St. Raven (26 page)

“Good God! Sack him.”

“The thought has crossed my mind.” Tris steered his foster brother down the stairs, and out of the house, his mind already turning to Cressida’s cause.

He’d told Uffham he was exhausted, but at the thought of her, arousal stirred. Arousal focused only on her, on her soft, sweet curves, her long silky hair, her wide gray eyes, her full, luscious lips, her clever hands, her frank enthusiasm.

They’d only started their exploration…

He realized he was standing before the door, and the footman was surreptitiously eyeing him.

Cressida. Waiting for news!

“Find Mr. Lyne, and send him to my study.”

Damn the fact that he couldn’t go to her himself. He went upstairs, realizing with every step how completely impossible he had made any further connection.

Crofton was stupid in some ways, but not that stupid. Miss Mandeville had been snatched by Le Corbeau. Crofton wouldn’t cause talk over it because that would expose his disgusting blackmail of her. He probably assumed she’d been ravished, however.

If talk started about the Duke of St. Raven and the same Miss Mandeville, he’d have to speculate. He’d probably assume—wrongly—that Tris was Le Corbeau. He’d also realize that she’d been the houri. The disguise had been good, but not good enough.

It would all be a damned mess, and not even one to be solved by marriage. Bad enough to thrust a woman like her onto the cruel, exposed pinnacle of society. Impossible with scandal like that attached.

He was staring into nowhere when Cary came in. “Trouble?”

Tris laughed. “An eel-bed of it. I’m just realizing how deep a toil we’re in here, with Miss Mandeville the one most at risk.”

“Gossip’s started?”

“No, but…”

Tris outlined his thoughts. Perhaps he’d hoped to have the problems argued away, but he saw Cary accept everything as seriously as he did.

“She’d never have a chance at a decent life,” Cary said. “It wasn’t…”

“Wise. Dammit, I know. And I could have gone after her damn statue by myself.” Tris raked a hand through his hair. “What’s done is done. Now we have to take care of her. I can’t be seen near her, but you should be safe enough. I won’t risk a note.”

He recounted his visit to La Coop’s house.

Cary grinned. “That’s a fine, bold sort of woman for you.”

“If you want her, have her.”

“No, thank you. We’re not going to let her get away with it, are we?”

Tris matched his smile. “Of course not. I hope you’re skilled in housebreaking.”

“No, but I’m ready to learn. Could lead to more trouble, though.”

“Dammit, I know. I’m thinking it’s time to settle down. Perhaps I’m getting old.”

“Bite your tongue. You’re a year younger than I am! Perhaps we’ve just run through our wild oats. It’s been a deep sack of them, but every sack must empty in the end.”

“So what do we do now? Starve in the wilderness?” But Tris shook his head at his own question. “I’ll be going on about bitter bread soon, and eating locusts. Which is almost as bad as cochineal.”

“What?”

Tris laughed. “Go to Miss Mandeville. Assure her that she’ll have her jewels within the week. My word on it.”

Cary gave an ironic salute and left.

Tris knew he should go to Leatherhulme, but after his friend left, he lingered. Never to see her again. That’s what it came down to. He’d expected that, hadn’t he? So why did it seem so bleak a sentence now?

“What a pity that I’ll never be able to tell my grandchildren that I once had the Duke of St. Raven on his knees before me.”

Grandchildren. That meant marriage to some other man. Some other man stroking her to pleasure, being driven to ecstasy by her. He put a hand in his pocket and pulled out the scrap of white veiling stained with red from her lips. When he brought it to his face, a soft perfume rose from it.

He clenched his fist on it and broke free of thoughts that could drive him mad. But, God, were they doomed to travel the rest of their lives in different lands?

Not doomed. Not her, at least. She would soon be back in the world she found comfortable, and surely she had sense enough to marry the right sort of man. She would live a comfortable life, wife to a prosperous professional man, or perhaps to a gentleman with a small, cozy estate. She would be a bustling, energetic wife and mother, a blessing to any community…

As for himself… He stuffed the silk back in his pocket. As the Duchess of Arran said, it only took resolution to form an attachment with the right person.

Cressida duly noted each book in her father’s library. He was not a great reader, and most of his books were to do with business. Directories of cities, merchants, banks, stocks, ports, ships…

She knew such things would have little value, but this mechanical recording blessedly numbed her mind.

Travel books. Some about India, but mostly of other places. China, Japan, Mongolia, Russia… Did her father still dream of travel to yet stranger lands?

No copy of the travels of Sir John Mandeville here, but he’d sent her one on her tenth birthday. There had always been letters and occasional gifts, and of course the money they lived on. But he’d been as real to her as the Faerie Queen.

Why had he come home to spoil everything?

Then she came to the same book on Arabia that St. Raven had lent her, and couldn’t help taking it down to flutter through the pages.

Where was he now? Had he returned from Miranda Coop’s yet? When would she hear? The sensible parts of her mind were anxious for that, but the deeper parts could hardly care, because she knew he would not, could not, bring the news.

What point to a handful of jewels, if not—?

Oh, folly
! She snapped the book shut and shoved it back on the shelf. But the next one was a directory of London. St. Raven’s address would be in there. It seemed positively unnatural that she not know his address…

Almost against her will, she took down the plain bound book. Did it list houses by proprietor? No, by address and by trade. She laughed. They would hardly list him under “Peers of the Realm” would they? She checked, but of course not. Between “Pastry Cooks” and “Pepper and Spice Merchants”?

But when she riffled through, she realized that it started with a section on the homes of the great.

The first page entry, of course, was the king. His Royal Majesty King George. The listings continued through the royal family and the members of the cabinet. She flipped along, but didn’t have to go far to find it.

His Grace, the Duke of St. Raven, 5 Upper Jasper Street.

Even that was enough to set her heart speeding.

Another book. A map book, with sheets that unfolded to show various parts of London in fine detail. She spread it on the desk and consulted the index.

Upper Jasper Street. There it was, close to St. James’s, each house delineated by an outline with the number neatly penned inside.

The meticulous mapmaker had even drawn the garden behind the house, implying a central flower bed, though whether he could have known that, she didn’t know. The house had an extension at the back that was only half the width of the main part. A scullery below, but what above? A small bedroom? A box room?

As she concentrated on these details, it almost seemed that if she found a magnifying glass, she would be able to see the actual house. With a strong enough glass, perhaps she could look in windows, perhaps even see him…

She pulled back and quickly, clumsily, refolded the map and put the book back on the shelf. There was nothing there for her but inked lines.

Tris went downstairs and toward the back of the house, where the offices lay. In the outer room three clerks rose from their desks to bow. “Your Grace.”

Tris smiled and turned to his senior clerk. “Good afternoon, Bigelow. All’s well with my dominion, I assume.”

The man, who was a merry sort when he let down his guard, winked. “I believe so, Your Grace.”

Tris nodded and went into the inner sanctum, where Mr. Nigel Leatherhulme ruled. Leatherhulme, pale, scrawny, and with thick spectacles, must be seventy if he was a day, but his mind was as sharp as Tris’s own, and his knowledge and experience far deeper. The man had terrified Tris when they’d first met. By now Tris could hold his own, but that was about it.

“Your Grace.”

Leatherhulme began to rise, but Tris waved him back to his seat. The brain was holding up, but the body wasn’t, which was why the man now lived here. His wife had been dead twenty years or more, and his children were practically pensioners themselves. Tris had thought it ridiculous that Leatherhulme was traveling a mile every day to this office when there were empty rooms available.

Leatherhulme had not completely approved, but eventually he had accepted the offer—but only after Tris had agreed to deduct a version of room and board from his wages.

In making the offer, Tris had not thought how difficult it would be to replace the man when he lived here, but he was going to have to in order to bring about change. Another rash mistake.

He pulled up a chair to the side of the desk and passed over the pouch of documents. “Here I am. Tell me where else to sign.”

Leatherhulme’s thin lips tightened almost to a hole. “Either you will read the documents, Your Grace, or I will summon Bigelow to read them to you.”

Tris was aware of playing a game—like a dog fighting over a bone. “If I sit and look at them, how will you know if I am reading them?”

“You are sensible enough, Your Grace, not to waste your time like that. In fact,” Leatherhulme said, looking over the top of his spectacles, “I am beginning to suspect that if I tried to prevent you from reading what you sign, I might have a fight on my hands.”

Tris leaned back in his chair. “You see, you made assumptions.”

“Your uncle had no high opinion of you, sir.”

“You think better of me now?”

“I would think more highly of you, Your Grace, if you had not arrived here playing the groom.”

“Gossiping, Leatherhulme?”

The man stiffened as much as his curved spine would allow. “Sometimes one cannot help hearing things, sir, especially when all the domestics are gossiping.”

“Honor of a Tregallows, I was engaged in a good deed.”

The old man sighed. “You are very like your father, sir.”

It was the first time Leatherhulme had mentioned his father, and Tris was tempted to ask for more. It was too sensitive to rush into, however.

“Another black mark against me?” he said lightly. “Very well, push over the first document.”

Tris started on accounts from various estates, signing or initialing them once he understood them, asking questions when he didn’t. For the first time he felt a sort of partnership here, and he began to think it a shame that Leatherhulme would have to go.

He would, though.

The man sat ready with the ducal seal and sealing wax to apply it to the appropriate documents, always precisely centered in the wax. The sharp smell of hot wax mixed with the dust of old documents and a faint, aged lavender smell from the wrinkled man. There was something unfortunately tomblike about this room.

Tris moved on to a request for improvements at an estate in Northumberland, reviewing the costs against income, present and anticipated, keeping in mind the overall income of the dukedom in these hard times.

“Can this be sold?”

“That is part of your family’s original holdings, Your Grace.”

He was in hot water now. “Yet far from any other property. I see no sense in clinging to the past when the money could be put to use elsewhere.”

“There are always economies, Your Grace.”

“Dammit, Leatherhulme, how much tighter do you want the belt? I’m not cutting staff when it’s so hard to find positions these days. And I’m not,” he added, “selling any of my horses. I deserve some pleasures.”

“Undoubtedly, sir.” Leatherhulme took the document. “I will let it be known that the property might be available. But it would be unwise to sell beneath its value.”

“Of course.” The old man hadn’t mentioned Nun’s Chase and women, which were an expense, but not enough to break a duchy, unlike his uncle’s avid collecting of Italian paintings. Which, alas, would now fetch a fraction of what he’d paid.

He took the next document, thinking that a rich wife would undoubtedly be a blessing.

He thought of Phoebe Swinamer, who brought a handsome dowry as well as her cold beauty, and shuddered. A Mary Begbie had been trolled through the season by Lady Trent—plain, dull, but heiress to a wealthy West Indies merchant. He’d vaguely considered her, with the idea of a mistress to make life bearable.

He wondered why he hadn’t noticed Cressida Mandeville, daughter of an East Indies nabob. Her father had probably not been as rich as Begbie, and perhaps they had been too refined—or too ignorant—to hire a needy or greedy aristocrat to dangle her before the highest bred noses. He did find it astonishing that he had been in the same room with Cressida a number of times and not been aware of it.

Leatherhulme cleared his throat, and Tris realized he’d been staring at the same page too long. He put it down. “Why am I suing a convent? It seems sacrilegious.”

“A convent can also be a landowner, sir. You are suing them because their estate has encroached upon your land in Berresby Studely. They cite boundaries that go back before the Reformation, but it is a Catholic convent removed here because of the turmoil in France, so they do not even have history on their side.”

“Lying nuns?”

“It would be a mistake to assume virtue merely because of religious vows.”

“Would it, indeed?” Tris asked with a grin. “Bring on the nuns, then.”

“Your Grace…”

But was that a hint of a twinkle in the faded eyes?

“Are you sure I can’t tempt you to Nun’s Chase, Leatherhulme? I could arrange delights especially for you. A mature mother superior…”

“Your Grace!”

The exchange gave Tris courage. He put down the documents.

“Leatherhulme, I need to talk to you about your position.” He thought he saw a flash of alarm and raised his hand. “On my honor, you have your place here as long as you want it, and your home here, too. With my gratitude. But I think it is time to hire an assistant for you.”