Authors: Evangeline Holland
Tags: #Fiction, #Historical, #Sagas, #Romance, #General
An Ideal Duchess
AN IDEAL DUCHESS
OTHER BOOKS BY
EVANGELINE HOLLAND
Non-Fiction
Pocket Guide to Edwardian England
Pocket Guide to Historical Research
Fiction
Lady Myddelton’s Lover
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
© 2013 Evangeline Holland
Beautiful elegant woman © coka | bigstockphoto.com
Stately home © Salpics32 | bigstockphoto.com
All Rights Reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at the address below.
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An Ideal Duchess / Evangeline Holland — 1st ed.
Continue reading on for an exclusive excerpt from
A DUCHESS’S HEART
CHAPTER 1
The Cotswold, Gloucestershire, August 1902
It was a very dull, rather cool and overcast August afternoon unbefitting of the name that marked the annual exodus of society from London to the countryside—the “Glorious Twelfth.” The aim of most during this time was to shoot down as many birds—partridges, pigeons, grouse—as one could bear, but for Auberon Townsend, tenth Duke of Malvern, he hoped the opposite would occur: he hoped he would fly. As a child, he grew fascinated by the cages of birds his father’s gamekeepers would carefully feed and cosset each spring in preparation of the late summer shooting. He marveled over their immense wingspan and the delicate, downy feathers that aided their flight. Of course, noisy guns shot down these partridges, indulged until they obtained the proper avoirdupois for gracing one’s table, before they even had a chance to soar.
His father had whipped him once for weeping over the birds as they dropped, inelegant in death, from the sky.
The thought, which skated unbidden across his mind, briefly doused his buoyant mood, and reminded him of the ugly inheritance both his father and brother had bequeathed him upon their premature deaths within the last year. Bron—for that was how he continued to think of himself despite ascending to the dukedom less than a year ago—forced his attention back to the reins in his hands before Hera, the frisky brown mare hitched to his waggonette could notice his wandering attention. Beside him on the bench sat Anthony Challoner, who tented his hands over his eyes as he peered at the sky.
“You think it may rain?” He gestured upwards with his chin.
Bron stole a glance at the sky, noting its misty gray heaviness, which hinted at the potential for an early autumn downpour. He shrugged and clucked softly at the mare as he steered her off the narrow dirt road and through the open fencing that led to the rolling green hills over which he planned to run his first test flight. “A little of it won’t hurt my aeroplane.”
“You’re bloody confident in getting this thing up in the air,” Bim lowered his hands to rest on his knees.
“It isn’t a thing,” Bron stared coldly at his oldest friend as he brought the mare and the waggonette to a halt. “It is a glider reproduced from Octave Chanute’s—”
“Yes, yes, I know, this is all you’ve spoken of since we’ve come down from Balliol.”
“Then you of all people ought to know how important my tests are,”
Bron jumped down from the waggonette’s bench and unhitched the mare to allow her to graze while he and Bim conducted their flight tests. He didn’t know how long it would take him to get up in the air, and the mare was known in Bledington stables for her impatience. He patted Hera’s soft velvet nose and gave her an apple he had tucked in his jacket pocket before moving to the flatbed of the wagon, which held the partially assembled pieces of his aeroplane.
Technically, it was a glider, since to the best of his knowledge no one had invented an aeroplane. Recently, Otto Lilienthal and—closer to home—Hiram Maxim and Percy Pilcher, had come the closest to achieving a controlled flight, but Bron hoped (and dusted off his latent Anglicanism by praying) he would advance the attempts at man-powered flight even closer to fruition. It would be a damned eleventh -hour miracle if he could do so, though he half-doubted at the idea that his patented aeroplane design could dig Bledington from its dire financial hole.
Bron began folding the tarp back, up and away from his modified Chanute glider, the fruits of three years labor, and held his breath as each piece of it was revealed. Bim joined him, moving to the other side of the wagonette to shift that end of the heavy tarp. They rolled it up and Bim stuffed tarp into the back of the flat bed as Bron turned to examine the assembled pieces for any injuries, running his hands over the balloon silk sewn to spruce struts, horizontal beams, and stanchions, and checking the tightness of his cables and bolts, before walking around to examine the rudder.
Bim whistled, long and low. “You’re much further along than when I last saw this thing—pardon, your aeroplane.”
Bron felt his ears heat with embarrassment and ran a nervous hand through his hair to cover his emotional reaction.
“So…” He squinted at Bim.
“Do you think it will fly?” Bim instinctively picked up Bron’s unspoken thought.
“It bloody well better,” Bron grimaced. “I’ve got a year’s worth of allowance invested in this ‘thing’ as you like to call it.”
“I envy your self-will,” Bim sighed deeply, leaning against the wagonette. “Four hundred pounds and all you can show for it are pieces of wood, metal, and silk bolted together.”
“At the rate Bledington Park eats away at the rent roll, I now consider four hundred pounds a measly sum.”
Bron tugged at the pieces on the top of the pile of parts and laid them carefully on the grass in the order of their assembly.
“Ah, Bledington,” Bim said lightly as he began to help.
“The mill stone around my wretched neck,”
“What did Lyttleton have to say about breaking the entail?”
“Nothing the family solicitor in Cheltenham hasn’t already said.” Bron reached for the toolbox left in the waggonette’s flatbed. “Ringing up my heir presumptive—my father’s brother, Lord Charlie Townsend, a rotter if there ever was one—and obtaining his agreement to break the entail in order to sell the heirlooms, land, or other estates irrevocably tied to the Dukedom of Malvern.”
“But I don’t know if I want to do it.” Bron stared at the skeleton of his glider laid on the ground.
“You’d better make a decision—I can’t afford to put you up at Challoner House indefinitely.”
“You are an arse,” Bron replied good-naturedly. “But I appreciate your grudgingly given hospitality nonetheless.”
“I’m obliged to, remember,” Bim grinned crookedly. “You put me up at Bledington during school holidays, and I’ve got you to thank for my safe Parliament seat.”
“Don’t thank me—it’s been safe for you because your father held that seat for forty years. And you’ve reminded me that you haven’t yet made your maiden speech.”
“The PM is singularly uninspiring—Pretty Fanny, indeed. Moreover, what am I to speak on—the conclusion of an expensive and embarrassing war with the Boers or another useless treatise on Home Rule? They are best left in the hands of more qualified parties.” Bim pushed away from the wagonette. “Shall we commence to flying?”
Bron stared at his friend, unable to shake the feeling that he had inadvertently struck a raw nerve, but Bim appeared as cheerful as ever, and he bent to give him a hand in assembling the glider. They carried it, left wing span in his hands, right wing span in Bim’s hands, up the small knoll overlooking the vast, rolling green and brown valley of the Cotswold. There was a slight breeze, and it tasted of the metallic, tangy forewarning of rain, but that was all the better, for he enjoyed the electrifying wildness of a storm. They lowered the glider just up the hill, and Bron stripped down to his shirtsleeves and breeches, tossing his Norfolk jacket into a heap on the grass after retrieving his leather hood and goggles from its pockets.
He pulled the hood over his head and tightened the goggles around his eyes before climbing into the operator’s seat and reaching for the handrails.
“All right?” Bim called.
“All right,” Bron replied, bending and lifting the heavy glider as Bim lifted the rudder.
He shifted the handrails in his hands until his grip felt tight and steady, and nodded, which signaled Bim to begin walking forward. The trick to gaining flight was the momentum of his jog combined with the angle of the knoll, as well as the wind sliding upwards into the wingspan. That he even possessed a glider—a prototype aeroplane, to be more specific—was a testament to his diligence in saving what little he could to purchase the necessary tools, aeronautic journals, and blueprints for building his ‘plane.
His flight experiments were expensive—no, more than expensive, damn near ruinous to his strained finances after the appalling combination of death duties and falling rents. The revelation of his father’s incredibly foolish speculations slowly drained away any freedom he could have possessed had both his father and brother not died within a year of one another.