Page 1 of The Duke of Cups (The Highwaymen #3)

HYACINTH THOMAS WAS not truly a British heiress, but no one knew that.

“You must be bored with balls by now,” said Hyacinth’s friend, Marian, who was now the Countess of Billingsworth.

Marian and Hyacinth had come out together, three years before, and last Season, they’d both been hopefuls.

Marian had gotten married. Hyacinth had not.

“You have danced with every eligible man in the entire country, I daresay. This ball, this year, it must be a frightful disappointment.”

“Well, I am hopeful to make a match this year,” said Hyacinth.

She and Marian were standing on the periphery at a large public ball in London, the first one of the Season.

It was February. Not everyone was back in London, not quite yet.

The rest of the ton would be arriving over the coming weeks.

This first ball was for those of upper class who’d come back early, to ring in the beginning of the Season.

“So, I must not allow myself to become too bored.”

“Yes, but look at them all,” said Marian. “There are only so many men left to marry. Who is it that you have not already rejected, Hyacinth? You do have such high standards.”

“Well,” said Hyacinth, “I am choosing the man who I will marry and spend the rest of my life with, after all.”

In truth, Hyacinth’s mother had been French, a woman who had come to England as an ex-patriot in the wake of the Revolution there.

Her mother had been married to a French nobleman, but he had not escaped France and had been executed on the guillotine.

Her mother had come to England, given birth, and promptly died, as mothers (and babes, truly) were wont to do.

Hyacinth could have been adrift, farmed out as a poor and pathetic little French ward to some family or other, but it had not gone that way.

Her mother’s dear friend, Seraphine Mertuelle, the Marchioness de Fateux, had intervened (with a little help from her friend the Comte Champeraigne) and had set it all up differently for Hyacinth.

First, she’d changed Hyacinth’s name. Hyacinth had been born Hortense, but when Seraphine arranged Hyacinth’s living situation, she said she was English, through and through, and that she was the daughter of a wealthy tradesman who had put a great deal of money away for Hyacinth in trust. Since money did seem to trickle in with regularity to Hyacinth’s foster family, there was no reason to question it.

In actuality, however, that money came from Seraphine, and it was all acquired quickly and sent off in service of Seraphine’s various schemes.

So, Hyacinth truly had no dowry, though it was rumored, and everyone thought, she did.

Everyone interacted with her as if she had a great deal of money, hundreds of thousands of pounds. In truth, she was a pauper.

If Hyacinth had been as wealthy as rumored, she would already be married.

She had been highly sought after by many a male suitor for the three Seasons she had been out in society, but almost all of them had been fortune hunters, and Seraphine said she must never settle for a man who had no money.

No, no, my dear, said Seraphine, you must marry a man who has enough money that he will not care when he discovers you have none. You must marry a man who wants you for your charms and your womanly skills. You must make a man fall hopelessly in love with you.

Seraphine talked about making a man fall in love as if it was easy.

Maybe it was for Seraphine.

She had a husband and a devoted lover (Comte Champeraigne) and she was regularly entertaining three or four other men to various degrees.

For some years, she had kept the Duke of Arthford on a leash, and he would do her bidding as she saw fit, and this was true, even though Seraphine was over ten years the man’s senior.

But then Seraphine and Arthford had some sort of falling out, and now the duke was married, anyway, and utterly uninterested in her.

“There’s the Earl of Yinshire,” said Marian. “He did offer for you last year, didn’t he? I don’t see why you rejected him.”

“He was only after my fortune, Marian,” said Hyacinth. “As you well know.”

“Yes, and what about the Baron Nessex? Also just after your fortune?”

“He has massive gambling debts,” said Hyacinth. “I told you this.”

Hyacinth had been unable to make any man fall in love with anything other than her fabled and utterly pretend dowry.

“Hyacinth, I don’t really see why this is a problem,” said Marian. “All men have gambling debts.”

“A man with debts like his would beggar me before my old age,” said Hyacinth. “I’m not even remotely interested in a man like that.”

She was nineteen years old and entering into her third Season.

She was not on the shelf, not quite yet, but the idea of that was breathing down her neck, and she must get married and soon, for she could not support herself on her own, and she did not know, at what point, Seraphine would simply decide to stop providing for her.

Seraphine was devoted, out of the love she had borne for Hyacinth’s mother, but she was not capable of supporting Hyacinth forever. Seraphine had to scheme and trade favors and play games to get whatever money she had. Seraphine had no income herself and neither did her husband, nor her lover.

At any point, Seraphine might decide to stop siphoning money from her various enterprises to buy Hyacinth her dresses and the like, the elaborate dresses made to keep up the charade that Hyacinth was effortlessly wealthy and well established.

“Well,” said Marian, “there are the dukes, of course, though they are dropping like flies. Two summers ago, we lost Nothshire, and then Arthford got married in the fall last year. Truly, both of them getting married outside of the Season? It’s truly cheating, if you ask me.

If a man goes off and gets married in the summer or fall, how is anyone supposed to compete? ”

Hyacinth knew who Marian was speaking of. There were four of these dukes. There were only two unmarried ones now, the Duke of Dunrose and the Duke of Rutchester.

Both of these men were at the ball, across the room, even now, not dancing with anyone, sipping at glasses of wine and surveying the gathering.

The four dukes ran around rather like a pack of wild dogs, carousing and being playboys, doing everything in each other’s company. Well, anyway, they had before they all started getting married.

“The dukes are young for marriage,” mused Hyacinth. “Or, at least, we had all assumed so before they started getting married left and right.”

“Only two are married. Nothshire married someone at least a little bit respectable,” said Marian, “but Arthford, well…” She shuddered.

The Duke of Nothshire had married a young widow. She’d been married to the Viscount of Balley, although briefly. Hyacinth knew Patience well enough, though the woman had gone off to Nothshire’s country estate in, well, Nothshire, and had just given birth her first child.

The Duke of Arthford, however, had married some woman named Marjorie Adams, no title, though she was a gentleman’s daughter.

Her father had been one of the lower landed gentry, owning some country estate somewhere or other.

The thing about Miss Adams (or the Duchess of Arthford, as she now was) was that she had been ruined.

No one told young virginal heiresses like Hyacinth the details when a woman was ruined, though, because it was not for a young girl’s ears.

This meant that young girls like Hyacinth tended to speculate amongst themselves, inventing wild and strange stories about ruined women, and the rumor mill had it that the former Miss Adams had been a proper courtesan, likely having bedded more than five and thirty men, and that she had been afflicted with the French disease (though Hyacinth usually termed it the Spanish disease, really, for she was French, and she did not think the disease had truly come from France) and that she was already starting to show signs of it and had probably gone at least halfway mad.

Hyacinth didn’t know the truth, though, and the newly married Duke and Duchess of Arthford had not deigned to come to town or to socialize in any way. They’d had a very private wedding and no one had been invited.

“Yes,” said Hyacinth to Marian, “it’s quite wretched. A loss of a perfectly eligible duke.” Of course, she could never have married Arthford, because she was not going to marry a man who’d had Seraphine as a mistress. It was too strange and nearly incestuous for her.

“Well, there are two left,” said Marian.

“But you’re right, they are young to be settled.

” Men usually started looking in earnest for wives in their early to mid-thirties.

Men could get married younger than that, but it was generally accepted that most men weren’t quite ready in their twenties.

Women, on the other hand, should be married off immediately, as soon as they were ripe for it, even as young as fourteen or fifteen sometimes.

That was why being nineteen meant Hyacinth was getting long in the tooth, even though the dukes were nearly ten years older than she.

She surveyed both Dunrose and Rutchester. Dunrose was slender, with sandy colored hair and a fair countenance. He had a way about him, though, a careless sort of arrogance .

Rutchester kept his hair long, all the way to his shoulders, even though it was not remotely the fashion for men to look thus. Rutchester always put her in mind of some kind of ferocious, ungroomed beast stuffed into a suit. She did not like the look of him.

“So, Dunrose,” she said to herself, tilting her head to one side.

“Oh, not that one,” said Marian, making a face. “He’s a drunk.”

“True,” said Hyacinth, nodding.

“I think he gambles, too. Riotously.”

“Yes, but he has country estates, all of which provide income, or so I understand,” said Hyacinth. “He doesn’t need to marry a woman with a dowry.”