Royal Regard (13 page)

“Perhaps if we are fast enough,” Charlotte
crowed, “we can overtake the duke, so he can see how your hands
tremble when I say his name.”

An hour later, against Bella’s silent, but
somehow still vociferous, objections, Charlotte’s wish was granted.
Bella, Charlotte, the two children and the nurse were seated across
the square from Gunter’s in the Firthley’s open landau. Standing
alone nearby, the Duke held a dish of lemon ice in his hand,
condensation dripping onto his glove. He made no attempt at
contact, but for the occasional look their way, nodding at others
in the crowd, but engaging in no conversations.

It couldn’t last long, however. The
speculative looks of the ladies nearby presaged an imminent mob of
gently-bred females. He was starting to look a bit chary.

“Duke,” Charlotte called out just as a very
brave young woman and her mother began to cross the square directly
toward him. Charlotte made a bit of a scene, rising slightly from
her seat and motioning for him to join them, Bella trying
unsuccessfully to stay her hand. When he walked over, avoiding the
gaze of the disappointed debutante, he removed his hat and bowed,
but didn’t even suggest joining them in the carriage.

Bella sighed, “I vow you are following
me.”

He laughed, “Of course not, Lady Huntleigh.
It is just my great good luck to come upon you twice in one day.
Please, do keep your seat, Lady Firthley.” Wellbridge held his free
hand out to forestall any deference from anyone, though Bella had
already decided she would nail her slippers to the carriage floor
before ever curtseying to him again.

Charlotte offered, “Would you care to join
us?”

“I would love to sit, Lady Firthley. I’m
afraid it has been a trying afternoon of fruitless shopping for my
nephew’s birthday. I’m sure I’ve walked at least fifty
furlongs.”

As the Firthley’s tiger pulled down the
stairs and opened the door, Charlotte poked Jewel. “Your Grace, my
daughter, Lady Julia Marloughe.” The six-year-old carefully,
reluctantly, set her coconut ice on the seat so she could stand,
her knees and the carriage wobbling as she curtsied, lisping,
“Pleathed to make your acquaintanthe, Your Grathe.”

“Lady Julia, I am honored beyond measure,” he
said with a deep, formal bow. As he entered, he gave her his hand
to help her scramble back onto her seat and removed his top hat.
Jewel giggled madly at being called Lady by a stranger, but quickly
went back to the important business of the treat in the glass dish
on her lap. Wellbridge turned to Nurse and chucked baby Alex under
the chin. “And this must be the young Earl of Herrendon.”

“Hare-din,” Alex agreed, chewing on the
melted chocolate all over his fingers.

Wellbridge smiled at Charlotte. “Keep him
this age as long as you can, Lady Firthley. Seventeen-year-old boys
are miserable beasts. I had promised to buy my nephew a curricle
and team for his birthday, but his mother forbade it, which
provoked the most appalling fit of temper. He called my sister
names for which I might have killed any other man.”

Charlotte nodded sagely, as though she had
raised hundreds of young men. “Lord Firthley says if our son
resembles him in temperament, Baby’s adolescent years will be
better served away at school, but I can’t believe my sweet boy will
cause me even a moment of wretchedness.”

She pinched Alex’s cheek and spoke to him in
baby talk: “Mummy’s boy doesn’t want to go away to school, does
he?”

Alex dragged his face away, yelling, “No
touch Hare-din! No, Mama! No!” Wellbridge managed to keep from
snorting, but Bella did not.

“The point of boarding school, Charlotte,”
she said, caustically, “is that other people will manage his
wretchedness, and you may take credit for manners someone else will
enforce with a stick.”

Wellbridge pursued a policy of appeasement.
“I’m sure Herrendon will grow up a fine chap who adores his
mother.” Then he took the even wiser course of changing the topic.
“Unruly though my nephew may be, it is his birthday, and he has
achieved top marks in his examinations, so I must find a gift as
excellent as a curricle, but which will not incur my sister’s
wrath.”

“Have you any other ideas?” Charlotte asked,
looking at him the same way she looked at baby Alex when he tried
to learn a new word.

“A skiff received the same reception as a
carriage. He is too young for an estate where he might hide from
his mother in a fit of pique, or an account he might use to run
away to some half-heathen British colony, which would be laid
entirely at my feet. Neither White’s nor Brooks’s will entertain
him yet for membership, and I’ve been banned from giving him brandy
or snuff, my gifts from a favored uncle at eighteen. And Allie will
lock Henry in a box before she allows him out in the evening with
me, afraid I’ll take him on a tour of disreputable London, which my
father did for both me and my brother, and what Thad will do if we
can find a way between us to sneak it past her.”

The nurse gasped, reflexively covering the
baby’s ears before she remembered herself, rapidly ducking her head
to clean the sugar off Alex’s clothes.

Wellbridge shrugged, “One afternoon with
Henry at Gentleman Jackson’s, a few unfortunate bruises that made
him the envy of all his friends, and suddenly I am the worst
influence imaginable. But I assure you, I have never been so bad as
my sister makes out.”

“Are you certain?” Bella asked sweetly,
drumming her fingertips on the carriage door.

Wellbridge’s lips turned up in much the same
fashion as when she had cut him at the linen draper’s shop.

“I simply think a boy should know how to
fight and play cards before he is old enough to lose his money to
Captain Sharp.”

Before Bella could draw enough breath to give
her palpable opinion, Charlotte changed the subject faster than a
two-year-old dashing across a room. Her lips looked like they were
trying to outrun the words on the tip of her tongue.

“So what will you do for his birthday?”

“I’m afraid all I am left with is ordering
him a wardrobe, but no matter how elegant the tailoring, I am sure
it will be deemed far too boring from such a brilliant uncle as I.
Cravats and gloves are so pedestrian.”

“A riding horse?” Charlotte suggested.

“That was my first thought, Lady Firthley,
but I met his father at Tattersall’s with the same idea, and
Nockham claimed it as a father’s privilege before I could offer a
fencing match to decide the matter. In truth, I had to concede, in
recompense for the puppy I gave Henry without consulting his
parents when he was ten.”

Bella’s countenance softened for half a
second, and Charlotte turned almost treacly, saved from fawning
over his kindness only when she exclaimed, “Ah! I have it! A pocket
watch! He is old enough to mark the occasion formally, your sister
can’t possibly object, and I’m sure you can think of something
terribly clever for the inscription. We just saw the most
interesting timepieces at Rundell’s.”

“That is a capital idea, Lady Firthley! I
wish I had told you my troubles when we spoke earlier. I might be
home by now.”

“Pity,” Bella said, looking for a reaction
sideways.

Wellbridge ignored Bella’s insult entirely,
holding his gloved finger out to Alex, who grasped it with both of
his grubby hands. “You have a very smart Mama, Herrendon. I hope
she is not so strict as my sister and lets you play cards and fight
with the other boys.”

“Knowing my husband, I’m sure the lessons
have already begun. And of course, there is no way to know what bad
habits he might pick up at school.”

Nick agreed, “As an Eton man myself, I can
confirm such scurrilous tutorial, though it won’t do at all to
discuss the hallowed halls with you ladies.” As he spooned the last
of the lemon ice from his bowl, he asked, “Is everyone quite sated?
I would be pleased to buy Lady Julia another, if she so
wishes.”

Jewel piped up, “Pleathe, Mama? I want the
goothberry, too.”

“Heavens, no. That is very kind of you, Sir,
but Jewel has had more than enough. Bella has been spoiling her
with treats all day long. It will be a wonder if she eats any
dinner at all.”

“Well, Lady Julia, I cannot disregard your
mother’s wishes, but perhaps she will allow me the pleasure of a
gift that will not spoil your appetite?” He arched a brow at
Charlotte and she nodded with a sly smile. Bella looked back and
forth between them, sensing a devious plan that neither could have
arranged.

Wellbridge reached into his pocket and took
out the bag from the linen draper. Without even a glance at Bella,
he turned over the ribbon with a flourish of his hat. Jewel took it
with wide eyes and started begging Nurse to replace the blue
ribbons in her messy ringlets.

“What do you say to the duke, Jewel?”
Charlotte reproved.

Jewel stood up and curtsied again. “Thank
you, Your Grathe, for your kindneth?” As Charlotte nodded, Jewel
turned back to Nurse, shoving the ribbons at her and demanding
attention to her hair.

Nurse responded with, “Seen and not heard,
Miss,” but she took the ribbons anyway, finally smiling at
Wellbridge, untying the blue ribbon, uncurling the purple, and
taking embroidery scissors from her reticule.

“And you, Lady Huntleigh? Have you had
enough?”

“I have had more than my fill,” she said, not
referring to ice cream. “We cannot stay long, in any case. I’ve
promised the children a Punch-and-Judy show at Covent Garden before
we return home.”

His eyes gleamed as he observed, “By Jove, it
has been years since I took in a puppet show. My sister’s youngest
is just past twelve, and informs me she is far too old now for such
childish pursuits, but I have always enjoyed the marionettes. Lady
Julia,” he said, replacing and tipping his hat, “might you allow me
the honor of accompanying you to the theatre this afternoon?”

Bella rolled her eyes, Charlotte stifled a
laugh, and Jewel just stared around the carriage at all of the
adults, unnerved by the continued attention of a man she’d never
met.

Charlotte prompted, “What does a young lady
say when a gentleman asks to escort her?”

Screwing up her forehead, tongue between her
teeth, Jewel said, “Yeth, Your Grathe, I would be pleathed for you
to join uth?” She looked up at her mother for approval, and
Charlotte nodded.

“It will be my privilege, Lady Julia.”

“Why are you here, Michelle?”
Malbourne asked, displeasure oozing from his voice as he entered
his study. He had travelled from London for his brief monthly
sojourn in the country, expecting no distraction from his estate
business, since he had sent his needy mistress back to France the
third time she mentioned marriage. Aside from meeting with his
steward to collect the quarterly rents, he wanted only to blow off
the stink of bowing and scraping to people less noble than he, not
to entertain uninvited, unwanted guests waiting at his gate. He
would have to leave on the morrow to return to the rank, dirty
city, and he wanted nothing but quiet and the view of France from
his cliffs between now and then.

Instead, he was forced to attend to this
unwelcome female.

Having been ushered into his study and made
to wait two hours without refreshment, the obsequious woman rose
from the
Bergère
chair upon his entry into the room,
curtseying deeply. Taking a seat at the gilded Riesener desk, he
ran his eyes up and down his visitor, but did not invite her to
sit. Her cheap, grimy, green cotton dress had no place in this
elegant room, nor did the smell of weeks traveling by public coach
and steerage. The aroma nearly made his eyes water, but he would
never rise to open another window. It would only serve to emphasize
how few servants he could now afford.

The sound of the waves crashing against his
Dover cliffs flowed in through the open casement, not quite
obscuring his profound irritation.

“It has been more than thirty years. I had
hoped never to see you again.”

“And still you look as handsome as I
remember.”

“Spare me the toadying. State your
business.”

The woman bowed her head, staring at the wall
to her left. Her thinning red hair was matted and disheveled,
falling from pins where it wasn’t sticking out in tufts, above a
sharp face set with deep lines, dark eyes flashing with fear—and
something else familiar he was loath to define.

“
Forgive me,
Monsieur le Duc
.
I do not mean to disturb.”

She nearly whispered, twisting her dress in
her hands, as though she would wring out the filth onto his carpet.
Finding himself disgusted by her state of disrepair, he turned
toward the roughened, dented, patched suit of armor in the corner,
worn by the first Duc de Malbourne in the seventeenth-century. The
plated iron was one of the few items of family significance his
retainer had found after the peasants overran the property. Like
the stone walls, it had been impervious to fire and too unwieldy to
carry off.