A Duke's Temptation (12 page)

Someone brought her brandy. Her brother listened to Jonathan repeat that he was innocent, that he loved her, that he wanted to take her back to the country. Her parents were bewildered, sympathetic, but torn. Their main concern was that she not ruin her name.

“Lily, my darling girl,” her mother whispered with tears in her eyes as she sat beside her on the sofa. “I know that you are devoted to reading romantic tales, as am I. Is it possible that you have confused your craving for adventure with what you think you saw? A lady’s life can be so dull at times.”

Romantic tales.

She thought wistfully of a beautiful face half-concealed behind a black domino. She remembered that hard-lipped mouth, a kiss wicked, sweet, and wild. She had changed that night. She had glimpsed another world, darker, intriguing, decadent . . . or not? Looking back she wondered if his kiss had been an omen of ill things to come.

Had she made a secret pact with a demon? They had embraced each other under a sword crossed with Sir Renwick Hexworthy’s wand. What a preposterous thought. What did Wickbury have to do with what she had witnessed tonight? She could not escape into a fictional world even if she wanted to. But why couldn’t her real life be as wonderful? Yes, Wickbury held its horrors. But good always won in the end. At least there was logic to follow.

“You weren’t drinking tonight, were you, Lily?” her brother asked in such a hopeful voice that she wanted to cry.

She glanced in appeal at her father, usually the first to defend her. He avoided meeting her eyes. She knew his heart well. He didn’t believe her either. Everyone thought she’d popped her cork. Maybe she had.

“We will not discuss this ever again, Lily,” he said decisively, standing beside Jonathan at the window. “Perhaps you ate or drank something that has disagreed with you. Perhaps you are coming down with a case of the influenza.”

“We should summon a physician,” her mother said, clearly relieved that there might be a physical reason for Lily’s disconcerting flight of fancy.

“We should summon a Bow Street Runner,” Lily retorted stubbornly.

Sir Leonard’s face tightened. “You will be ruined if anyone outside the family hears of this. It is to Jonathan’s credit that he is giving you his comfort.”

“And his name,” her mother added worriedly. “Oh, Lily, don’t let this spoil your beautiful wedding.”

Lily rose from the sofa. The brandy
had
gone to her head, but instead of calming her, it gave her false courage. “I can’t spoil a wedding I will not attend. I’m not marrying him. I won’t do it.”

Jonathan strode across the room and took her firmly by the shoulders. “You are promised to me, and I to you. In a few days you will have had time to rest and reflect, and everything will go back to normal.”

Lady Boscastle sighed in relief. “Wedding nerves, my love. All the excitement, the parties—”

“—the stories that stuff her head with nonsense,” her father interjected. “No more of these
Wickbury Tales
, with wizards and fallen women and . . . I don’t know what. I forbid you to read another page of this rubbish. It is a well-known fact that females are easily misled by literature.”

Lily’s brother rescued the empty brandy glass from her grasp. “That’s funny, sir. I could have sworn I caught you reading one of those books after supper a week or so ago.”

“I’d give everything to be in one of
those
books right now,” Lily said softly.

The quartet stared at her in shock. Then her mother’s eyes teared up again, and she broke into heartbroken sobs, as if she had raised a monster instead of a girl with a mind of her own.

“I think, gentlemen,” Jonathan said somberly to her father and Gerald, “that we should get her into bed and dosed with a sedative. We’ll want to keep the servants in the dark about this until she recovers. The embarrassment, you understand.”

“She’ll be standing beside you at the altar in a fortnight,” Sir Leonard said in a collected voice that half convinced Lily to believe him. “And after you exchange vows, it will be your responsibility to keep this prurient reading material out of her hands.”

T
he staff gathered in the great hall of St. Aldwyn House to welcome the duke back home. He gave them a smile of appreciation and inquired about the health of their families, his neighbors, his pony, and his two pigs, Pyramus and Thisbe.

He listened politely to their replies. But he felt tired, not his usual self, and said he hoped they would understand if he went straight to his office and did not eat the vegetable pie and strawberry clotted-cream trifle the cook had prepared in his honor.

He could hear them whispering to one another after he excused himself. Unlike another man in his position, he did not bother to chastise them.

They knew something wasn’t right.

He wouldn’t confess what it was. But in time the head housemaid, Marie-Elaine, would find out; God only knew how. Samuel suspected his valet talked, and he would be unable to escape their infernal concern for him. He hoped to convince everyone that having to rewrite the end of the last book had made him melancholy, that he always had a hard time saying farewell to his characters for a while, because who knew when, or if, they would ever talk to him again?

He might not even care.

He might just write an epilogue revealing Lady Juliette to be a man-slaying dragoness who decided to put an end to both Michael and Renwick in one great swoop of her tail.

 

 

 

Marie-Elaine missed nothing.

“It’s a woman,” she told the cook, Mrs. Halford, while the upper staff sat grouped in the servants’ hall to discuss the situation.

Mrs. Halford put a cloth over the pie sitting before her on the table. “How can you tell? He might just have gotten another stinking review.”

Marie-Elaine shook her head. She and her illegitimate daughter, Josette, had been living at St. Aldwyn House longer than any of the other servants. “It’s his look.”

“I’ve never seen that look about him before,” Mrs. Halford agreed. “And it’s not as if he’s lived like a monk.”

“Yes, and he’s never been in love before, either.”

“His Grace and that bookseller’s daughter weren’t exactly acting like mortal enemies when I caught them in the pavilion last month.”

“That isn’t love,” Marie-Elaine said bluntly. “I ought to know.”

The duke’s valet, Wadsworth, sat down at the table with a pack of cards. He had owned a gaming hell six years ago and had gone to prison after a knife fight on the premises had ended in a nobleman’s death. “What were you doing out there anyway, Mrs. Halford, at that time of night?”

The cook rolled her eyes. “I was picking parsnips. It’s the only time I can sneak out for a breather without those pigs snuffling at my heels.”

“He’d have a fit if he knew,” Marie-Elaine said absently. “He leads such a private life.”

Mrs. Halford shook her head in worry. “Perhaps he’s getting sick again.”

Marie-Elaine sighed. “Shuffle the cards. Bickerstaff isn’t talking, but we’ll get to the root of this soon enough.”

 

 

 

The body had not shown up in the two weeks since the murder. Lily’s father leased a cottage on the outskirts of London, hoping the tranquil atmosphere would compose her thoughts. No one outside her immediate family was allowed to see her, except for a physician, who grimly revealed to her parents that he wasn’t sure, but that after examining her, he thought she had tried to tell him she was turning back into a goose.

Lily heard her father shouting up from the bottom of the stairs, “It is those damned books again!”

The London Boscastles had asked their private inquiry agent to become involved. Lily knew this only because her brother had sneaked her a note from Chloe in a basket of fruit.

The boxwood sprig that Lily had saved from the literary masquerade had crumbled. So had her foolish hope that the duke would intervene on her behalf. She wasn’t certain what she expected him to do. He hadn’t witnessed a crime. The only thing he could confess was that he had kissed her. And that she hadn’t put up a protest at all. Neither of which would boost her credibility in anyone’s view.

She woke up on her wedding day and heard Jonathan’s voice below. It held a familiarity that made her ache.

She slipped into a day gown, not bothering to even brush her hair, and crept to the top of the stairs.

“We are going to send her away,” her brother was saying in his quiet voice.

Jonathan looked frantic. “Where? I want to take care of her. I still want us to be married.”

“I don’t know where she’ll go or what the future holds,” her brother said, apparently unmoved by this display of emotion.

Jonathan walked to the front door, then looked up as if he had seen her behind the balustrade. “I didn’t kill anyone,” he said to Gerald. “Don’t you believe me, either? And I want to marry her. We can go into exile, but I still love her. Tell her that for me. Tell her in those words.”

Her brother was silent.

But the moment Jonathan left, Gerald turned and climbed halfway up the stairs to speak to her. “You shouldn’t have come out when he was here. We’ll sort this out. I’m not sure how.”

She shook her head. “You don’t expect me to marry him after all this?”

He glanced back at the door. “Lily, my dear. Don’t you understand? It got out in the papers. Our cousin the Marquess of Sedgecroft managed to get a retraction, but the damage is done. If you don’t marry Jonathan, you probably won’t marry at all.”

“I don’t care.”

He sighed, his eyes shadowed with worry. “We need to go away. Perhaps in a year or two it will be forgotten. This family has survived worse scandals.”

“No. You’re right. I’ll never be offered another decent proposal again. I’ll receive only illicit offers from now on.”

And that night, when she told her parents that she would leave to spare them further embarrassment, she thought they looked relieved.

“We have plenty of relatives with young children who would welcome a hand for a year or two,” Lady Boscastle said, more animated than she had seemed since the incident. “Who knows? You might even snare an agreeable squire who doesn’t care about your failed engagement or advancing age.”

Lily regarded her mother with affection. “I have no intention of looking at, or for, another man as long as I draw breath.”

Her mother paled. “Then what are you going to do? You cannot live alone. What will you do?”

“Apply for a position. As a housekeeper.”

“To a stranger?” Lady Boscastle said, appalled. “What if he turns out to be—”

“He might be a cantankerous ogre with onions for ears for all I care,” Lily said calmly. “He will assuredly not be a lout who shoots a man in cold blood two weeks before his wedding. And pretends to be utterly innocent of the crime.”

Her father snorted. “What do you know about keeping a house?”

“I have lived in one all my life.”

“Do you know how to plan a supper party?” her mother asked skeptically.

“No. And neither does our housekeeper, but I will buy several books on the subject and study the art.”

“Books,” her father said in despair. “You’ve never gone to the fish market early in the morning and haggled over eels.”

Lily’s stomach turned at the thought. “I suppose I’ll have to learn.”

“Who in his right mind would hire a housekeeper who is rumored to be losing her wits?”

“A gentleman who hasn’t heard the gossip about me. Or better yet, one who doesn’t care about gossip at all.”

“You cannot blame people for speculating,” her father said grimly. “You are not behaving rationally at all.”

True to her word, Lily began to read the newspapers again. She ignored the social announcements and concentrated on the advertisements for domestic help. Her brother drove her to four interviews that same week, and two the following. Lily offered nothing about her personal scandal and oddly no one asked. On one interviewer’s desk, however, she spotted a newspaper clipping in which she glimpsed her name. As it was not a marriage announcement, she could only conclude that she was being interviewed for prurient reasons and not for potential employment.

Sir Leonard and Lily’s mother made arrangements to return to Tissington. Chloe and the viscount called once and offered to take Lily in for as long as she liked. They meant to be kind. But Lily had had her fill of society. Although the Boscastles had grown adept at shrugging off scandal, she didn’t want to be stared at whenever she went out.

Gerald took her to the seventh interview and they both agreed that if this did not result in an offer, she would have to lower her expectations and move closer to the country, where her name might not be known.

“Wish me luck,” she said as he parked his curricle outside the redbrick building on Bond Street. It didn’t appear to be a servant registry. The bronze name plaque said it was a solicitor’s office. Mr. Benjamin Thurber.

“I wish . . . Well, I wish this had never happened,” her brother said. “I still can’t believe it.”

“Nobody can,” she said with a bittersweet smile.

The agent introduced himself and escorted her through the waiting room. He studied her intently as she introduced herself and admitted her lack of experience.

He was the first interviewer who did not ask her why she wanted the position. He scribbled quite a bit in his notebook while she talked. She slid to the edge of her seat, dying to know what had struck him as important. Had she revealed too much?

“Well,” he said at last, fidgeting with his pen. “I think you will be a good match. May I ask you a question or two that might seem odd?”

She braced herself. Was she willing to sell her body into the bargain? Would she mind satisfying more than her employer’s domestic needs? Whatever the questions were, he seemed hesitant to ask them. She shook off a shiver of foreboding. Of course, she did not trust anyone at this low moment of her life.