The Duchess Wager Read online

  The words hung in the air even after Lady Gresham shut the door behind her. Margot turned to Alice, who looked a little queasy. “It doesn’t matter whose idea it was,” Margot reminded her. “Miss Dawes is the one who suffers, and Lord Gresham is the one who got his heart’s desire.”

  Alice nodded.

  “Our goal is to make sure he knows we know that Miss Dawes deserved better.”

  Alice nodded again. Then she turned a smile on Margot. “I’m beginning to regret our wager. If you keep up these spirits, you’ll have no trouble winning, and then I’ll end up with a firstborn named Bartholomew.”

  “I am leaning towards Vladimir, actually.” Margot took her hand. “Let’s get out of this bedroom before we’re caught again, and you have to explain it to your husband.”

  “Or you have to explain it to your duke,” Alice shot back.

  “He’s hardly my duke, and I’ll thank you to remember that.”

  Yet Margot had to admit – to herself, and no one else – that she was thrilled by the idea that her eyelashes had any effect on him at all.

  Chapter Five

  Ensconced in his little private sitting room, Fitz supposed things had worked out in his favor, all things considered. True, their journey was delayed at least another night while they waited for the snows to melt from the road; and also true, Fitz itched to return to Pembroke Abbey before reporting to London for the February sessions. Yet, being trapped in Bleneccle Manor really wasn’t the worst of fates.

  For one thing, he and Winpole had a very productive discussion at breakfast regarding the apothecary initiative. Winpole had broad, loud opinions, very much in keeping with his general person, and on the whole, they tended to the conservative side of progress. However, he was Fitz’s favorite kind of conservative: one willing to compromise. If Fitz supported his private bill to build a canal connecting Bleneccle Manor to the Irish Sea, then Winpole was more than happy to vote in favor of Fitz’s ‘pet’ apothecary bill.

  There was nothing that put Fitz in a good mood such as striking a deal, particularly in the name of moving the realm forward.

  Another point in favor of their northern detour was the very sitting room he now occupied. Though small – it would barely fit four people for socializing – the room was cozy and well-appointed, with a generous hearth. Long, wide windows admitted plenty of pale winter sun, with comfortable leather chairs inviting one to open a book for the afternoon.

  A knock at the door reminded Fitz of the final point in favor of his wintry prison. None other than Margot stood at the other side, a slightly mischievous smile wreathing her lips. He had discovered at breakfast that, in daylight, Margot’s dark hair gleamed with a few threads of gold, and her eyes danced with honey. Her cheeks warmed with delicious blushes, too, which he hadn’t been able to see by candlelight.

  He wasn’t usually one to enjoy eliciting blushes from a lady, but it would be good fun with Margot.

  Shaking himself of such thoughts, Fitz greeted Margot with a slight bow.

  “I’m sorry for disturbing your privacy, Your Grace,” she said, her voice a rush of breathless words. “I wondered if I might borrow a book from this library.”

  Stepping back to let her in, Fitz couldn’t help but wonder how desperately she really wanted a specific book. His blood quickened at the hope that perhaps she had conjured up the need as an excuse.

  An excuse to enter his private chambers.

  “I thought I asked you to call me Fitz,” he said.

  A lovely blush crept behind her ears. “I supposed I had lost that privilege last night.”

  He leaned against the stone threshold. There was something lovely in the idea that she had sat up feeling guilty for her words. “I’m not so sensitive that I would hold a little fairy story against you. Though I daresay you insulted Lord and Lady Gresham.”

  Fury flashed across her whole body – from the clench of her eyebrows down to her feet stepping into fighting stance – as quick and as brief as lightning. “That was rather the point,” she said, before softening again, a regretful smile at her lips.

  She still stood just inside the room, a mere arm’s distance from Fitz, and he wondered again what really brought her visiting. It was his good fortune that she was there. She was the perfect dalliance, a sweetheart who could never be his wife. Besides the fact that she was a widow and guardian to an earl, Fitz needed a duchess who would stand calmly at his side, unflinching as they managed the ton, foreign diplomats, and his tenants alike.

  A woman ruled by emotion such as Margot was best kept as a friend, not a wife.

  Fitz decided to test how committed she was to her excuse. “Were you here for a specific book, or did you hope to browse?”

  There came that lovely blush again, reaching just to the tips of her ears. “A specific book. I’d had it in my room until a few days ago, but I suppose a well-meaning maid put it away.”

  She crossed to the shelves just below the lead-paned windows and knelt to slide a thick cloth-and-board book from its spot. Fitz watched with a mixture of disappointment and fascination as Margot caressed the spine, then held the book to her nose, inhaling its scent the way young brides inhaled their bouquets.

  Fitz resisted the urge to close the distance between them. The room was small enough that even from the other side of it, he could smell her rose water perfume. Still, he prodded, “It must be a very dear book to you.”

  Margot beamed. “Paradise Lost. It is my best friend when I’m in the depths of despair. Shakespeare’s sonnets are just the thing when I’m in a good mood, but when I am sad, there is no comfort but Milton. I need his strange combination of faith and wickedness to sustain me. And I always comfort myself knowing at least I haven’t gone blind yet.”

  Clutching the book to her breast, she did not look much like a woman in despair. Yet Fitz supposed that was the thing about grief; one never could count on being free of it.

  “Paradise Lost was my favorite in school, though I’ve never been partial to verse myself,” Fitz admitted. “I prefer histories, if I’m doing leisure reading.”

  “The only use I have for histories is to put me to sleep.” Margot said this with a certain friendly spark of challenge in her eye. “Unless it is about knights of yore. My son George and I share a fondness for anything to do with knights in armor.”

  “Must they be Knights of the Round Table, or do you care for the real knights of the Crusades, as well?”

  “Any knight will do, as long as they are in shining armor, for George’s sake, and have a maiden waiting for them at home, for mine.”

  Fitz had noted a copy of Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart tucked beside a history of the Roman Empire. Now he retrieved it from the shelf. “Have you read this one with little Wharton yet? It was my favorite poem as a boy.”

  Margot took the little volume with care, tucking it on top of her Paradise Lost. “I read it years ago, but I haven’t shared it with George yet. It’s quite scandalous, isn’t it, with Lancelot stealing Queen Guinevere from King Arthur?”

  Fitz had never much fixated on the romance of it. What he remembered were Lancelot’s numerous battles on his way to Guinevere, the jousts, and the agony of a knight lowering himself to be carried in a cart. It had been a lesson in what a man must be willing to do to carry on his quest; he hadn’t paid a whit of attention to the adultery.

  “I don’t suppose Guinevere owed King Arthur much loyalty after he let her be kidnapped,” he responded. “A wife’s loyalty should only extend as far as her husband’s, and King Arthur surely wasn’t being loyal when he walked into Meleagant’s trap.”

  Margot’s eyebrows spiked in amusement. “I believe the Bible says otherwise, but I suppose a bachelor such as yourself hasn’t had to pay attention to such details before.”

  She was right; though suddenly, Fitz was captivated, wondering how often she had contemplated
adultery as a married woman and whether it had been on her behalf or old Wharton’s. Or both.

  “I was going to sit down with a book,” Fitz said, gesturing to the chairs. “I’d welcome the company, if you would care to join me.”

  Margot followed the direction of his hand with a dubious glance. To sit alone with him in the room adjoining his bedchamber – even if only reading – would certainly invite speculation, should anyone see them. Fitz had offered it in part to test just how much she had really wanted that copy of Paradise Lost, but truly, he wouldn’t mind spending the afternoon with her. He suspected there were many debates they could get into.

  “I can’t stay, for I promised to help Alice,” Margot said at last, rushing out the words like a debutante fishing for an acceptable excuse.

  Fitz allowed himself to feel a little dip of disappointment. “Ah, I imagine sisters can be quite demanding.”

  This earned a smile, the kind she’d bestowed on him last night while spinning her tale. “You cannot begin to know. Speaking of which, I wonder if you would help us with a little lark this evening.”

  “I am at your service.”

  “You see, as special friends of Miss Dawes, Alice and I would like to show Lord Gresham what we think of his behavior. We have solicited Lady Gresham’s support – so as not to cause irreparable offense – and she suggested a plan that depends upon none other than you.”

  So she did have an ulterior motive for her visit. Fitz was glad to know he’d been right, though he wished the motive had been more related to his charm. “Lady Gresham supports this?”

  “It was her idea.” Margot’s eyes flashed again, but instead of anger, Fitz picked up on a touch of admiration. “We’re going to deliver a letter that claims Miss Dawes is publishing her account of the episode in the Times. We’ll include all sorts of dreadful falsehoods – Lady Gresham suggested we claim that Lord Gresham knows nothing about horses – and make him feel really awful and nervous about it. Alice is writing the letter, but we need you to be the one to receive it and read it, so that Lord Gresham won’t suspect it is a sham”

  Fitz could just imagine Talbot quaking in his seat at such a letter. His friend felt badly enough about the whole situation; the man didn’t need any further torment. But if Annabelle was in on the joke, then it must not be too bad.

  Still, Fitz felt that as the man’s best friend, he must at least attempt to stop the prank. “Miss Dawes really was much happier not to get married that morning, you know. I was there. I daresay I’ve never seen a more blissful bride, once they announced it was off.”

  The friendliness that had softened Margot throughout their whole interview disappeared, and she regarded him with a brittle, fiery distance. “This is about the principle of the thing. Frankly, the men in the Dawes family should be defending Miss Dawes’s honor, but since they are letting her name be dragged through the mud, we must stand up for her instead.”

  Hostility was a natural progression of negotiation. Fitz dealt with it a hundred times throughout each Parliamentary season. Still, there was something about Margot’s anger that made Fitz’s heart race in fear that he had lost her goodwill altogether. He opened his palms in peace. “I have every intention of dancing the first set with Miss Dawes when she returns to town. That should set her up with enough suitors to have a dozen offers by the end of the Season.”

  “How kind of you,” Margot said. “Will you read the letter this evening, too?”

  Fitz reviewed the woman in front him. Swathed in gray widow’s weeds, clutching books to her chest, standing straight and erect, she shouldn’t have been beautiful. She should have made him think of his severe governesses or the fussy matrons who guarded society too jealously. She stared at him with a steady power that surely she used on her children, intense and heavy with the expectation that he would do as she bid.

  Fitz shouldn’t have felt a surge of admiration, yet he did.

  And he shouldn’t have wanted to kiss her, but he yearned for it, as he’d never yearned to kiss any woman before.

  He reined it in, of course. He hoped his eyes were cool, his expression clear of any of those strange thoughts, as he answered. “For you, my lady, I will.”

  Margot’s lips curved in victory. “Then we shall look forward to the evening post.” She floated out the door, pausing in the threshold – so close to him again – long enough to throw him one last look over her shoulder. “Thank you, too, for the book recommendation.”

  Fitz nodded helplessly, watching her sashay down the corridor. He wondered if this was how his Parliament friends felt when he bargained them into his corner. Like they didn’t quite know what had just happened. Like their thoughts had been whipped into a new shape they’d never seen before.

  Like his heart might never be the same.

  Chapter Six

  Evenings came early to Bleneccle Manor in the winter. Dusk fell as soon as half past three, before they had even given George and Valentina an afternoon snack of bread and butter. It was Margot’s personal theory that her family was so lively precisely because of these yawning dark winter hours. One had to be entertaining, or else end up like poor Hugh before he married Alice, sitting in silence across the hearth from his mother.

  Still, this winter, the evenings had been especially dreary. Even that day, with all the excitement of the morning, something dark and deep settled on Margot’s heart as the sun went down. She was accustomed to slow days with George’s boyish exploits forming the only excitement; the episodes with Lady Gresham and the duke – Fitz, he’d reminded her, and how secretly delicious it was to call him that in her thoughts – left her head spinning. Instead of dressing for the evening, Margot was tempted to climb into bed, burrow under her blankets, and pretend the world had stopped turning.

  Alas, there were children to tend to and guests to entertain.

  George and Valentina quizzed her on what the adults would get up to as she kissed them goodnight in the nursery, where they would have their supper and be allowed to play until seven. Would they collect costumes for charades? Would Aunt Alice play the harpsichord for singing? Would they stay up all night playing cards? Valentina went so far as to suggest that Margot don her ballgown, for there were surely enough gentlemen for a dance.

  Their excitement only increased when Alice swept into the nursery dressed in her dinner gown. It was one of her finer dresses, trimmed with lace about the neck and sleeves, and she’d added a string of pearls at her neck for ornamentation. Valentina grabbed at her skirts in awe, begging Aunt Alice to please give her doll a kiss.

  Alice complied, then straightened with a fierce glitter of anger. “I’m not speaking to Hugh,” she informed Margot.

  “Oh?” Margot took in the flush of her sister’s face, the heat in her voice, and decided the best response was teasing. “Are we back to the theory that he plotted to ruin you?”

  Alice scoffed. “He told me I must set aside our plans and try to be nice to Lord and Lady Gresham. He actually used the word ‘must’!”

  Margot hadn’t thought Hugh had the backbone to give Alice advice, much less try to order her around. She imagined he hadn’t been quite as firm as Alice heard him. “I’m sure he meant it as a suggestion.”

  “Lord Gresham had a private word with him after luncheon to confide that Lady Gresham was feeling unwelcome. Now Hugh thinks I’m being uncharitable and mean. He doesn’t think Lisbeth would want me to behave this way. Can you imagine it? After we took Lady Gresham into our confidence, too.”

  “Lady Gresham probably didn’t share with her husband that we are now chums, given our plans,” Margot countered. “Besides, we are being uncharitable and mean.” She remembered the way Fitz had tried to evade the favor. The way he had squirmed mixed a strange combination of guilt and tenderness in her heart, which she preferred to cover with a steady flame of anger. “We must be, since that is our only recourse once men fail us.
”

  “Indeed. I daresay you don’t miss Geoff today,” Alice huffed. She thundered on before Margot could quite process the comment, much less respond. “Besides, we’re not being mean to Lady Gresham. Even if she does claim that she proposed to him, Lord Gresham was the one with the obligation to Lisbeth.”

  “And once we’ve taught him his lesson with the letter, we’ll set the matter aside,” Margot reminded her. “Fitz has promised to dance Lisbeth’s first set this Season, which should set her up with dozens of suitors.”

  Alice’s eyebrows shot up to her hairline. “Fitz has, has he? Did he say so with a charming smile, too?”

  Margot pulled a face at her sister. “We had better get downstairs, don’t you think?”

  “I’d rather hear more about your conversation with Fitz. What else did he promise?”

  Nurse entered with the children’s supper, saving Margot from this line of questioning. A seasoned Wickhamshire woman, she’d been with Margot since George’s birth, and felt familiar enough to exclaim, “Shouldn’t my ladies be downstairs? I daresay everyone else is in the drawing room.”

  “Quite right, Nurse.” Margot looped her arm through Alice’s. “I believe something interesting came by messenger, too.”

  “Yes, yes, but remember, I’m not speaking to Hugh.”

  Margot didn’t think that would last long. Alice and Hugh were too smitten to do anything but send each other moon eyes across the room when they were forced to separate. But in the name of sisterly solidarity, she promised to remember.

  The atmosphere of the drawing room was considerably more relaxed than it had been the previous evening. Even their mother had let down her guard, laughing with Lady Gresham rather than keeping a watchful eye to make sure everyone was enjoying themselves. The only two who seemed uncomfortable were Hugh – who kept glancing over at Alice, as if hoping she might suddenly forgive him – and Fitz, who stood stiffly by the mantel, sipping his sherry with a distinct look of distraction while her father droned at him about the canal project.