The Accidental Duchess (18 page)

“He knew your brother would have his head if anything happened to you.”

“So he said. Still, he did not have to turn around as he did. He could have at least finished the run so I could see France. He did not have to tell Southwaite either. And he most definitely did not have to make me help row. My hands were blistered for weeks.”

He knew Tarrington. His opinion of the man now rose with each of her sentences. “A few blisters on your hands was a small punishment. You were lucky your brother was not the sort of man to give you blisters on your rump for such a stupid and dangerous caprice.”

“It
was
stupid. I knew it was even as I did it. But it was still exciting.” She smiled slyly, turning their prior conversation back at him.

He hardened at once. He came close to throwing her down and showing her more excitement. Instead he stretched for his robe, threw it on, and left her to her sleep.

She might be nothing but trouble. She might try one outrageous extraordinary thing after another. As a duchess, however, the whole world would hear about most of it.

There was nothing else to do. He would be forced to see that her need for excitement was met in other ways. Duty called.

 • • • 

“I
t is very early for you to be going out,” Rosalyn said two mornings later. She sat in the morning room drinking coffee and eating the little cakes she kept instructing the cook to make. Her earlier than normal arrival for breakfast meant Lydia had not left before Rosalyn came down, the way she had planned.

Lydia pulled on her gloves. “I am going to Berkeley Square.”

Rosalyn considered that while she sipped and chewed. Finally she gave an expression of quasi-approval. “I suppose with your own family, the question of appropriate hours for calls can be ignored.”

“I am so relieved you think so. I almost did not dress until I received your agreement that it would not cause a scandal.”

Rosalyn’s lids hooded her eyes. “You do not fool me, Lydia. Nor will I allow you to make me the brunt of your disrespectful humor.”

“Then do not indulge your inclinations to treat me like a schoolgirl, Rosalyn. I do not need a finishing governess.”

“Do you not?” Her gaze raked Lydia from head to toe. “Better if you had not dressed before seeing me, I dare say. That dress will not do for a duchess, even if she only visits family.”

“Actually, I am going to visit Cassandra.”

Rosalyn’s brow puckered. Her mouth twitched. Lydia picked up her reticule and left.

It had been naughty to deliberately upset Rosalyn by announcing she would visit the unsuitable Lady Ambury. Very wrong. But each time she saw Rosalyn, Rosalyn managed at least one nasty poke. One criticism or one sigh or one expression of dismay. Under the circumstances, she could be forgiven for poking back. Perhaps in a few years she would become so mature that she would be able to resist doing that.

She instructed the coach to take her to her brother’s house. She entered it as he had insisted she feel free to do, without ceremony. She found Emma finishing her own breakfast.

Emma ate faster on seeing her. “I am ready. Just one more bite.”

“Has Southwaite come down yet?”

“No, but he will soon.”

“Then we should go. I would rather not lie to him.”

“And I would? I have already told him you and Cassandra insisted on taking me to some shops so I do not die of boredom. That was not a lie. We will indeed go to some shops before we return.”

Emma stood. Rather suddenly in the last week her condition had begun to show. The styles hid it still, but when she moved, the little bulge became visible beneath the muslin.

“It is so good of you and Cassandra to do this,” she said as she buttoned her spencer.

“I have been looking forward to it, Emma.”

They went out to the coach. It then circled the square to Ambury’s house. Cassandra appeared at the door as soon as it stopped. She came down the steps and accepted the footman’s help into the carriage.

Lydia took in Cassandra’s fashionable blue coaching ensemble. “You can hardly be useful wearing that.”

“I brought an apron.”

“You will cry off doing anything that might dirty that ensemble, apron or not. If I had to suffer Rosalyn thinking I had no style, you could have worn old clothes too.”

“Rosalyn only disapproved. Ambury would have been suspicious if I decked myself out like a servant. Now, let us go. I confess I am very excited, but I do not know why. Perhaps because we are on a secret mission.”

“How dramatic,” Emma said. “I hope you are as excited three hours from now. I fear you are in for a big disappointment. This will be hard work. I would have brought the servants if I could be sure they would be discreet.”

The coach rolled through Mayfair, heading south. It stopped near Piccadilly, on Albemarle Street. Emma led the way into a tall building that housed Fairbourne’s auction house.

A chaos of activity greeted them inside the exhibition hall. Men scrubbed floors and dusted high chandeliers. Others moved tables. Two hung paintings on one of the high gray walls.

They followed Emma through it all to a chamber in the back. She paused after she opened the door and audibly groaned. “It is even worse than the letter from Obediah admitted.”

All kinds of objects stuffed the chamber. Paintings and rolls of paper. Silver objects and fine porcelains. Small furniture pieces and stacks of leather-bound books.

A new presence hovered behind Lydia. She stood aside so Obediah, a slight, balding man with an avuncular manner, could enter.

“I am distraught that you had to come, Lady Southwaite.” He looked around, shaking his head in dismay.

“How long has it been since my brother was here?”

“A week or two. Maybe three.”

Emma’s eyes narrowed. “None of this is catalogued? The auction is less than a fortnight away. I will
kill him
.”

Cassandra patted her shoulder. “Do not become overwrought. We are here and in no time at all we will have dealt with this.”

Emma did not appear convinced. Stoic but unhappy, she studied the contents. Then she walked out.

“I will do it, as I usually do, because he does not. Here is how we must proceed. The items should be brought to me in the office, one by one. I will write them up, and you can dust them while I do. The men have too much to prepare and cannot be spared today, but hopefully they can help tomorrow.”

Cassandra shed her mantelet and donned her apron. Lydia removed her spencer.

“The silver first,” Emma said before disappearing through a door nearby, to the office.

Lydia gripped a heavy candelabra. Cassandra handed her a cloth.

“Do you think your brother will be angry if he learns she is doing this?” Cassandra asked.

Lydia thought about how her brother treated Emma. He was no one’s fool, least of all a woman’s, but they had a very special understanding of each other. “If he forbade it, yes, he will be angry, but mostly out of worry for her. He understands what Fairbourne’s means to her, so that will make a difference.”

She carried the candelabra to Emma. She sat at a desk, paper and ink at the ready. Her sharp eyes examined the base for marks, then she scratched onto the paper. Dust flew when Lydia used the cloth.

She returned to the storage room. “We must dust here. She will be the worse for it if we do it in the office.”

She and Cassandra found a rhythm that wasted little time. It was hard work, however, especially when they handled the larger items. If Emma tired, she did not show it. The hours progressed in a series of passings, Lydia going one way while Cassandra went the other.

After delivering one of the rolls of drawings, Lydia returned to the storage room to find Cassandra waiting. “After she finishes with those, we must make her stop. It has been more than four hours. She will go all day and all night if we are not firm with her.”

“It was a rather thick roll. I expect it will take her some time.” Cassandra sat on a chair waiting to be catalogued. “It appears you and I have time for a chat. How do you fare at Grosvenor Square?”

Lydia moved a tapestry and sat on another chair. She had not really spoken to either Cassandra or Emma since her return to London. Oh, they had seen her that first day and showered her with expressions of happiness, but neither one had visited her yet, and no questions had been asked.

One just had been, however.

“I manage not to hate his aunt, although she does not like or approve of me and makes her opinions very clear. She is careful not to go too far, because she fears he will ask her to leave then. Only that restrains her, I think.”

“I was not really asking about his aunt, Lydia.”

No, she was not.

“I have learned that I like sharing a bed with a handsome, exciting man, even if I do not love him and hold a serious grievance against him. So I fare well, I suppose, in the one thing that could have made this marriage hellish.”

Cassandra’s smile barely wavered. Her gaze probed, however. “There are not many whose direct speech can startle me, but you have always been one whose words often do. So it was not a love match. I wasn’t sure. He always seemed to be around you the last month, and I thought, perhaps— Had you no choice, Lydia?”

“He insisted not, and I saw no way out. A comedy of coincidences and accidents lined up, leading to that church in Scotland. I wasn’t even really compromised. It only thoroughly appeared as if I had been. If that isn’t unfair, I don’t know what is.” She laughed, then sighed. “He probably feels he was trapped into doing the right thing, and I feel trapped into being a duchess. If you sympathize with his plight more than mine, I cannot blame you.”

Cassandra took her hand in hers, and looked very sympathetic. “You have found one kind of contentment, you say. Perhaps with time you will find many other kinds.”

“I am determined to try, but . . .”

“But you have that serious grievance. Does he know about it?”

She nodded. Cassandra said nothing. Lydia looked at her friend, sitting there patiently, not asking the question whispering in the silence. Cassandra had been more sophisticated at nineteen than most women were at forty. She did not judge quickly, or in the normal ways.

“It is that duel,” she blurted. “None of this would have happened if my brother and Ambury had not become his friends again. I was supposed to just accept that they did, and that all was forgiven and forgotten. Only it isn’t. Not with me.”

Cassandra appeared surprised, even taken aback. “You mean Lakewood. It was almost two years ago, and while he was your brother’s good friend—”

“He was my friend too. A real friend, not like Ambury and Penthurst whom I saw as they came and went.”

Cassandra peered intently at her. Curious. Guessing. “Did you spend time with him?”

“On occasion, after I came out.”

Cassandra stood abruptly. She paced, her arms crossed, her expression distracted by thought, glancing Lydia’s way every few steps. One quick look slid past Lydia’s chair and Cassandra strode over and closed the door. She sat again.

“Lydia, I find myself in a dilemma. Forgive me, but I must ask—did Lakewood indicate he saw you as more than a friend? Did he lead you to believe he wanted a life with you?”

Had he? She had picked through her memories so often, even before he died. Had his attention been only friendship, and she built the rest out of air? There had been all that time in Hampshire, however, and a kiss, and the way he wanted their time together to be a secret so her brother would not interfere.

“I do not know,” she admitted. “He did not propose, if that is what you mean. Yet—I think he flirted. He did not treat me like Southwaite’s little sister entirely. He amused me with descriptions of great adventures we might have one day, but those could have been mere storytelling. I thought there was more, but perhaps he was just being kind.”

“Do not blame yourself if you misjudged Lakewood’s intentions. If he did not want your brother to know, he had some purpose, whether good or ill. You were simply too inexperienced to see it, and to guess which way it would go.”

It was a very Cassandra sort of thing to say—direct, almost cruel, but immediately noting the one part of the story that made the relationship something other than a normal friend-of-the-family one—Lakewood’s desire for discretion.

“Lydia, I cannot absolve Penthurst for what happened that day. However, I doubt Lakewood’s intentions to you were honorable. He probably planned an elopement, because your brother did not countenance a marriage. Lakewood’s fortune had been much diminished, and he sought to marry well, by any means possible.”

“You damn him easily, with no evidence.”

“Evidence enough, to my mind. He was charming as sin, Lydia, but he was not of good character.”

“You still hold whatever happened between you and him against his reputation, when it was years ago. Six or seven, no? Ancient history, but you will speak badly of him and he cannot defend himself.” She stood and hurried to the door. “I am sorry I confided in you.”

She found Emma cleaning her pen in the office. “You must go home now, or you will become overtired and Southwaite will never forgive me, Emma.”

Emma rested back in her chair. “I will not argue. I have made good progress, and am content that the auction will not be a disaster. I will finish with the paintings another day.”

Cassandra stepped into the chamber too, removing her apron. “We will visit a few shops on Oxford Street on the way back. We need only step into them to make our explanation for the day’s outing honest.”

“If we must,” Lydia muttered. She had expected Cassandra to comfort her, not tell her Lakewood had planned to use her like she was a young, naïve idiot. Now she longed to be alone with her thoughts at home.

Emma stacked her pages neatly, then looked from one of them to the other. Her gaze lingered on Lydia. “Only a few shops, Cassandra, if you do not mind. I think both Lydia and I are quite done for the day.”

After the shops were visited, the coach brought Cassandra home. Lydia and Emma proceeded on to Southwaite’s house.

“Did you and Cassandra have an argument?” Emma asked.