A Duke Never Yields (43 page)

Indeed, he would welcome the peace.

“Very well,” he said at last. “Luisa rejects the notion, Stefanie embraces it. Emilie, my dear? I believe it falls to you to cast the deciding vote.”

Stefanie rolled her own eyes and sat with a pouf into her chair, corgi against her breast. “Well, that’s that, then. Emilie will never agree.”

“I am shocked, Uncle, that a man of your stature would even consider such a disgraceful notion.” Luisa smoothed her skirts with satisfaction.

Olympia held up his hand and regarded Emilie. She sat with her back straight and her fingers knit, thumbs twiddling one another. Her head cocked slightly to one side, considering some distant object with her mother’s own eyes.

“Well, my dear?” Olympia said softly.

Emilie reached up and tapped her chin with one long finger. “We shall have to cut our hair, of course,” she said. “Luisa and Stefanie will have an easier time effecting the disguise, with their strong bones, but I shall have to wear a full beard of whiskers at least. And at least we are not, taken as a group, women of large bosom.”

“Emilie!” said Luisa, in shocked tones.

“Emilie,
darling
!” cried Stefanie. “I knew you had it in you!”

Olympia clapped his hands in profound relief. “There we are! The matter is settled. We shall discuss the details in the morning. Wherever has the tea gone? I shall have it sent to your rooms instead.” He turned around and pressed a button on his desk, a state-of-the-art electrical bell he’d had installed just a month ago. “Ormsby will show you the way. Tally-ho, then!”

“Uncle! You’re not going to
bed
?”

Olympia yawned, tightened the belt on his dressing robe, and made for the door. “Oh, but I am. Quite exhausted.” He waved his hand. “Ormsby will be along shortly!”

“Uncle!” Luisa called desperately. “You can’t be serious, Uncle!”

Olympia paused with his fingertips on the door handle. He looked back over his shoulder. “Come, my girls,” he said. “You shall be well instructed, well placed in respectable homes. You are actresses of exceptional talent, as I have myself witnessed. You possess the dignity and resourcefulness of a most noble family. You have, above all, my unqualified support.”

He opened the door, stretched his arm wide, and smiled.

“What could possibly go wrong?”

*   *   *

T
he Duke of Olympia did not, however, make straight for his room. He walked in the opposite direction, down the hall toward the service staircase at the extreme back of the house. As he descended, the expressions of feminine outrage and excitement from the study died slowly into the walls, until the air went still.

Miss Dingleby was waiting for him in the alcove near the silver pantry. She made a little noise as he drew near, and stepped into the light.

“Ah! There you are, my dear,” Olympia said. He looked down at her from his great height and placed his hand tenderly against her cheek. “Won’t you come upstairs and tell me all about it?”

ONE

A ramshackle inn in Yorkshire (of course)

December 1889

T
he brawl began just before midnight, as taproom brawls usually did.

Not that Emilie had any previous experience of taproom brawls. She had caught glimpses of the odd mill or two in a Schweinwald village square (Schweinwald being by far the most tempestuous of the three provinces of Holstein-Schweinwald-Huhnhof, perhaps because it was the closest to Italy), but her governess or some other responsible adult had always hustled her away at the first spray of blood.

She watched with interest, therefore, as this brawl developed. It had begun as the natural consequence of an ale-soaked game of cards. Emilie had noticed the card players the moment she sat down in an exaggerated swing, braced her elbows, fingered her itching whiskers, and called for a bottle of claret and a boiled chicken with her deepest voice. They played at a table in the center of the room, huddling with bowed heads about the end as if they feared the spavined yellow ceiling might give way at any moment: three or four broad-shouldered men in work shirts, homespun coats slung over their chairs, and one stripling lad.

The stakes must have been high, for they played with intensity. A fine current of tension buzzed through the humid smoke-laden air. One man, his mustache merging seamlessly with the thicket of whiskers along his jaw, adjusted his seat and emitted a fart so long, so luxuriously slow, so like a mechanical engine in its noxious resonance, the very air trembled in awe. A pack of men at a neighboring table looked up, eyebrows high with admiration.

And yet his companions were so intent on the game, they couldn’t be bothered to congratulate him.

At that point, Emilie had taken out a volume of Augustine in the original Latin and made an impressive show of absorption. Travelers, she had discovered early in today’s journey from London, tended to avoid striking up conversations with solitary readers, especially when the book’s title encompassed multiple clauses in a foreign language, and the last thing Emilie needed was an inquisitive traveling companion: the kind who asked one impertinent questions and observed one’s every move. St. Augustine was her shield, and she was grateful to him. But tonight, at the bitter end of her journey into deepest Yorkshire, that godforsaken wilderness of howling wind and frozen moor, she could not focus her attention. Her gaze kept creeping over the edge of the volume to the table beyond.

It was the boy, she decided. Like her, he seemed out of place in this stained and battered inn, as if—like her—he had sought it out over higher-class establishments in order to avoid his usual crowd. He sat at a diagonal angle from her, his left side exposed to her gaze, illuminated by the roaring fire nearby. He was not much more than sixteen; possibly not even that. His pale face was rimmed with spots of all sizes, and his shoulders were almost painfully thin beneath a long thatch of straw-colored hair. He alone had not taken off his coat; it hung from his bones as if from an ill-stuffed scarecrow, dark blue and woven from a fine grade of wool. He regarded his cards with intense concentration behind a pair of owlish spectacles.

Emilie liked his concentration; she liked his spots and his long fingers. He reminded her of herself at that age, all awkward limbs and single-minded focus. Without thinking, she pushed her own spectacles farther up the bridge of her nose and smiled.

The boy was clearly winning.

Even if the stacks of coins at his side were not steadily growing into mountains, Emilie could not have mistaken the scowls of the other men at the table, the shifting in seats, the sharp smacks with which they delivered their stakes to the center of the table. Another round had just begun, and the dealer passed the cards around with blinding swiftness, not to waste a single instant of play. Each face settled into implacability; not a single mustache twitched. One man glanced up and met Emilie’s eyes with cold malevolence.

She dropped her gaze back to her book. Her wine and chicken arrived in a clatter of ancient pewter, delivered by a careless barmaid with clean apple red cheeks and burly fingers. Emilie set down the book and poured the wine with a hand that shook only a little. The coldness of the man’s gaze settled like a fist in her chest.

Emilie concentrated on the ribbon of wine undulating into her glass, on the chilly smoothness of the bottle beneath her fingers. Her wineglass was smudged, as if it had seen many other fingers and very little soap. Emilie lifted it to her lips anyway, keeping all her fingertips firmly pressed against the diamond pattern cut into the bowl, and took a hearty masculine swallow.

And nearly spat it back.

The wine was awful, rough and thin all at once, with a faint undertone of turpentine. Emilie had never tasted anything so awful, not even the cold boar’s heart pie she’d been forced to eat in Huhnhof Baden two years ago, as the guest of honor at the autumn cornucopia festival. Only duty had seen her through that experience. Chew and swallow, Miss Dingleby had always instructed her. A princess does not gag. A princess chews and swallows. A princess does not complain.

The wine felt as if it were actually boiling in Emilie’s mouth. Was that even possible? She held her breath, gathered her strength, and swallowed.

It burned down her throat, making her eyes prickle, making her nostrils flare. The atmosphere in the room, with its roaring fire and twenty perspiring men, pressed against her forehead with enough force to make her brow pearl out with perspiration. Except that princesses did not perspire; even princesses in exile, disguised as young men. She stared up at the ceiling, studied the wooden beam threatening her head, and let gravity do its work.

Her stomach cramped, recoiled, heaved, and settled at last with a warning grumble. A buzz sounded from somewhere inside her spinning ears.

Emilie picked up her knife and fork with numbed fingers and sawed off a leg from her chicken.

Gradually her ears began to pick up sound again, her nose to acquire smells. To her right, a rumble of discontent ricocheted among the card players.

“Unless my eyesight is capable of penetrating the backs of your cards,” the boy was saying, his voice skidding perilously between one octave and the next, “your accusation is impossible, sir. I must beg that you retract it.”

One of the men shot upward, overturning his chair. “Not bloody likely, you cheating little bugger!”

“You are wrong on both counts. I am neither dishonest nor a practicing sodomite,” said the boy, with unnatural calm.

The man flung out his arm and overturned the pile of coins next to the boy’s right arm. “And I say you are!” he yelled.

Or so Emilie presumed. The words themselves were lost in the crash of humanity that followed the overturning of the coins onto the floor.

Emilie, who had just lifted the chicken leg to her mouth with a certain amount of relish—she had never, ever been allowed to touch a morsel of food without the intercession of one utensil or another—nearly toppled in the whoosh of air as a long-shanked figure dove from his seat near the fireplace and into the tangle of flailing limbs.

“Oh, fuck me arse!” yelled the barmaid, three feet away. “Ned! Fetch the bucket!”

“Wh-what?” said Emilie. She rose from her chair and stared in horror. A coin went flying from the writhing scrum before her and smacked against her forehead in a dull thud.

“I’ll take that.” The barmaid swooped down and snatched the coin from among the shavings.

“Madam, I . . . oh, good God!” Emilie ducked just in time to avoid a flying bottle. It crashed into the fire behind her in a shattering explosion of glass and steam, laced with turpentine.

Emilie looked at her wine and chicken. She looked down at her battered leather valise, filled with its alien cargo of masculine clothing and false whiskers. Her heart rattled nervously in her chest.

“Excuse me, madam,” she said to the barmaid, ducking again as a pewter tankard soared through the air, “do you think . . .”

“Ned! Bring that bleedin’ bucket!” bellowed the barmaid. The words had hardly left her lips when a thick-shouldered man ran up from behind, bucket in each hand, skin greasy with sweat. “About time,” the barmaid said, and she snatched a bucket from his hand and launched its contents into the scrum.

For an instant, the scene hung suspended, a still-life drawing of dripping fists halted in mid-swing and lips curled over menacing teeth. Then a single explicit curse burst fluently from some masculine throat, and the fists connected with solid flesh. Someone roared like a wounded lion, a feral sound cut off short by a smash of breaking glass.

“You’d best fly, young sir,” said the barmaid, over her shoulder, as she tossed the second bucket into the fray.

“Right,” said Emilie. She picked up her valise and stumbled backward. She had already engaged a room upstairs, though she wasn’t quite sure where to find it; but at least she knew there
was
an upstairs, a refuge from the brawl, which seemed to be growing rather than ebbing. Two men ran in from the other room, eyes wild, spittle flying from their lips, and leapt with enthusiasm onto the pile.

Emilie took another step backward, a final longing gaze at her chicken. She’d only had a single rubbery bite, her first meal since a hurried lunch of cheese sandwich and weak tea at the station cafe in Derby, as she waited for the next train in her deliberately haphazard route. She hadn’t thought to bring along something to eat. What princess did? Food simply arrived at the appropriate intervals, even during the flight from the Continent, procured by one loyal retainer or another. (Hans did have a knack for procuring food.) This chicken, tough and wretched, pale and dull with congealed grease, was her only chance of nourishment until morning. The dismembered leg lay propped on the edge of the plate, unbearably tantalizing.

At the back of Emilie’s mind, Miss Dingleby was saying something strict, something about dignity and decorum, but the words were drowned out by the incessant beat of hunger farther forward in the gray matter. Emilie ducked under a flying fork, reached out with one slender white hand, snatched the chicken leg, and put it in her pocket.

She spun around and hesitated, for just the smallest fraction of an instant.

“I’ve got you, you bleedin’ little bu—” The shout rang out from the melee, cut short by an oomph and a splatter.

Emilie turned back, set down her valise, and wrenched the other leg from the chicken. The bone and skin slipped against her fingers; she grabbed the knife and sawed through until the drumstick came loose.

A half crown coin landed with a thud on the platter, at the bisection of leg from trunk, in a pool of thickened grease. “Oy!” someone yelled.

Emilie looked up. A man rushed toward her, his nose flinging blood, his arms outstretched. Emilie took the chicken leg, left the coin, and scrambled past the chair.

“What’ve you got there? Oy!”

A heavy hand landed on her shoulder, turning her around with a jerk. Emilie held back a gasp at the stench of rotting breath, the wild glare of the bulbous eyes. The chicken leg still lay clenched in her left hand, the knife in her right.