The Secret Duke (12 page)

Thorn hurried along a quiet corridor, braced for any level of disaster.

What he discovered was simply astonishing. Christian had indeed been caught in a passionate encounter, but the woman was his wife, the Dorcas Froggatt he was seeking to escape through annulment. Peculiar to be caught in a compromising situation then, except that she was also that Mistress Kat Hunter whom Christian had fallen in love with.

Love! There was nothing worse for ruining a man’s life, especially when Dorcas, Kat, or whoever she might be was accusing Christian of compromising her to force her to hold to the marriage.

Whatever the truth of the tangled web at the end of a long night, Thorn found himself committed to going to Malloren House on the morrow to meet with Rothgar and plead his foster brother’s case.

For Rothgar, damn him, was in the very middle of the whole incident. Christian’s wife, it turned out, was a Yorkshire friend of his marchioness, and a guest at Malloren House. Rothgar had brought her to the revels, knowing the whole truth. He claimed a benign intent, but Thorn had to doubt that. The incident could have resulted in Thorn suffering embarrassing scandal and royal displeasure.

However, if Rothgar had deliberately used Christian as a weapon, political rivalry could shift to outright, personal war.

Only when he finally found his bed, with the sky showing predawn light, did Thorn’s mind return to Kelano.

Perhaps she’d been a Harpy after all, and had caused this all by casting a curse on him.

 

Bella had returned to her small rented house in a sedan chair as clocks struck three. Her two young maidservants greeted her as if she’d just escaped a pit of snakes. They could be right.

“Oh, miss!” Annie Yelland gasped, still waif thin despite months of good food. “We were so afraid for you.”

“All that wickedness!” declared her sister, Kitty, who’d filled out to become a buxom beauty on the same diet.

When Bella had rescued them, they’d seemed more similar—thin, pale, and frightened. Kitty, the older sister, was an inch taller than Annie, but still not tall, and her hair was red squirrel to Annie’s brown mouse. Annie had better skin and larger brown eyes.

“Was it ’orribly shocking?” Kitty prompted.

“In general, no,” Bella said, stretching the truth a bit. She didn’t want to encourage Kitty’s taste for scandal.

She’d rather not have involved the girls in the matter at all, but she’d needed to dress here and return here. Kitty was learning to be a lady’s maid, while Annie was learning to be a cook, but what one knew, the other did, and whenever possible they were together. If Kitty needed to mend something of Bella’s, she took her sewing basket to the kitchen instead of staying in Bella’s bedchamber, as she really should.

Here they were, together again, when it was only Kitty’s job to wait up and help Bella undress. Bella could and would give Kitty permission to sleep in, as she would rise late herself, but Peg Gussage would need Annie in the kitchen at first light. No point in making an issue of it now. Perhaps Annie would learn by experience.

Bella went up to her bedroom with Kitty while Annie hurried to the kitchen for hot washing water. Kitty insisted on helping Bella undress, though a shift and loose gown hardly needed assistance. Annie arrived with the jug of water and filled the china bowl behind the dressing screen. Bella washed in water at exactly the best temperature, but at that point she insisted that they both go to bed.

The sisters were treasures, and she was very fortunate.

She’d arrived in London with just Peg, and rented this house. Peg would be cook and housekeeper, but she’d needed a kitchen maid and at least one housemaid as well as someone to do the rougher work, a man or a boy. Both Peg and Bella preferred the latter to be a sturdy boy rather than a man, if he was to live in. Aware of her own good fortune, she’d decided to attempt charitable selections.

The workhouse had been heart-wrenching, and she’d discovered that most of the inhabitants were elderly or infants, for healthy children were sent out to work as young as six. She’d spotted one robust-looking lad, however, on a mattress in the middle of the day.

“You don’t want ’im, ma’am,” the supervisor said, pulling the grimy blanket off the boy, who looked to be about ten. “We found ’im good work at a stables, but ’e got ’imself injured and won’t ’eal. The rot’ll creep up and kill him sooner or later.”

Bella had feared that was true, but the boy’s sad eyes had touched her, and apart from his swollen, suppurating leg, he looked strong. Fearing she was a softhearted fool, she’d asked his name—Ed Grange—and then hired a cart to carry him to her house. The cart had been necessary because she couldn’t imagine how to get him and his leg into a coach, but he was also filthy and probably infested.

Peg Gussage had been appalled, and yes, had called Bella a softhearted fool, but she’d set to work with baths, good food, and country nostrums.

The sick lad had made finding maids even more urgent, so Bella had spread word through Lady Fowler’s supporters and spoken to the vicar of Saint Anne’s Church. It had been the latter who’d told her of the sad case of the Yelland sisters.

“They lived with their widowed father, Miss Flint. A coal heaver, but a worthy man. He perhaps protected them too much, for his own comfort and theirs. If they had learned a trade, or gone into service, they would be in better condition now. Last winter, he fell and broke his back. The girls tended to him with loving care, but he died six weeks ago and the modest funeral took the last of his money. Annie and Kitty kept their situation from everyone, even me, for they were terrified of the workhouse. And with reason, with reason.”

“Indeed,” Bella said. “How old are they?”

“They say that Kitty is sixteen and Annie fifteen, but often such people aren’t sure. Too old for most charities, you see, and as I said, untrained. But they’ve kept house for their father, and I know of no illness or weakness. With a little kindness and ample food, they will soon be hearty workers, and they are good girls.”

Knowing a more sensible woman would have ignored the case, Bella visited the girls in their tiny house. It was neat and clean, but had clearly been stripped of anything they could sell, and the girls were thin and pale. She’d be bringing more work home, not helping hands, but she could no more abandon the Yelland sisters than she’d been able to leave Ed Grange to die in the workhouse.

Taking the name Bellona Flint had not made her harder, and her imprisonment at Carscourt seemed to have left her with a softness toward the unfortunate unknown to the Bella of four years ago.

Despite their frailty, the sisters had set to work eagerly, perhaps thinking that if they slacked they’d be thrown out. Within days Ed too was doing all the work he could from his mattress in the kitchen, and in a week he was hobbling around on a crutch. Now they were all robust hard workers and Bella gave thanks every day.

She was already planning to do more for all of them.

Annie would make a good cook, and Kitty an adequate lady’s maid, but Bella was reaching higher. They were both clever girls and she’d already taught them and Ed to read, write, and do arithmetic. If Bella were to set them up in a business in a few years’ time, they could be independent women, just as she was.

A cake shop, perhaps, which also sold and served tea. Or a haberdashery. Anything that would free them of the need to take a husband. Her time with Lady Fowler had convinced her that the dangers of marriage far outweighed any advantages for many women, but also that to be single without family or income was a dire fate.

At least Ed’s life was easy to arrange. He needed only an apprenticeship.

Bella emerged in her nightgown and looked longingly at her bed. She sat at her desk instead to dutifully record the events of the night. Alas, the scandal had proved disappointing, and in any case was no secret. The whole masquerade had been gossiping about Lord Grandiston and his wife, for it seemed the marriage itself had been a secret.

She’d observed little else other than drunkenness and looseness.

She’d heard that the king had been present, but only after he’d left. She would keep that to herself in any case, for Lady Fowler saw him as the epitome of virtue, her hope for a reformed nation. The poor lady’s mind seemed already strained. To discover she was wrong there might cause a fit.

Bella worried the tip of her quill, frowning over Lady Fowler. It was time to leave that circle, but where would she go? The idea of being alone in the world terrified her. She also hesitated to abandon the weaker members of the flock to Lady Fowler’s erratic moods and the Drummond sisters’ radical tendencies.

She rubbed her head, trying to focus on the page, but neither her eyes nor her mind cooperated. In fact her mind tried to wander to a wicked goatherd, a lamplit terrace, and astonishing kisses. . . .

She stood up, shaking herself. She, above all women, should be impervious to the seductive charms of a rascal.

She circled the warming pan around the bed, removed it, and climbed in while the warmth lingered. Perfect. She snuggled down, turning her mind away from folly. It slid toward another sort of foolishness—distant memories, revived tonight.

Her last masquerade ball. A much smaller affair at Vextable Manor not far from Carscourt. Everyone had known everyone, but they’d all pretended not to and acted their parts. She’d slipped away with . . .

Oh, who had it been? Tom Fitzmanners or Clifford Speke? Probably Tom, as she remembered the favored gentleman had been only a few years older than herself and rather nervous at finding himself alone with a young lady and invited to kiss her. He’d certainly been clumsy about it.

She chuckled at that memory. What a wicked minx she’d been.

Above all back then, she’d loved to dance.

They’d danced so much—at parties and assemblies, but sometimes impromptu at one house or another, furniture pushed back, carpet rolled up, and someone playing a harpsichord or virginals.

Four long years without dancing, without flirting, without the lightest kiss, and she’d not realized how much she’d missed it. Until tonight.

Had she panicked because the goatherd was wicked, or because of her own feverish response? A response that had sprung with teeth and claws out of starvation.

She didn’t want to give away her freedom in marriage, but she couldn’t deny that she wanted a man. A young, handsome, skillfully wicked man.

She rolled over and buried her head in her pillow as if she could bury all such foolishness, but her mind wasn’t smothered and whirled back over the whole annihilating experience.

His eyes, capturing hers just as that silky shawl snared her, drawing her tight against his long, hard, hot body with so little clothing between them.

His mouth hot and in control of hers. Nothing at all like Tom Fitzmanners.

But a little like Captain Rose.

She rolled onto her back to stare up into darkness. She’d forgotten that kiss. That too had been stolen, but there was no other connection, so why feel as if there were?

Perhaps because of dark stubble. The goatherd had been unshaven because he was pretending to be a peasant; Captain Rose because he was one. Not a peasant, but not of the rank to attend the Olympian Revels.

They had one other thing in common: if she’d been foolish enough to fall in with either man’s plans, he’d have ruined her.

No danger of that. She punched her pillow into a better shape. There was no place for rakish folly in Bellona Flint’s life, and it was best that it remain so.

 

 

 

 

A
fter such a late night, Bella rose later than usual and sat dozily at breakfast. She went over her time at the revels again, desperately seeking some juicy tidbit to take to Lady Fowler’s. The Drummond sisters would make hay of her failure.

But fail she did, so she decided that she might as well get the unpleasant errand over with. She quickly dressed in one of Bellona’s dull, practical garments, quashing down foolish regret for a flimsy gown and an even more foolish regret over the way men had responded to her in that guise.

She needed no help to dress, for she still wore the homemade jumps instead of a corset, but she allowed Kitty to practice her trade. As usual, Kitty pulled a face over the unboned jumps, so as usual, Bella tried to convince her of the advantage of simple dress.

“There,” she said, “neatly dressed in minutes. What a deal of time most women waste on clothing. And on hair.”

Kitty said, “Yes, miss,” but with disapproval. Both Kitty and Annie thought anything less than fully boned stays indecent.

Kitty wasn’t any happier about Bella’s need to look older and plainer, and always turned away while Bella applied the cream to her face that turned her sallow, and the darker one that made her eyes sunken.

Bella shrugged and stuck on the small wart on her nose, and then she pulled her hair up tight and hid it beneath a plain mobcap.

She’d been doing this for months now and hadn’t minded, but now she gazed in the mirror and pulled a face at Bellona Flint. Last night she’d been herself. She’d been pretty. Men’s eyes had told her so. . . .

And only see where it might have led. As she pinned on a small flat hat, she said, “There. I have no further need to think of my hair all day long. Which leaves time for more important, more useful matters. I hope you’re continuing with your reading, Kitty.”

Kitty turned back from tidying the bed. “Yes, miss. I’m halfway through
Pilgrim’s Progress
and there’s very few words I don’t know. I have written them down.” She pulled a paper out of her pocket.

“Excellent,” Bella said, rising. “I’ll go over them with you as soon as I get home. I need to go to Lady Fowler’s immediately.”

“What cloak, miss?”