When the Duchess Said Yes (5 page)

“Oh, Lizzie, I am sorry,” Charlotte said. “The man’s behavior is appalling, to show you so little regard.”

But though Lizzie nodded solemnly, as she was expected to do, inside she was vastly relieved. She wouldn’t have to smile sweetly at one man while another’s kiss was still on her lips. Her secret was safe, and she wouldn’t be called Lizzie Wyldest again.

And at least for this night, the duke’s absence and neglect didn’t wound her. How could it? For this night, there was at least one man in London who believed she was as sweet as the first peach, and luscious as the first rose.

Hawke was not by nature a man who found much profit or goodness in the early hours of the day. To his mind, more and more interesting things occurred as the day progressed, with the absolutely most fascinating taking place well after boring, sensible folk had long since retired. Those first hours after the cock’s crow were tedious and dull and far too bright, and it was Hawke’s habit to pass them with the curtains drawn, snug in his own bed (or someone else’s, if a pleasing female opportunity had presented itself).

This was, of course, the expected regime of a gentleman in Naples, where no one of rank or fashion ever ventured out before noon, and Hawke had continued to keep the same hours here in London as well. All of which explained why the ebony panther clock on the drawing room mantelpiece had just begun chiming eleven as Hawke finally appeared to take his breakfast.

Granted, he was only slightly more awake than asleep. His eyes were still heavy-lidded and his jaw unshaven, and despite the pleas for ducal propriety from his manservant, Giacomo, his feet were bare and he wore only his silk banyan wrapped loosely over his nakedness. Yawning, he dropped into a leather-covered armchair near the fire and watched Giacomo pour his coffee:
very black, very thick, very potent, the way the Turks drank it.

“Excellent, Giacomo,” he murmured, sipping the coffee. He spoke Italian with Giacomo, with the southern lilt he’d acquired over the years. “You earned your passage for your coffee alone.”

“You are kindness itself, sir.” Giacomo touched his forehead and bowed so low that his waist-length pigtail with the red ribbon bow flipped forward over his head. Before he’d come into Hawke’s service, he had apprenticed as a barber, and he was terribly vain about his own appearance, a true macaroni. But Hawke considered Giacomo’s endless primping a fair trade for his skill with a razor and his gift for making Hawke eminently presentable in the shortest of time.

That, and the coffee. He closed his eyes, savoring the heady fragrance. He needed this even more than usual this morning. It wasn’t that he was suffering from the aftereffects of a raucous night. Far from it. He’d spent the last two nights and the day in between making his way through every fashionable resort he could imagine—clubs, dining houses, playhouses, gaming dens, pleasure gardens, even the better class of bagnio and brothel—trying to find his fairy queen again. Surely a beauty who had appeared alone at an opera and at Ranelagh had to have a name, and a reputation to go with it. Yet every time he’d described her, he’d met with only blank faces and shrugs, coupled with the occasional pitying shake of the head. He’d begun to feel like one of Fielding’s Bow Street runners, except that they were successful and he was not. She’d said her affections were taken, and clearly that lucky gentleman, whoever he was, had her securely squirreled away in keeping in a private house.

He could see her in his thoughts as clearly as if she stood before him still, and the memory of her kiss was just as vivid. She had beguiled him thoroughly, fascinated
him as if she’d cast a true fairy spell over him, and then vanished completely into the night.

“The curtains, sir?” Giacomo asked, already poised to pull them open. It was another of the servant’s admirable qualities that he never let the morning light intrude unbidden, and with a sigh Hawke nodded and opened his eyes to the scene from his drawing room window.

He was still half surprised to see the regimented English garden of his family’s London house instead of the familiar Bay of Naples with Vesuvius wrapped in a haze in the distance. Hawkesworth Chase stood on the grounds of an ancient royal hunting park, one of the many rewards given by the old king to the first Duchess of Hawkesworth for generously sharing her favors. Although the deer, the old lodge, and the chase were long gone and the house had been absorbed by the spread of London in the last hundred or so years, the place still retained its original name. Hawke’s father had made some improvements, but it remained a rambling, old-fashioned mansion of brick and stone, with octagonal towers at each corner and a hawk with spread wings carved over the door.

But what made Hawke most uncomfortable about the place wasn’t the unstylishness of the façade or the small-paned windows. It was the overwhelming sense that this was still his father’s house, not his. His mother had moved to the dowager’s house soon after his father’s death, and Hawke himself had left for Italy. Almost nothing had changed since he was a boy, with every chair and painting in exactly the spot that his father had decreed. It wasn’t exactly that Hawke believed in ghosts, but he swore he could still smell his father’s tobacco in the hall and hear his voice in the library, worrying over politics with other members of the House of Lords. To the consternation of the servants, on Hawke’s return he had chosen to sleep in his old boyhood bedchamber
rather than in the rooms once occupied by his father, rooms reserved for the duke, with those for the duchess close by.

The duchess. Not his mother, but his wife. He tipped his head against the armchair’s tall back and muttered a halfhearted oath aimed at nothing in particular. Could anything else spoil his morning more completely?

“Forgive me, sir, a small interruption,” Giacomo said beside him, and reluctantly Hawke turned. With Giacomo stood one of the footmen, and both wore the sort of pained expression that servants always adopted when bearing unwelcome news. “You have a visitor, sir. His Grace the Duke of Breconridge.”

“Brecon? Here?” Immediately Hawke sat upright. There could be only one reason why his eldest cousin would come to the Chase at this hour. “Tell him I’m not at home, or tell him I’m still abed, or—”

“Too late, dear Hawke,” Brecon said, entering the room as if it belonged to him. He handed his hat and his gloves to the footman, sat in the chair opposite Hawke’s, and motioned for Giacomo to pour him coffee, too. “You make yourself damned elusive, cousin. Fortunately, my skills as a huntsman are excellent, and you weren’t going to escape me any longer.”

“Good day to you as well,” Hawke grumbled. Richard, Duke of Breconridge, was the eldest of the quartet of cousins descended from the royal bastards of the same king. If March was like a brother to Hawke, then Brecon was like an uncle, a half generation older at forty-two. Brecon had long ago married and produced three stalwart sons, which had given him the confidence to offer advice, friendship, and solicitude to the younger cousins as they’d lurched their own ways toward manhood.

Not that Brecon was a doddering graybeard. He was a worldly, witty widower who knew everyone worth
knowing in London. Celebrated both for his embroidered French waistcoats and for his mistresses, he was as adept with his sword as he was with a bon mot, and perfectly capable of making ladies of every age swoon with delight at his gallantry. Secretly Hawke had always wanted to be like Brecon, a much more dashing model of a duke to emulate than his father had been.

But not now, not when Brecon was sitting before him, as elegantly dressed as Hawke was not, and with a steely set to his handsome face that instantly put Hawke on his guard. Clearly Brecon was here to ask difficult questions, the sort of questions to which Hawke had no suitable replies to offer in return.

“A good day to you as well, cousin,” Brecon said agreeably. “Or rather, what is left of it. By my recollection, you were born an Englishman, no matter that you’ve spent the past decade attempting to prove otherwise. Perhaps now that you are once again in London, you might at least attempt to keep London hours.”

Hawke set his cup down on the table and folded his arms over his chest. “Is that why you’ve come, then? To lecture me on the hours I choose to keep?”

Brecon smiled. “Oh, we both know that’s not the case,” he said easily. “Hawke, you dishonor yourself by ignoring your bride.”

Hawke knew this was true, but he hated hearing it from Brecon. He
did
feel dishonorable, which made him speak even more dishonorably.

“Is that why you are here?” he asked. “Did the harridan herself send you?”

As soon as he’d spoken, he wished he hadn’t, and seeing Brecon wince at the cruel words only made it worse.

“Unkind, cousin,” he said “most unkind. The lady is no harridan, as you will realize at once if ever you deign to call upon her. And no, unlike you, she is too well-bred to involve me in her private sorrows.”

Hawke shook his head, as if that were enough to make all of this go away. “If my father hadn’t—”

“This is not about your father, Hawke, but you,” Brecon said firmly, leaning forward. “This is not about love, or desire, or whatever other nonsense has filled your brain. This is a contract, a legal obligation that you must obey, or be considered a scoundrel—a scoundrel who, as I recall, will also be without a bent shilling to your name if you continue to ignore the lady beyond her next birthday. I would say your father knew you better than any of us realized.”

Abruptly Hawke rose, going to stand before the window with his back to Brecon. Every word was bitterly true, especially the part about his father.

“I have every intention of going through with the marriage,” he said, his voice hollow and strained. “I would not have made the journey from Naples if I hadn’t.”

“True enough,” Brecon said evenly. “But the delay does not serve you well, nor does the way you have pushed aside the lady bound to be your wife in favor of some insignificant jade you met in Ranelagh.”

Hawke turned back sharply. “How could you know of her?”

Brecon swept his hand through the air. “How could I not, given how publicly you have hunted for the whore and scorned the lady?”

“But if you had seen her, Brecon,” Hawke protested, once again imagining his fairy in green. “Her beauty, her grace, her—”

“Forget her,” Brecon said curtly. “She will ruin you if you don’t.”

Hawke groaned and thumped his fist against the window in frustration.
Ruin
was a word more usually applied to what an unscrupulous man could do to a woman, yet Brecon was absolutely right: if Hawke persisted
in chasing this phantom, he would in fact be ruined, dishonored, and broken in every way that a gentleman could be.

All for the sake of a girl with spangled wings and a merry laugh, a girl as sweet as the first peach and luscious as the first rose.

“We are invited to take tea this afternoon at Marchbourne House,” Brecon was saying. “I have taken the liberty of accepting for you, and further, I will be bringing my carriage to gather you at half past two. If the weather holds, I imagine we’ll repair to the duchess’s garden. Most agreeable.”

“Your Grace,” called one of the footmen solemnly from the doorway. “Lady Allred.”

“Mother?” Hawke turned from the window in disbelief. The morning had descended from bad to much, much worse. He and his mother were not particularly close, though she’d been the first one he’d called on when he arrived in London. He’d been that dutiful. But he’d never expected her in turn to come here, and as far as he knew, this was her first time back since she had remarried and left the dowager’s cottage. She’d come with a reason and a purpose, and he could already guess what that must be.

“Yes, yes, Hawkesworth, your mother, as if even you would forget.” She sailed across the room toward him in a black gown topped by a yellow silk capelet and an oversized feathered hat on her head. She had always prided herself on presenting a fashionable figure, and though she must be nearly fifty—Hawke wasn’t entirely certain—she still did. She wore a great many jewels on her fingers, on her ears, and draped over her person, her habit for both day and night, and as she drew closer and into the sunlight from the window her sparkle increased. She waited for him to bend down low enough so she
could kiss his cheek, then stepped back to study him critically.

“Are you ill?” she asked, scowling fiercely at the tuft of black hair on his bare chest where his banyan had fallen open. “They should have told me at the door if you are. Is that why you are still in your undress? Because you are ill?”

“No, Mother, I am not ill,” he said wearily. “I am in perfect health.”

“Then cover yourself like a Christian,” Lady Allred ordered sternly, the plumes on her hat twitching. “How can I address you about poor Lady Elizabeth if you’re parading about in your nakedness like some wicked pasha?”

Defensively he pulled his banyan more closely about his body. “There’s no need for you to address me like I’ve been sent down from school.”

“That is true,” she said. “Sensible talk accomplishes nothing with you. It never has, and it never will. What is required is a good thrashing. Why are you treating your future wife so shamefully, Hawkesworth? My friends speak of nothing else, and what defense can I make for you? You, my only son?”