Love Letters From a Duke (24 page)

Felicity urging him to try his Turkish coffee.

The keen pain in her eyes when Miss Browne and Lady Gaythorne had done their worst to cast their poison upon her.

The taste of her lips when he’d kissed her.

Jack’s revelation about his grandfather.

Stewie falling over in a dead faint.

The incredible feeling of having her seek solace in his arms.

Oh, it was a day worth recounting.

“Cap’n?”

Thatcher glanced over to find Mr. Mudgett standing before him.

“You well, Cap’n?” the man said, his head cocked to one side as he studied him. “You look funny.”

“I’m well, Mr. Mudgett, just surveying the field a bit.”

“Oh, aye, Cap’n,” the man replied, though his skeptical glance suggested he didn’t understand in the least.

“Mr. Mudgett?”

“Aye, Cap’n?”

“Do you remember the warning you gave me?”

“Which one?” the fellow asked, sticking his hands into the pockets of his trousers.

“The one about Miss Langley.”

“Oh, aye.”

“When was it that you said I was going to end up in briars if I wasn’t careful?”

“Yesterday, sir.” Mudgett shuffled his feet in the snow. “Sir?”

“Yes, Mr. Mudgett?”

“Are you?”

“Up to my neck,” he confessed, looking up at the sitting room, where a few candles had been lit. He wondered if Felicity was already at work amending her
Chronicles
entry about Hollindrake. About him.

“Hmm,” the older man mused. “You kissed her, didn’t you?”

Thatcher swung around. “How did you—”

“I’ve a cousin. Had the same thing happen to him.”

The man didn’t elaborate, but Thatcher’s curiosity nudged him. This was, after all, entirely new territory for him. “What happened to your cousin?”

“Oh, sir, I don’t think you—”

“That bad, eh?”

Mudgett hung his head, then nodded it in a forlorn bob.

Thatcher glanced back up at the window where the light shone like the first star of the night. “Was your cousin happy, Mr. Mudgett?”

“Never stopped smiling, sir.” His batman glanced up at the window as well. “Are you going back in there and tell her the truth?”

The truth?
That she deserved to be loved and love a man in return. Felicity Langley was so far gone with the idea of marrying a duke—a real one—that if he went in and told her
the truth, first of all he doubted she’d believe him.

And more important, he feared she’d send him packing, with or without the musket ball.

Thatcher shook his head. “I’ve been warned that she’ll shoot off my ballocks when she finds out. That, and I’m hardly the man she deserves.”

“Don’t see how you can’t be good enough for any lass, sir, iffen you don’t mind me saying. As for your miss there,” he nodded toward the house, “too bad you can’t just marry her afore you tell her the truth. She might still be madder than a hornet, but she’ll be married and a duchess to boot. She’ll hardly shoot you then.”

Thatcher stilled. “What did you just say?”

“She won’t shoot you once she’s a duchess.”

He shook his head. “No! The other part—”

“Why can’t you just marry her afore you tell her the truth?” Mudgett blew on his hands. “Seems it won’t matter much then.”

Thatcher laughed. “Mr. Mudgett, you old matchmaking dog, you! That’s perfect!”

Mudgett looked none too happy. “Don’t you be telling anyone this is my idea. ’Specially if that miss can shoot. I like me ballocks right where they are.”

Thatcher clapped him on the shoulder and led him down the alley. “Say, whatever are you doing out here, my good man?”

“Looking for you,” Mudgett replied. “You told me to keep watch for that Gibbens fellow and he arrived not five minutes ago. So I was coming around the corner here to find you.”

The letters.
Thatcher caught his breath. “Gibbens? He’s made it to London?”

“Aye, sir.”

He took off on a fast march across the icy cobbles, Mudgett bringing up the rear. He flew through the gate in the back and into the kitchens. The cook and scullery maids
gaped at the sight of their master rushing past.

“Gibbens!” he bellowed, even as he came up the kitchen stairs. “Gibbens, where are you?”

The poor man, still rumpled and icy from his journey, sat on a chair to one side of the grand foyer looking miserable. “Yes, Your Grace. Here, Your Grace.”

“Where have you been, my good man?” Thatcher said, glancing around for his secretary’s trunks.

“The roads were—”

“Yes, yes, Quite so. Terrible. Do you have my grandfather’s correspondence with you?”

The man blinked. “Correspondence?”

“Yes, his letters.”

“Letters? Oh, I brought what I thought you would need, the books, some newly arrived reports from your stewards, and since the former duke kept a rather voluminous exchange, I brought only the more recent and relevant—”

“His letters, man!” Thatcher bellowed. Then he looked around and realized that Staines, Mudgett, and the rest of the staff were staring at him as if he’d gone mad.

Perhaps he had.

Still, he lowered his voice and leaned forward. “The letters, Gibbens. The ones from Miss Langley.”

His secretary blinked again and then blushed. “Oh!
Those letters
.”

“Yes, yes, those letters,” Thatcher said.

“Yes, of course.”

“Give them to me. At once.”

A slightly ruffled Gibbens turned and surveyed the luggage around him. Then his owlish eyes lit on one of the trunks and he fumbled in his pockets, finally removing a key and moving with agonizingly, exacting precision that had Thatcher wishing for his old rifle. He’d have that lock open and the contents spilled without any of this painstaking agony.

Finally, after what seemed an eternity, the man opened the
chest and retrieved a stack of correspondence, neatly tied with a blue ribbon. Even before he held them out, a note of Felicity’s perfume tantalized his senses.

But to his amazement, Gibbens wasn’t quite the lackluster fellow he appeared. When Thatcher reached out to snatch the letters away, the secretary snapped them back, his eyes narrowed, and looking for all intent and purpose like Thalia’s little mutt of a dog, Brutus.

“Gibbens, give those to me,” he ordered, pushing his open palm forward.

The man shook his head. “Not until you give me your word, Your Grace. Will you be careful with them?”

Careful with them?
He was acting like he was holding the only copy of Magna Carta, not the romantic musings of some chit. But the stubborn glint in Gibbens’s eyes said only too clearly he wouldn’t be naysaid, not by anything.

“Yes,” Thatcher ground out. “I will.” After another moment of détente, he added, “I promise.”

Gibbens’s brow furrowed and then, after another long moment, he ever so slowly extended the bundle into Thatcher’s eager grasp.

With what he was positive was the key to all this mess, Thatcher turned on one heel, marching toward the study that overlooked the garden. “Staines, I’ll need the fire in the study stoked, extra candles…and, oh yes, a bottle of my grandfather’s best brandy. The good French stuff he always kept. And then I don’t want to be disturbed. Not by anyone—especially not my aunt. No one is to bother me.” He was nearly down the hall when he heard a hasty patter following him. He turned to find Gibbens at his heels.

“Your Grace?” the man said.

Stopping at the door to the study, Thatcher bit back an impatient curse. “Yes?”

The man shuffled his feet and cast an anxious glance at his new employer. “Do you want the replies?” His question
sounded more like a confession.

“The what?”

“The replies.” His owlish eyes blinked again and he swallowed down an anxious breath. “As a matter of course, I always made a copy of His Grace’s correspondence in case it was needed for future reference.”

Thatcher shook his head. “You have not only all her letters, but my grandfather’s as well?”

“Yes, but his are only copies.”

He waved his hand at the man. “Well, what are you doing standing there? Go get them.”

Again the little man’s brows furrowed. “I must advise, Your Grace, that they are the
only
copies.”

“I don’t care if they contain the King’s own secrets, get them!” This he thundered, and when he looked up after his secretary who was now scurrying with all haste to fetch the letters, he caught Staines beaming from ear to ear.

As if the old duke himself had made an appearance from the choirs above.

Finally, Gibbens returned with an equally thick bundle, tied just as the first was, with a worn blue ribbon. He glanced down at the letters in his hands, then said, “While His Grace dictated most of these letters, I should tell you I added my own sentiments from time to time.” He took another wheezy breath. “Miss Langley is a most excellent lady and I—”

Thatcher reined in the explosion that threatened to erupt, and carefully pulled the letters free from the man’s grasp. “You needn’t say more, Mr. Gibbens. I understand.” He turned to enter the study, where a fire was already waiting for him.

Ah
,
Staines. This is why you are the finest butler in all of London.

“Your Grace?”

Thatcher turned back. “Yes, Gibbens.”

“The ribbon…” he stammered.

Thatcher looked down at the silken bit. “What about it?”

“She—that is, Miss Langley—sent it because she said it was the same color as her eyes.” He glanced one last time at the bundle then up at Thatcher. “Is it?”

So Felicity had made a conquest of his grandfather’s poor secretary. Heaven help the besotted fellow when he finally met her—the troublesome minx would bowl him over like a regiment of cavalry, leaving him lifeless in the ditch.

Yet he couldn’t help himself, he looked down at Gibbens’s prized letters where the poor faded ribbon conveyed none of the blue fire of Felicity’s fierce gaze. Yet he knew what his secretary wanted to hear.

“Yes, Gibbens, it is.”

The man fairly beamed. “I’m glad of it, Your Grace.”

When Thatcher arose for breakfast the next morning, he looked out at the snowy garden below his window and knew exactly what he had to do.

What he
must
do.

It wasn’t a matter of duty or honor. If he hadn’t already been half in love with Felicity, after spending the night reading her letters, he would have been. And in those letters he’d received a far greater gift.

He’d discovered his grandfather through pages on politics, on social questions, and on the subject of women’s rights—surprisingly, his grandfather had even conceded a few points to Felicity’s well-formed answers. Amidst those lines, he found himself in the middle of conversations, wishing he could have joined in on the discourse, for they were often lively and always engaging. But there were moments of depth in there, where for once he saw the man his grandfather truly was, the man his title and position had masked.

And that was the message he’d found from his grandfather laced and twined between the lines—not to let being Hollindrake take away from the passions and important things
in life.

A mistake he was not going to make. At least not after he’d won Felicity’s heart, he mused, as he pressed his forehead to the icy windowpane and let the chill of the morning clear his thoughts.

An hour later when he came downstairs, he thought he saw tears in Staines’s eyes at the sight of him in a perfectly fashionable dark green jacket, buff breeches, and gleaming Hessians. As he entered the breakfast room, he found his aunt in her new chair, and on the opposite side of the table, his mother, Lady Charles Sterling.

Mudgett had forewarned him about her arrival, but nothing could have stopped him more than her enthusiastic welcome.

“Aubrey, my dearest, dearest son!” she said, crossing the space between them so she could wrap him in a tight embrace. Then she held him out and looked at him. “Home at last! How I have worried and prayed for your safe return.”

“Yes, well, it is good to see you too, Mother,” he said, trying to recall the last time Lady Charles had ever shown him any warmth. His childhood? Not that he could recall. When he’d been sent off to school? Nay.

Then again it struck him—perhaps he knew as little of her as he had his grandfather. He smiled at her, tentatively, and lent her his arm as he led her to her chair.

“We’ve held breakfast for you, but first let me look at you!” She stepped back and admired him. “Why you look positively ducal. Quite surprising, for who would have ever thought that
you,
of all the family, would ever have inherited?” She made a
tsk tsk
under her breath and sat down in her seat.

Now
that
was the mother he remembered.

She took another sharp glance at him and sighed, then turned to his aunt. “Geneva, dear, I hardly see what you were nattering on about.” She shook her head and turned back to Thatcher. “Some nonsense about you posing as a footman.
Geneva, I think you should start avoiding the sherry bottle. He doesn’t look at all nicked in the nob—though that scar doesn’t help. Really, Aubrey! Whatever were you doing in Spain?” She sighed and waved to Staines to begin serving as if she were the mistress of the house. “Why, your aunt had me believing you were as mad as Dick’s hatband, which wouldn’t be surprising given how you spent your youth, but I can see for myself you’re no worse for wear.”

Thatcher heaved a sigh as well. No, his mother hadn’t changed, but perhaps that wasn’t such a bad thing. She did have a way of getting Aunt Geneva’s ire up, and now his aunt wouldn’t spend the morning pestering him.

At least so he hoped.

“I see you’ve finally found the coats Weston delivered,” Aunt Geneva said, wresting the conversation away from his mother.

“Yes, madam, and I thank you.”

She nodded to the footman to fill her teacup. “Am I to understand it that you’ve ended your association with Miss Langley and are now going to make your entry into good society?”

“Miss Langley?” his mother asked. “Who is she?”