Lady Adventuress 01 - His Wayward Duchess (14 page)

“
Oh, yes, I am very good at helping gentlemen out of such tangles. My brothers are often in some fix or another. I am determined to help you out of yours.”

Holly
found that she liked Sir John very much. There was something in his manner that reminded her acutely of her third brother, Henry, and that made her feel instantly protective of him.

“Forgive me, Lady Strathavon, but I must venture to point out that you have no obligation to get involved in any such thing.”

“No?” asked Holly. “Very well then, we will call it a charitable impulse on my part.”

“
Then you must have a weakness for hopeless cases,” said the baronet with a pleasant smile.

“You must not talk
complete flummery, Sir John,” Holly berated. “Never in all my life have I heard such nonsense and it is not to be borne. I am unsurprised that you should have got nowhere in wooing Miss Dacre, if that is how you talk. Now, I think the first thing you need to do is join the row, for I see your Miss Dacre means to dance.”

“
But she already has a partner – Mr Jutland. He is an excellent dancer.”

“So she does. But only for this set. You must wait it out and request the next. The country dance will be better fun anyway. And don’t fret about this Mr Jutland.”

Sir John gave Holly a rather dreary little smile and a
defeated sigh. “It is no good. Miss Dacre wishes to marry a man of fortune, to know for certain that he is not courting hers. I haven’t got a fortune to my name, and so I’ve no way to convince the lady that I haven’t any need of her blunt.”

Holly looked at him in astonishment. “Then you must find one! You are a clever, capable man, Sir John, and I know that we will think of something that can be done.
Faith!”

The music began and Holly found herself enchanted by the cheerful strains.

While the dances tripped the light fantastic toe, accompanied by the little orchestra engaged for the occasion, the Duchess of Strathavon observed Miss Verity Dacre.

It felt good to be on familiar ground even if she was
likely being roguish and fast. There was a good chance life was about to get a lot more interesting.

When the two sets were over and the music had faded, Holly
urged Sir John to approach the lady for the next set, and kept a shrewd eye on them both. Left to his own devices, Sir John was truly hopeless – faultlessly polite, and impossibly grave even during a light country dance.

Miss Verity Dacre
seemed more taken with a handsome blond gentleman in a blue coat who had brought her a glass of punch after her set. He looked to Holly like a storybook hero come to life.

Humming softly along with the next dance, Holly came to the conclusion that nothing could be done to advance Sir John’s cause until the man learned to
abandon his stony gravitas.

She made mental notes on how she would go about helping her new acquaintance – but first, she would need to meet Miss
Dacre.

Filled with a bright new energy,
Holly felt excited about her new role. She could finally be of some use, and help two people find love: that most rare of earthly joys. The feeling was liberating, not because she was embracing a part or playing make-believe: just the opposite, in fact. This was something she was good at.

She felt more herself than she had in a long time. More than that, even! S
he was becoming someone she had always wanted to be but had never had much of an opportunity to become. And she would use this new power to help her new friend. Being a duchess was not so very difficult after all.

Surely, having navigated the complex and treacherous politics of growing up
in as chaotic a family as hers, where alliances could shift at the drop of a hat, she ought to find London society laughably easy by comparison.

Holly’s thoughts were interrupted when Lady Castlereagh
approached, flanked by a tall smartly dressed man, who had requested an introduction out of an urge to compliment her gown. Such a declaration would have been unforgivably vulgar on any personage other than the one who stood before her, and Holly was momentarily speechless.

She was
delighted to discover that he was none other than the celebrated Mr Brummell, easily the most fashionable man in town. The society journals claimed that he, too, had re-invented himself into this splendid persona upon arriving in London, and the new duchess felt a great kinship with the man.

“Now, I do believe I would like to request the next set, Lady Strathavon,” Mr Brummell said with a most
beautiful bow. “It would be a shame not to show off the product of your seamstress’s genius.”

Holly returned his smile with one of her own mischievous grins “I do believe that you ar
e right, Mr Brummell.”

The gentleman proved a most excellent dancer and an extremely witty conversationalist, and Holly
immensely enjoyed the two dances. She was sorry when the music came to an end. Dinner was announced and a stately line of guests formed to proceed into the adjoining room.

The Earl of Avonbury
promptly turned up at Holly’s elbow to escort her into the meal and exchanged amiable greetings with Mr Brummell.

“I do believe we are to be seated together, my dear Lady Strathavon,”
the earl said, answering Holly’s unasked question. “And it has been such a night that I’ve not yet had an opportunity to speak with you.”

It was a well-known fact that
, along with being the duke’s cousin, Avonbury was his boon companion.

“Speak to me? What about, pray? I do believe you are spying on me for my husband, Lord Avonbury,” Holly said, wryly raising an eyebrow at him.

Avonbury endeavoured to look scandalised, and failed spectacularly. “Mercy, my dear! His Grace would never ask such a thing – why the very thought… You wound my soul – it is only fortunate that your beauty is enough to set it back to rights.”

“
You are entirely shameless, Lord Avonbury. It might be that Strathavon would not ask it of you, but I doubt such a technicality would stop you from spying on me anyway.”

“I have only the most earnest interest in your happiness, my dear.
And my cousin’s, of course, though he can be quite the cad. You did look very fetching dancing with Mr Brummell, I may add. Now, I do believe that, having levelled me such a dire insult, you must do penance and listen to me tell school stories about Strathavon all through dinner.”

Holly laughed at that. “Penance
, is it? Oh, very well – I see what you are playing at. Do your worst, then.”

“Your servant, Madam.”

Avonbury was a surprisingly good storyteller, and Holly was engrossed in listening to his accounts of boyhood mischief. It was strange to see Strathavon from such a fresh perspective and it left Holly a little breathless.

Afterwards, she could hardly recall what had been served at table!

If even half the tales were to be believed, they had blazed a trail
through Eton together, nearly got expelled from Cambridge and then caused havoc all over Europe on their Tour.

“It really was a wonder they
’d put up with us as long as they had, but there is nothing like the intellectual challenge of university life. I daresay we did some of our very best work back then,” the earl said a little wistfully.

Holly supposed he was not
blind to Strathavon’s grim new demeanour, and she wondered idly what it would take to shatter her duke’s melancholy for good. Holly was fascinated by this younger Strathavon, who was personable, roguish and fun. It seemed he had delighted in rash misadventures, unseemly behaviour and sheer chaos.

It was difficult to reconcile this man with the one who locked himself up to do accounts.

For his part, Avonbury carefully watched the duchess’s expression. He had been unsure of her, and Strathavon would have been angry at this liberty, but he had to know what the girl was about.

He’d
not missed the regret in her eyes at his wistful words, nor the childlike, impressionable raptness with which she had listened to his tales. Whether she was really the green debutante or the fashionable duchess, however, one thing was unmistakable. There was no denying the love written across her face whenever his cousin’s name was mentioned.

Avonbury wondered how he might go about arranging a reunion, for a reunion there had to be – especially since Strathavon seemed to have taken to brooding the days away in his damned study.

“And most famously, there was the race to Brighton, one year, during the Long Vacation. We met at a post house with every intention of staying just long enough to lay the dust in our throats – only to get completely foxed. Then, we raced. The next morning was a drudge and a half. Strathavon let me win, I suspect – the devil. Said that it was a cost he was willing to pay to retain his dignity. I can assure you, my dear, that victory was anything but sweet by the time I arrived in Brighton. I swear that ale-draper had grown tired of all the races and decided to teach us a lesson. Now, would you care for more duck? It’s really very good.”

“Yes, thank you.”
She realised that she’d barely glanced at her plate the whole time, yet she had eaten everything on it.

As Holly’s companion served her with more of the plum duck,
carefully engineered by Lady Castlereagh’s incomparable cook, she mused on what she had been told.

She thought that
, had she met Strathavon then, before he had lost his family and become a duke, their marriage would have been entirely different.

She found herself falling even more in love with the man
, both for who he had been and for the great sorrow he had had to endure. Undeniably, it was his brother’s death that had changed him so much.

Avonbury
found Holly to be the very best kind of audience – she asked the questions he wanted asked and laughed in all the right places, and she did not once look even a little weary of his narrative.

“I wonder,” she
mused quietly, “if there is any trace of your old friend left in the present duke.”

For a moment, she was horrified at having said such a thing aloud, but Avonbury inclined his head sadly, considering her words.

“I have often wondered myself. Devilish hard to read, Strathavon. But perhaps – perhaps I have yet glimpsed flashes of that man in his chilly eyes.”

He gave Holly a considering
look, wondering if she could achieve the impossible and bring that man to the fore once more. He missed that Strathavon – his oldest and best companion, but he had given up trying to bring him about again.

He
took another look at Holly with her bright eyes, rosy cheeks and chestnut curls. Maybe there was hope after all.

In the carriage
on the way home, Holly could not stop thinking of her conversation with Avonbury. His words kept running through her mind:
I have yet glimpsed flashes of that man in his chilly eyes…
She really ought to have been too angry with Strathavon to care about such things – and yet the thought of him suffering or lonely tore mercilessly at her heart.

“That was quite a night,” she told Lady Louisa wearily.

Her friend regarded her with interest.

“You are cutting it very fine,
my dear,” Louisa laughed. “The
ton
hasn’t the faintest idea what to make of you – very well done.”

Holly thought of the night’s events.

“Nor I, of them, Lady Louisa.”

The real trouble
was that she didn’t know what to make of herself, either. What did she want? And did that matter?

*

It was to His Grace’s unreserved astonishment that he’d arrived back in London to discover that his mousy wife had become the toast of the town.

After his very
singular visit to Pontridge, he spent his entire journey back wondering what to make of his vanishing wife. But the news that awaited him once he had returned to St James street was by far the most astonishing
on dit
he had heard in a very long time.

At first he had wondered if some impostor had taken her place.
After all, it couldn’t really be
his
duchess making such waves in society. Some hoax or prank, likely – his Holly could not possibly have become a celebrated original.
His Holly.
No indeed, even that was impossible.

Then his cousin turned up at his door to be abominable
to him, and really there was little else left for him to do but get swept up in Avonbury’s transparent manipulations.

“I do hope you mean to make some
effort to attend Lady Harecroft’s card party, Strathavon – I have it on very good authority that Her Grace will be in attendance,” the earl began with studied artlessness.

“Will she?” the duke murmured, without looking up from his correspondence.

“Along with her
cohort of swains, I expect.”

That made him look up, and frown at his cousin’s dishevelled appearance.