Page 2 of A Tale of Two Dukes

A FEW WEEKS EARLIER

Viola stood on the steps with her arms wrapped tight around herself and watched as the carriage with its ducal crest rumbled off down the long drive.

Loose strands of hair, black and stark white, had worked themselves free and whipped about her face in the strong breeze, blurring her vision along with the tears she had been suppressing.

She’d normally be accompanied by a group of excited spaniels of varying ages, but they’d been locked away in the stables till the coach was safely out of the way, or they’d have chased after it.

If they’d realised what it signified, they’d have been howling inconsolably, threatening her precious self-control.

Even when the vehicle had vanished from view, she still stood there, gazing pointlessly after it, tracking its progress in her mind. It would – barring accidents – have reached the post road at the edge of the estate before she turned away. And the estate was very large.

When she moved at last, her old governess and closest friend, Emily Naismith, who had been waiting in supportive silence beside her, took her arm and drew her inside the house. ‘Let’s have some tea,’ the older woman said with an effort at cheerfulness. ‘You must be chilled, love – I know I am.’

‘I’m sorry, Em,’ Viola said dully. ‘You should not have waited with me in so sharp a wind. You know I don’t feel the cold.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Miss Naismith sturdily. ‘Of course I waited.’ And then, after a moment’s silence: ‘They’ll be fine. You know they will.’

The footmen sprang to open the doors for the two women, closing them behind them as they passed inside.

Viola allowed Emily to draw her through the marble atrium and into the library, where a cheerful fire had dispersed any early autumn chill.

Perhaps it wasn’t really needed yet, but it was a comforting sight, or should be.

There was a large, slightly battered sofa beside the fire, and the two women subsided into it.

The big house seemed very quiet suddenly, the crackling of the flames and the shifting of the logs in the grate the only sound.

How could a building that was still full of busy people seem so empty, just because two small boys had left it?

They were noisy, of course, and always seemed to be in several places at once, sliding down bannisters, jumping on furniture, but it was more than that.

When the Duchess said nothing, staring into the flames in a brown study, Emily persisted in her futile attempts at consolation. ‘You cannot doubt that William will take the best possible care of them,’ she said softly, flushing a little.

‘Of course I do not doubt it. You know I don’t.’

The occupants of the coach had been Mr William Muncaster, the local magistrate, his twelve-year-old son, Sam, and Sam’s fast friends, Viola’s boys.

These were two small persons with grand titles: His Grace the Duke of Winterflood, usually known as Ned, and the Honourable Lord Robert Armstrong, Robin, the Duke’s younger brother by a mere twenty minutes.

The boys would all be studying together at one of England’s most distinguished boarding schools, and Mr Muncaster had most kindly agreed to take the twins with him when he delivered his own son to that institution.

Viola had some while ago been made to understand, the message given by Mr Muncaster with a gentle concern that had made her eyes smart, that ladies – mothers – did not generally take their sons to school, and it would not be particularly helpful to the lads in question if their doting mama, even if she was a widowed duchess, broke with custom and did so.

Mr Muncaster was a good neighbour and a good friend, as well as being Emily’s betrothed, and the Duchess had not the least fear that he would allow her boys to come to any harm while he was with them.

But that did not mean that she could regard their prolonged absence with complaisance, nor cease worrying about their safety.

She had never been separated from them before in all their almost eleven years.

And they were all she had, as a widow of three years’ standing.

Their father, Edward, had been nigh on thirty years her senior, and had died as the result of a sudden heart attack – some congenital weakness, the doctors had said, which in hindsight the Duke had perhaps long suspected but kept secret from everyone – when his sons had been rising eight years old and she had only been six and twenty.

She shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, Em,’ she said again. ‘I must be very dull company. It will take me a little time to accustom myself to their absence, you know. The silence. And I must, for I need to decide what I shall do. I can’t put it off any longer.’

‘I know you feel that,’ said Miss Naismith softly, entirely ignoring the conventional apology, which was no more than it deserved, between such close friends. ‘But does it have to be today?’

The two women were of very different appearance and character.

Emily was small and trim, her hair a smooth blonde and her eyes warm blue – the kindest, gentlest face, a much younger Viola had once told her, in the whole world.

The Duchess herself was taller, obviously quicker-tempered and more decisive, statuesque in build, and of a dramatic dark colouring that spoke of her mother’s Italian background.

They had been close since a nervously determined seventeen-year-old Emily had arrived as governess to Mrs Constantine’s large family of daughters, among them Viola, a great gangly child only five years her teacher’s junior.

And Viola knew that soon, she must lose her too.

As if sensing her gloomy thoughts, Miss Naismith said fretfully, ‘We can easily postpone the wedding for a while. I hate to leave you alone like this, when you are so bereft – it is unconscionably selfish of me. I am sure William will not mind.’

Her friend and employer smiled wryly. ‘I am sure he would mind excessively, and it would be unnatural if he did not. It would be unconscionably selfish of me to let you put it off. You shall be married Thursday week as planned, and I shall be there to wish you very happy and cry over you. And you know that I will not be alone here, or not for long – not if I decide to accept Lord Ventris’s offer of marriage, outrageous as it is. ’

Emily’s gentle face was troubled. ‘Viola, my dear… please tell me you aren’t contemplating such a rash step merely because you don’t want to be on your own in this great barn of a house.

I could not bear to think that it would be all my fault if you married that odiously rude, disagreeable, untrustworthy man. ’

She laughed with genuine amusement. ‘My God, Em, do you think me so feeble? If I feared loneliness, I could find quite a dozen ladies who would rush to be my companion, though not one of them, I hope I need not say, could be what you have been to me and always will be. I could ask one of my sisters to stay with me this winter, for that matter: Bea, or Cecilia. No, that is not even the smallest of my reasons for considering the offer, I promise you.’

‘Then why…? My dear, putting aside all the rest, you hardly know him. How can you seriously contemplate tying yourself to a stranger so irrevocably? If he has set foot in this house once in the last decade, it must have been when I was absent, and I have so rarely been absent. Or am I mistaken?’

The Duchess said quietly, ‘No, you are not mistaken. He has not visited of late years, and I have had no contact at all with him since Edward died and he wrote to condole with me. Probably you even replied to his letter on my behalf – you remember how distracted I was at that time, the boys so shocked and distressed as they were. But I knew him years ago, a little. He and Edward were very attached to each other – they were cousins, as you know, but the age gap was such that they were more like uncle and nephew.’

‘If Lord Ventris had in fact been your husband’s nephew, it would be illegal for you to marry him.

’ Emily’s tone suggested that she thought the law sadly negligent in this respect.

‘And I would be glad of it, for the man is a notorious rake, to say nothing of the rest. And even so, I wonder he was bold enough to write you such an extraordinary letter.’

The missive had come just over a week ago, brought in to the Duchess as she breakfasted with Emily one bright morning.

The boys had been with them earlier, consuming improbably large quantities of food and then rushing off together to collect Sam for some mysterious errand that would, in Viola’s experience, lead to bruised knees, torn and dirty clothing, and the consumption of another huge meal in order to sustain them in further adventures.

She had not been entirely sure she recognised the hand, her acquaintance with Lord Ventris not having been such that they had ever had occasion to carry out a regular correspondence, but he had scrawled his title and the legend Ventris Castle across the paper by way of a frank, so she had known before she opened it that it was from him.

Her stomach had lurched at the sight in instinctive recoil, and she had been annoyed with herself for that before she even knew its contents.

But when she had unsealed it and read it, and then read it again because she’d feared her eyes were deceiving her and it could not possibly say what she thought it said, she had impulsively uttered highly unladylike words that had had Emily staring at her in shock.

Luckily, there had been no footmen or other servants in the room to overhear her curses.