Barbara Metzger (3 page)

Then she had the twins, and nothing else mattered so much. Her world was the nursery, not the battlefield. And Tony was even prouder of his young wife.

Then suddenly he was gone—they brought her his scarlet jacket and his sword for his sons—and she and the twins were bundled aboard the next ship and conveyed, willy-nilly, to the Warefield vicarage. No one asked her, no one gave her a choice. Now she was home in Warefield village, Warwick, back to being her father’s obedient daughter, her mother’s dutiful companion. But she was still Willy and Leslie’s mother, and that would never change. She’d flee to America with the boys before she let some imperious nobleman put a decadent hand on either of their heads.

Of course she might have trouble booking passage with the few coins she’d managed to squirrel away from the pittance doled out by her father. She and her sons were living on his charity, the frugal vicar never ceased to point out, and Graceanne naturally believed that to be true. No one had ever discussed money with her, but she assumed her settlements to be negligible since her dowry was nonexistent. Tony used to pat her hand and tell her not to bother her pretty head about such dreary topics. The vicar told her what money she might be entitled to barely covered expenses, with a little bit put aside for the children’s education.

So Graceanne never asked for money for herself. She made her own mourning clothes out of the sturdiest black material so they’d last longer, and she did without all the fripperies other females her age took for granted. The widow also tried to pay back in service what her father so reluctantly expended. She made fair copies of the vicar’s sermons, writing half of them. She took over her mother’s parish duties, the poor, the sick, the Sunday school classes, and the ladies’ committees. Graceanne even made an effort at teaching Prudence prudence. She was also trying to manage the understaffed and underfinanced household.

Meanwhile, she was learning to manage her difficult father. There always seemed to be enough money for the vicar’s own comfort and scholarly interests, so Graceanne practiced a subtle form of extortion.

She’d have more time to help him, Graceanne explained, if she could hire the twins a reliable nursemaid. Why, she might even be able to start cataloguing his precious collection of religious books. And just think, with more careful attention than Pru’s wandering gaze, the boys might never get into his library again to practice their drawing on his latest sermon. As for the new pony cart Graceanne wanted, Heaven knew she could accomplish her errands among the parishioners and in the village so much more quickly than she could on foot. She could deliver six jars of soup to the shut-ins, stop at the butcher’s, collect the mail, make sure the Rigg brothers knew about the change in choir practice, and still be home to help Cook prepare luncheon. And, the piece de resistance, she could take the jabbering, mischievous little monkey children with her. She got the cart. And money for pencils and paper so the boys wouldn’t use his, and pennies for treats so they wouldn’t get underfoot in the kitchen so often, in Cook’s way. Of course the boys had to be dressed warmly, coming from the hotter Peninsula climate. Their grandfather wouldn’t want them catching infectious diseases, would he? Doctors were so expensive.

The only thing Graceanne hadn’t been able to cajole out of the nipcheese cleric was money for Christmas. Unlike Pru, she knew better than to come between the vicar and his firmest beliefs. So she was knitting mittens and staying up late baking gingerbread men and taking the holly garlands off the pony cart before they reached the stable. They’d have Christmas one way or another. She’d manage, just like she was managing her father. And as for that dreadful duke, she’d manage his high and mighty lordship at Ware Hold, too!

Chapter Three

The Duke of Ware hated to play the fool. That was why he rarely overindulged. Spirits too often made a man forget his manners or his morals, loosened the connection between his brain and his tongue until Bacchus alone knew what drivel he might spew. Which was why, that morning after Almack’s, when His Grace awoke with his head on the desktop in his library and the taste and feel of a desiccated hedgehog in his mouth, his first action was to reach for that addlepated letter he’d penned to Tony’s widow the night before. Actually, his first action was to dismiss the footman who opened the drapes to let in the sunlight that pierced his aching head like an arrow dipped in particularly nasty poison, the kind of poison that made a fellow wish he’d die, and quickly.

His second action was to gulp at the hot coffee the obliging footman had brought, so Leland hired him back. The coffee restored too little of his equilibrium and too much of his memory—Almack’s, Ellerby’s warnings, Crow’s cork-brained scheme to ask his cousin’s widow for one of her twin sons, and how Fanshaw’s idea didn’t seem so caper-witted by three in the morning and three sheets to the wind. No one needed a matched set of boys, he’d reasoned. Carriage horses, yes. Dueling pistols, yes. Boys, no. By George, he’d actually written that fustian in his note, Ware recalled.
That
was when he reached for the blasted letter.

The problem with being a well-paying employer who was fair as well as demanding was that one’s loyal staff tended to be efficient. They anticipated one’s every need and desire. Hence the hot coffee. Thence the letter. Seeing a folded, sealed, sanded, and franked letter on His Grace’s desk, one of the duke’s devoted retainers immediately sent the missive on its way.

Ware had made a prime ass of himself this time.

He intended to apologize while he was at Ware Hold in Warwick, of course. It rankled, naturally, having to excuse his ungentlemanly conduct to a country nobody, but the female was his cousin’s widow, after all. He intended to make amends by raising her allowance or some such. What he didn’t intend was to be confronted with a raging harridan within hours of his arrival at the family seat.

Tony’s widow stormed through the massive doors of the ancient castle like an avenging Fury, ugly black cloak gusting behind her in the gale of her fierce stride when she caught sight of her victim crossing the Great Hall. “You!” she shouted in a voice of doom that echoed in the high-ceilinged room, stunning the duke, his butler, three footmen, and a housemaid. One of the suits of armor rattled, Leland swore.

The Gorgon—or Graceanne, for he finally recognized his cousin’s wife—advanced on Ware. A gentleman didn’t run from danger, Leland had to remind himself, especially not in front of his servants. So he dismissed the servants. That was a tactical error, for it seemed Mrs. Warrington had been restraining herself until she had him alone. Valkyries had their standards, too. Now she lit into him, starting with unfeeling and inhumane, pausing only slightly for toplofty and despotic before the descent to rakehell and roué. She didn’t quite accuse him of being a child molester, but he could see it dangling on the tip of her tongue. She’d already judged him guilty, and was most likely only biding her time before she grabbed up one of the medieval battle-axes from the wall to perform the execution.

While Mrs. Warrington was roundly cursing him in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and cockney navvy—the passage home must have been an interesting one, he figured— Leland took the time to observe Tony’s bride. Bride, hah! He remembered a sweet young innocent, soft-spoken, dewy-eyed, as lovely and gentle as her name. He remembered thinking Tony was a lucky man. He still was; he didn’t have to face this termagant anymore. Besides turning into a fishwife, Graceanne had grown thinner, darker-skinned from the Spanish sun, and even less fashionable. Her widow’s weeds were a shapeless sack and her hair was scraped back in a straggly bun under a black mobcap his lowest scullery maid wouldn’t be caught dead in. And her nose was red from the cold outside. A tiny drip of moisture hung from its end. She was magnificent.

Ware’s mouth quirked up at the corners, which nearly sent Graceanne into apoplexy. “That’s it, laugh. ’Tis all a great joke to you, that you might destroy whole families! ‘I’d like to try my hand at child-raising,’” she quoted from that unfortunate letter. Leland winced, but before he could offer excuses, she was off again on her rant: “Why couldn’t you stick to trying your hand at oil painting or poetry like the other idle, useless dilettantes of your class? To think that Tony died to preserve your way of life, when the French might have had the right idea after all!”

With her bosom heaving to keep pace with her tirade, Graceanne wasn’t thin all over, Ware could tell. In fact, child-bearing had brought out more than rabid maternal instincts. With the proper dressing…

“You may win my father to your way of thinking,” Graceanne was shouting, “and you may have your dissolute friend the Regent plead your case. You may spend every last groat of your wealth buying the law. For all I know, even God is on your side or He’d never put you here to torment me. But it does not matter! I swear by everything I hold sacred, you shall never take my sons away from me!”

Ware meant to offer his abject apologies then, truly he did. Instead, he heard himself make another kind of offer entirely. “Since you won’t let me take the boy, my dear, perhaps you’d be willing to come with him? There’s a vacant cottage at one of the tenant farms. You’d have every comfort those same groats can provide. I can be very generous.”

“You can be damned!”

Lud, somehow he’d forgotten she was a vicar’s daughter, not a town-bronzed worldly widow. Which just went to prove that a born fool could make an ass out of himself without alcoholic assistance.

Graceanne had gone absolutely rigid, her mouth opening and closing with no sound issuing forth. Most likely she couldn’t think of any words foul enough for him. Before she did, Leland closed her mouth in the most convenient— for him—way possible. He’d been wanting to taste those rosy lips for an age. Now he had an excuse. Not a good excuse, admittedly, but one that was just loud enough to drown out his conscience.

He thought her lips would be warm from the fire of her anger, but they were as cold as the wintry day outside. And they were stiff, as unyielding as an icicle. All in all, not a promising embrace. But she smelled of lilacs, and enough of her hair had come unpinned from that spinsterish bun for him to see its honeyed gold color. He was satisfied.

Leland released her and stepped back, waiting for the slap. He deserved it, had earned it, would suffer it like a man. The slap never came. Instead, the thick heel of one serviceable, no-nonsense, unfashionable boot came down on his pump-clad toes with the accompanying command to “Go find a woman with morals as low as yours, if you can.”

And then, while the duke was hopping on one foot, one serviceable, no-nonsense, and extremely unfashionable knee landed between his legs. “And go get your own children, if you can.”

Gads, he’d forgotten she was a soldier’s wife, too.

* * *

Of all the imbecilic, hen-witted things to do, Graceanne chided herself as she took up the reins of the pony cart. Calling on a single gentleman alone in his home—of course he thought she was a lightskirt! Then kicking him. How could she have been such a ninnyhammer?

There she’d been thinking how clever she was, to bribe Jem, Ware Hold’s gatekeeper, to send one of his boys to her at the vicarage as soon as Ware arrived. She was going to get to the duke before her father could come to an arrangement with him, the way he did with her marriage settlements. She was going to give His Grace time to change from his travel clothes, refresh himself, perhaps have a bite to eat. Then she could approach him for a rational, mature conversation about his cockleheaded notion of stealing her son.

Instead, when she drove her cart through the formal gardens past the ornamental lake where the castle’s moat used to be, and up to the front door, where the portcullis once protected against invaders, two grooms ran to hold her pony, as if poor Posy were a mettlesome destrier. A third groom came to hand her down, a procedure so unprecedented, Graceanne nearly tumbled them both to the ground. Then the massive front door opened long before she could reach for the knocker, and a bewigged butler bowed to her. Two footmen in liveried splendor silently posed at either side of the doorway, like bookends. Behind them the Great Hall was brighter than the December day outside, with more candles burning at two o’clock in the afternoon than the vicarage used in a winter month. Graceanne blinked. Two paces into the hall brought her dripping nose the aroma of mince pies cooking, even though the kitchen had to be miles away. One more step, and a welcoming warmth touched her frozen cheeks from roaring fires at both ends of the cavernous room, in hearths large enough to incinerate Sherwood Forest. And no one sat there. Both mantels held huge arrangements of holly and ivy and tinsel stars, while the imposing stairwell’s carved banister and every wall in the place was decorated with swags of evergreens and red ribbons. And according to Jem’s boy, only the duke, one man, had come to celebrate Christmas here.

There he was, walking across an Aubusson carpet so beautiful it could have hung on a wall. He was immaculate, elegant even in his informal wear that still bespoke the finest tailoring and a valet’s fastidious attention. Tony would have called him top-drawer, bang up to the mark. Graceanne’s mind called him greedy.

He had everything, His Grace of Ware. All she had was her sons.

So she kicked him.

To do violent bodily harm to another human being was outrageous, underbred, sinful. To kick a man who had such influence and control over one’s life was worse. It was foolish beyond permission. Graceanne wished she could kick herself for being such a gudgeon. Instead, she drummed her feet on the pony cart’s floorboard. Posy snorted in disgust. “Me, too,” Graceanne agreed.

Why, the duke could see Papa removed from his living, frail Mrs. Beckwith thrown out into the cold, beautiful Prudence sold into white slavery, the entire family transported to Botany Bay. He could do anything, the all-powerful Duke of Ware, once he managed to stand up again.

He would hate her forever now.

How could she have been so indelicate? Such a want of conduct, Mama would be ashamed of her. Tony would be ashamed of her. No, Graceanne decided, clucking to Posy to pick up her speed from shuffle to amble, Tony would not be ashamed at all. He’d be proud of her ability to defend herself from unwelcome advances. He’d been the one to teach her, after all. Tony had worried about the rough soldiers, the Spanish peasants, the French Army. He should have worried about his own cousin.

Graceanne’s indignation turned from her own idiocy to the duke’s infamy. Obviously his reputation as a rake was well earned, the blackguard. Then again, she reflected honestly, it was easy to see how Ware would be very, very good at his chosen path to perdition. Susceptible women—not that she was one of them, of course; she was just being objective—would find his laughing hazel eyes and well-shaped mouth attractive. His dark curls just begged to be tousled, and the slightly hawkish nose only added character to an otherwise classically handsome face.

Ware wasn’t as handsome as Tony, she thought loyally. But Tony’s good looks were more boyish. Leland had the tiny lines and wrinkles of a mature man, plus an air of dignity and assurance quicksilver Tony never managed to attain. He was broader and taller than her husband, too, which was not necessarily a mark in Ware’s favor, for his embrace made her feel overpowered, intimidated, and weak. She did have to admit that His Grace made a good figure, even compared to the young officers in prime physical condition she was used to. Yes, Graceanne could see where some goosish women might succumb to the duke’s appeal if they didn’t mind being cast in the shade.

Even at their wedding Tony teased that the best man was more splendid than the groom. Heavens, the elegant duke was more splendid than the bride! All the village girls ogled him and the matrons sighed. There was just something imposing about Ware, commanding, confident…lordly. Except for the last time she’d seen him, whimpering on the floor.

Graceanne pulled her cloak more tightly about her. Never had she missed Tony more or felt so defenseless—not precisely defenseless, obviously—but vulnerable in her position as a woman. Not just physically, either. Women couldn’t handle money or attend university; they couldn’t hold decent positions or offices of power. If they visited a man alone, they were considered no better than they ought to be, and the one area that ought to be guaranteed safe, their nursery, wasn’t.

No one would ever threaten to take a man’s children away from him. No one would dare, even if he mistreated them. Why, her father often recommended from his pulpit beating the wickedness out of children, and the men in the congregation always nodded. He even threatened to practice his preachings on Willy and Les if they ever laid another grubby hand on his books. They’d only been looking for pictures.

This last thought reminded Graceanne that the Macgruder sisters had promised to order some picture books for her for Christmas. She ought to check, especially since having errands in the village was her excuse for going out this afternoon. Vicar Beckwith had been told that Cook needed some special herbs and spices, as if that would improve the woman’s abominable culinary skills. At the low wages he offered, it was astounding Cook could boil water for tea. But Papa had optimistically agreed and had given Graceanne a few shillings to accomplish a miracle. Graceanne roused Posy into a half-trot so they might reach the village before nightfall.

* * *

The village was full of talk of the duke. Did Mrs. Warrington notice if the standards were flying yet over the Hold, signaling his arrival? Had she heard if he was bringing a party with him? The village could use the custom.

At the little lending library, the elder Miss Macgruder was positive he was bringing a bride home for Christmas. So romantic. The younger Miss Macgruder believed it was a band of like-thinking libertines he’d invited, for an orgy. The grocer’s wife declared she heard Ware was looking for a wife; her husband said he was locking up their daughters. No one wanted to talk about choir practice or the Sunday school’s Nativity play.