Love Letters From a Duke (7 page)

“Miss Langley,” Thatcher blurted. “I do apologize. But you will be late to call on the marchioness if we don’t continue on. Her man said she expected you promptly this morning.”

Miss Browne turned her sharp gaze on him. “And who might you be?”

“This is Thatcher,” Felicity said. “Our footman.” She slanted him a quick glance and smile, as if to say,
Thank you
.

There was no thanks necessary, he would have told her. He’d stopped Miss Browne’s dissertation lest she give away enough information to have the agile and astute Miss
Langley adding up his timely and coincidental arrival into her life.

“Oh, you have a footman!” Miss Browne replied, taking another glance at him. “A cheeky sort of fellow, I think.”

“Yes, but he came highly recommended,” Miss Langley replied. “We quite stole him away from his previous employer.”

Thatcher listened to the girl lie without a qualm or a bit of conscience and decided it was time to send Miss Browne packing before he found himself with an entirely new history. “The marchioness, Miss Langley?”

She turned and stared up at him, as did the others. “Yes,
the marchioness
,” she finally managed to reply. “How could we have forgotten? It would be dreadful to be late to see
Her Ladyship
when she’s done so much for us.” She pressed her lips shut and shot a triumphant look at Miss Browne.

The ill-mannered Yankee heiress looked them over, as if gauging where to send her next sally, but happily for all, other quarry caught her eye. “Oh my, look,” she said, pointing at an approaching carriage, “here come those horrible Hodges! I can spot their carriage anywhere. Oh, what mushrooms they are. The eldest Miss Hodges is completely unsuited for society for all she can converse upon is horses and hunting!”

“I always found them to be quite nice,” Miss Langley said, her hands fisting to her hips.

“My dear Miss Langley, this isn’t Bath,” she said as she fluttered a handkerchief in front of her nose. “Why in London the coal dust from their grandfather’s mines just seems to follow them.” She took another glance at the other carriage. “Probably out shopping, for it is all they have to recommend them. What a triumph it will be for Miss Emery when
I
…oh, I mean to say, when
we
all contract lofty marriages and those Hodges creatures return home in the summer, spinsters still.” Turning to her mother, she said, “What do you say we
lurk after them to make sure we don’t patronize the same modistes? I’ve always thought they looked so common.” Matron and daughter cackled with much the same note of venom, and that was enough to signal their driver to depart.

Miss Browne leaned over the side. “See you at the Setchfield ball! I will be quite easy to find, for I shall be dressed as Pocahontas. Quite savage, Mother thinks, but I’m of the opinion that my feathers and tomahawk will make me stand out.”

“I know what I’d do with her tomahawk to make her stand out,” Miss Thalia muttered.

“Sounds perfectly suited for you,” Miss Langley called after her, drowning out her sister’s continued muttering. “We’ll look for you.”

“But Felicity, we weren’t invited,” Lady Philippa whispered.

“Not yet,” she shot back, even as she kept the bright smile pasted on her lips until the carriage turned the corner.

“Whew! That was close,” Miss Thalia said. She glanced over at him. “And that part about the marchioness—Mr. Thatcher, that was brilliant. You had her quite green with envy and she’ll spend the rest of the day trying to determine who you meant.”

Miss Langley turned around as well and was about to say something when Lady Philippa announced, “Oh, finally. Here comes Stillings with the carriage.”

The plain-looking coach pulled to a stop and the driver hopped down from his perch and greeted them like long lost friends. “Lawks, look at all of you! Young ladies, if ever I saw them.” He shot a wink over at Miss Langley. “You aren’t up to your usual matchmaking mischief, now are you?”

If it was possible to believe, the chit blushed. “Mr. Stillings, I don’t consider my efforts mischief.”

He doffed his hat and grinned. “If you say so, miss.” He
slanted another broad wink at Thatcher. “Best keep a careful eye on these three! Caused me a fair bit of trouble a few years back and nearly lost me my position.”

“Go on with you,” Aunt Minty told the fellow. “These girls are the finest ladies I’ve ever met. Now give me a hand up, you handsome rogue.” Their aged chaperone reached over and pinched the driver’s backside as she toddled past him.

“Aunt Minty,” Miss Langley scolded, her cheeks growing even rosier.

“What?” the old woman shot back, shoving her cane into Thatcher’s chest, so he had no other choice but to take it with one hand, while Mr. Stillings helped the miserable crone, er, chaperone, up into the carriage. Once seated, she grabbed her cane back and finished her retort by saying, “I told you afore, I ain’t dead yet.”

Miss Langley groaned and followed the lady into the carriage, with Lady Philippa and Miss Thalia following until each of them had found a seat.

“Well?” Miss Langley said, nodding up toward the empty spot beside Mr. Stillings. “Are you with us or not, Mr. Thatcher?”

There were several important things Thatcher had learned in the last half an hour.

First of all, his arrival into Town hadn’t gone unnoticed, as his aunt had quite astutely foreseen.

Secondly, these chits had enough secrets to keep an entire battalion of Bow Street runners employed with the task of uncovering them.

And thirdly, Miss Felicity Langley was one dead cool liar, a sharpster you wouldn’t want to meet up against across the green baize without anything less than a hefty pile of coins in front of you and God’s own luck with cards. The chit could bluff her way out of Hell’s gates.

But most importantly, whatever these three daft girls had up their sleeves to make their way into Society, well, frankly it would never work.

Like every other responsibility his grandfather had left behind, some part of this travesty was his to fix. And all of a sudden he knew that crying off and leaving Miss Langley wasn’t right. Not until he’d gotten to the bottom of what was amiss in this household.

If it had been just a nagging sense of duty to the chit, he could have put Gibbens in charge of the entire situation and washed his hands of any guilt he may have felt over the obligation.

If only it was that, he thought. No, it was all about this minx. This unlikely lady his grandfather had chosen. He still wasn’t utterly convinced this was the
same
Felicity Langley the old duke had courted.

She couldn’t be.

Yet when this Miss Langley looked down at him from her seat in the carriage and asked him in her usual forthright manner, “Are you with us or not?” he suddenly found himself in one of those moments where one’s life teeters on a precipice. For she slanted a wayward glance at him, and in those blinding seconds, he found himself caught by the spark in her eyes, by the tip of her lips.

Quite honestly, it had taken every bit of military discipline he possessed not to turn tail and run all the way back to Westmoreland to the safety of Bythorne Castle and its high impregnable walls.

Especially considering that Miss Felicity Langley, the nearly betrothed of the most lofty Duke of Hollindrake, had just sent him—Thatcher the footman—a flirtatious look of invitation that would have made a Lisbon courtesan weep with envy.

And like a raw recruit, her siren glance disarmed every plan he’d had about her, especially the one about crying off.
Instead he found himself nodding and climbing up beside the driver.

As they drove away, Thatcher realized he was not only in her employ, he was also falling under her unfathomable spell.

“You minx!” Tally whispered across the carriage to her sister.

“Whatever are you talking about?” Felicity shot back, fully intending to bluff for as long as she could hold out.

“You just gave that new footman Nanny Jamilla’s look.” Tally sat back in her seat and grinned. “And don’t even deny it.”

Felicity did anyway. “I did no such thing.”

“You did something,” Pippin chimed in. “And whatever it was, it worked like a charm.”

“I did nothing,” Felicity averred.

Tally snorted. “You used Nanny Jamilla’s look on that poor man and now you’ll have to pay the consequences.”

“Oh, what is this look?” their cousin asked, leaning forward in her seat in all eagerness.

“There is no such thing,” Felicity told her.

“There was something to how you looked at that fella,” Aunt Minty declared, “and I know my fair share of Seven Dials whores who’d pay good money to be able to coax a man like you just did.”

“Aunt Minty!” Felicity protested, glancing up at the closed hatch that sat between them and the two men above. “Will you keep your voice down? And how many times must I ask—please, no improper statements.”

“She’s improper?” Tally said, sitting with her arms folded over her chest. “You just used the most dangerous look known to the female race, and you’re worried about Aunt Minty? Felicity, you were flirting with our footman! Oh, what would Nanny Jamilla say? Or better yet, Hollindrake?”

“Oh, do show me!” Pippin begged. “What is Nanny Jamilla’s look?”

Tally made a moue, her eyes rolling back in her head, a strangled sort of expression that made everyone laugh.

“I didn’t do that,” Felicity protested, pulling the lap blanket higher and glancing out the window to gauge their progress. In her opinion, they couldn’t get to the Thames quick enough. Flirting with a footman, indeed!

It wasn’t like that in the least…

“You should have just sacked him,” Tally said, settling back into her seat. “Now you have the poor man befuddled.”

“He is not,” Felicity retorted. “Besides, I didn’t do it for
those
reasons. I only wanted him to stay on so we could go to the Frost Fair.” If she could have bit back those words, she would have, for this always happened when she started arguing with her sister.

“So you did use the look on him,” Tally said, pouncing on her sister’s confession and sending a triumphant glance toward the others. But as quickly as her victory occurred, she paused and then turned slowly and cast a dubious glance at Felicity. “Nanny Jamilla said it only works when you have a
tendre
for a man.” She took a quick glance up at the roof and then back at her sister.” And if it worked, then I must surmise that you—”

“Thalia Langley, you take that back!” Felicity said, rising out of her seat, that is until the carriage bounced over a pothole and she flew back with a rude thump.

“You like Thatcher?” Pippin whispered, her words aghast.

“No!” Felicity exploded with more vehemence than was necessary. Worse yet, she felt her cheeks run hot, adding more flames to Tally’s imaginative bonfire. “I just met the man yesterday, and the notion that I am in love with him is utterly ridiculous.” She turned on her sister. “You’ve read too many French novels of late—they’ve turned your mind to a pot of romantic mush.”

Her twin only preened under the admonishment. “I know what I saw, and you gave that man Nanny Jamilla’s look. And it worked.”

“Which one was this Jamilla?” Aunt Minty asked. “The Russian doxy or the bit of skirt from Italy?”

Felicity shook her head. “Neither. Nanny Jamilla was with us when father was attached to the embassy in Paris. And really, Aunt Aramintha, none of our nannies were a ‘bit of skirt,’ as you so indelicately put it. Father took great care every time we moved to a new posting to choose lovely women of good breeding to keep our household and bring us up while he went about his duties as His Majesty’s representative.”

Aunt Minty blew out a long breath. “Sounds like a fine bunch of gammon to me.”

It was, Felicity knew. At least she did now. While it was true her father had been a diplomat, he’d also been one of England’s most apt spies—something she and Tally had only learned in the last few years.

And their nannies? Well, with a bit of hindsight and the perspective that being one and twenty gave a lady, Felicity had come to realize that perhaps their nannies’ obligations may not have ended when she and Tally were trundled off to bed. But she wasn’t about to admit to such a thing and only add to what was already considered an unconventional upbringing.

Why, the gossips and old cats of the
ton
would have a field day if it was bandied about that they’d been raised by their father’s romps.

So instead Felicity raised her defenses. “Oh, heavens no, Aunt Minty! Take our Nanny Tasha—she was a distant cousin of the tsar.”

“A what?” Aunt Minty asked.

“The tsar,” Pippin repeated. “Like a king or an emperor.”

“Harrumph! Most of them are half mad, so it’s hardly a
recommendation to my way of thinking,” Aunt Minty declared.

Tally chimed in. “And Nanny Lucia was a respectable widow. Her husband was a duke who’d been the finance minister to the King of Naples. Papa adored her because he said she made him laugh.”

Pippin joined the chorus of approval. “Wasn’t your Nanny Jamilla the daughter of a famous Arabian doctor?”

“She was,” Felicity nodded. “And her mother a lady-in-waiting to the Swedish court. When her father was summoned to Paris to serve Napoleon, Jamilla married the Duc de Fraine, one of Bonaparte’s advisors.” She sat up straight in her seat and folded her hands in her lap. “So you see, our nannies were ladies of quality, and therefore, any look I sent Thatcher was purely of a practical nature.”

“Practically flirting,” Tally muttered, casting a wink at Pippin, who grinned back.

Felicity chose to ignore them.

For in the last half hour, Felicity Langley had discovered something far more startling than the fact that her almost betrothed was back in London. No, Felicity had discovered that she shared more with her twin than just the same honey-colored hair and their mother’s blue eyes.

Because when she’d glanced up into Thatcher’s strong features as he’d outflanked Miss Browne, she’d felt a wild, very insensible, most decidedly improper romantic notion—the same lament that had risen from the depth of heart yesterday when she’d answered the door and found him standing on her steps.