Page 3 of The Duke’s Christmas Bride (Drop Dead Dukes #3)
C HAPTER 2
I t had taken fifteen years, one battered carriage, two lost horseshoes, and irreparable damage to his right arse cheek for Maxwell Alastair Hammond Burke, the Tenth Duke of Grantham, Viscount Hammond, to return to the village of his birth.
Fifteen years and eight hours, that is. Eight interminable, bone-rattling hours of travel from London to Fairford, the carriage tilting crazily with every inch of rutted road that passed under its wheels, his body aching and his backside battered beyond the telling of it, only to find ruin at the end of his journey.
Not figurative ruin, either, but actual ruin.
A heavy blanket of snow covered the gardens, but choked weeds and gnarled roots jutted up from underneath the thick carpet of white like bony fingers, and the once-tidy pathways were now a wilderness of overgrown shrubs and untrimmed hedges.
It was positively uncivilized to a gentleman accustomed to the manicured grounds of Hyde Park, but if possible, the house was in even greater disarray than the gardens. Crumbling stone walls staggered under the weight of a sagging roof, and three of the four bedchamber windows on the third floor were cracked, the slashes in the glass like ugly scars on an otherwise smooth cheek, the raw edges glinting in the weak light.
If he’d had a smidgen of forbearance left, even the thinnest thread of good humor, the sight of the old place after all these years would have extinguished it in an instant.
He didn’t, as it happened.
He’d lost any claim to proper human feeling when they’d reached Hermitage, and his flask of brandy had run dry. Why hadn’t he thought to bring two flasks? Or the whole bottle, come to that? He wasn’t given to heavy drinking, but a sojourn in the godforsaken village of Fairford could drive the soberest of men into his cups.
Was it any wonder his father had found his death at the bottom of a bottle?
But this was no time to think about his father’s disgraceful end. There was never a proper time to think about that . He generally made a point of not doing so, but damned if the mere sight of Hammond Court didn’t set all those old ghosts free again.
He’d only just arrived, and already he was growing mawkish.
But he was here now, and the sooner he got this over with, the sooner he could leave and forget about Fairford for another two decades. He stepped up to the front door, seized the knob, and gave it a hard twist, but for all that the rest of the house was falling to bits, the iron lock on the front door appeared to be maddeningly intact.
He backed up and scanned the front of the house. It was early, not yet seven o’clock, but there wasn’t a flicker of light to be seen behind the windows, or a curl of smoke rising from any of the four soot-stained chimneys ranging across the lopsided roof.
Abandoned, of course, and just as well. The place was a bloody hazard.
Behind him, his coachman stirred. “All right, Your Grace?”
Max turned and glanced back at Bryce. He’d ordered him to stop halfway up the drive to save his carriage springs, which had been popping loose with every turn of the carriage wheels over the rutted drive. “Just a bit of trouble with the door, Bryce.”
He grasped the knob again and gave it a vigorous shake. The lock held steady, but the same couldn’t be said of the doorknob itself, which rattled in its setting, the wood around it cracked and shredding.
A hard kick would see the thing done. It wasn’t quite the dignified entrance he’d envisioned, but he had , after all, been invited. He retreated a step, braced himself, and struck the knob with the side of his boot.
Nothing. The blasted thing held fast.
“Damn it.” He struck it a second time, giving in to a fit of temper utterly unworthy of a gentleman, and most particularly a duke.
Bryce let out a startled gasp. “Your Grace?”
Max sucked in a deep draught of freezing air until he was able to face his driver with his usual sangfroid. “It’s all right, Bryce. Remain with the carriage.”
It was just as well if Bryce wasn’t close enough to witness what he intended to do next. Kicking doors down was not proper ducal behavior, but this was his house, his door, and his doorknob, or they would be, soon enough, and he may abuse them as he pleased.
“Can I help, Your Grace?” Bryce called out again, clearly alarmed.
Help? No, he was well past the point of help now. If he hadn’t been, he would have returned to his carriage, ordered Bryce to take him to Grantham Lodge where a meal, a bath, and a comfortable bed awaited him, and return later with a few sturdy footmen in tow.
But where his past was concerned? He was a perfectly rational duke, run mad in the Cotswolds. “No. I’ve got it, Bryce.”
“Yes, Your Grace.” Bryce cast a dubious glance at him. “If you’re quite sure, Your Grace.”
He wasn’t sure of a damned thing anymore, except that he would get into this house, one way or another. “I’m sure. Wait there.”
He retreated a few steps, then ran at the door, aiming a kick at the doorknob. This time he struck it dead on with his heel. A crack echoed in the frosty air as the wood splintered, and the knob and the plate that affixed it to the door dropped to the ground like birds shot from the sky.
Ah, good. That would do.
He pushed the door open and ducked through it, coughing as a cloud of dust rained down on him, ruining a perfectly good beaver hat. He paused on the threshold, but there wasn’t much to see with the dull gray sky above greedily hoarding what little light there was.
But he didn’t need any light to know the way. Even after so many years, and with half the furnishings shrouded in dust cloths, he moved easily from room to room, memory guiding him.
It was strange, how little things changed.
It had been nineteen years since he’d set foot inside this house—fifteen since he’d set foot in Fairford itself—but he knew it as well as he knew the lines intersecting the palm of his hand. Every decorative plaster cornice, every one of the hundreds of pieces of crystal dangling from the heavy chandelier in the entryway, and every inch of the wooden floorboards under his feet.
Time had taken liberties with the cursed old place, but otherwise, it hadn’t changed as much as he’d expected. It was still the same house in which he’d run wild as a small boy—or what was left of it, after nineteen years in Ambrose St. Claire’s careless hands.
It wasn’t surprising. Everything Ambrose touched, he ruined.
Not just houses, but people, too. Lives.
Ambrose was the reason he would never be able to truly come home again—the reason his boyish adoration for his once-beloved home had turned into a man’s implacable hatred. But that was the way of things, wasn’t it? Love and hate were inextricably linked, different sides of the same coin, a mere flick of a thumb the only thing separating one from the other.
He ambled through the rooms on the main floor, taking care to sidestep the floorboards that had swollen and warped with age and damp, wandering from the entryway with the grand, carved-wood staircase down the hallway toward his father’s study, with the library on the left, and the drawing and music rooms on the right, each a faded version of what they’d once been, and everything hidden under a thick layer of dust.
He made his way down the corridor and the servants’ staircase, the thud of his footsteps much too loud in the silent house. The kitchen hadn’t changed. The same copper pots still hung from the rack over the stove, and the old table still took pride of place in the center of the room.
He rested his hand on the scrubbed wooden surface. He and his mother used to sit here together on cold winter afternoons, feasting on warm chocolate and her special ginger biscuits, the same recipe his grandmother had used to make for her when she was a girl. He’d never tasted any as delicious. Even Gunther’s, for all that it offered the most celebrated sweets in London, couldn’t produce a ginger biscuit to rival his mother’s.
He cleared the sudden thickness from his throat. How absurd. That had been a lifetime ago, and his mother was long since dead and buried. Still, he couldn’t resist running his hand under the edge of the table, a smile rising to his lips when he felt the familiar indentation under his fingertips.
Four letters—M, A, H, and B, for Maxwell Alastair Hammond Burke.
He’d carved them with one of the cook’s sharp kitchen knives when he was seven years old. He’d wanted to carve his entire name, but it was too long, so he’d settled for his initials to save his backside from the thrashing he certainly would have gotten if Mrs. Archibald had caught him abusing her precious knives. The letters weren’t as distinct as they’d once been, the edges of each dulled with wear and time, but they were still here, the wood smooth and clean under his fingertips—
Clean? His head jerked up, the hair on the back of his neck rising as he glanced around the space. The table had been recently scrubbed clean. The polished copper pots gleamed in their place over the stove, and there wasn’t a speck of ash in the massive stone fireplace that dominated the room. The iron kettle sat atop the stove, with coals stacked neatly in the firebox underneath it, and the flagstone floors were swept clean.
Nearly every stick of furniture on the main floor was shrouded with sheeting and coated with dust, but here in the kitchen, there wasn’t a single streak of dirt or a cobweb to be seen. It was as spotless as it had been when Mrs. Archibald had presided over it, almost as if . . .
Someone had been in here.
He turned about in a circle, peering into the shadowy corners.
That was when he heard it.
It was so faint it would have been inaudible to anyone whose ears weren’t straining against the silence. The soft scuff of a footfall over the floorboards, a creak, and then louder, from behind him, the unmistakable click of a pistol being cocked.
Then a voice, soft and steady. “I don’t know who you are, or what you’re doing here, but I demand you leave at once.”
He whirled around, but by then it was already too late. A figure was advancing toward him from the deepest shadows hovering around the archway that led into the stillroom—a figure clad in a filmy white gown with a cloak thrown over the top of it.
She—for it was a she , and rather a small, slight she at that—was not at all an intimidating figure, aside from the pistol balanced in her hand. It was no pretty little muff pistol, either, but a double-barreled flintlock dueling pistol that was more than capable of blowing a sizable hole in his chest.
“Turn around, and go back out the way you came in.” Her voice was calm, even polite, but there wasn’t so much as a quiver in the hand that held the pistol, and her finger was steady on the trigger. “Now, if you please.”
As assassins went, she was a remarkably courteous one. Surely, such a gracious, soft-spoken lady wouldn’t actually fire on him? “If I don’t, madam? What then?”
She raised the muzzle of the gun—higher, then higher still, until it was no longer aimed at his chest, but right between his eyes. “Then I’m afraid I’ll have to shoot you.”