Page 9 of Scoundrel Take Me Away (Dukes in Disguise #3)
Chapter Four
“And then I had to walk into Maidenhead and find a stable that was open and willing to lend me a couple of horses to get the curricle back to Ashbourn House— It’s not funny, Charlie!”
“Begging your pardon, miss,” grinned Charlie Truitt. “But it’s a little funny. Serves you right for sneaking out without telling Molly and me what you were about. You know we would’ve helped you.”
“I didn’t want to presume on our friendship, or get either of you in trouble,” Lucy protested.
“No fear of that.” Charlie leaned the kitchen chair back on two legs, hands behind his head. “Mrs. Drummond quite dotes on me. And Mr. Goring has been training me up to serve as underbutler, in case he ever wants to retire.”
“Oh Charlie, that would be wonderful,” Lucy exclaimed, immediately distracted from her own troubles. “You’ll be the youngest butler in the history of Ashbourn House!”
“First duke’s butler with West Indian grandparents, I’d wager.” He slanted Lucy a look. “First married one, too.”
Joy lit Lucy up like she’d swallowed a candle. “You finally asked Molly!”
“And she said yes.” Charlie accepted Lucy’s excited congratulations with a pleased, proud smile creasing his face. “So as I say, miss, Molly and I would do just about anything to help you. As we know we owe a lot of our current happy situation to you.”
“Nonsense,” Lucy said, flopping back into her own seat with a satisfied sigh. “You owe it all to your own hard work and personal charm. I’ve had no hand in it!”
“Aside from saving my life that day on the Thames riverbank,” Charlie said, arching a thick, skeptical brow.
“And then visiting me in the surgery and convincing your brother to hire me on as a footman. And sending Molly home from France when by rights she ought to have been keeping you out of trouble! She still feels badly about that.”
“Nonsense. I didn’t want anyone to keep me out of trouble.”
“But you need it,” Charlie said with the flat certainty of someone who had known Lucy for years and been party to some of her wilder schemes.
Lucy smiled around the bustling kitchen, still bubbling over with happiness for him and his romance with her ex-lady’s maid, Molly Jenkins. Her friendship with them—her comfort with everyone belowstairs, she supposed—was quite unusual among ladies of her class.
Most of her childhood friends had never set foot in the kitchens of their own houses, much less been on intimate terms with any servants.
But even before Lucy’s father died, she’d observed her mother’s warm, cordial relationships with her own lady’s maid and the ever-efficient housekeeper, Mrs. Drummond.
And then, of course, Papa had left them with nothing to their names but a derelict coaching inn in the middle of nowhere. Lucy and her sister, Gemma, had brought that place back to life with their own hands, working alongside the inn’s cook, Bess—who was now their sister, and a duchess.
Social distinctions were a mass delusion, Lucy thought. A fragile fiction that people of the ruling class clung to out of fear of what would happen if they were forced to acknowledge the humanity of those who served them.
Moving to Little Kissington to live at Five Mile House had been a wrench at the time, but now Lucy could only be grateful she’d spent so many formative years outside of that poisonous bubble of privilege.
Who would she have been if she’d been raised at Ashbourn House, debuted at eighteen with all the girls her same age, thrust onto the Marriage Mart to be passed directly from her father’s care to a husband’s? Lucy could hardly imagine that woman. She wasn’t sure she’d want to be friends with her.
Certainly not at the expense of her friendships with people like Bess, Charlie, and Molly.
She wondered if she could make The Gentle Rogue see that. Perhaps if she explained, he’d lift the ridiculous condition he’d placed on their continued meetings.
There was no point in Lucy spending time with a duke. Even the best duke in London—which Thornecliff positively was not—would not interest Lucy.
She had no desire to lock herself back into the prison she’d only barely escaped as a teenager.
“Was His Grace angry about the grays?”
Lucy bit her lip. She did feel badly about having lost her brother’s horses after taking them out without asking. At what age was one too old to still be getting into scrapes?
“I told him I’d replace them, but he just shook his head and said I could have come to him if I needed anything.”
“A common theme this morning,” Charlie commented mildly.
“All right, all right! I promise next time not to go haring off on my own. It’s been a while since I had anyone to consider other than myself.”
“Sounds lonely.”
“It was, at times.” Lucy sighed, thinking of her little attic room at the pensione in Florence, with its round window that looked out over the Arno and flooded her writing desk with Italian sunshine. “At other times, it was marvelous.”
“But you’re back to stay?” Charlie gave her a sharp look as he set down his finished cup of tea and stood to get back to his duties. “Molly told me she was unpacking your valise this morning.”
“Yes, when I tried to help she shooed me from the room and told me to distract you from your work instead of her.” Lucy laughed.
“I don’t know how long I’ll be staying. I should like to go home to Little Kissington to see Mama.
And Gemma and Hal, of course. But I came back to England because of Bess. ”
Charlie nodded soberly. “We’ve all been that worried about Her Grace. It’s good you’re home.”
Bess’s second pregnancy hadn’t been going as smoothly as her first. From the start, it had made her quite sickly, barely able to keep down more than broth, ginger biscuits, and weak tea.
Bess insisted she was fine but the tone of Nathaniel’s letters had gotten increasingly alarmed, and Lucy had needed to see for herself.
Not that she knew the first thing about midwifery, but Bess had taught her to make exquisite ginger biscuits. And she knew how to sit with someone and be entertaining, so she intended to do as much of that as Bess would allow.
For her part, Bess maintained that though this pregnancy was different, it was all still perfectly normal and Nathaniel was merely overreacting. She felt worst in the mornings and seemed to gradually improve over the course of the day, and some days were better than others.
Today, Lucy had awoken late only to find her sister-in-law still abed and resting. Lucy had caught Nathaniel on his way upstairs with Bess’s breakfast tray and made her confession concerning the theft of his prized matched grays.
An unpleasant start to the morning, but one she’d dreaded considerably less than the task she was about to undertake.
As if he could read her thoughts—it was simultaneously awful and wonderful to be suddenly surrounded once more by people who knew her well—Charlie said, “All right, that’s enough woolgathering for me. And enough procrastinating for you, miss. If you don’t mind me saying so.”
“What if I did mind?” Lucy grumbled, but she got to her feet as well and gathered up their tea things to wash. A scullery maid she didn’t know appeared before her, bobbed a curtsy, and whisked the teapot and cups from Lucy’s grasp before she could take a step.
“Duke’s sisters don’t do the washing up,” Charlie said with a tsk. “Leastways, not in a well-run household like this one. And anyroad, you’ve other things to be doing. Don’t you?”
With a sigh, Lucy gave up and went to her writing desk to scribble out a quick note. She handed the folded missive to Mr. Goring before she could overthink the wording or second-guess her tone.
“Please have this delivered to the Duke of Thornecliff,” she requested, feeling a little as though she’d signed her own death warrant.
“Should the footman await a reply, my lady?”
Lucy hesitated only briefly. “Bother. I suppose so. Might as well get it over with.”
Thanking Mr. Goring, Lucy turned back to the stairs and trudged up them toward Bess’s bedchamber. She had a copy of Northanger Abbey , and she thought she could make Bess laugh with the satire of their old mutual favorite, Gothic novels.
Lucy would offer to read aloud this morning, before she had to read whatever Thornecliff would write in response to her note, in which she’d had to grovel and apologize and ask if his offer to escort her about London was still on the table.
His reply would undoubtedly make her want to scream, vomit, or commit murder, so she really ought to make herself useful in whatever scant hours she had left before being carted off to Newgate Prison.
* * *
By the time the sleek, expensive-looking barouche box rolled to a gentle stop in front of Ashbourn House, Lucy’s native optimism had reasserted itself.
London was a vibrant city, and based on his popularity, one had to assume Thornecliff could be a pleasant, engaging companion if he put his mind to it.
And perhaps by spending more time in his company, she would be able to ascertain if there truly was some sort of dark ulterior motive to his friendship with her family, or if he was, indeed, a changed man.
Surely this outing wouldn’t be a complete waste of her time.
That outlook lasted exactly as long as it took for Thornecliff’s carriage driver, a burly man turned out in head-to-toe ivory satin livery including a curled and powdered wig, to spring down from his perch to unfold the step and hand Lucy into the carriage.
The carriage was open, with only a light hood to shade them from the sun while not shielding them at all from the observation of onlookers. There was room for Molly to sit beside the driver on the box, fulfilling the tedious obligation of an unmarried lady at least appearing to be chaperoned.