Page 170 of The Ladies Least Likely

CHAPTER TWENTY

“ H ighness?” A strange voice whispered to Harriette in German. “Highness, it is time to wake up now.”

Harriette groaned and thrashed as an awful smell assaulted her nostrils.

Her eyelids felt glued shut, but she wrenched them open and looked about her.

The canopy of a bed, the drapes stained and covered with dust; a small room with wooden walls with no decoration, just bare planks; a chair before the fire, a small table next to it, but no fire in the grate.

She was cold. She lay in her black gown in a strange bed, and she sat up so quickly her head whirled.

A hoarse cry rasped from her throat when she recognized the man standing next to the mattress.

“You! I intend to have you thrown in gaol for kidnapping.”

Her voice didn’t work right. Her throat hurt terribly, the consequence no doubt of his choking her until she fell unconscious.

Harriette scrambled out of the bed, grateful to note that her arms and legs responded to her will, that she didn’t appear to be injured or otherwise manhandled.

“What did you do to me while I was out?”

“ Nichts , Serene Highness,” he said indignantly. “But I knew you would not come with me if I asked.”

Harriette glanced around the room again.

They were alone. A tray of cheese and bread and small beer stood on the table next to the chair.

Her velvet cloak hung from a peg. She still wore her boots.

She patted herself down quickly, found her porte crayon in one pocket and her sketchbook in another.

She ought to pull it out and capture the villain, but she went to retrieve her cloak first. The room was cold despite the tiny fire, and the gray gloom at the window told her it was either late evening or early morning.

“What time is it?”

“The duel will be soon,” the man said. “We must stop it.”

Harriette sighed with relief, which soon turned to irritation. “I meant to stop it until you abducted me.”

“ Entschuldigung, bitte, ” he apologized politely, and Harriette nearly laughed.

“Let me guess. You are Dietz?”

He bowed.

“And Franz Karl did not come to his senses?”

It was part of the unwritten code duello that time should pass between the issuing of the challenge and meeting upon the field of honor, during which time every effort would be made by the seconds and others to dissuade the aggrieved party from pursuing a course leading to possible loss of life.

That Franz Karl had defied the English custom and insisted recklessly on satisfaction showed his character in no better light than what she had already concluded about him.

The manservant shook his head, his face covered in distress. Harriette felt her insides twist. “Do you know where they are? And how to get there?”

He gestured hesitantly toward the window, and Harriette ran to it.

In the narrow street before the tavern, empty at this predawn hour, stood the Countess of Calenberg’s cabriolet, with Beater on the platform and Jock atop the horse.

Abassi sat in the driver’s seat holding the reins.

A case that held the former Count of Calenberg’s prized dueling pistols covered the seat beside him.

“I deliver the weapons,” Abassi called up. The gleam of his smile lifted her heart. “But I tink we do better than dat, yah?”

Harriette clattered down the stairs to the street, Dietz trundling behind. She was beside Abassi in a flash, urging him into motion, while Dietz scrambled onto the platform beside Beater.

“Do you know where we’re going?”

“Th’ molly does,” Beater groused, jerking his chin toward Dietz.

Harriette turned and studied the man’s face. The servant flushed a dull red, but he didn’t attack Beater as a man would if the accusation were false.

“You are his valet? Bodyguard? Companion?”

Dietz set his square, overlarge jaw and looked straight ahead with a stony expression. “You know he is to marry me,” Harriette pressed. “What do you think of that?”

The man’s ears burned red. “It is the way of the world, Highness,” he bit out.

Harriette turned to face forward as Jock navigated the horse through the narrow streets. They moved through some older part of London she didn’t know, but she trusted her aunt’s men with her life. And Ren’s. The life of the man she loved.

And Dietz had stolen her from Renwick House because he wanted her to save the life of the man he loved, if she could.

The signs of the city melted away into farmland, and they came to a pasture with a large oak tree in one corner and a fence of crossed wood.

A building sat in the distance in one direction and a copse of trees in the other, but all Harriette saw was the cluster of men beneath the tree.

Franz Karl, in a suit of a truly stomach-turning pea-green, wearing a powdered wig and a smug, murderous expression.

And Ren, her beloved Ren, in an understated brown suit with a golden waistcoat and his white-tipped riding boots, the early sun catching golden glints in his unpowdered hair.

Harriette threw herself out of the coach before it had fully halted and stumbled toward the group of men.

“Stop,” she cried hoarsely, the word barely a whisper. “You must stop.”

Franz Karl’s eyes narrowed as he glared at her, then sent an accusing look at Dietz. His manservant stared at the dirt path.

“I will not stop!” Franz Karl cried. “I demand satisfaction!”

“You have no reason to shoot him.”

Harriette threw herself in front of Ren. He leaned on his cane—she knew his leg pained him in the morning, especially if he’d not had a chance to do his stretching exercises. Unable to stop herself, she laid a hand on his chest, but faced her cousin.

“There is no satisfaction, Franz,” she said, trying to infuse her half-whispered cry with authority. “I am not going to marry you.”

Franz’s mouth sagged open. “Was ist das ?”

The other gentlemen watched in amusement and surprise. Franz’s second looked to be someone he had recruited from the tavern, a workman in a fustian coat who yawned and scratched his belly.

Ren’s second was an extremely elegant man, as well-dressed as Ren, his face and form made of clean, graceful lines that on another day would have made her reach for her crayon.

But he wasn’t nearly as handsome as Ren, who stared down at her wearing an inscrutable look.

Normally she could read his every thought in his eyes, but he watched her soberly, gravely, giving nothing away.

Harriette faced her cousin. “I dishonor my mother to do this. I break the promise my grandfather made to yours. I am sorry for that.” She lifted her chin.

“But I cannot chain us to a life of misery, Franz. Not for them, and not for Lowenburg. There is no earthly reason we need to keep their contract. We can find another way to reconcile our family.”

“Not another way for me to become a duke !” Franz Karl shrieked. He turned on his man. “Dietz! How could you bring her here? After all we planned—after everything—” He dissolved into a fury of swift scolding that made Dietz’s shoulders sag.

“What are you saying, Harriette?” Ren asked gravely. “I don’t know any German beyond Guten Tag. ”

“I won’t marry him,” Harriette said shortly.

Ren’s fingers closed around the hand she held to his chest. “What?”

“I know you need to marry someone else. I shall have to figure out what to do with Lowenburg. But I cannot—nay, I will not—marry my cousin, and that is that.”

She faced the quarreling Prussians. “I am the Duchess of Lowenburg,” Harriette said clearly, and in English. She knew her cousin understood her for his head whipped around, his face set in a scowl.

“I claim that title and all the lands, titles, and duties appertaining. And,” she went on steadily, as her cousin began to sputter again, “I intend to appoint Franz Karl as my steward over the duchy of Lowenburg. He will live in the castle—with Dietz—and have a home there all his life. I will insist that he govern well and wisely, according to the policies I put in place.”

She glared at the astonished Franz. “I shall visit often, and if I do not find things to my liking, you will not like it. But if you will consent, I shall grant you full authority to act in my name and in my stead.”

Franz opened his mouth, then closed it. He looked over at his body servant. Dietz looked back and forth between the two of them as if he didn’t understand what she was saying. Harriette repeated herself in German. “You understand me, ja ?”

Wonder warred with suspicion on her cousin’s face. “Why should I accept being your steward when I can have full authority as your husband?”

Harriette walked to where Abassi stood over the case of dueling pistols, which he and Ren’s second, the draper, stood admiring.

She picked up one of the pistols, a beautiful piece of work, inlaid with silver.

For a moment she hefted it, admiring its weight and balance.

Then she marched to her cousin and handed him the pistol, butt first.

“If you wish to be Duke of Lowenburg, you will have to kill me.” Her voice carried in the clear, damp morning air.

“For I will not marry you, Franz, and I will not relinquish my claim. That title is the one thing my mother gave me, that she gave up her entire life so I would have it. I intend to do right by her people—your people—as much as I can. But I will not sacrifice my happiness, nor yours.”

She stood before him, waiting for his decision. Franz looked at the pistol.

“If you raise that pistol, I will kill you before it fires,” Ren said, his voice quiet and ominous.

“Will the seconds have to fight, then?” the draper drawled.