

“Have a long and happy life together, and stick to your ideals when you use the power you’ll gain. That will be thanks enough.” He pushed the coach door shut, then William urged the team into motion.

“Hawkscliffe!” Griffon shouted down the street, waving out the window as the town coach rolled away. “You have the heart of a poet!”

Hawk waved, praying that he might be given a poet’s eloquence as he ran into the livery yard, swung up onto Griffon’s pearl-white stallion and charged off to win his lady’s heart.

“A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!”

Bel and her father sat enthralled in her theater box while the astonishing Edmund Kean, playing as Richard III, tore across the battlefield stage crying out the history’s most famous lines at the climax of the fifth act. Though she knew the play well, both she and her father stared, thunderstruck, as King Richard did battle with his nemesis, the earl of Richmond, and was slain.

Kean delivered a death scene not to be equaled in Christendom. There was a moment of cathartic silence as the audience, trampled by the poet’s pen, could only gaze at the dead villain-king in lingering shock. The theater was perfectly silent. Then, before Richmond could speak his triumphal piece, all of a sudden, the center doors at the back of the theater creaked open.

Bel felt a flicker of annoyance at the interruption as she gazed at the stage, still spellbound. Suddenly a ripple of gasps moved in a wave through the audience, starting in the back. Whispers and wordless exclamations whirred. Shouts followed.

How rude, Bel thought, turning indignantly, then her jaw dropped as a huge white horse bearing a magnificent black-haired rider clambered into the theater and down the center aisle. Even Mr. Kean looked up from his demise upon the stage.

Bel stared in disbelief. The duke of Hawkscliffe urged the shying horse to the front of the theater, heedless of the amazed cries that filled the air.

“What is he doing?” Bel breathed in shock, gripping her father’s forearm.

“I have no idea,” Papa murmured.

The horse whinnied nervously and tossed its head, flipping its white forelock. The audience was in an uproar. The stage manager and his assistants rushed out to try to stop him, but Robert reeled the horse away in a graceful pirouette, its long plume of tail dusting the stage, then he made the stallion rear up.

“Stand back!” he shouted in a voice of thunderous command. “I have come on the most urgent business. You shall have your show!”

“Leave him be!” someone in the audience shouted.

“Is that Hawkscliffe?”

“It can’t be,” people were saying.

Edmund Kean said something to the stage manager, who in turn threw up his hands then called his assistants back before the horse kicked anyone.

With a slight, devilish smile, Robert guided the tall white horse back to a vantage point just below Bel’s theater box. With a sweeping gesture, he produced a gorgeous red rose and lifted it, holding it out to her. The courtly gesture won him cheers, whistles, applause. Even Mr. Kean laughed.

The roguish smile Robert sent her made her heart somersault with crazed, incredulous joy.

Her heart beating wildly, Bel reached over the railing and accepted the rose, abashed to be brought to the public’s attention, because everybody knew who she was—“the Magdalen,” the papers now called her—the penitent whore.

“Come away, my lady,” he said softly.

“Have you gone completely mad?”

“I was mad ever to let you go. Take me back. You won’t be sorry, I swear,” he said. “Marry me, lovely.”

“Robert!”

The whole audience leaned in as he turned to her father.

“Sir, I love your daughter more than anything in this world,” Robert loudly announced, his rich baritone ringing out across the theater. “Do I have your blessing to ask for her hand?”

“You do, Your Grace,” Alfred said with a fond chuckle.