Page 5 of Where Have All the Scoundrels Gone (Dukes in Disguise #2)

Chapter Five

“Of all the arrogant, insufferable, high-handed, pig-headed, unreasonable, snobbish, hateful?—”

Bess took a sip of tea and waited for Lucy to run out of epithets. But Lucy was a self-described scribbler, always writing stories and anecdotes on whatever scraps of paper she could find. She seemed likely to run out of breath before she ran out of insults to lob at her absent half-brother.

“Oh, my dear girl, must you?” Henrietta interjected, wringing her hands together and twisting her dainty lace handkerchief into knots. “I need to think. What is best to be done?”

“We should tell Ashbourn exactly where he can stick his unmannerly, ungentlemanly invitation!” Lucy was out of breath, her eyes blazing and cheeks red with the heat of her fury.

“Have some tea,” Bess suggested, pouring out a cup. “Settle your nerves.”

“My nerves don’t need settling! I am perfectly calm!”

Bess met Henrietta’s fondly wry look over the rim of her teacup. For someone who’d been known to indulge in a few dramatics of her own, once upon a time, Henrietta had steadied over the months Bess had known her. She’d gone from a frail shadow locked in her own personal grief for the loss of her beloved husband, to a mother her two grown daughters could rely upon.

She was someone Bess could rely upon. And for Bess, who’d lost her own mother at the tender age of sixteen, the kindness, care, and attention Henrietta shared in such abundance was something to treasure. Bess absolutely adored her.

So when Henrietta bit her lip and said, “I hate to say it, but I think we ought to consider the duke’s offer,” Bess already knew what would happen.

“Absolutely not,” Lucy cried, with predictable vehemence.

“If,” Henrietta said, with emphasis. “ If , Bess, it’s not too much of an imposition to ask you to stay with Lucy, as her chaperone.”

“I don’t need a chaperone, because I’m not staying!” Lucy gripped the back of a spindly legged chair, white-knuckled. “And Bess doesn’t want to be my chaperone, Mama. She doesn’t like Ashbourn any more than I do—it wouldn’t be fair to ask her to spend any more time with him than she already has.”

Henrietta had gone back to torturing her handkerchief, but her faded blue eyes were steady on Bess’s face. “You’re right, Lucy. It isn’t fair. In fact, it’s very wrong of me to presume upon Bess’s generous nature. But we are in a bit of a pickle! Your sister and my darling new son-in-law have contributed all they can afford, at present, to this endeavor. These rooms cost money, new gowns cost money, and you honestly need far more of them than we’ve been able to order, but between the refurbishment of Kissington House and the repairs to the tenant farms and whatnot, there just aren’t a lot of surplus funds. Truthfully, I think it would ease your sister’s burdens quite a bit if we were to let this place go and avoid paying the rent for the rest of the summer.”

“Yes, yes, Gemma is very busy and has made so many sacrifices for me.” Lucy swung moodily into her chair, slouched and spiky as a hedgehog.

“You know how much Gemma wanted to be here with you, but?—”

“I know, I know. Newlyweds.” Lucy pulled the face of someone who had accidentally walked in on Gemma and Hal enjoying their newly wedded status in one of the many corners of Little Kissington that had now borne witness to their conjugal bliss.

Bess sympathized utterly. If she could’ve scrubbed her brain with a vinegar solution to rid it of the images of the boy she’d grown up with in the throes of passion, she would have.

“And I, myself, would give anything to be able to help you, to be here when you make your debut,” Henrietta went on, voice going a little thready with impending tears. “And to see everyone at Ashbourn House, all our people! But it is not to be. Your brother has a will of iron; he takes after your dear father in that way.”

Bess wondered. She had never met the previous Duke of Ashbourn, but everything she’d heard about him suggested a man of great charm and lively disposition—not necessarily a man who laid down the law about anything.

She couldn’t imagine that the current duke took after him much at all.

“I could wish that…well. If wishes were horses, something something, I can’t quite recall. But wishes aren’t horses, are they? Which is to say, Lucy, my girl, I know you’d like to come home with me. And Bess, I’m sure you wish the same. But I’m asking both of you to stay. Try to make the most of this opportunity—this chance to right the wrongs your father and I did in the way we raised you, Lucy.”

Lucy bit her lip and turned pleading eyes on Bess, who understood at once that Lucy hoped Bess would be the one to gently refuse Henrietta’s request.

“Come, Bess. Tell her it’s a travesty. I know you think as ill of Ashbourn as I do, and have as little wish to put yourself under the control of such a horrid, stuck-up, disagreeable man.”

Lucy could not have been more correct. This was not at all the manner in which Bess would’ve chosen to extend her stay in London. To have the great metropolis spread out at her feet, and all its varied wonders and delights entirely closed to her?

And all the while to be faced with the humiliating fact that while she’d come near as damn it to losing her entire head over an almost-kiss with Nathaniel Lively, the Duke of Ashbourn—he had been nowhere near as affected.

But what she’d said to him in that carriage was true. Bess truly believed that Lucy could and should have choices, and that a reconciliation with Ashbourn was the best way forward.

Bess looked at Henrietta, anxious and fluttery and with those occasional flashes of startling wisdom. She looked at Lucy, loyal and headstrong, yet sweet underneath it all.

It was true, too, that Bess loved these women, these new friends who had upended her life and welcomed her into their family. She would do anything for them, she’d said, and she’d meant it. So how could she refuse?

Bess took a deep breath and shoved down her own misgivings. “Of course, I’ll stay. It won’t be so very bad, Lucy—there will be balls and outings now, all sorts of invitations to interesting things to see and do, I’ll warrant. We shall have fun, in spite of the duke, if need be!”

Disappointed, Lucy shook her head. “You don’t really believe that. I wish you’d say how you really feel.”

“Oh, dear. It is a lot to ask.” Having secured Bess’s cooperation, Henrietta began to fret.

“It’s nothing. Not for friends such as we,” Bess said firmly, setting down her teacup and reaching across the table to the two ladies. Henrietta clasped her hand at once, tears springing quickly to her eyes, and after a moment, Lucy grabbed ahold too.

“Ah yes,” Lucy sighed. “What are friends for, if not to impose on them and take advantage of their affection!”

She smiled a bit as she said it though, and Bess grinned back at her while Henrietta finally untwisted her handkerchief and used it to dab at her eyes.

It’s nothing , Bess repeated to herself. A few months out of your life. And if playing chaperone isn’t quite the adventure you hoped for, well, life is full of these little disappointments. You’ll do your part, and Lucy will be launched into Society, and then you’ll go home and that will be the end of it.

Just keep your head down and don’t put a toe out of line to ruin Lucy’s chances, and everything will be fine.

But as the women began to pack and make preparations for Henrietta’s journey back to Wiltshire, and Lucy and Bess’s move to Mayfair, Bess was uncomfortably aware that there was a small, foolish part of her heart that thrilled to the knowledge that soon she’d be living under the same roof as the Duke of Ashbourn.

* * *

Dinner the first night was nothing short of a disaster.

Nathaniel had introduced Lucy and her chaperone to his housekeeper that afternoon and made himself scarce, but he couldn’t in good conscience avoid seeing his houseguests at table.

Now they sat in thick, tense silence as the footmen served the main course.

His half-sister had a mulish set to her mouth and chin which boded ill for polite conversation, but Nathaniel felt it his duty to make the attempt.

“I hope you are settling in well.”

No reply from Lucy save a tightening of her fingers around the handle of the silver knife she was using to methodically dissect her roasted squab. Darting a quick look at her charge, Mrs. Pickford cleared her throat and answered, “Very well, thank you. The rooms are lovely.”

He’d asked Mrs. Drummond to put Lucy in her old room, with Mrs. Pickford across the hall for convenience.

Nathaniel would have liked to be able to say he’d given no thought to the fact that he’d placed Mrs. Pickford in the room beside his own bedchamber, but he could not. He would not permit himself to do more than think of it, however.

He had controlled himself in the carriage; he would continue to do so.

“I am glad,” he said calmly, taking a bite.

Silence blanketed the table once more. Nathaniel applied himself grimly to his meal and very carefully did not stare at Mrs. Pickford, luminous and lovely in the flickering candlelight.

“I do hope Mama has stopped for the night at a good coaching inn,” Lucy said, her voice overly loud as she sawed at her food. “It is awful that she had to travel home unaccompanied.”

“I lent her a carriage,” Nathaniel pointed out. “She will be perfectly safe and well cared for on her journey.”

“She’ll be alone .” Lucy scowled.

A state of affairs to be envied, Nathaniel thought, but didn’t say. He attempted to change the subject instead. “I’ve arranged for you to visit a modiste tomorrow, and your deportment lessons will commence after that. The Season has already begun, and we will have some catching up to do.”

“Deportment! What, as in which fork to use and how to curtsey? I’m nineteen years old, Ashbourn, not an infant. I know how to behave in company.”

If Lucy’s parents had ever troubled to instruct her on how to behave properly, Nathaniel would eat his napkin.

“Think of it as a refresher course,” he said blandly.

“I won’t do it.” Lucy’s silverware clattered as she threw it down on her porcelain plate.

A headache began to throb behind Nathaniel’s eyes. “I wasn’t asking.”

“What time should we be ready to go to the dressmaker’s tomorrow?” Mrs. Pickford put in hurriedly.

“At eleven,” Nathaniel said without looking away from his half-sister’s furious glare. “I shall accompany you.”

“Oh!” Mrs. Pickford sounded taken aback. “That’s not necessary, Your Grace.”

“Again,” Nathaniel said softly, turning his gaze upon her. “I wasn’t asking.”

Her lips thinned but she dropped her gaze to the tablecloth. Nathaniel’s stomach felt tight, but he doggedly kept eating.

The dinner devolved from there. Lucy, with some innate understanding of how best to annoy him, talked of nothing but her mother. By the time dessert was served, he had heard more about his father’s mistress-turned-wife than he had since the happy newlyweds packed him off to Eton at age eight.

Determined to regain his equilibrium, Nathaniel bore it as impassively as he could. His mind turned inescapably to one of his earliest memories of his own mother during his daily visit with her in the drawing room.

He had his mother to thank for his odd, indefinite eye color, Nathaniel knew, and that day her gaze had appeared the gray of a summer storm cloud as she regarded him gravely upon the carpet.

Nathaniel had been upset about something, he could no longer recall what, and he’d hoped for a hug and a kiss from Mama, though she was not as soft or as prone to cuddles as his nursemaid, who was perched upon the settee opposite with Nathaniel’s father, ostensibly there to manage any unruly behavior on Nathaniel’s part. Of course Nathaniel always did his best to behave, and not to do anything that would get him sent out of the drawing room before the teatime visit was over.

But that day, he’d been crying. And instead of a kiss, his mother had produced a pristine white handkerchief and told him to stop crying and to wipe his face clean.

When he’d done so, she’d let him come up into her lap as a reward. Leaning close, all her attention on him, she had said quietly, “Try not to feel things so deeply, my love. It can only bring you pain.”

It was sound advice, Nathaniel had always found. He’d forgotten it once or twice as a young man, and always to his detriment. But Lucy’s presence at Ashbourn House—his mother’s home—brought all those early memories, and their attendant feelings, close to the surface. For the first time in years, Nathaniel felt himself at the mercy of his emotions.

He did not care for it.

When Lucy dug her spoon savagely into her tasse à glace of pistachio ice and remarked that Henrietta would have loved to taste it, Nathaniel finally broke.

“Enough,” he snapped. “I see that I shall need to engage a tutor in the fine art of conversation if you are to have any success on the Marriage Mart. No man wants a woman who can talk of nothing but her mother.”

Lucy’s eyes narrowed. “I hate you.”

She threw down her napkin and stalked out of the dining room, leaving Nathaniel to face the narrow-eyed censure of Mrs. Pickford.

“You are fortunate enough to still have a family,” she said in a voice that seethed with emotion. “How can you treat them like this?”

Did that mean she had lost all her family? Nathaniel distracted himself from his inappropriate curiosity about Mrs. Pickford’s circumstances by taking another bite of his ice. “My half-sister has been allowed to run wild. If I don’t take the trouble of correcting her behavior, who will?”

“Lucy is a young girl.” She paused, her gaze fathomless, consuming him. “A young girl who feels lost and alone here, and misses her mother.”

There was nothing she could have said that would have made him feel like more of a villain. He, of all people, knew what it was to be without a mother’s care.

The ice turned to ashes in Nathaniel’s mouth. Swallowing as best he could, Nathaniel took a sip of wine to clear his throat. “You are right. I should not have spoken so.”

He thought her expression softened a bit. A trick of the candlelight, perhaps. “When we took our leave of the dowager duchess at Charlotte Street, before she went home, she told me she understood why it would be so hard for you to see her. She admitted you might have some cause for the grudge you hold against her. But if you could only see that your behavior makes it impossible for Lucy?—”

Nathaniel felt as though his heart had turned to solid rock, caving in the walls of his ribs around it. “I hold no grudge. It would not be ‘hard’ for me to see her. I feel nothing for her, one way or the other.”

“Of course. From time to time, don’t we all threaten to burn down our ancestral homes rather than open them to someone to whom we are perfectly indifferent.”

He stared at her down the length of the table. Apparently unconcerned, she took a serene bite of her ice.

“Perhaps I cannot claim indifference.” He picked up his glass of claret for something to do with his hands. “I’m sure you think I should have allowed Henrietta to accompany her daughter here. But I wonder if you recall, at all, the whirlwind of gossip that attended my father’s decision to marry my nursemaid.”

“Gossip.” She shrugged. “I don’t care much for gossip. And I care even less about gossip that is twenty-odd years out of date.”

He smiled faintly. “Then you are unique. Twenty years is as nothing when it comes to a scandal as titillating as a duke marrying a servant girl less than six months after his duchess’s death. The Ton has a long memory in such cases.”

Mrs. Pickford looked as if she would like to roll her eyes. “I suppose there would have been a few tongues set to wagging if Henrietta had joined her daughter here at Ashbourn House?—”

He couldn’t let that stand. Impatience bit his words off sharply. “Nothing so simple. Or benign.”

“What do you mean?”

Something was building in Nathaniel’s chest, something he had to strangle back before it burst forth and rampaged about the room. He gritted his teeth. “My father sent me to Eton when I was eight.”

She frowned. “I thought boys usually went off to school around the age of twelve.”

“Most do, but bear in mind, my father had just finally married the love of his life. And perhaps understandably, was tired of stumbling over an angry, miserable brat when he wished to be reveling in his newfound happiness.”

“You were—” Mrs. Pickford appeared to be struggling. “A child! A child grieving his mother. How could he?”

Nathaniel shrugged dismissively. “Many parents would have done the same.”

“Not good ones,” she snapped.

Uncomfortable with the intent way her gaze searched his face, Nathaniel continued. “I only mention it so that you may understand how pervasive the scandal was. I wasn’t in London, surrounded by adults who had known my mother and socialized with my father. I was away at school with a lot of young scions of the nobility who all, to a one, believed that my father ought to have his lands and titles stripped from him for what he had done.”

“But that’s…” Her brow furrowed. He didn’t want to notice that it was adorable. “That’s patently ridiculous.”

“Ridiculous or not, it was regarded as accepted fact that if the Duke of Ashbourn was so lost to propriety, so completely out of his senses as to marry a servant, then he should no longer be the Duke of Ashbourn.”

“As if the lot of them wouldn’t turn a blind eye to a duke doing whatever he liked with a servant girl, whether she liked it or not,” she pointed out hotly. “It’s only the fact that your father loved Henrietta, and married her, that they minded. The hypocrisy is sickening.”

Not having thought of it precisely in that light before, Nathaniel could only agree. “Yes. It was rank hypocrisy.”

“But he was a duke, so they obviously could not actually do anything to punish him for it,” she went on, voice taut. “And anyway, who cares what they thought? By all accounts, your father was extraordinarily happy with Henrietta. He must have loved her a great deal.”

“ Love .” Nathaniel’s fingers clenched on the stem of his cut-crystal wine goblet. He forced them to release. “You’re correct, madame. My father was happy. Happy to ignore his responsibilities, happy to squander my inheritance, happy to rack up a mountain of debt?—”

He cut himself off, appalled at the words coming out of his own mouth. There was no excuse for such indiscretion. But, Nathaniel realized, he trusted on a deep level that Mrs. Pickford truly cared for Lucy’s well-being. She wouldn’t use any of this against the family.

And he’d had no one to talk to about any of this. Not since he assumed the title…and along with it, the full comprehension of the mess his father had created.

The only legacy he’d left his son and heir.

Across the table, she did not take her eyes off him for a moment. He felt the weight of her regard like a physical touch.

“My point,” he said, his voice gruff with restraint, “is that they could, and did, punish my father for marrying Henrietta. They punished me, as well.”

“Your time at school.” She bit her lip, her eyes brimming with an awful understanding. “It must have been terrible.”

“That’s not what I meant,” he said, more sharply than he intended. God, where was his control? “I meant that everyone in the Ton turned their backs on this family. Not only socially, but in the wider world of influence and political power, investments and delicate financial understandings that are the foundation of—look. I have the matter well in hand. You need not fear for Lucy’s dowry; I have restored our fortunes through my own investments and connections. My reputation is pristine, such that no one in the Ton would refuse to deal with me.”

“But you have learned how fragile a reputation can be.”

He sat back in his chair. She understood. “And how little can be accomplished without the good opinion of others.”

Nathaniel had goals far beyond the restoration of his family’s wealth and his interests in new ventures like railroads and modern farming techniques. For him to achieve his goals, he would need every ounce of power and prestige his title and his personal standing could deliver.

He certainly could not afford to stir up all the old doubts about the Duke of Ashbourn’s abilities.

Like father, like son , they’d sneered at him.

Does the widdle babykins miss his mummy? Wah wah wah , they’d taunted Nathaniel on the way to class, in the dormitories, after breakfast and in the halls. Lucky little grub, your new mama is a whore! When you go home for hols, maybe you can stick it in her, just like your mad father does. What a family!

He had not reacted with the flicker of an eyelash then, and he did not react to the memory now. “Perhaps you understand a little better why I must distance myself from a woman who stands so wholly outside my own sphere of society.”

The candles flickered; a shadow passed over her lovely face. “Yes,” she said distantly, carefully folding her napkin and placing it beside her still full plate. “I do understand you a little better, I think. I certainly see why you would never wish to spend time with anyone not of your own exalted social standing, as it’s so important to you. That being the case, I believe it is time for me to retire and check on Lucy. Good night, Your Grace.”

He sat frozen at the head of the empty table long after she left him, cursing himself and his sister and his thrice-damned stepmother…and her.