To Charm a Naughty Countess (16 page)

In return, he
did
admit that he liked her better than a few others.

Her smile hurt.

Caroline stayed wrapped in her banyan for hours afterward, watching the silent street through her bedchamber window.

***

The next day, she parsed the situation to exhaustion, and she thought she might have misjudged him. His sudden, wild attack of panic or whatever it had been—surely that could not be entirely motivated by the disappointment of a thwarted bargain. Surely he had felt some emotion beyond the fear of poverty.

Caroline was, as Michael would say, forming a hypothesis: that his iron will covered the same desires as other men. He was only better than most at hiding them, more determined than most to master and control them.

Yet the deeper she delved into Michael, and into herself, the farther she was from answering her questions.
Why? What did it all mean so long ago? And what does it mean now?

She wanted to ask him. Needed to.

But try as she might, over the next week she could not talk to him or meet him or see him. Her notes went unanswered, and he seemed never to be at home to callers. She heard of him only by proxy. No one had seen him at any
ton
events, but everyone had a story to tell—and the more outrageous, the more they repeated it.

Mad Michael had set fire to a pile of invitations on the front steps of Wyverne House.

He had been heard shouting in his garden in the wee hours of the morning.

He had galloped down Rotten Row and nearly overturned the Duchess of Winterberry’s landau.

He had ordered six dozen Carcel lamps from a shop on Bond Street.

Of all these rumors, Caroline credited only the last. But they caused her to wonder: was it worth it to try to rehabilitate
Mad
Michael
by using her influence with her friends? The Weatherbys? Miss Meredith? Everything she’d done to reintroduce him to the polite world, he was throwing away with his impolite withdrawal from society. Only a madman would throw away something so hard earned as his reputation.

But
anyone
would
throw
away
something
he
considered
of
no
value
, her devilish inner voice replied.
Perhaps
he
cares
nothing
for
your
efforts.

Perhaps he did not. But he cared for his dukedom. And he hadn’t yet left London.

For lack of a better idea, Caroline began to organize plans for the Lancashire house party she’d once mentioned as a certain means of finding him a wife. Now the house party that was to be his entrée back into the polite world would also be Caroline’s way into his.

If she saw him in his own home, surely there she would come to understand him at last. She still had four events left on their fool’s contract, with the excuse of finding him a bride. Four events to answer her questions with the excuse of business, no emotion involved.

She was determined that he would not leave her behind again, as he had so long ago, to stew in the humiliation of rejection. With a house party taking place in four weeks, he wouldn’t be able to shake free of her. Not again. This time she was stronger. She would leave
him
, and on her own terms, when she wanted to.

Though as she laid her plans and sent her invitations, she wondered—was the right word
when
, or was it
if
?

For Michael, the fortnight following his encounter with Caroline was an agony of solitude. In the third week, he left London.

Out of sheer stubbornness, he waited until the beginning of August so that he would not be the first to depart the City. He would not have anyone say he turned tail and left before the end of the season, much good it had done him. He still had no wife and no money. In fact, he was even more impoverished than when he’d come to London, for he had given Caroline his secrets and his trust.

The journey back north, taken at the greatest speed Michael’s aged carriage could manage, nonetheless left him too much time to think. At first he was able to smother his worries with work, scrawling notes with a pencil stub whenever the light permitted. But dusk came early. Rather than light the lamps and look ahead to Lancashire, Michael sat in the dark of the rattling carriage and thought of London—and Caroline.

He thought he had forgotten the feeling of sanity slipping from his grasp, of his world tipping and falling, knocking him flat and breathless. But as soon as the panic had struck, it was like meeting a lifelong enemy, ever-known, ever-despised. Eleven years was not too long between such episodes.

And somehow, they were always tied to Caroline.

He grimaced as he stared out the window of his carriage at a sliding, cold rain that obscured the fallow fields outside. A rain that pitted the roads on which he drove, turning country passes into slippery troughs of mud.

For the second time in his life, he left London behind, but this time he would not forget it. He had seen the kindnesses and comforts threaded through the shallow chaos of the
beau
monde
, and he saw the value of moving easily within that world.

Now that he had slept with Caro, he understood the soaring joy of physical passion. But he also understood the pain of complete vulnerability.
Business
before
pleasure
, Caroline had said. That was his way, and he would not be permitted any other. The realization, the rejection, had shaken his body to its very marrow. The panic of this prison he had built for himself—it had threatened to unmake him, even as she watched.

Though he little resembled the caricatures of the scandal rags, they weren’t entirely wrong. The everyday tasks that came easily to others—talking of the weather, dancing, laughing, flirting, lovemaking—were a struggle to him. Perhaps he really was mad, just as the
ton
said. Just as his own father had believed.

The carriage lurched heavily, knocking Michael’s head against the window. He wished it could jolt free his unpleasant thoughts. They seemed to be wearing a groove in his brain as deep as the ruts in the road.

The relief of homecoming was delayed for endless dull days in a carriage, long nights in coaching houses. The land seemed wilder, rougher, bleaker than he remembered. After the macadamized streets of London, the sodden, mucky roads were bone-jarringly rough under his carriage’s old, groaning springs. The public house rooms seemed colder than he recalled, the sheets threadbare. He noticed every instance of peeling paint, rotted wood; every slatternly servant who gave him food that was neither cooked nor served well.

As they traveled steadily north, the cold clutched more closely at everything, creeping through every gap in the carriage, stiffening blankets and joints, tiring the horses and drivers.

Had the world died yet a bit further while he was gone? Or was the change within himself?

He was annoyed with himself, to have developed a taste for the ease of London so quickly. Or was he seeing it all through Caroline’s eyes now, imagining what she would think of Lancashire? Surely she would look with disappointment on the secret provinces of his life, his tattered dukedom.

Or maybe she had woken his flesh, and now it simply yearned for pleasure.

He could only hope that when he saw Callows, he would feel that sense of rightness again. For now, he had the uncomfortable feeling of having shirked his duty, of having let himself become distracted from his goal, ensnared by his own disobedient body. He had shared himself with a woman who would never do the same.

The human heart was far more confusing than any ledger. So he had long known. But he hadn’t truly experienced the full, damning agony of that knowledge until now.

If he couldn’t convince Caroline to marry him, after all that had passed between them, then why should
anyone
marry him? And how could he shackle himself to another when he had invested in her as surely as other men invested in the funds?

Now he was sure of nothing except that he wanted her again and that he could never trust himself with her.

***

Sanders’s homely face was brown and creased as a walnut as he smiled a welcome to Michael.

“It’s good to see you, Your Grace.” The steward doffed his hat, working its brim in his thin fingers. The inevitable chilly drizzle plastered his gray-brown hair to his head and darkened the drab tweed of his coat.

“You needn’t have come outside to greet me,” Michael said gruffly, marching up the front steps of Callows.

But he was pleased all the same. He cut his eyes sideways at Sanders, and the older man smiled, his gold teeth glinting bright in the watery remnants of daylight.

Sanders was the same as always: nondescript, pleasant. For the first time since Michael’s disastrous second proposal to Caroline, he felt a slow bleed of comfort through his chilled body.

Callows was the same, too. All solid dun-colored gritstone, its Elizabethan façade had scarcely changed since the stately home had been built. Solid and blocky except for its three watchful towers, their sharp-angled crenellations softened by centuries of wind and rain. The inner court was cobbled with many of the same stones that had helped along the wheels of carriages under the rules of Elizabeth, James, and the assorted Georges who had followed.

Michael and Sanders stepped inside, and Michael handed off his sodden greatcoat and hat to a waiting servant. The great door closed behind them with the familiar scrape and thump of determined wood against a resistant stone frame.

Here was Callows, reassuringly familiar, simple and sturdy, and beautiful in its usefulness. The rich, dark wood of the staircase, with its thick, turned balusters and smooth-worn treads. The wide, stained-glass window at the turn of the staircase. The peat fire that roared at one end of the great hall, frustrated by its inability to banish the chill. Above the fireplace—big enough to hold a dozen men—hung the Wyverne coat of arms. The history of his family, larger than life.

It had looked exactly the same when Michael returned from London eleven years earlier, not knowing he was soon to become Wyverne. Surely it would be the same after someone else was Wyverne in his place. He simply had to find a way to safeguard it.

A new way, that is. His grandiose plans for improvement had, to date, possessed the opposite effect.

At Michael’s side, Sanders dripped quietly on the marble tiles and took on the mouthful-of-glass-beads expression he always adopted when he would prefer to avoid a subject. After champing his gold teeth together, he ventured, “Will the new duchess be joining us soon, Your Grace?”

Michael rubbed the bridge of his nose. “There is no such lady, Sanders.”

The steward was silent for so long that Michael turned his attention back to the man’s weather-beaten face. It held an expression he had never seen before.

“Sanders, you look ghastly. What is it?”

“I… I am sorry, Your Grace. I should not…”

“Should not look ghastly?”

Sanders managed a tiny smile. “I should not have suggested the journey to London. I see now that it was a hardship for you, and I am sure the fruitlessness is discouraging.”

Michael looked up at the coat of arms and felt the weight of his title settle into position on his shoulders. It was his responsibility to care for everyone in his dukedom—even for his steward, who had served the family for decades, whose responsibilities had begun long before Michael ever became duke. It was understandable that Sanders felt responsible for Michael too. But it was not fitting; it was not fair to the older man.

“As a matter of fact,” Michael said in a voice of determined cheer, “it was
not
fruitless. I have in one of my trunks two dozen of the finest Carcel lamps London had to offer. I have also refreshed my wardrobe. And I have consented to a small house party, to commence here in one week’s time. I may yet find a duchess among its number.”

He might. He had no idea. When Caroline had sent her house-party plans to him by messenger, the sight of her rounded scrawl had made his head pound, made him ache with desperate want. In the end, he had simply inscribed
Do
as
you
see
fit.
That had put an end to her notes.

He was glad of that. Probably.

Sanders was still goggling at the revelation that they were to host guests, so Michael added, “I thank you for your concern, Sanders. But you must know it was entirely my choice to travel to London. And it is entirely my doing that I have somehow returned without a bride. On me lie Wyverne’s problems, along with the responsibility for their remedies.”

Now that he was back in the solitude of Callows, he felt all the farther from a solution. A small compartment of his mind wondered if Caroline would still aid him if and when she arrived for the house party. She had promised him her company at six events, after all, and only two had taken place.

Three, if one counted that glassed-in morning during which she taught him to dance.

Four, if one counted their outburst of passion.

He must not think of such numbers. He locked the treacherous memories away.

“Yes, Your Grace.” Sanders lowered his eyes. “One week’s time.”

Michael surveyed the stretching hall, the staunch steward, his own drizzle-dampened garments.

He had never brought London into this world. The idea of doing so sapped some of the home’s familiarity, like a favorite coat gone shapeless in the rain.

On that subject: “I must change my clothing, Sanders,” Michael said. “You should too, since you caught as much rain as I did. Once you’re dry, if you’ll see to the unpacking of the Carcel lamps, we shall meet in my study so you can inform me of all that went on here during my absence.”

“Yes, Your Grace.” Michael was not sure whether he imagined it, but at this barrage of orders, Sanders seemed relieved.

It was good for everyone that he was home again—himself, most of all.

***

“You’ve done well, Sanders.” Michael offered his servant what he hoped was a bracing smile.

The steward straightened with some effort, blinking groggily across the battered leather top of the walnut desk in Michael’s study. Scarred and stained by decades of carelessness with penknives and ink, the desk was covered with ledgers of the household accounts, the tenants’ affairs, observations on the weather, and any other scraps of information the steward had recorded during his employer’s weeks in London.

Michael had been looking over these papers with Sanders for three hours, as soon as they could both dry themselves and fill and trim a Carcel lamp. Sanders had dutifully professed to be impressed by the superiority of the lamp’s light.

For his part, Michael was impressed by the records kept by his staff in his absence. Here and there, they had departed slightly from his preferred methods of arranging figures, or they had made minor errors in subtraction on some account.

Subtraction, it always was. Never addition this year.

But these were minor considerations. It was pleasant to discover that few surprises had awaited his return.

Michael rolled his knotted shoulders and leaned back into his favorite chair, an ancient wood monstrosity with tatty velvet upholstery worn to the precise angles of his back and rear.

Arse
, Caroline’s voice said in his mind, and a spasm of heat gripped his body before he dismissed it with an effort of will.

She would not compliment his appearance now. All the garments he customarily wore in Lancashire were serviceable and shabby from long use: a plain cotton shirt with no neckcloth, a flannel waistcoat, worn breeches, leather boots rubbed raw by walks through heather and mud.

These clothes suited the cold weather and the work he liked to do. They suited
him
. But they would not suit his London guests. Soon enough, he would have to starch himself up again and go hunting for coin. He could not continue this subtraction indefinitely.

Sanders’s jaw clamped shut on a yawn. “Thank you, Your Grace. Of course, the household accounts were kept by Candleforth and his wife.” The butler and housekeeper. Relics of Michael’s grandfather, they were as devoted to Wyverne as was Sanders.

The knot between Michael’s shoulders loosened slightly. “I shall thank them for their excellent service as well.”

Sanders bobbed his head. “About the money…”

Michael passed a quick hand over his eyes, willing them not to squint against a hard truth. He needed to see it, and clearly. “I’m about at the end of my rope, aren’t I? Your letters to London did say that credit was extended for a short time, but…” He trailed off, not wanting to complete the sentence.
It’s too much to hope that will continue after I withdrew into Wyverne House like the madman all London thinks I am.

And who was to say they were wrong? He
had
gone mad after Caroline refused him. Mad enough to shake his body apart.

Sanders cleared his throat. “That’s not precisely… that is, I can give you some assurance of a potential avenue for—”

Michael lifted his head and let his arms thump onto a ledger. “Sanders, please. Plain speech.”

The steward sucked in a breath. “I was able to arrange funds to cover the servants’ salaries and the interest on your debts, for now. But in approximately two more months…”

“I’ll no longer be able to borrow, and I’ll have to beg or steal. Or marry.”