Love Letters From a Duke (9 page)

“I have to imagine that Lord and Lady Stewart would shower gold down upon your head if you helped their daughters make lofty matches. Your
Chronicles
would be worth a fortune overnight,” he said, thinking it all a fine jest, that
is, until he spied the mercantile light blazing to life in Miss Langley’s eyes.
No! He hadn’t meant…

“Thatcher, that is perfect.”

Demmit, what had he just unleashed? “No, Miss Langley, no!”

“But I will! That is the most perfect idea.” She clapped her gloves together. “I’ve never thought to use my
Chronicles
thusly—well, other than for Pippin and Tally—but do you really think they would reward me for helping them?”

“I—I—I—” he stammered.

“But of course they would! Think of it! Using my
Chronicles
to help unlikely ladies find husbands could change matrimony forever! Not only that, it could reverse our current situation.” She clapped her hands together as if that settled it. “And I have you to thank.”

“Oh, no, don’t thank me!”

“But I must,” she asserted.

“No, really, leave me out of this,” he told her. If it was nosed about Town that he’d inspired Miss Langley’s scheme, every bachelor in England would be vying for the right to put a bullet through his heart.

“Duchess!” Miss Thalia cried out, as the ride finished and her cousin was in the midst of negotiating with the man for a second turn. “Have a go?”

Miss Langley shook her head.

Her sister, cousin, and aunt climbed back into the swings and in a few moments were being rocked skyward again.

“Why does your sister call you that?” he asked.

“Call me what?”

“Duchess.”

Miss Langley shook her head. “Oh, ’tis an old joke.”

“Willing to share?”

A little blush stole over her cheeks. Was it from embarrassment or the icy wind racing across the frozen river? He
didn’t know, but it softened her features and made her look like a young lady of twenty should, instead of the little general who normally inhabited her slippers.

“Our uncle Temple christened me that when I was about seven,” she finally confessed.

“Temple?” he asked, wondering if it could be his old friend, Templeton. “Do you mean the Marquis of Templeton?”

“Oh, yes, the very same. But he’s the Duke of Setchfield now. He inherited several years ago, but he’s still Uncle Temple to Tally and I. He’s not really our uncle, but a good friend of Father’s and he often visited us when we lived abroad.” She eyed him again. “Do you know him?”

“I’ve read of him in the papers,” he said, realizing he was going to have to guard his tongue around her.

She didn’t look all that satisfied with his answer, but finally, much to his relief, continued with her story. “Well, if you must know, Uncle Temple told my father and half the court in Naples that I had the temperament and bearing of a future duchess. From then on I was known as
la duchessa piccolo
. She paused for a moment and then translated. “‘The little duchess.’ Even after we left Naples, I fear the name stuck.”

“You lived in Naples?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “My father was a diplomat and we lived many places: Constantinople, Naples, Paris, Geneva, Vienna, and St. Petersburg, until we came home to go to school.”

“And did you always want to be a duchess?”

A strange, wistful look crossed her face. “When I was younger, I thought of it only in terms of the coronet and the jewels,” she said, smiling. “But now, I fear I’ve become so eminently suited for the position that there isn’t much else for me to do.”

“How does one become ‘eminently suited’ to be a duchess?”

“Years of training.”

“You trained?” If it took years of training to be a duchess, there was little hope of him becoming a proper duke.

“But of course. Deportment, social engagements, household management, diplomacy—though of course that comes naturally to us Langleys.”

“But of course,” he agreed, thinking how diplomatic she and her sister were with Miss Browne. “But a duke? Why wouldn’t a nicely landed marquess or a long-lined earl do?”

She shook her head. “You don’t understand—a duke is so much more than any of them. A duke is heroic, and noble, a knight errant, if you will. The kind of man who is handsome and carries himself with a self-assurance that commands the respect of one and all. And above all, he is a proper English gentleman who expects a proper English lady for his bride.” She shook the snow off her cloak. “Really, what else is there left for me to do but become a duchess?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” he mused, for really all he’d done to become the duke was be the next available Sterling, and he certainly possessed none of the characteristics she’d listed.

She huffed a sigh and glanced over at the passing throng of visitors on the ice. “I think what I will like the most is the respect that comes with being a duchess. I won’t have to endure Sarah Browne’s slights ever again. She won’t dare.” And then, when she realized she’d revealed something too personal, she turned and ended the discussion just as one might expect from a real duchess, tipping her head so the rim of her bonnet hid her face from him.

A cut direct and well done, he had to admit. But he wasn’t finished. “I’m sorry if I said something offensive.”

“It’s not that,” she replied. “It’s just that it isn’t proper for a footman and lady to be chatting so publicly. I have a reputation to guard.”

Thatcher leaned over and glanced beneath the rim of her bonnet. “Is that one of Miss Browne’s rules or yours?”

“Miss Emery’s,” she informed him. “She was our teacher in Bath. She always said that ‘a lady never expresses any familiarity with her lesser.’”

Her lesser?
Oh, if she only knew. Thatcher straightened, rising to his full height, towering over this suddenly imperious miss at his side. “And you think of me as
your
lesser?”

For a moment there was no reply from beneath the little blue bonnet, but finally it tipped back and she glanced up at him. “No.”

Her straightforward answer took him aback. “And why is that? I’m a servant after all.”

“But I daresay not by choice,” she offered. “You were in the army. You fought in the Peninsula, did you not?”

He nodded.

“And you were on the battlefield?”

His eyes clenched shut—the movement was involuntary, but he did it every time someone mentioned the fields. Ciudad Rodrigo, Badajoz, Salamanca. The images were enough to make a man mad. “Yes, I served in the field.”

“Hollindrake once wrote to me that the men who fight for a cause, a noble one, have more honor than any mere gentleman. That you have seen things, done things, that can rend apart even the stoutest of hearts. And since you are here, and appear to be whole, I must conclude you are a brave and honorable man, and therefore hardly my lesser, even if you are our footman.”

She turned around at the sound of her sister’s gay laughter and watched the trio as they swung back and forth, merry and giddy.

Thatcher stared instead at this woman at his side. Every time he thought he knew her, had a picture of some marriage-mad miss fixed in his mind, another facet of her turned and sparkled like a diamond, leaving him blinded and dumbfounded.

But even more so because she’d quoted his grandfather. What had the old codger written to her?

The men who fight for a cause
,
a noble one
,
have more honor than any mere gentleman.

Perhaps she had misunderstood what he’d said, for he doubted his grandfather, the man who held nothing but contempt for anyone who had no holdings and lineage behind him, would share such an opinion regarding military service.

And honestly, he didn’t know how honorable he was for it.

She was right, though, he had done things that weren’t fit to remember, but it had been his duty to see the war won and Napoleon stopped, and those memories were the cost he bore.

“You should have gone on the swing with your sister,” he said after some time. “Those things are fun.”

His question teased her out of her silent reverie. “You’ve been on one of those?”

He grinned at her. “Of course! In fact, it was at the Frost Fair in ’95. I was a lad of—”

Almost immediately he saw her set to work calculating his age. Demmit, if he gave her much more information, she was going to discover who he was without any trouble whatsoever.

“How old?” she ventured, trying to hide the curious note in her question.

“Let’s just say a lad old enough to like trouble,” he demurred.

“No doubt,” she replied as her gaze swept over him from head to toe. “Was the fair then like all this?” she asked, waving her hand at the booths, the makeshift shows, as well as the circle where the snow had been smoothed and swept clean so skaters could make elegant turns about the ice.

He nodded. “And more—there was also a wild animal show. I remember someone brought the elephant from the
Tower out on the ice to prove to everyone it was safe.” He laughed, at both the memory and her shocked expression. “I came every day—learned to dice at a tent not far from there.” He pointed at a pavilion to their right.

“Don’t tell Tally that,” Felicity warned. “She’ll be mad to learn as well.”

“I don’t think she will when she finds out I diced away my only pair of skates.”

“Then it was a good lesson to learn early,” she observed.

“What was?” he asked.

“Losing your skates. I’m sure it taught you the dangers of wagering,” she said. “I have to imagine you never gambled after that.”

“Oh, no, never,” he teased.

After a woeful shake of her head, she said, “Were you any good?”

“At dicing?”

“No! I believe I know that outcome.” She reached over and nudged him with her elbow. “At skating, I meant.” Her gaze traveled over to the ring, where an older couple were gliding arm in arm over the ice.

“
Oh
, skating. Well, yes. Yes, I was,” he told her. “Though I haven’t done so in years. There weren’t a lot of opportunities for it in Spain.” He too looked over at the agile pair. “Do you skate?”

“Oh, yes,” she said, an enthusiastic yet wistful note to her words. “We were in Russia for three years with Papa and spent every winter skating to our hearts’ content.”

“And your father took you skating all those times?” he asked, posing the question with an innocent air.

She shook her head. “Of course not! Papa had his responsibilities at court. Our foot—” Her eyes narrowed and she glanced up at him. “You tricked me.”

He pushed off the rail and winked at her. “I did no such
thing. I merely asked if your father took you skating, and you said he did not. Then you seemed to have some problem remembering who it was who took you skating.”

“I remember,” she ground out.

“And who was it?”

She blew out a long breath, which was only exaggerated by the cold, leaving the little cloud hanging in the air like an exclamation point. “Our footman,” she muttered.

“Your footman?” He folded his arms across his chest. “Wherever would you find one of those?” And before she could make another response, he pointed over to the other skaters. “Shall we?”

“Oh no, I couldn’t…It wouldn’t be…”

“Proper?”

“Exactly!”

“Why not?”

“Because I am about to become betrothed.”

He let his brows rise in a wide arch. “You are?”

“Well, of course. Haven’t you been listening to a word I’ve been saying?”

He’d been trying not to. “Miss Langley, I can’t see how a few turns on the ice will affect your betrothal. Does this gentleman have objections to skating?”

She heaved a sigh and glanced back at the skaters. “Oh, ’tis nothing like that, it’s just that he’s a…”

“A curmudgeon?” he offered. “For he must be to deny you something you enjoy.”

“It’s just that I am to be a duchess, and you don’t usually see such ladies out skating.” There it was again. That wistful note. But she was right. Skating wasn’t exactly a ducal pastime. He was positive his grandfather never had. And so he found himself sharing her envious glances at the people gliding over the ice.

“You should go skating,” he urged her. “We could both go.”

She shook her head. “I haven’t any blades. Nor do you.”

“Leave that to me,” he told her as he took her hand and towed her toward a booth near the skaters. The red mitten now encased in his hand felt small, and oddly vulnerable.

“Really, I don’t think—” she protested.

“Miss Langley, you aren’t a duchess yet.”

“But I will be quite soon and then—”

“And when you are, you may find yourself looking out the windows of your gilded prison wishing you’d gone for one last turn around the ice with your improper footman.”

“I doubt—”

He held up his hand to stave off her protests, and by some miracle it worked. “Freedom, Miss Langley, has its advantages, and those ducal glories you long for will still be there tomorrow, but ice doesn’t last forever.”

She set her mouth in a stubborn line.

“Do you really want to spend the rest of your life without ever having skated again?”

“You sound like Tally,” she shot back, and he had to imagine she wasn’t offering him a compliment. “She was going on and on just yesterday that we’ll both most likely end our days without ever being kiss—” Her eyes widened as she realized what she’d nearly confessed.

“Without ever being what?” he asked, bemused by the pink blush on her cheeks.

“Skating,” she told him, her lips pursing shut and her gaze turning back to the skaters.

“Then come along,” he coaxed. “Just a few turns. Besides, if your Miss Browne is right, no one of any consequence is down here and therefore your proper reputation is quite safe.”

“She is not my Miss Browne,” she shot back, her gaze on a couple who, hand in hand, were making an elegant and graceful circle around the ice. “Oh, it does look fun, and I suppose—”

He didn’t give her a chance to reconsider. “Then skating it is.” And he towed her toward the booth where a man stood hawking blades to passersby. This was madness, but he couldn’t resist. Most likely she was right, duchesses and dukes weren’t likely to be found skating. So they might both take this opportunity while they had the chance. He owed her that much. Before he took his place as Hollindrake and ruined all her expectations by crying off.