The Duchess Diaries: The Bridal Pleasures Series (16 page)

He had to launch his own investigation, and whether it was to prove his honor to himself or to the Boscastles seemed to matter less by the minute.

Nick ambled about the street, oblivious to the bustle of another London morning. He calculated that there would be several bidders for the diary, which he had first stowed in a place of honor under his pillow beside his pistol and then, reappraising its worth, had hidden under a loose floorboard. He had been up half the night reading select passages from the lusty tome. He was shocked, titillated, and impressed. He might stumble over an occasional word he didn’t recognize, but he got the gist of the entries that described Miss Boscastle’s encounters with the duke. Naughty, naughty. She used words as well as he used a knife. Quite the wicked girl. He thought he was in love.

Still, business was business. Who wanted the diary the most? The bat who had commissioned its theft? The
publisher on Fleet Street who’d had the displeasure of conducting business with Nick before? The fancy courtesan whom the duke had thrown over for the lady with the red-hot pen?

Trickier to predict was whether the duke would let himself be blackmailed or would go off his head and throttle Nick. He’d seen Wynfield fencing at Fenton’s School of Arms. The duke was a natural fighter; he had to be good if Fenton had trained him, and Nick had to respect that, if nothing else. Then there was the lady herself.

It was no wonder the duke was marrying her. Nick had been curious to find out what she looked like and had finally caught a glimpse of her this afternoon when she and her pupils set out for shopping in the Strand. Fair hair, a sweet face, and white muslin.

“Who’d have thought it?” he mused to the costermonger, who’d moved out of the street to let the lady’s carriage pass. “It’s the quiet ones you got to watch.”

“Do you want to buy any or not?” the vendor asked in a testy voice, pulling the apple away from Nick’s nimble fingers. “I ain’t pushin’ this cart for charity.”

“No, old man. I’m not purchasing your wares today. In a day or so, I reckon. I’ve recently come across a mint. After a few negotiations I’ll return with a fat purse.”

“Fat chance of that is what I predict.”

But Nick took no notice.

He had a fortune under the floorboard.

Gideon was surprised when Audrey Watson agreed to see him the next morning. He had sent her a note asking whether they could meet away from her house, and she
had returned his message by suggesting she pick him up outside a bookseller’s on Bond Street.

Her carriage was nondescript and not likely to attract notice on the congested streets. Nor was she, dressed in a leghorn bonnet and high-buttoned sage green morning gown that made her look more like a matron going about her domestic errands than the abbess of a thriving bordello.

“Your Grace,” she said with a genuine warmth that he also did not expect. “Is the gossip true? Must I mourn the loss of another rogue?”

He couldn’t help laughing at her candor. But then, Audrey was a popular half-world hostess, and she boasted a network of influential friends. She was accomplished in the social as well as the amorous arts.

“It is true,” he confessed.

“Then I must congratulate you, although I hope this sudden engagement is the result of romance and not anything that happened in my house.”

He shook his head. “I don’t think I can explain it.”

“I see,” she murmured, and he guessed she already knew more than she wanted to reveal. “Innocence often holds a stronger appeal than sophistication. I could have offered you another courtesan, but I doubt I could have found one with your fiancée’s heritage.”

He hesitated. Could he trust her? He decided that he had to take that chance.

“I wanted to make a personal appeal for your help. I brought my betrothed’s diary into your house. If Gabrielle thought to avenge herself by stealing it when she visited me later on, well, I will offer a generous sum for its return and leave it at that.”

“I doubt Gabrielle has the wits for anything that
elaborate. She is already looking for another protector. But if you would like to see her, I’ll have to warn you that she is very put out and upset with you.”

“I gathered that,” he said with a wry laugh. “I shall be in trouble with not only Charlotte’s cousins but the two brothers who have just arrived in town.”

“Brothers?” Her eyes lit up. “Are they married?”

“You probably know the family better than I do.” He laughed again. “I don’t believe in romance.”

“But you do believe in honor?”

He nodded. “What else does a gentleman have to go by?”

The carriage had returned to Bond Street. He had made his case and had to leave it at that.

“We’ll meet again, Your Grace,” she said with confidence. “If not here, at a party or another soirée.”

He leaned forward to the door. The slight rustling of paper unfolding in her hands stopped him.

He turned his head reluctantly, hoping it was not a random page from Charlotte’s confessions. She appeared to have drawn from her reticule one of the satirical broadsheets that littered the gutters of London.

“I don’t know whether you saw this,” she said. “But in case you haven’t you should be prepared for the days ahead.”

He took the paper from her hand and stared down blankly at a caricature that took moments for him to interpret; it was a rude depiction of himself as a fire-breathing dragon in the theater last night and a cowering Moreland in a dented steel helmet, with Charlotte holding her open fan between the two men like a medieval shield.

Jane, too, had warned him that the scurrilous press
had scented a scandal in the theater lobby. He had been too infuriated to listen.

“These filthy rumors come and go,” Audrey said with a reassuring smile. “It won’t touch you.”

“No.”

“Still, the sooner you are married the better.”

A
note arrived for Charlotte shortly after she returned from shopping with the girls. The duke would like to take her to the park with her brothers; the Marchioness of Sedgecroft would act as chaperone. Charlotte immediately sent the duke’s messenger off with her acceptance. Their rushed courtship might not deceive anyone, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t enjoy it.

The sky was overcast when he came to call, but Gideon against the gloomy backdrop seemed larger than life, a magnificent creature who could master his milieu. Evidently she was not the only woman of that persuasion. She noticed that every housemaid the academy employed had found an excuse to swarm the hall.

The added bonus of her brothers Caleb and Jack chatting against the duke’s coach had drawn even the under footmen to the door. It seemed to her that the entire world wished to experience every aspect of this romance almost as much as she did.

They reached the park at the fashionable hour, Gideon’s carriage halting in the parade of stylish phaetons, gigs, and curricles whose owners had come to see and be seen. It was apparent to Charlotte that Gideon belonged to the former group, and that the arrival in London of her eligible-bachelor brothers had already caused quite a stir.

Grayson and Jane, of course, drew their own circle of admirers, as did Grayson’s sister Chloe. But the majority of females abroad at this time of day, from governesses to gentlewomen to ladybirds looking for a lovely duke to land on, aimed covetous glances like Cupid’s arrows his way. Charlotte kept a good grip on his hand until another tall, attractive gentleman, who was giving a fencing demonstration by the water, called out a challenge to Gideon across the green.

It was Sir Christopher Fenton, Charlotte realized, the dashing sword master whom Grayson and Jane had retained to instruct their young son, Rowan. Fenton was said to be Gideon’s closest friend.

“Sorry, I’m courting today,” Gideon called back with a sly grin.

“That was a subtle announcement,” Grayson said wryly.

Gideon glanced down at Charlotte. “Do you mind if I take him up?”

“Not at all.”

It was a brief but impressive show of swordplay. The two men started with the five positions of the salute and launched immediately into a heated contest.

“Why don’t they wear protection?” Jane wondered aloud.

Chloe’s lip curled in a knowing smile. “It’s considered
unmanly when one is fencing an opponent of equal skill.”

Charlotte watched Gideon and his friend in admiring silence. She might have never been able to look away had a strain of conversation not disturbed her.

“I wouldn’t want to meet those two in a dark alley,” a gentleman standing next to Grayson remarked.

“I would,” the lady in front of him announced to the shocked laughter of her friends. “I could happily become the hostage of either or both of them.”

Charlotte reminded herself that it was rude to eavesdrop, although it wasn’t until the lady dropped another disconcerting statement that Charlotte realized
she
was the topic of this unfortunate discussion.

“I would choose the duke over the master, despite the fact that we were about to conclude negotiations for an arrangement when he became involved in a scandal with some milksop schoolmistress.”

“Really?” said one of her companions, her eyes lifting to Charlotte in uncertain recognition. “Well, I’m sure she is a lovely person.”

“I’m sure she is a spoiled chit who will lose his interest a week after the wedding. I’d like to tell her to her face.”

“Gabrielle,” the other woman whispered, gesturing with her head to Charlotte. “I think you already have.”

Jane turned around, her elegant nose in the air. “Kindly pick your sour grapes in another vineyard, if you please. His Grace’s betrothed is trying to enjoy the match. And so am I.”

At that moment Caleb strolled up to join them, Jack at his heels. “Ah. I see we have a contest under way. Who is winning?”

Jane smiled. “Charlotte is.”

“Charlotte?” Grayson turned his head in confusion and stopped his gaze on Gabrielle. “I know you,” he said. “I met you at a rout last week. Aren’t you the woman whom Wynfield—”

“—doesn’t know,” Jane finished for him. “Is that what you meant to say, dearest?”

He tipped back his top hat and stared over the heads of the audience to the fencing match. “If you say it was, Jane, then it was.”

By the time the match ended, having been called a draw, Gabrielle had fluttered off to the other end of the park with her trio of subdued companions in tow.

“Well,” Charlotte said quietly when Gideon returned in a casual stride to her side. “Would you like me to leave you alone? I know that she is the one you hoped to be with now.”

Not to mention that he could still take Gabrielle as his mistress after the wedding, and they both knew it was not only a possibility but a standard practice in the ton.

But he glanced only once toward the woman in question before giving a decisive shake of his head. “I want to be alone with you,” he stated. “Shall we go for a walk so that the upper ton has another reason to stare?”

“I don’t know whether that’s a good idea,” she said, and glanced around to see Jane nodding in consent, if not encouraging her to comply.

So Charlotte took his arm and let him lead her to a well-worn path, the world of mistresses and fencing matches receding like a wave. It was another first, she thought, to walk with Gideon in comfortable silence.

Perhaps she felt at ease because there were no more
secrets between them. She had met Gabrielle. He had thwarted Phillip in the theater lobby.

How good it felt to have confronted the truth. The only secrets that need concern her were those they would share, both in daily life and in their marriage bed. She felt her heart sing with the anticipation of it all.

And then he turned to her with a gravity of purpose. His face bore no trace of the wonder she felt. Instead, it reflected a discontent that made her afraid of what he was about to say.

“Charlotte, I have to tell you something,” he said, his eyes searching hers. “I should have told you before, but everything has happened so fast.”

She braced herself.
I don’t really know him,
she realized with dismay.
I have made him up the way I wanted him to be.

“If you have changed your mind about this marriage, Gideon, I will try to convince my family to release you. I will deal with the aftermath. I’m responsible for this tangle.”

“You don’t understand. What I’m about to say, and should have said before, might make
you
reconsider. Come. We can walk a little farther and still be seen.”

A dark foreboding filled her.

“I cannot change who I am,” she said, feeling defensive. “I know what sort of beauty a man seeks in a lover.”

“How would you know?” he said. “There is no one standard of beauty. Your beauty is—”

“Quiet.”

He frowned. “I disagree. May I finish?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“I need to be honest with you,” he said. “I never
planned to marry again after my wife died. But we were both young. I am expected to produce a male heir.”

“I am sorry for her death, Gideon. What was her name?”

“Emily,” he said, still holding Charlotte’s hand. “She died of cancer four years ago.” They paused beneath a canopy of tangled branches. “When she died everything in my life dissolved. Our marriage was arranged, and both of us were shy of each other. Neither of us was even twenty. But then she fell ill and there was nothing I could do. She was sweet. She would have liked you.”

“Oh, Gideon.”

“I couldn’t do anything except watch her go. And then I lost the courage to care. Everyone urged me to marry again. But it seemed like too much effort to look for anyone else. After all, I didn’t look for her. And so I was drunk and belligerent for two years following her death.”

Charlotte felt an aching sadness that she was afraid to express. She didn’t want to embarrass him with an excess of sympathy. Yet she wished him to know that she cared.

And then he said, “My daughter doesn’t remember her at all. She may remember me even less. In effect she lost both of us at the same time.”

Charlotte pulled her hand from his to stare up at him in disbelief. “Daughter? I wasn’t sure whether her existence was a rumor. You have a daughter and have never mentioned her to me?”