How to Dance With a Duke (8 page)

Also, he was a gentleman and might have some suggestions for how she might go about persuading one of the club members to see her as a potential fiancée. And perhaps she could do something for him. Perhaps frighten away the matchmaking mamas—weren’t all the marriageable gentlemen forever bemoaning the young ladies who schemed to trap them into marriage?

The more she thought of it, the more she recognized the soundness of the plan.

Looking over her shoulder, and around the rest of the terrace to ensure that no one was near enough to hear her, she leaned forward.

“I will tell you my reasons,” she whispered conspiratorially, “but you must keep this between the two of us.”

The duke leaned forward as well, eyebrows raised in expectation.

“I did it…” she hissed, “because I mean to marry a member of the Egyptian Club.”

Four

“The devil you will,” Lucas said, resisting the urge to take Miss Hurston by the shoulders and shake some sense into her.

The idea of her marrying some prosy scholar with more hair than wit was ridiculous. Not only because she deserved better, but because there had to be a better way for her to get her hands on her father’s journals. It had nothing at all to do with the way she looked in the moonlight and the way his eyes kept straying to her mouth.

Unfortunately, Miss Hurston was currently scowling in the moonlight, her delectable mouth pursed in annoyance.

“I’m sure I never asked for your permission, Your Grace,” she said, drawing back from him, her arms folding across her chest in the universal posture of affronted females everywhere. “I was simply sharing my plans with you. If you do not agree with them…”

Of course he didn’t bloody agree with them, he thought, grateful for the military training that had taught him to keep his mouth shut when needed.

“It isn’t that I disagree with your plan,” he began, though he did disagree with her plan. “It simply seems unnecessary to go to such an extreme to achieve your goal.”

But the damage was done. Whatever rapport they’d achieved earlier had vanished in the time it took him to utter an oath.

“Thank you very much for your advice, Your Grace,” she said, rising from the bench. “I’m afraid I have to get back to my cousins now.”

Her curtsy was perfectly executed. Her expression was serene. But he knew he’d seriously harmed his cause. If he were to convince her to help him search for clues to Will’s disappearance, he would need to woo her back to his side.

Odd choice of word, that.

He rose carefully from the bench, the muscles in his leg throbbing, momentarily erasing his thoughts of anything but the red-hot sting of pain. When he could breathe again, his thoughts returned to Miss Hurston.

Cecily.

Surely there was no harm in thinking of her by her given name.

He would have to find some means of dissuading Cecily from her ridiculous plan. Marriages of convenience might be
de rigueur
for the
ton
, but he knew from his brother’s marriage that being leg-shackled to someone for whom you felt no affection was soul-crushing. Certainly nothing like the true partnership and genuine love he’d witnessed between his parents.

She might be well versed in Latin and Greek and probably a whole host of other languages, but in this matter, Cecily was woefully ignorant.

He’d simply have to teach her the error of her ways.

It was, he thought, relying on his walking stick the whole way to the French doors, a lesson he was very much looking forward to.

*   *   *

Cecily was finishing up a cup of tea in the breakfast room the next morning when she felt the skin on the back of her neck prickle. Turning, she saw a dark figure looming in the doorway.

She couldn’t help it.

She jumped.

Then felt foolish when the dark shadow resolved itself into a very ordinary-looking man of middle years.

“I did not mean to startle you, my dear,” Lord Geoffrey Brighton, her father’s oldest friend, said, his eyebrows raised. “Never say you’ve started believing that curse nonsense. I thought you were too sensible for that.”

A confirmed bachelor, Lord Geoffrey had run tame in their house for as long as Cecily could remember. And though his hair was turning a bit silvery at the temples, he still looked just as he always had. Comfortable, mussed. He had been a steadfast supporter of Lord Hurston’s expeditions to Egypt from the beginning, investing his own fortune heavily in the acquisition and transport of various antiquities back to England. And he had made a tidy profit selling those goods that the Egyptian Club did not always find to be of particularly significant historical value.

And unlike the other members of the club, who had not even bothered to call on her father after that first awful week, Lord Geoffrey was a constant presence in Hurston House. He had even been on hand to calm Lord Hurston a time or two after he had suffered one of the terrible convulsions that still seemed to strike out of nowhere. It had brought Cecily to tears to see her father’s oldest friend at his side, speaking to him in a low, patient voice that was surprising in such a robust man.

“Please don’t you bring up the curse too,” Cecily said with disgust. “Even the
Times
has written of it today. It’s like something out of Walpole.”

“We are a superstitious people,” he said with a shrug, helping himself to bacon from the sideboard and taking his usual seat to the left of her. “It helps to explain things that have no explanation.”

Not wishing to dwell on the matter, Cecily changed the subject. “I take it you have been up to see Father? How is he this morning?”

“Well enough,” Lord Geoffrey said, taking a sip of tea. “I believe he must have recognized me today. At least, I hope he did. When I spoke to him he squeezed my hand in a manner that up until now he has only done with you or Violet.”

His eyes darkened with grief. “I cannot tell you how disheartening it is for me, Cecily, to see your father in such a state. I almost think it would have been better if the apoplexy had carried him off that first day.”

An invisible hand gripped Cecily’s heart. Though she and Violet had spoken of just such a possibility in the early days of her father’s illness, it was jarring to hear her father’s dearest friend in the world voice it. Perhaps the public were not the only superstitious ones.

“I do not say that I wish for it to have happened,” Brighton went on. “Indeed, I would not wish such a fate on him for anything. But I do know that your father values his mental acuity above all else. And I cannot think that he would ever have imagined himself living in such a condition. Alive, but unable to do any of those things that make life worth living.”

“I do understand you,” Cecily said, thinking of how vibrant and full of life her father had been before his attack. “I don’t know that he would have wished for such a thing, but surely the fact that he still lives gives us hope that one day he will be able to live his life with the same passion he did before.”

“You are right, my dear, as always.” He reached out to grasp her hand. “I do know this. He would be unspeakably proud to see you now, finally allowing yourself to cast off your cocoon and flap your wings like the glorious butterfly you are.”

“Butterfly, indeed.” Cecily laughed. “And you know very well that Papa would be heartily displeased at my continued academic pursuits. Though I do believe he would be pleased to see that I’ve finally accepted Violet’s assistance with my wardrobe.”

“Oh, I think you do yourself and your father a disservice, Cecily. Your father has always been proud of you. Even when he was railing about your stubbornness. He’s terribly proud of you. Just as proud of you as he was of your mother, God rest her soul.”

The mention of her mother made Cecily’s smile fade. “Yes, I suppose he was proud of her. Though I wish he hadn’t taken her death as a sign of why ladies should never pursue any sort of academic activities. It wasn’t her translation work that drove her to her death, but a stubborn refusal to rest properly when she was taken ill with the lung infection. Knowing my own restlessness, I suspect that having her books around her would have helped her survive the tedium of the sickbed.”

“He took your mother’s death hard, my dear,” Lord Geoffrey said. “Indeed, there was a time when I feared that he would do the unthinkable … but he resisted. For your sake, I think. And eventually he married Violet and all was right again.”

But Cecily knew that was only a partial truth. All might have seemed right, but she knew that Lord Hurston had never been the same after her mother’s death. And when she had shown the same skill for languages that her mother had possessed, Lord Hurston had tried every means at his disposal to ensure that his daughter would not become as enthralled with her studies as his wife had been.

But Cecily had persisted, and over his objections, with the help of her godmother, she had become a well-regarded scholar in her own right. Or, as much as was possible for a lady of gentle birth.

Knowing that it would do no good to dredge up that ancient history, Cecily simply nodded. “It’s true. Violet did change everything.”

They chatted for a bit about less upsetting subjects. Cecily’s new gowns, Lady Bewle’s ball. The latest news from the Royal Society.

Something, however, was clearly bothering him. Cecily gave her honorary uncle a questioning look. It was not like him to mince words.

“What is it?”

Looking a bit sheepish, he said, “My dear, I do not like to bring it up, especially after your earlier comments, but I must. Your father’s reputation hangs in the balance.”

“I thought we had dismissed the curse as ignorant superstition,” she said.

Ever since news had emerged from Bonaparte’s explorations in Egypt, and even before, the reading public had been fascinated by the possibility that the ancient people who built the pyramids had sealed them with a curse for those who might disturb their tombs. Each time a worker died, each time an expedition member fell ill, each time a box of cargo was dropped as it was loaded onto the ship bound home from Egypt, it was blamed on a curse.

Never mind that the curses said more about the people who inscribed them onto the tombs than about the people who found them. The newspapers and scandal sheets had told the tales and forever after every expedition member was doomed by a curse.

Cecily had found it tiresome enough to be confronted by whispers every time she ventured out of the house, but she had hoped the breakfast room of Hurston House was safe.

“I do not believe in curses any more than you do, my dear,” Lord Geoffrey said. “But I really do believe that something is going on with the members of that expedition. I was there, you know. And there were a good many incidents that happened while we were in Alexandria that in hindsight seem to indicate that there was something amiss with that trip.”

This was the first Cecily had heard of anything going wrong during the actual expedition. With the exception of Will Dalton’s disappearance.

“Tell me,” she said, willing to listen even if she suspected she’d be proved right.

“Well, aside from that nasty business with Dalton,” Lord Geoffrey said, “there were many small things that gave us all a bit of unease. Items went missing between the dig site and the storage site at our encampment. A fall rendered one of our guides unable to continue on with us. And one day one of the native men your father hired to assist with the removal of some of the larger items was crushed to death beneath the weight of the sarcophagus he carried.”

“Oh, dear,” Cecily said, horrified to hear of such an accident befalling the man. Still, this was no more than she had expected to hear. “Surely all of these things are typical of an expedition like that. It is dangerous work. Why attribute such things to a curse rather than simple misfortune?”

Lord Geoffrey fiddled with the lace at his cuff, decidedly uncomfortable. “Because in this instance we were actually warned of a curse just before we opened the doorway into the tomb.”

His eyes were troubled as he warmed to his story. “You are acquainted, I think, with our translator, Gilbert Gubar, who has been with us on several previous expeditions?”

Cecily nodded. She and Herr Gubar had corresponded about some Greek texts once or twice. He was a good man, though she envied him his position with the expedition.

“We had been working all day, and already three of the workers had been forced into rest by the heat. But your father was certain that we were close to the entrance. If only we pressed forward. I tried to argue with him, but you are not the only one in your family with a stubborn streak, my dear.

“Finally, as we all looked on, we were there. Everyone crowded back around, ignoring the heat now in their determination to be there when we finally reached our goal.

“Then your father was calling for Gubar to read the inscription on the door, and as he stepped forward we all fell silent. I cannot remember any other unveiling like it.

“In his accented English, Gubar said the words as he sketched them into his notes, though we had no idea what they meant. We all waited there, impatient as the devil, for him to translate them into English. Finally, he read them out word by word.

“‘Whosoever violates this tomb shall cease to exist, his years will diminish, and his house will belong to his enemy.’

“I can tell you,” Lord Geoffrey said with feeling, “there was not one of us who went to bed that night with an easy heart.”

“But that curse is nonsense,” Cecily said, trying to maintain her skeptical stance despite the chill Lord Geoffrey’s words sent up her spine. “How can one both cease to exist and have his years diminished? Curses are there to deter would-be thieves from taking away the valuables buried with the noble deceased. That is all.” Her laugh sounded nervous to her own ears. But her father’s friend wasn’t laughing with her.

“I know that, Cecily. I have been in more tombs than you’ve been in ballrooms. And I tell you, this curse—it’s different. I have never felt such an air of … unease fall over an entire party of people like that. It was one of the most disturbing experiences of my life.”