Barbara Metzger (4 page)

“Not anymore you don’t, missy.” Uncle Alfred tapped the newspaper that was next to his plate. “The old duke is dead. Shot in a duel over a Covent Garden whore.”

“Sir Alfred!” Aunt Cherise nodded in Esmé’s direction. “Little pitchers.”

The baronet shrugged. “You’re the one who said the chit was almost ready for a London come-out. She’ll hear
a lot worse there.”

Lisanne was burning to snatch up the newspaper and run to her room with it, but her uncle still held the folded pages. “The article says the heir is being notified. He’s with the army in the Peninsula. I suppose he’ll have to resign his commission and settle the estate, what there is left of it.”

Aunt Cherise sniffed. “It’s more likely Viscount Shearingham will take up where his father left off. The young man already has a reputation for wildness. There were rumors of his being turned away from various clubs before he purchased his colors.” Aunt Cherise had to stop and think. “Money from his mother’s side, I believe. There was not enough left of his patrimony to purchase a corncob pipe, much less a coronetcy.”

Lisanne excused herself, although no one noticed when she left. The footman did not even pull her seat back, she got up in such a hurry, eager to get to the bundle of old newspapers that was always stored in the polishing room. Yes, there he was, Major Lord Shearingham, mentioned in the dispatches. The viscount was on Wellesley’s own staff, and it seemed, from the tittle-tattle columns, that he’d made a career of equal parts daring and debauchery.

From that day on, Lisanne made sure she saw the daily newspapers, even if they were two days late from London. She skimmed the war news, the political reporting, and the financial sections, but she studied the
on dits
with as much intensity as her father had studied his Greek tomes. She even paid attention to Aunt Cherise’s gleanings from her gabble-grinding correspondents.

The new Duke of St. Sevrin was frequently mentioned for his acts of bravery, his commendations and medals. It was duly noted that he refused to sell out in the middle of the war. According to Aunt Cherise’s informants, from whom Wellesley could have learned a thing or two, His Grace hired a London man of business to engage a new bailiff, to handle the income, and to make investments until St. Sevrin was good and ready to take up the domestic reins.

An infected saber wound wasn’t good, but it made St. Sevrin ready to leave the front a year or so later. Lisanne read the papers even more avidly. Now the news was of the swath St. Sevrin was cutting through London’s
demi monde,
instead of through the French forces. He seemed to favor opera dancers, from all she could gather. If Aunt Cherise and the budding debutante Esmé were examples of the females in Society, Lisanne didn’t blame him. Weighed against the rest of the gossip she read, Sloane St. Sevrin didn’t seem much worse than any other London profligate—certainly no worse than his own father. No better, either.

Tongues wagged and turbaned heads shook in disapproval, but not Lisanne’s. She didn’t care a jot about St. Sevrin’s morals. In fact, she wished him joy of his birds of paradise, his gaming hells, his dockside brawls, whatever it took to keep him happy in London—and away from St. Sevrin Priory.

Sloane Shearingham, late of Her Majesty’s First Hussars, only son of the late fifth Duke of St. Sevrin, and perpetually late with the rent, was not happy in London. Not at all. The gossip mills might lump him with the other idle pleasure-seekers of his class, but the sixth Duke of St. Sevrin was getting deuced little pleasure out of the constant rounds of gambling, drinking, and wenching.

It wasn’t that he missed the army. Zeus knew he’d hated the bloody war. Sloane still woke in the middle of the night bathed in sweat from the memories of cannons and fallen comrades, screaming horses and the stench of blood. He still ached where the Frenchie’s saber had sliced across his chest and under his left arm, which the sawbones warned would always be weak. If Sloane’s right arm hadn’t been so strong around the surgeon’s neck, the medico would have removed the left one altogether, so Sloane should have considered himself lucky.

Lucky, hah! He’d come home to find that his man of business had played ducks and drakes with whatever income the swindling bailiff had sent on to London. There was nothing left of his inheritance but bills. The estates had been bled dry and weren’t about to see a profit without a major investment of capital that His Grace simply did not possess. St. Sevrin would have broken the entail in an instant, sold off half the property to maintain the other half, or at least let himself live in comfort. Half the time he was shivering with the return of the fevers just because there wasn’t enough blunt to waste on coal.

But the new duke couldn’t break the entail. His cousin and presumed heir Humbert Shearingham had made sure of that. Bertie didn’t need the unprofitable Priory acres; he didn’t even need the blunt the sale would bring. He wanted the title. He sat like a spider that had built its web, waiting for the unwary bug. Bertie had agreed to pay off the mortgages, Sloane’s new solicitor reported, and to restore the estate. He’d even make Sloane a handsome annuity. All St. Sevrin had to do was renounce the title in his cousin’s favor.

Well, Napoleon Bonaparte hadn’t succeeded in giving Humbert the dukedom. Be damned if Sloane would, either.

So the former officer was living on his wits and luck, and feeling more every day that both had gone begging. He lived in three rooms of St. Sevrin House in Berkeley Square with his retired batman Kelly as his only servant. He paid his expenses, when he managed to pay at all, with his gaming winnings.

Unfortunately the men he gambled with—not always gentlemen, either—were heavy drinkers. Anyone more sober than themselves was suspected of being a Captain Sharp, as was anyone who won too often or too much. The drink kept St. Sevrin from being distrusted—and from being a successful gamester.

It was easier to stay drunk than to face the piles of bills, as well as the pity and disdain on his fellow peers’ faces. Soon the doors of polite Society were closing in his face, except for a few that remained open on account of his war record. St. Sevrin didn’t give a rap for the Quality, save that they were easier to pry loose from their blunt.

A good cardplayer, though no wizard with the pasteboards, St. Sevrin managed to keep his head above water, barely. There was nothing left to sink back into the estates, so there was no hope, therefore, of His Grace’s seeing a shilling from his fine inheritance.

There was nothing his father hadn’t mortgaged, nothing unentailed that the old rip hadn’t sold. Sloane was desperate, and the vultures knew it. A man on the edge couldn’t wager recklessly because he couldn’t afford to lose. Time and again Sloane had warned his young recruits not to play where they couldn’t pay. Now he was doing the same thing, finding himself deeper in debt every day.

The war may have been a nightmare, but at least Sloane had felt he was getting a job done. Here in London he was accomplishing nothing, and it was taking all day and night to do it. He was exhausted and dejected, but not yet ready to admit defeat.

“I have a new plan,” he announced to his valet-butler-groom one morning. It was actually more like late afternoon when St. Sevrin opened his eyes for the second time that day. The first time he’d seen nothing but the walls swaying, so he’d shut them again. Now the pounding headache was almost endurable.

“What, are we going to go on the high toby? Might be more profitable holding up coaches. And hanging might be quicker’n freezing to death in this place.” Kelly placed a cup of coffee near his master’s hand, his right hand. Kelly was tired of mopping up when the major, what was now His Grace if Kelly could only remember, tried to use that left arm. The old infantryman’s joints were too sore for all that bending.

“Freezing be damned. It’s spring. We don’t need fires.”

“Then why are you sleeping under your greatcoat?” Kelly had been with the major through Coruna, Oporto, and Cifuente. He’d dragged him off the fields of Talavera to the hospital tents. With all the gray hairs Kelly’d sprouted on the major’s behalf, he could deuced well complain about the conditions in Berkeley Square, and frequently did.

St. Sevrin as frequently ignored the older man’s grousing. He’d promised Kelly a glowing recommendation if the batman wanted to find other employment, but Kelly chose to stay on, for which the duke felt grateful, and guilty as hell. “You can borrow my greatcoat tonight,” he offered now, taking a gulp of the coffee to help clear his mind. The coffee had been sitting on the stove all day for just that eventuality, though. Now it was scalding, bitter, and thick as boot polish. In fact, it could have been boot polish. The duke spit out the brew and fell back on his pillows. “Thunderation, what does it take to get a decent cup of coffee?”

“Let me think…some fresh beans, ’haps a grinder what works, a pot without rust, one of them modern stoves. Oh, and maybe a real cook what gets paid. Yessir, Yer Grace, that ought to do the trick.”

So the duke threw one of his pillows at his longtime, long-suffering servant and companion. “Stubble it. I know you’re doing the best you can.”

Kelly picked up the pillow and His Grace’s discarded clothes from the evening before. “A’course, I could go out to the coffeehouse and bring you back some fresh-brewed and a meat pasty or such, was the dibs in tune.” He shook the duke’s coat, hoping to hear the rustle of paper money and the jingle of coins. All he heard was his own stomach grumbling that they’d have to eat his own cooking again. “So what’s the new idea?”

“We’re going to Devon, Kelly, that’s what.” St. Sevrin felt better just thinking of getting out of the stinking City, especially with the weather turning toward spring. In London all one noticed was a warmer fog.

“Devon, eh? We taking up smuggling, then?”

“Dash it all, I know you don’t approve of my making a living at the baize table, but it’s not as if I’ve been shaving the deck or anything. And this plan is strictly legitimate.” The coffee was cool enough to drink now. St. Sevrin tried to make it more palatable by pouring in a dollop of brandy from the bottle at his bedside. “We’re going home, if you can call St. Sevrin Priory my home.”

“You usually dub the place the millstone around your neck.”

“Yes, well, it is the ducal seat, even if I’ve only been back there a handful of times since I was out of short pants.”

His Grace did not have fond memories of those visits, either. He’d been sent off to boarding school when he was six, unfazed at the petty cruelties there. The schoolyard brawls were as nothing compared to the arguments between his parents. Theirs had been an arranged match, the old story of the groom’s title and the bride’s wealth. Fiona’s father was an Irish shipbuilder who’d amassed a fortune that he left to his daughter, so pleased was he that his little lassie was to be a duchess.

Sloane’s mother died after his seventh birthday, and his father began a quick descent into dissipation. It wasn’t grief that sent the fifth duke into his decline; it was the freedom from his duchess’s shrewish tongue and her hand controlling the purse strings.

The heir was sent to relatives during vacations at first, when his father remembered to make arrangements. The few times the young viscount did return to his birthplace, he found the ancient building depressingly run-down, ill-staffed, and damp. His father was usually passed out from drink, or entertaining the kitchen wenches in the ducal suite. The duke’s bed must have been the only warm thing in the
house; surely the food never arrived
hot. After that, Viscount Shearingham managed to sidestep Devon and the duke as much as possible. He planned walking tours or tutorials during school breaks, and accepted friends’ invitations for the long holidays.

Upon graduation, when his classmates were eager to acquire a veneer of Town bronze, Sloane was only eager to avoid his father’s dissolute presence. He purchased his colors as soon as he came down from university, and hadn’t been back to the Priory since. He wasn’t looking forward to this trip, either.

Kelly knew the major never spoke of home or family, so the batman wasn’t ready to commit himself to an opinion. He hadn’t heard the rest of the plan. He did move the bottle of spirits farther out of reach, making room on the bedside table for His Grace’s shaving lather. “I hear Devon’s pretty countryside. Good farmland. Cows and sheep.”

“Pretty be damned. And if there was a cow or a sheep on the property, the thieving bastard I had as bailiff would have eaten it by now.”

“Then what? We’re going on a repairing lease to St. Sevrin Priory? The footman next door says as how it’s in the guidebooks.”

“As a location to avoid, I’m sure. The house is not worth saving for dry rot and termites, the staff decamped ages ago, and the whole pile is supposed to be haunted. This place is a regular palace compared to what we might find there.”

“And I was just telling myself a tent in the mud and dust of Portugal would look good about now. So why are we going to Devon?”

Sloane was happy to hear the “we.” Despite his complaints, Kelly was the best forager St. Sevrin had ever known. And the most loyal. The duke tipped his cup in salute—without spilling any when he saw Kelly wince. “We are going to the ancestral abode,” he declared after a swallow and a cough, “because we are at
point non plus
here. We’ll be reduced to burning the banisters for the cookstove, which will only bring my cousin Humbert breathing down my neck. Every rung and railing is part of the entail. I checked. If they weren’t, the pater would have sold them for kindling the way he did the Hepplewhite chairs.”

“Maybe the gudgeon’s hot air would keep us warm.” Kelly didn’t think much of Humbert’s Corinthian set: wealthy, active, sportive young men who’d be better employed facing Boney’s artillery like honest Englishmen. He started to strop the razor in angry swipes that had St. Sevrin’s bloodshot eyes blinking rapidly.

“We’ll be warm, I swear. For there is one thing at St. Sevrin Priory that my esteemed parent didn’t manage to sell. If I can get a decent price, it might just see us through the next winter at least. I’d have a stake to bet with, or I could buy back my commission.”