The Mark of the Midnight Manzanilla A Pink Carnation Novel (34 page)

The sheer injustice of it took Lucien’s breath away. Scared? What in the devil was she talking about? What did she know about it? Just because there were hundreds of tenants—thousands of acres—a million decisions he knew nothing about—that had nothing at all to do with any of his actions. Nothing.

And what did Miss Sally Fitzhugh know about it? She hadn’t had her family ripped away from her, first, in their deaths, and then again, in the massacre of their reputations. No. She was the center of a loving family circle who protected and cosseted and teased her.

With a flash of disgust, Lucien realized that he was jealous. Sickeningly, indefensibly jealous of the warm circle of affection that surrounded Sally, the affection she bestowed so generously on those around her. He wanted a drawing room that smelled of cinnamon and a child with her pudgy hands smeared with raspberry jam. He wanted, as he had so long ago, to be part of a family, a real family.

What was the point of it? Bile rose at the back of Lucien’s throat. He didn’t have that sort of family. He had a sister who despised him, a cousin willing to stand back and see him hang, an aunt who wanted him dead, and parents who might not have been at all what he believed them to be.

It was, he decided, all Sally’s fault for filling him with these foolish wishes, for making him see Hullingden as the home it could be. Lucien dragged one of the drapes defiantly open, yanking the rope into place on its gilded hook. “It might be better for everyone if you took a little less responsibility.”

Sally blinked in the sudden onslaught of light. “I don’t—”

“You do,” said Lucien shortly. “Whatever it is, you do. You’re like—you’re like a puppy.”

“A puppy?” Sally regarded him incredulously, looking entirely unlike a canine of any species and very much like an irate young lady of considerable good looks.

“Yes.” Perhaps it wasn’t the best simile, but he certainly wasn’t backing down now. “Constantly bounding around and getting underfoot and snarling up the carpets. Do you ever stop to think before you go charging in?”

“I—,” began Sally.

Lucien wasn’t prepared to stop. “You’re a one-woman cavalry charge! It doesn’t matter if it’s a windmill at the other end. You’ll tilt at it anyway, because: You. Don’t. Stop. To. Look. Everyone else’s troubles are just so much fodder for your entertainment. Never mind the toes you might tread on in the process.”

Sally bristled. “If I’m asked for help—”

“Are you?” Lucien retorted. “Are you? Or do you offer it regardless of whether it’s wanted or not? When was the last time you left well enough alone?”

There were two bright spots of color in Sally’s cheeks. “That,” she said, “is entirely unfair.”

“Is it?” said Lucien sharply. “How did you end up on that bloody balcony with me?”

“I was
trying
to save you from fortune hunters.” Sally bit down hard on her lower lip. “And you should be grateful that I did! What would have happened if I hadn’t been out there with you? If I hadn’t, you—”

“Would have dealt with it myself, with a great deal less fuss and bother.” The thought that she saw him as that weak, that ineffectual, filled Lucien with gall. “Did you ever stop to think, just once, that perhaps the world might not be in need of your expert advice?”

Sally flinched at the acid in those last two words. She breathed in deeply through her nose. “You seemed to like my advice well enough before.”

“I was being polite!” All the frustration of the past night found an outlet in Lucien’s voice. “Do you think I enjoy being embroiled in this—this farce?”

The words cracked off the walls.

Sally’s face went as pale as porcelain. As abruptly as it had risen, Lucien’s anger bubbled away. He ought to feel smug that he had made a dent in that boundless self-confidence of hers. Instead, he felt as though he’d taken a bat to a priceless porcelain ornament just to hear it crack.

There was no triumph in it, only the shards of something precious that used to be whole, but wasn’t anymore.

“Well, then,” said Sally. “Well, then.”

With a pang, Lucien recognized it as what she said when she didn’t know what to say, because, being Sally, she couldn’t bear to say nothing at all.

He was worse than a cad. He was an idiot.

He took a step towards her. “Sally—”

Sally moved hastily out of his path, her skirt swishing around her legs, speaking rapidly all the while. “You needn’t worry. I shan’t embroil you any longer. Would you like me to release you from your obligations? There. It’s done.”

Being beaten around the head with a bat was too good for him. “Don’t be hasty.”

“But I am. Isn’t that what you told me? That I don’t think?” Sally’s eyes were suspiciously bright. “Besides, it’s hardly hasty when we always knew this had to end anyway.”

Lucien felt as though he was sinking in a swamp of his own devising. “I didn’t mean—”

“We have our betrothal ball tomorrow night. It will be the perfect time to announce our disengagement. It will be our un-betrothal ball.” One hand on the doorknob, she paused only long enough to look regally over her shoulder. “Who knows? Perhaps we’ll start a fashion.”

And with that, she sailed out the door, nearly colliding with Dabney, who managed to scrabble out of the way just in time to escape a doorknob to the nose.

“Sally!” said Lucien, starting after her, only to be thwarted by Dabney, who planted himself smack in the center of his path.

For a slender man, Dabney could take up a great deal of space when he chose.

Behind him, Sally was disappearing through the arch that led into the Great Hall. Lucien could hear the furious slap of her slippers against the marble floor. Her lilac scent still lingered in the air, an olfactory reproach.

He’d been an idiot and he needed to make it right, but for the fact that there was a butler in his path.

“Not now, Dabney,” Lucien ground out.

The fact that Dabney had clearly been listening at the keyhole did nothing to improve Lucien’s mood.

Dabney neatly blocked him, all without appearing to move. “Lord Henry wishes to see you, your grace.”

The last flounce of Sally’s jonquil yellow skirt swished through the arch, like sunshine disappearing behind a cloud.

What in the devil was it that Dabney was saying? Oh, yes. Uncle Henry. Lucien bounced from one foot to the other, trying to get a glimpse of Sally over Dabney’s shoulder. “Tell Lord Henry that I will be with him presently.”

Despite an entirely bland countenance, Dabney still managed to convey an air of extreme reproach. This, after all, was the man who had fished Lucien out of the frog pond when he was a five-year-old. “I had the impression it was quite urgent, your grace.”

The very fact that Dabney was calling him “your grace” rather than “Master Lucien” was a clear indication that Lucien was out of favor.

Brilliant. He’d alienated not only his betrothed, but his servants as well. It might have something to do with the fact that Dabney was a font of information on the care and feeding of stoats, a fact of which Lucien, despite a childhood at Hullingden, had been ignorant. It had taken Sally all of fifteen minutes to ferret it out, and to win Dabney’s undying devotion by soliciting his advice on all matters stoat.

According to Patrice, who heard such things in the servants’ hall, Sally had also, in that brief space, managed to recommend a poultice for the gamekeeper’s daughter’s sore leg, and warmed the cockles of Cook’s heart by asking for her recipe for raspberry jam.

Sally, thought Lucien grimly, would make a brilliant Duchess of Belliston. Not the “go to London and sparkle at parties” sort of duchess, but the “organize the county gentry and bring all the tenants soup” sort of duchess. The sort of duchess his mother had never tried to be. The sort of duchess that his Aunt Winifred so desperately wanted to be, but wasn’t, even aside from the small fact of her not being the duchess.

Sally would be a brilliant duchess. But he wasn’t that duke.

That was the devil of it. Sally was right. Completely, undeniably right. Lucien didn’t know the first thing about being the Duke of Belliston. In addition to Hullingden, there were three other, lesser estates, at least one of which had been deeded to Clarissa upon his parents’ deaths. Lucien was sketchy as to the details of what fell within the entail and what didn’t; he had never bothered to find out.

First he had been too young, and then—it had been easier to be indignant and alienated than to come home and face his responsibilities.

The realization struck Lucien like a cannonade. All of those years, wandering the world, feeling sorry for himself, being cosseted by Tante Berthe. He ought to have been here, learning how to care for his tenants, doing his duty by Clarissa. There he was, envying Sally the warmth of her relations with her family, her easy camaraderie with her friends, as though one were either blessed with such things or one weren’t. Maybe it wasn’t a matter of blessing. Maybe it was a matter of working at it.

He was the one who had run away all those years ago; he was the one who had made himself a stranger to his lands, a stranger to his family. No one had done that to him; he had made those choices for himself. And he didn’t know how to fix that any more than he knew what to say to Sally to make that light behind her eyes come back, that boundless self-confidence that was so much a part of her, that made her sparkle like a royal firework display.

He’d certainly fouled that up, hadn’t he? Maybe Clarissa was right. Maybe they were a cursed race. Maybe the wrong ancestor had sacrificed the wrong chicken at the wrong time.

Except that sacrificing chickens made him think of Sally, and her odd grudge against poultry.

What did she have against chickens? Lucien wondered irrelevantly. As matters stood, it was unlikely he would ever find out.

Dabney pointedly cleared his throat. “Lord Henry is in his office, your grace.”

“Yes, yes, I know.” The last thing Lucien wanted was an interview with Uncle Henry, but the alternative, seeking out Sally and trying to figure out what to say, was even more alarming.

With chilling formality, Dabney said, “The office is—”

Apparently Lucien was still being punished. “I know the way. It hasn’t been that long.”

“Your grace,” Dabney said gravely, and melted away into the dark recesses of the hall.

It was amazing how much reproach could be packed into two little words, uttered with the utmost deference and respect. Lucien wondered if it was something that was taught to good butlers along with how to sneak up on one’s employer and terrorize footmen with a single curl of the lip.

Lucien took himself off to his uncle’s office, a nook in the old wing in between the formal part of the house and the servants’ domain. It had its own exit and entrance, so that tenants and tradesmen could come and go without traipsing through the convoluted corridors of the house. Anything that happened at Hullingden passed through Uncle Henry’s office.

It looked just as Lucien remembered. Unlike Uncle Henry’s richly appointed study in his house at Richmond, a gentleman’s retreat, the office at Hullingden had been designed for use. Shelves along the walls were crammed full of decades of ledgers detailing expenditures on everything from the servants’ tallow candles to seed for planting. The large oak table at the center of the room was all but eclipsed beneath piles of invoices, correspondence, and, for some reason that probably made sense to Uncle Henry, a fowling gun.

“Lucien!” Uncle Henry looked up from his notations as Lucien entered. He plunked his pen back in its stand, pushed aside a fat ledger, and stood up, leaning his palms on the tabletop. “Dabney found you, then?”

Lucien inclined his head. “As you see.”

If Uncle Henry noticed the edge in Lucien’s voice, he didn’t comment on it. “I just had a very unpleasant interview with Sir Matthew Egerton.”

The day only improved as it went on. Lucien mustered a weary smile. “I wish I could say that surprises me.”

Uncle Henry looked grave. “Sir Matthew refuses to be disabused of the notion that you had something to do with the death of that unfortunate woman. He believes you have, as he put it, ‘an insatiable craving for blood.’”

That was all the situation needed. Lucien rubbed the heels of his hands against his eyes. “I wouldn’t have thought that Sir Matthew would be a reader of
The Convent of Orsino
.”

“No, no, not like that.” A network of furrows appeared between Uncle Henry’s eyes. “The phrase he used was ‘like mother, like son.’ He believes—”

“That we have the seeds of evil within us.” Lucien meant the phrase ironically, but Uncle Henry nodded.

“Just so.”

Lucien buried his head in his hands. “Good God.”

“There are higher powers to which you might appeal,” Uncle Henry suggested.

Lucien lifted his head. “The Almighty?”

“I was thinking more of the Lord Chancellor,” said Uncle Henry. “He was well acquainted with your father.”

Everyone had been well acquainted with Lucien’s father—everyone who was anyone, that is. Lucien’s father hadn’t been very good at charming the tenantry, but he had been brilliant at dominating the ballrooms and back rooms of both London and Paris.

The thought rose, unbidden, that if he were to face up to his responsibilities—
stop brooding about the past,
whispered Sally’s voice—he would be a very different sort of duke than his father had been.