The Duke

IVY BOOKS •
NEW YORK

Copyright notice

For Eric, and he knows why

For who so firm that cannot be seduced
? —Shakespeare

I would like to thank the following people for their extraordinary generosity to me in their respective fields of expertise: Mary Jo Putney, for her matchless tact in steering me out of a dead end in the planning stages; Richard Tames, eminent London historian, Blue Badge and British Museum tour guide, author of
American Walks in London
along with 130 other books, and all-around genius (read him, if you love London!); Sheila Tames, London and the Lakes guide and author, for also helping and bearing with me; Andrea Caweltia of the Rosenthal Archives of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, for supplying me with the information I needed about period music and instruments; Dr. Jean Mason, professor of history at Duquesne University and enlightened reviewer for
The Romance Reader
online, for scouring the manuscript for historical and logic errors; David Tucker, director of The Original London Walks Company, for his courtesy and helpfulness; the always-ready-to-help members of the Beau Monde online group, who all deserve vouchers to Almack’s in my opinion; Marina Richards, writing buddy, for reminding me to have the courage not to pull my punches with a story I needed to tell; and last but never least, heartfelt thanks to my editor, Shauna Summers, for being behind me every step of the way and allowing me the creative freedom to write books that break the rules.

Any mistakes, blunders, or misinformations are the author’s own.

Georgiana
’s Brood—the Knight Miscellany

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London
, 1814
 

Many years ago, as a curly-headed youth on grand tour, he had fallen madly in love with beauty and so had stopped in
Florence
to take drafting lessons from a bonafide Italian master. Starry-eyed and romantical, he had followed the light-winged muses south to the
Bay
of
Sorrento
, where he had first heard the ancient Italian proverb “Revenge is a dish best served cold.” He was an old man now, without illusions, cold and canny as a scheming pope. Beauty had betrayed him, but decades later, oddly enough, here on this gray English day, the Sicilian proverb held true.

A neat, slight-framed man, James Breckinridge, the earl of Coldfell, gripped the ivory head of his walking stick in gnarled fingers that ached with the needling April rain. He permitted his footman to assist him down from his luxurious black town coach while another held an umbrella over him.

The slumbrous quiet in this place was like a church, but for the pattering of the rain. He turned slowly, looked past the servants’ blanked faces, past the jagged wrought-iron fence, into
St. George’s
Burying Ground on the

Hawkscliffe.

Coldfell’s mouth flattened into a thin line. He took the umbrella from the footman. “I shan’t be long.”

“Yes, my lord.”

Leaning on his walking stick, he began the slow ascent up the graveled path.

The thirty-five-year-old Robert Knight, ninth duke of Hawkscliffe, appeared unaware of his approach, stony and immobile as the monument. He stood in bleak granite stillness, the rain plastering his wavy black hair to his forehead, running in chilly rivulets down the stark planes of his cheeks, and dripping off his rugged profile as he stared down at the yellow daffodils that had been planted on her grave.

Coldfell winced at the ungentlemanly intrusion he was about to make on the other man’s grief. Hawkscliffe was, after all, the only one of the younger generation he respected. Some of the old-school pigtail Tories found the young magnate’s views alarmingly Whiggish, but none could deny that Hawkscliffe was twice the man his weak-willed father had been.

Why, Coldfell reflected as he hobbled up the path, he had seen Robert become a duke at the age of seventeen, managing three vast estates and raising four wild younger brothers and a little sister practically single-handedly. More recently, he had heard him deliver speeches in the Lords with a cool force and eloquence that had brought the whole house to its feet. Hawkscliffe’s integrity was unquestioned; his honor rang true as a bell of finest sterling. Many of the younger set, like Coldfell’s own idiot nephew and heir, Sir Dolph Breckinridge, considered the so-called paragon duke a rigid high stickler, but to wiser heads, Hawkscliffe was, in a word, impeccable.

It was pitiful to see what Lucy’s death had done to him.

Ah, well
. Men would see in a woman what they wanted to see.

Coldfell cleared his throat. Startled, Hawkscliffe jerked at the noise and spun around. Tumultuous emotion blazed in his dark eyes. Seeing Coldfell, his dazed expression of pain took on a stab of guilt. With his honorable nature, it had no doubt tormented the duke to have wanted an old friend’s wife. Himself, he had never been that chivalrous. James nodded to him. “Hawkscliffe.”

“Beg your pardon, my lord, I was just leaving,” he mumbled, lowering his head.

“Stay, Your Grace, by all means,” Coldfell answered, waving off the awkwardness. “Keep an old man company on this dreary day.”

“As you wish, sir.” Narrowing his eyes against the rain, Hawkscliffe looked away uncomfortably, surveying the jagged horizon of tombstones.

Coldfell hobbled to the brim of the grave, cursing his aching joints. When the weather was fine, he could hunt all day without tiring. But he had not been energetic enough for Lucy, had he?

Well, she had had her fashionable
London
burial, just as she would have liked. Having died at his house just outside
London
, she had a spot in the most exclusive cemetery in the city, complete with a Flaxman funerary monument, the height of good taste, sparing no expense. And well he should have to pay for this most expensive mistake—an old man’s folly, he thought bitterly. Beauty indeed was his weakness. With nothing to recommend her but a magnificent mane of flame-colored hair and the most luscious thighs in Christendom, the twenty-six-year-old Lucy O’Malley had been an artist’s model in
Sheffield
before she had bewitched him into making her his second countess. He had sworn her to keep quiet about her background, devising a false one for her. At least she had given
that
pledge sincerely, eager as she had been to join the ton.

Coldfell was merely glad he had not been forced to bury Lucy next to Margaret, his first wife, who was reverently enshrined at Seven Oaks, the ancestral pile in Leicestershire. Ah, wise Margaret, his heart’s mate, whose only fault had been her failure to give him a son.

“I am—very sorry for your loss, my lord,” Hawkscliffe said stiffly, avoiding his gaze.

Coldfell slid a furtive glance at the duke, then sighed, nodding. “It’s hard to believe she’s really gone. So young. So full of life.”

“What will you do now?”

“I leave for Leicestershire tomorrow. A few weeks in the country will help, I warrant.” A visit to Seven Oaks would also take him out of the way of suspicion when this man carried out the deed for him.

“I’m sure you will find it soothing,” Hawkscliffe said— polite, automatic.

They were both silent for a long moment, Hawkscliffe brooding, Coldfell reflecting on the uneasiness of living anymore in his elegant villa in South Kensington with its four pretty acres of sculpted gardens—the site of Lucy’s death.

“ ‘Lay her in the earth. And from her fair and unpolluted flesh may violets spring,’ ” Hawkscliffe quoted barely audibly.

Coldfell looked at him in pity. “Laertes’ speech on Ophelia’s grave.”

The duke said nothing, merely stared at the carven letters on the monument: Lucy’s name, her date of birth and death.

“I never touched her,” he choked out abruptly, turning to Coldfell in impetuous anguish. “You have my word as a gentleman. She never betrayed you.”