The Art of Duke Hunting
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Authors: Sophia Nash
Tags: #Fiction, #Romance, #Historical, #General
The Art of Duke Hunting
Sophia Nash
To my mother
Contents
An Excerpt from Between the Duke and the Deep Blue Sea
R
oman Montagu, the seventeenth Duke of Norwich, knew he would end up at the bottom of the sea. He’d known it for almost two decades.
Yet, he never complained about his fate. For God sakes, no. Why, he had cheated death longer than most of the devilishly long line of Norwiches before him. He even considered himself lucky.
For a Norwich.
Indeed, almost everyone in England knew why there had been a dizzying number of Norwich dukes in two hundred years. They were cursed. Every last one of them had found death prematurely.
It was said the first bloodthirsty duke had damned the family by publicly accusing a young lady of witchcraft after she had refused his ham-handed offer of marriage. But really, who could blame her for her less than enthusiastic response? The duke had not brought jewels to profess his affection. No, he had brought a half dozen ill-plucked fowl to her family and proclaimed her the luckiest lady alive due to the honor he would bestow on her. That did little to impress the young lady, or rather, the young witch, whose powers might not have saved her from persecution, but had managed to thereafter damn each and every Norwich duke, whose blood matched Norwich I, the Duck Hunter.
Roman had learned to live with this familial noose by adopting the blackest sense of humor concerning his forebears’ early visits by the Grim Reaper. Indeed, he could recite the family’s history by rote.
1. The first duke stuck his spoon in the wall when he choked on a giblet in his favorite duck stew not two days after his not-so-beloved burned at the stake while cursing all Norwich dukes.
2. The second unfortunate duke ate grass for his last breakfast when a bolt of lightning struck his duck blind in which he was silently perched at dawn in the pouring rain. It was then that the whispers of the curse began.
3. The third, fourth, fifth, and sixth dukes vowed to give a wide berth to all fowl to stay alive. Instead, they dampened their insatiable thirst for hunting by pursuing the dangerous fairer sex in London’s ballrooms. While they might have been well-endowed with passion for the wives and daughters of their class, sadly, they were not well-talented with dueling pistols or swords borne by the husbands and fathers. The line devolved to a far less romantic branch with better aim.
4. The seventh duke tried to avoid the curse by daily readings from Johnson’s sermons. He tumbled from the rolling ladder in Norwich Hall’s famous, but mostly unread (especially by dukes III through VI), library while looking at an illustrated guide to geese hidden between Johnson’s pages.
5. The adventurous eighth duke tossed away all sermons and took his dirt nap after sinking in a Scottish bog in search of a rare merganser, which barely looked like waterfowl at all. He had wrongly assumed the curse would not cross the border.
6. The ninth, tenth, and eleventh dukes were never seen or heard from again when they heroically went to war against the French. At least they were brave. Then again, when you knew you would die young, why not embrace your fate and die like a hero instead of a demented birdbrained predator?
7. The twelfth duke refused the call to arms. Indeed, he refused to put one toe out of bed in an all-out effort to avoid his fate. He cocked his toes in an acute case of gout within a twelve month. Most said it was the duck paté enveloped in goose fat.
8. The thirteenth duke knew he stood not a ghost of a chance given his number and family history. He went out in a blaze of pleasure, at full cry, with one of his seven mistresses, who tickled him with duck feathers.
9. The foppish fourteenth duke sacked a host of valets before he inadvertently strangled himself whilst fashioning a new knot for his Widgeon-colored neckcloth the scandal sheet dubbed the “Norwich Noose.”
10. The fifteenth duke decided to confound the curse by befriending the enemy. He raised a pet mallard, who quacked on command and followed him everywhere. But while taking a short lie-down under a willow tree, a poacher aimed for the sitting duck and killed the dreaming duke instead.
Only Roman Montagu’s father, the sixteenth Duke of Norwich, had lived past his fourth decade. Some said it was due to a tragedy of which he never spoke, or his avoidance of all spirits and hunting. Indeed, the stern aristocrat refused to sin in any fashion whatsoever.
But Roman knew better. The man had avoided a premature rendezvous with his maker by sheer bloody pigheadedness. Yes, the sixteenth duke had been nothing if not inflexible. But even the most wary and stubborn Montagu man could not avoid his destiny. At least Roman’s father’s death had been dignified. It was hard to find humor in a fall from a horse. Then again, the sixteenth duke had not possessed a shred of wit. Roman never told his sister or his mother that there had been feathers nearby, indicating his father’s horse had most likely bolted from the sudden appearance of a migrating flock.
And so Roman Montagu, “Seventeen” to his intimates, did not worry overmuch about his future since it was already written. He would be the first Norwich to sink to the ocean floor—just like his elder brother before him, who should have been duke. He did not know how a duck would cause it, but of his fate he held not a feather of doubt. The other point on which he was decided, was that he would be the last—the very last—Norwich. There were no males left in the line—not even a fourteenth cousin twenty-four times removed.
And so, Roman Montagu, went about the process of life in a simple manner. He avoided ducks, and he did not enter bodies of water larger than his bath. The rest he left to chance. He worked on his grand schemes, and seized every moment of every day with gusto for who knew when the lights would go out.
But at this very moment in time, it appeared he was about to break the record of shortest title holder. Well, at least it did not involve a damned duck.
Or did it?
S
heer unadulterated terror rained down on Roman Montagu, the Duke of Norwich. He was in the grip of a hellish nightmare—on the one thing he had vowed never to set foot on again . . . a ship. He shook his head, and it seemed to spin endlessly in the gale wind. Seawater lanced his eyes as waves crashed and retreated over the railing, while clips rattled against the masts over the roar and whine of a storm.
Hell and damn
. ’Twas not a dream. His brother was not some ghostly figure haunting him. No. Roman was wedged in the windward corner, unable to move. His fingers clawed the quarterdeck, only to find one hand tied to the sodding taffrail. His blood seized and stood still in his veins.
Blindly, he freed his wrist, and managed to crab-walk away from the stern. The vessel rose and violently shifted on a massive wave and he slammed into the mizzenmast. The blow sent a shower of white hot pain sparking through his brainbox. He lunged for the aft mast again. It was his only chance.
Safety was up in the rigging, where he would wait for the hair-raising crack of the deck’s wooden beams giving way to shoals—when the sea always won her game with foolish mankind who tried to tame her. Up one of the three masts, he would be the last to lose.
As the ship violently creaked and rocked in the kaleidoscope of the summer storm tumbling through the inky darkness, he tried mightily to make the muscle of his brain flex. He had not one particle of an idea of how or why he was on this bloody wreck in the making. Flashes of insane evening revelry with his fellow dukes in the royal entourage crackled through his mind as he was tossed away from the mast.
Well, damnation, he knew how to swim. He’d once proved he could outswim fate. Maybe he could do it again.
It was worth a try.
E
sme March, the Countess of Derby, peered out of the rain-riddled porthole of the door leading to the ship’s deck. She was probably the only passenger not terrified or ill. Yet.
But at least she was not afraid. The captain had warned of an approaching storm when they set sail, and the vessel was a very fine ship. The greatest deterrent to any sort of fear was excitement. She was finally embarking on the trip of a lifetime. All by herself, despite everyone’s pleas to the contrary.
But she might become as green as a pea if she didn’t inhale a few gulps of bracing sea air instead of remaining in her small cabin. Her gaze swept the murky seascape as she gripped the door handle to keep her balance.
For a moment, she thought she saw something odd—likely just a poor sailor whose task it was to secure a line. The deck would be impossible to negotiate given the pitch and sway.
There he was again
—an eerie image of a man, his hair whipping his face in the storm. She inhaled sharply as he slammed into a mast and fell back.
Good God
. The man regained his footing and swayed dangerously as an enormous wave crashed over the railing. He reached wildly for the mast but the wave dragged his body toward the edge of the ship.
Esme bolted past the door, knotted a line about her, and dashed for the stranger about to be lost to the sea. She couldn’t breathe for the ferocity of the wind and the freezing sheets of rain.
She grasped the man’s wrists just as he would have been tossed into the deep blue. Esme prayed for strength. His hands gripped her arms as another wave crashed over them both, the white foam glowing in the darkness.
As the seawater receded, for just a moment hanging in time, she chanced to see his face; harsh lines etched the corners of his mouth and forehead. But it was his translucent pale eyes that frightened her.
She recoiled. It was the second time she had spied death in less than two years. The ship pitched to advantage, and they were hurtled in the direction of the door to the cabins.
For some odd reason, the gentleman appeared to pull away from her. She used the last remaining strength she possessed to navigate him over the threshold before he sagged. She had but a moment to open her door before he lost consciousness.
Esme struggled to move his leg from the doorjamb, and then shut her cabin door and locked it. She paused, dripping puddles on the bare wooden floor. She pushed back her wet, tangled hair from her eyes.
Lord, he was so deathly pale; his lips waxy and almost blue. Wind-whipped strands of dark hair threaded with premature gray plastered his vaguely familiar, noble profile. He looked like a weary archangel felled to earth while she probably looked like a drowned rat.