How to Dance With a Duke (37 page)

She was trying to decide what to tell Violet when George, the fresh-faced lad who had only recently begun as a footman at Winterson House, scratched on the door.

“A note for you, Your Grace,” he said, his expression far too open and expressive to make a proper footman. Though she knew Violet would never stand for such an unprofessional servant, Cecily preferred to give the young man a chance. After all, one of the responsibilities of running a ducal household was to provide gainful employment to those who needed it. Besides, she liked the young man.

Taking the note, she broke the seal and was disappointed when she saw it was not her husband’s handwriting. She had hoped that he would contact her and let her know that he had returned to town on his own. But the message in her hand made all thoughts of her husband’s perfidy fly from her mind.

I know you seek your father’s travel diaries. I know where you can find them. Meet me at half past three at the magazine to the northwest of the Serpentine. Come alone.

Cecily stood staring down at the missive, thinking. It would serve Lucas right if she procured her father’s journals on her own, while he pursued his own investigation without her. She was still quite annoyed with him over that, and it would take many apologies on his part to set the matter right with her.

Still, she knew that to follow the instructions in this anonymous note would be foolhardy in the extreme. One man had already lost his life in this business, and she had no intention of doing the same. No, she would go to the park for this meeting, and she would see who this mysterious person was. But she would not go alone.

Quickly, she went to the escritoire and scrawled a note of her own, which she hurriedly sanded and sealed. She handed it to George.

“Wait for a reply,” she told him. “And ask Molly to come to me at once.”

*   *   *

Two hours later, Cecily allowed her husband’s best friend, Colonel Lord Christian Monteith, to hand her from the hired hack, just on the other side of the Serpentine from Rotten Row.

She had chosen one of her old gowns, from the days before her fashionable transformation. And by wearing one of her old bonnets she hoped that she was unassuming enough to be mistaken for a less-than-prosperous merchant’s wife.

It had taken a bit of doing to convince Monteith to accompany her on her errand. At first his response to her request had been an adamant and resounding, “No!”

Chief among his reasons was his friendship with her husband.

“I can tell you now that if your husband were to find out I’d accompanied you on such a fool’s errand he would thrash me within a hairbreadth of my life,” he said, shaking his head to add emphasis to his denial. “And I would let him, because a gentleman does not come between a husband and wife. It is simply not done, ma’am.

“I will,” he added, doing his best to placate her, “however, go and meet this mysterious person myself and report back to you immediately. You have my word.”

“The note says that I am to be the one to meet him,” Cecily said calmly. “If you show up in my stead this person is very likely to disappear into the mist. Surely you can see why. We have no idea who this person is. For all I know it could be a maid who works in the Egyptian Club, or a young boy in the employ of whoever it was that took the diaries. I cannot risk this opportunity for answers simply because you are too chicken-hearted to accompany me.”

After much wrangling, during which Christian tried his damnedest to talk her out of it, Cecily found herself riding along in a hack with a much-put-upon Colonel Lord Monteith.

“I do not mind telling you, Your Grace,” he informed her when they began to near the Serpentine, “that while you may be accounted a rare intelligence when it comes to scholarly thingummys, you are thoroughly lacking in common sense. If you had simply let me come here on my own I could have easily gained your father’s journals for you with a little persuasion. Now, of course, we’ll have to explain all of this to Winterson when he comes.”

Cecily turned to stare at him. “What do you mean ‘when he comes’? My husband knows nothing of this. And you will not tell him of it. I forbid you.”

“With all due respect, Your Grace, what did you think he would say when he discovered you had your father’s journals?”

“Well, I hadn’t thought that far ahead.”

Monteith merely gave a noncommittal grunt. To which she would have responded, if they had not at that very moment rolled to a stop. Her escort leaped to the ground and handed her out of the hackney. Before she could object, he paid the driver, who drove off at a rather fast clip.

“My lord,” she hissed, “I had hoped to ask him to wait for us.”

“Don’t need him” was the curt reply. And to her annoyance, the colonel took her elbow and led her to the powder magazine, where the Four in Hand Club was often to be found showing off their latest tricks and maneuvers. Today the area surrounding the small building was thin of company, with only a couple of young men in a phaeton who seemed intent upon testing their own driving skills. Perhaps hoping to gain some sort of wisdom from doing so where the most acclaimed driving club in London was often to be found.

“Don’t see anyone yet,” Monteith said in a low voice.

Cecily felt a little chill run up her spine as she tried to keep watch for her mysterious messenger. Of course, it was difficult to know what to look for, given that he’d told her nothing about himself. She hoped that she and Christian looked nondescript enough to keep from alarming her note writer. She was opening her mouth to request that he step away from her so that the person with the diaries didn’t run away when he saw that she wasn’t alone when all hell broke loose.

A loud blast sounded from somewhere behind and to the right of her, followed quickly by a burning sensation in her right shoulder. At which point, first Christian, then someone else both leaped upon her, bringing her down to the ground with a thump. A shout rang out as the horses pulling the phaeton nearby reared up in response to the blast.

It all happened within the same few moments, but to Cecily, it felt as if time stood still. And even as she found herself thudding into the ground under the weight of not one, but two rather large men, she was relieved of one of them almost before she hit the ground.

“Cecily,” she heard her husband say, “dammit, answer me!”

And as he hauled her against his very solid chest, Cecily did something she’d never in all her life thought she’d do.

The foremost English scholar of Egyptian hieroglyphics, that bluestocking-turned-fashion-plate who had only recently married the Duke of Winterson, who had faced mummies and the patronesses at Almack’s with the same degree of calm, took one look at the blood pouring from her shoulder and fainted dead away.

*   *   *

Lucas got Christian’s note when he returned from a fruitless search through Lawrence’s lodgings. His friend had lured the fellow from his rooms with a cock-and-bull story about needing him to appraise a statue his grandfather had left him. A statue Lucas had borrowed from Neddy Entwhistle that afternoon. A statue that both Winterson’s and Monteith’s fortunes combined would be unable to pay for should something untoward happen to it. Which he’d reminded Monteith of several times before he’d headed off to find Lawrence.

Lucas knew that Lawrence was hiding something, but he was damned if he could find precisely what. Whatever it was, he must have it in his office at the museum. Which would prove slightly more difficult to gain access to, given that many more people tended to congregate there than at the Albany.

Of course when he read his friend’s note, he wondered whether Lawrence had been the one to request this meeting with Cecily. Putting his hat back on and shrugging back into his greatcoat, he tore out of the hotel and took one of their stable horses.

He saw Cecily and Christian alight from a hackney some distance from the magazine, probably in the hopes that whoever had summoned her would not see them together. Of course, if he were watching their approach as Lucas had, that hope was a fruitless one. His wife’s inclination to go alone had been sound from a tactical standpoint, but he was glad Christian had refused to let her do it all the same. It was unclear whether the person who called this meeting was the same one who had killed Will, but if having Christian along meant that Cecily remained unharmed, Lucas was willing to do without whatever it was this person had promised her.

Striding through the trees at the edge of the park, he had just watched Christian pay the hackney driver, and was nearly close enough to touch Cecily, when a shot rang out. He saw Cecily flinch, and with the automatic reaction he’d honed on the battlefield, Lucas flew through the air and took her to the ground even as he felt Christian slam into him with the same goal in mind.

His friend, seeing that Lucas had Cecily, took off in the direction from which the shot had come. Still wary that more shots might come, Lucas covered his wife’s body with his own.

He’d expected her to object in some manner, but when no protest was forthcoming, and with no further shots fired, he lifted himself up and realized that she’d fainted. Easing her over onto her back, he saw a singed flap of fabric at the shoulder of her drab-colored pelisse, and a darkening spot where blood rose to the surface.

He tore through her garments, rending them with his bare hands in order to see whether there was much damage. Fortunately she had escaped with only a flesh wound, but if the shot had been even a few inches lower … well, he did not care to think about the possibility.

“Lucas?” Cecily murmured as he made a pad from the sleeve of her now-ruined outer garment. “Did you get him? Did you see?”

“Shhh,” he told her. “Christian has gone after whoever it was. And no, I didn’t see anything, save you.” He did not add that he’d seen her
recoiling from a gunshot.

“My shoulder hurts,” she said, as if just feeling her injury. “What happened?”

“The bastard shot you,” he said through clenched teeth. “That’s what happened.”

“The diaries,” she said, becoming restless and trying to sit up. “Did you get them?”

“No,” he said, pushing her back to lie down. “Now lie still. We’ll talk about this at home.”

Something he said must have jarred her memory because he saw her expression clear and she frowned at him.

“Home,” she said. “I hope you mean Hurston House, because I will not be returning to Winterson House.”

“What do you mean? Of course you’re coming back to Winterson House. You’re the duchess.”

“Yes, I am, aren’t I?” she asked. “Then I suppose that means that I should be informed when the duke returns to town. Wouldn’t you agree?”

She tried to sit up again, and this time, he let her.

“Not,” he said, “if the duke has very good reasons for keeping his return to town a secret.”

“Indeed? And what very good reason could that be? Perhaps to keep the duchess from getting in the way of his secret investigation into a matter that heretofore has been something that both of them worked on together?”

“Dammit, it’s not like that. The duke—” He stopped and ran a hand through his disheveled hair.

“I,” he began again, “wanted to protect you from this blackguard who has already killed my brother and might very well wish to kill you.”

She shook her head. “Not good enough. Do you know what my father’s argument against my becoming involved in scholarship has always been?”

Her eyes were clear, all traces of her earlier fainting spell removed in light of their very serious discussion.

“He always said,” she continued, “that he could not allow me to stress my brain in such a way, because he feared that it would endanger my health, as my mother’s health had suffered from her own studies.”

“That’s not the same thing,” he said. “Your father’s worries were unfounded, and were based on fear of some nebulous threat. This is real, Cecily. The danger here is very, very real. This person has killed, and today has tried to do so again.”

“Yes, and who is to say that he wasn’t driven to shooting at me today because he saw both you and Lord Monteith here with me when he expressly said that I should come alone.”

“But you’re the one who asked Christian to go with you!”

“Yes, and it was my intention to make sure he moved away from me as soon as I found a spot to wait for the message writer.”

He was saved from saying something he would come to regret by the reappearance of Christian, who was out of breath, and looking most put out.

“Damned snake got away from me,” he said, panting. “He had a horse hidden on the other side of the footbridge and was swinging into the saddle before I could get a decent look at his face.”

He looked up at his friend, his expression serious. “I shouldn’t have—”

But Lucas forestalled him. “We’ll discuss things later. Now I need to get Cecily home and examined by a physician.”

His wife was being unaccountably quiet, which he worried was due to her injuries. “I’d offer you a lift, Monteith, but I’ve only brought the phaeton.”

“I’ll find a hack,” Christian replied, nodding to his friend. He made his bow to Cecily and trotted off in the direction from which he’d just come.

The duke handed his wife into the open carriage, careful not to jar her injured shoulder, and vaulted into the seat beside her. They made the trip back to Mayfair in silence, arriving at Winterson House in record time.

“I do not wish to stay here,” Cecily said when she realized he was not taking her to Hurston House.

“We will discuss the matter indoors like civilized people,” he returned, steering his horses to a stop before the entrance to his town house.

She opened her mouth to protest, but perhaps seeing that he was in no mood for argument, she shut it again and allowed him to lift her by the waist and carry her up the front steps and into the house.

It took a great deal of self-control to keep from protesting his high-handed behavior, but one look at his countenance told her that her husband was not ready for discussion.

Once they were inside, he barked an order to Watkins to send for a physician, and then made the arduous climb of two flights up the stairs to the duchess’s rooms. Cecily knew she was not a lightweight, but as he seemed not to notice that she was heavier than the average lady, she had no intention of telling him.