Page 18 of Duke of the Underworld (Regency Gods #2)

CHAPTER 18

P ersephone was drifting in and out of a fitful sleep—her habit over the last few days, one which she very intensely did not enjoy—when a tentative knock came at her door.

She sat bolt upright in her bed.

Hugh. It had to be Hugh. Who else would come to her room at—well, she didn’t know what time it was, but the room was full dark, and it looked like the moon had already set.

“Come in,” she called, then tried not to look too disappointed when the housekeeper, looking uncomfortable, poked her head inside the room.

“I’m every so sorry to wake you, Your Grace,” she said, the lines of her posture uncertain, as though she was doubting her course of action. The shiftiness to the woman’s stance made Persephone realize that this could only be bad news; the older woman wouldn’t have woken her for anything that couldn’t wait until morning.

“Are the girls all right?” Persephone asked, already rising from her bed, casting about for her dressing gown.

“Oh, yes,” the woman hastened to explain. “They’re sleeping soundly. It’s just, ah…Lady Daphne seems to be missing.”

Persephone froze with one arm in her dressing gown, the rest of the fabric falling from her fingers and hanging awkwardly before she grabbed it again.

“Missing?” she repeated.

“It seems so,” the woman said. She appeared as uncertain as Persephone felt. “Her maid has a small chamber inside Lady Daphne’s rooms, and she woke with a chill. She went out to prod the fire, stealthy-like, so the lady didn’t wake from the cold, either. Except Lady Daphne wasn’t there. But her window was left open.”

“Have you checked anywhere else yet?” Persephone asked. Now that her dressing gown was on, she slid her feet into her slippers. All that time acting as her own lady’s maid had prepared her for this moment well; she had no trouble finding all the necessary things, even in the darkness.

“We’ve looked all around the house, Your Grace,” the housekeeper said, deftly putting to bed any hopes Persephone might have held that Daphne was just having a restless night and accompanying wander of the house. “It seems as though she may have left through her window? And I know that young ladies might slip off to do a bit of harmless mischief from time to time, but… But this really is not like Lady Daphne at all. And so I thought it best that I wake you.”

“You did the right thing,” Persephone assured her. She didn’t envy the woman her position. There was a new lady of the house, a missing girl, and it was the dratted witching hour. It made for an unsettling combination for everyone.

But Persephone was supposedly in charge in Hugh’s absence, and as much as she found that idea highly alarming—and she did; she was just the daughter of a profligate baron, and now suddenly she was meant to be a duchess who knew what to do about missing little sisters? The mind boggled—she needed to keep cool.

“Right,” she said. “Right. Well, unless we have a sense of where she might have gone—” A quick shake of the housekeeper’s head indicated that this was not a helpful avenue of inquiry. “—then I suppose we shall have to check the house again. If that turns up without any hints or clues, we shall have to send word to His Grace.”

Persephone applauded herself for saying this last bit without wincing. She really, very truly did not want to tell Hugh that she had lost his sister. Technically, looking after Daphne hadn’t been one of the responsibilities he’d assigned her when they’d wed, but it did rather feel in the spirit of the thing. It was hard to market oneself as being capable of watching after three six-year-old children when a single sixteen-year-old girl had slipped through her fingers.

But maybe, Persephone told herself, Daphne would be in the house. Maybe the staff’s search had merely coincided with an exceedingly poorly timed trip to the necessary! No doubt it would all be resolved quickly and then they could all laugh about it.

It was not resolved quickly. Daphne was not in the house.

And Persephone had never felt farther from laughter in her life.

“Do you think we ought…” The housekeeper trailed off. She and Persephone had become comrades in arms over the past three quarters of an hour. They were battle-hardened brethren, now.

“To write to His Grace?” Persephone sighed heavily. “Yes, I rather think we must. I do hope he is at his club, or else we’ll have two of them missing.”

“I’m sure he is, Your Grace,” the housekeeper said encouragingly. Persephone hoped this was true and not just the older woman’s attempt to reassure a new bride that she knew her absent husband well enough to predict his movements.

Persephone rubbed her temples. Marriage was confounding, it turned out.

At least the girls were still asleep. This thought caused her to briefly reflect on the horror that would transpire if she had to manage three children and try to find the missing adults of the household.

Persephone was just resigning herself to going to dash off a note to Hugh when the clatter of hooves came up the drive. She turned, alight with hope, toward the front of the house.

When Daphne poked her head sheepishly around the edge of the front door, she was, of all things, wearing a top hat. A gentleman’s top hat.

For some reason, this was the thing that pushed Persephone right past the limit of her reason.

“What is going on ?” she cried, throwing up her hands. “Where have you been? What are you doing ? What are you wearing? Do you know what time it is, Daphne? It is nearly four o’clock in the morning! Do you know how worried we all have been? Are you trying to kill me ?”

This was, Persephone allowed, a great number of questions. They also began to sound increasingly hysterical with each successive inquiry. By the end, Daphne looked hesitant and confused.

“Ah, which of those do you wish me to answer first?”

“All of them!”

It was a shriek. Persephone was officially shrieking. And she wasn’t proud of that, per se, but she also felt that she simply could not be held accountable for any shrill, unseemly, or otherwise overwrought sounds that came from her at the moment.

Daphne wisely made no commentary on Persephone’s emotional state.

“Right,” she said. She came all the way inside, an act which revealed that she was not wearing the top hat alone; she was dressed entirely in a patchwork of men’s garb that seemed to be part pilfered footman’s uniform, part overlarge shirtwaist, and part…something that Persephone assumed was meant to pass for a waistcoat but really, truly did not meet any standards of any fashion of any era.

“I might have gone to Underworld to speak with Hugh,” she admitted.

“You what! ”

At Persephone’s cry (oh, very well, it was another shriek), Daphne’s bashfulness faded. She adopted a sardonic look.

“All right,” she said. “I am sorry to have worried you, I truly am. But Persephone—I don’t think you’re in a position to chide anyone for going to Underworld unchaperoned.”

This was annoyingly fair.

“I didn’t go in men’s clothing,” Persephone argued. She hoped Daphne didn’t ask for a defense for why this made a difference, as she did not necessarily have one. It wasn’t, on the whole, a bad idea—or it wouldn’t have been, if Daphne’s version of men’s clothing gave the impression that she’d only ever read about men in books but had never actually seen one in real life.

Daphne frowned down at her disguise.

“Yes, well, I allow that my outfit choice may have been a miscalculation,” she admitted. “But I was worried that I’d be stopped, if I showed up in my own clothes. And I needed to talk to Hugh.”

Persephone shook her head. This past hour or so was starting to feel so surreal that it felt like a terrible dream, like she was secretly still sleeping in bed, and that her mind was throwing up strange hallucinations in response to the fitful nature of her nights these past few days.

“I don’t understand,” she said. “What was so important that you couldn’t wait until he came home to discuss it with him?”

“That’s just it,” Daphne said, sounding exasperated. “I don’t think he is coming home.”

These words were like a bucket of icy water being poured over Persephone’s head. She suddenly felt very, very awake.

“What do you mean?” she asked dully.

“I went to his office at the club,” Daphne explained. “And, my goodness, people were up to all sorts of things there. It was astounding. There was a woman sitting on a man’s knee. Just sitting there, laughing, right on his lap, like she was a child! Only he was not looking at her like she was a child, I’ll tell you that, and?—”

“Daphne,” Persephone interrupted. “Why isn’t your brother coming home?”

“Oh, right.” Daphne blinked back to herself, which was good, though, in truth, Persephone found the younger woman’s distraction comforting. She didn’t think Daphne would have been drawn into a narrative about scandalous interactions between gentlemen and women who were decidedly not ladies if the end of her story had been Hugh isn’t coming home because he’s abandoning us for good .

“Well,” the younger woman went on, taking off her top hat. Her hair had been braided and shoved down the back of her collar. Goodness, that was a poor excuse for a disguise. “I went up to his office. He was half asleep at his desk. He looked positively awful, like he hasn’t slept a wink. He claimed he was working, but he was not in a state to do any sort of good work, I’ll tell you that. Then, when I told him to come home, he gave me some sort of nonsense about how it is a man’s duty to provide for his family and a woman’s role to keep the home.”

She gave an expressive eye roll that very clearly outlined what she thought about that .

“Well…” Persephone hated to say it. “You do realize that he’s not entirely wrong . It is rather how the world expects things to go.”

“Oh, good Lord, not you too,” Daphne complained. “The two of you do realize that Hugh is a duke, don’t you? They are not known for their industriousness. He’s supposed to lay about and think about how marvelous it is to inherit such vast tracts of land.”

Persephone felt that laughing at this admittedly amusing comment would give Daphne unwarranted encouragement.

“Yes, but he’s working to restore the dukedom,” she countered. “That’s noble, isn’t it? That he cares about the people who are beholden to him.”

“Oh, of course it’s noble ,” Daphne said. “That’s the problem; you can’t tell him to stop being stupid when he’s being decent and generous and honorable and all the things that every man of his status should be but too often isn’t. I understand that. But I also know that he’s completely full of nonsense because the dukedom is doing fine .”

Persephone was back to feeling as though things were surreal again. She’d started this conversation with the undisputed moral high ground. She was a married lady who had not snuck out of the house in the dead of night, while Daphne was a girl of only sixteen who had apparently robbed half a dozen men of their clothing and taken to the streets.

In Whitechapel .

Even so, Persephone felt as though she was losing some kind of argument. She just wasn’t sure what the argument was about.

“But the death duties,” she said numbly.

Daphne waved a hand. “Oh, yes. Well, the thing is, I got to thinking after we spoke the other day. Because the club is supposedly doing well, isn’t it? And he had enough money to pay off your father’s debts.”

That was…a good point.

“How did you know about that?” Persephone asked.

“The girls snoop,” Daphne told her. “But they are terrible at keeping secrets. They heard someone discussing dowries, then had about a thousand questions about what a dowry is , and we were staying with my mother, unfortunately, and she does not have a terribly strong sense of what counts as reasonable privacy , so she told them all she knew from Society gossip.”

“Oh.”

That was…a little embarrassing. But personal feelings about her father’s gambling were not presently at the top of her list of immediate concerns, so Persephone put this aside.

“And then,” Daphne went on, unabashed, “I decided to do some snooping of my own. So, since Hugh had absented himself, I let myself into his study to read his papers.”

“Daphne!”

The younger woman shrugged. “Hugh keeps too many secrets in the name of ‘protection.’ It is a terrible habit of his. How else am I supposed to know anything about anything?”

Persephone felt that she should protest this but found that she couldn’t. She rather wished she had snooped in her father’s affairs before things had gotten as bad as they had.

She settled on “Please don’t do it again.” Daphne did not agree to this, but she didn’t disagree, either, and Persephone decided she’d done her duty, at least for tonight.

“Anyway,” Daphne concluded with an air of triumph, “the club is, as it happens, doing exceedingly well. And it functions largely without Hugh’s interference. Therefore, if he is staying there for days on end, it is not because he is working, as he claims, but because he is being a big cowardly baby.”

This seemed, to Daphne, to be a meaningful proclamation. A victory, even.

Persephone wasn’t entirely sure where that left them.

“All right,” she said. “I take it he didn’t agree.”

“Well, no,” Daphne said, giving Persephone a look that said she was missing the point entirely. “But you realize what you have to do, don’t you?”

“I assure you that I very much do not.” Persephone was so tired.

The earnest look that Daphne gave her was almost comical. “You have to go to him .”

This bit Daphne said with such relish that Persephone wondered if anyone had ever checked up on the girl’s reading habits. It sounded rather as though she spent a great deal of time reading highly dramatic romances.

“Go to him and…tell him about his own financial affairs?” Persephone said hesitantly. “I mean, I suppose I could, but I don’t think he’d thank me for it.”

Daphne looked disappointed in her. Persephone found that it stung.

“No, of course not,” she said. “You have to go and tell him to come home. Tell him that the club doesn’t need him but that we do .”

Her voice broke a little on these last words. Persephone felt keenly aware, in that moment, that Daphne was barely out of childhood, that she’d been asked to assume adult responsibilities very young in her life, and that Hugh was more or less the only parent she’d ever known.

This meant that if she went to Hugh and asked him to come home, she wouldn’t be doing it just because she was struggling to sleep, or because—as much as she was trying not to admit it to herself—she missed him.

She would be doing it for Daphne. And that was reason enough for her.

“All right,” she told the girl. “I’ll speak with him.”

Daphne’s eyes lit up like Persephone had promised her the sun and the stars, not just to have a conversation with her own husband.

“You will?” she asked.

The hope in Daphne’s expression mirrored the optimistic way the girls looked whenever they heard that their Uncle Hugh would come to spend time with them. Daphne was right; the family did need him more than his club or his tenants or his employees.

Hugh needed to recognize that those girls—all four of them—were his family. And any heir the two of them produced would need their father, as well. Persephone was prepared to give him a piece of her mind on this matter. She would fight for those children, even the one that was nearly grown.

Even the one that was perhaps not yet growing at all.

And maybe, just maybe, she’d fight for herself, too.

“Yes,” she told Daphne firmly. “I am going to tell him that he has a choice to make. And that he had better be certain that he makes the right one.”