Page 2 of The Duke's Stolen Heart
“No. However seeing as Miss Lowry has elected to leave me to my own devices, it appears I shall have to.” He moved away from the window in decisive strides. Few good decisions had ever been made with an empty stomach. “Ready my horses for after supper.”
The footman bowed and backed away to do his bidding with a hint of fear behind his expressionless features. Malcolm found the great dining room, like the rest of his home, empty and cold. He attacked the soup as though it were a mortal enemy and devoured the fish course like a famished shark. The exquisitely prepared lamb, he dismembered with unnecessary savagery. A carrot nearly escaped beneath a scrap of gravy. Malcolm stabbed it with his fork and lifted it to his mouth, victorious in his hunt, lost in thought.
As if he hadn’t had sufficient time to formulate a plan to cow Miss Lowry into submission. Like most of the aristocracy, Havencrest had retreated to his country seat to brood through the lonely Christmas holidays. Alone but for servants and memories in his grand old family mansion, his obsession with the American woman had festered for a full month. Even Boxing Day, ordinarily his greatest pleasure of the season, came and went without lightening his heart. Families receiving packages of secondhand clothing, housewares and gifts of fabric ordinarily brought a rare smile to his face, but this year, Havencrest had been too preoccupied to enjoy the ritual much. Now that he was back in London ahead of the parliamentary session forming on January twenty-ninth, Malcolm had more than enough time to consider his next move with regard to the infuriating Miss Lowry.
He needed…leverage.
Miss Lowry pretended to be unafraid of the Bow Street Runners. After a string of thefts last fall, half thetonhad hired an investigator to discover whom had relieved London’s highest ladies of their pearl strings, ear bobs, bracelets and hairpins at every ball and the occasional opera since last September. After the magistrate had made a shocking arrest of Mrs. Viola Cartwright, rumored paramour to Lord Darby, the young fool who had taken a shine to the widowed sister of Lady Briarcliff.
Why should Miss Lowry feel any sense of danger from that quarter, when the idiots had already made one wrong arrest and nearly hanged an innocent woman?
After Mrs. Cartwright had been proved innocent in court thanks to the efforts of her rumored lover, the larceny had ceased as quickly as they had started. Therefore, it had to be someone within Darby and Mrs. Cartwright’s orbit. Someone with no particular goodwill toward either the man or his paramour, who yet had access to the best of London’s social events. There was no shortage of well-heeled foreigners thronging London society. The Kilpatrick family, for example, with three sisters as bold as their brassy red hair. Yet they possessed no talent for subtlety. No, the culprit must be an innocuous young lady, newly arrived, demure and too clever by half. Miss Lowry had caught his attention
If he hadn’t glimpsed her committing a crime, he might not have believed it himself. Yet her letters proved it.
What makes you think I feel guilt?Miss Lowry had asked. It was hardly a denial, more of an oblique confirmation. Malcolm smiled grimly as he settled into his box and lumbered off through the gloom of a January evening in London. By the time he was done with her, Miss Lowry would feel far more than guilt. She would feel the lash of a whip at her back in punishment if he had anything to say about it.
* * *
The incredible arroganceof the Duke of Havencrest did not negate the danger he represented to Antonia Lowry’s peace of mind. She hovered at the door of the bedroom where she lived as guest of Lady Margaret Evendaw—widely regarded as the most insipid young lady in all England—listening.
“Is she here?” a man’s voice demanded of the butler in an arrogant growl.
“Lady Margaret is indisposed this evening, your lordship,” a cowed and obsequious butler informed the unwelcome duke with a deep bow. “Her brother, the Earl, and Lady Evendaw are at Covent Garden theatre to see Kemble’s latest Shakespeare production.”
Of course, the servant assumed the duke was here about Margaret. He would never guess for one moment that the Evendaw family’s American houseguest of indefinite duration was the true object of a duke’s impromptu visit. Petite and biddable, Antonia’s unwitting friend made a desirable prospective wife for many a London bachelor—at least, the ones who failed to understand that Margaret might be young and unsophisticated, but she was far from stupid. Naïve, however…there had been times during what these fancy people called the “Little Season,” — as opposed to the formal season just now gearing up—when it was all Antonia could do to keep her guileless companion from wandering out onto a balcony with a man more interested in her substantial dowry than in Margaret’s chatter. Antonia had not been born to this world of chess-move alliances and cutthroat matchmaking, but she grasped its rules easily enough. To be compromised forced a lady’s hand to marry. Antonia found the notion of suffering through an unwished-for marriage poisonous to her soul.
Even for a lamb of questionable good sense like her friend.Especiallyfor someone like Margaret.
“I meant, Miss Lowry,” Havencrest said from below. Hearing her name in the duke’s low rumble sent a delicious, unexpected thrill through Antonia’s body.
“You aren’t the first man to mistake me for a mouse,” she whispered into the darkness. Antonia had edged out onto the stair landing to better eavesdrop on the men in the elegant foyer of the Earl of Evendaw’s townhome. As if he had heard her, Havencrest jerked his gaze upward. Antonia froze.
“Miss Lowry is attending to Lady Margaret. Shall I inquire whether she is able to receive visitors?” offered the butler with a note of skepticism. There could be no legitimate reason for a duke to demand an audience with an unmarried woman well after visiting hours—especially when the earl and his countess were were out attending a theater performance.
Even she, a crass American, knew that much. He must be desperate to come here. Five months’ residence amongst England’s finest families had been plenty of time for her to pick up on the basics of social expectation and comportment if not every subtlety of rank. Dukes were such rarities that even the most asocial, toothless and ancient example was considered a prize for a husband.
As Antonia recollected, Havencrest still possessed all of his teeth. Not that she had ever witnessed the dour man display them with any hint of humor or levity. He might have been handsome if it weren’t for the haunted bleakness in his gaze.
“No,” he said after a tense moment. “I’ll call upon her tomorrow afternoon. See that she is at home.”
The butler bowed, subservient. As though he had the slightest influence over her comings and goings. Ever since her arrival here last December, Antonia had made a point of going about her business in town without a chaperone. Occasionally she took a maid or a footman, but as often as not she simply left. Now, she made a mental note not to be at home tomorrow afternoon. Havencrest dragged his gaze away from the landing. Antonia inhaled sharply. Her pulse pumped, ready to run. She was good at that. Running.
After tonight, Antonia Lowry was a dead woman. The sooner the better. Pity. She had done so well insinuating herself into this world to which she did not belong. First through the company of three red-headed women from Virginia, then, as they had made inroads socially, by befriending Margaret and her family.
If Havencrest suspected that she had been the source of so much grief for the past few months, others must, too. It was amazing that she had gotten away with her false identity and petty thefts for so long. If the Kilpatrick sisters, whom she had stayed with for months prior to accepting Margaret’s invitation to reside with her brother and sister-in-law during the Christmas season, ever put their quarrelsome red heads together and figured out she had stolen from their highbrow new friends, Antonia had no doubt they would turn her over to the authorities.
“Who was that?”
Antonia started, but in the way she had learned to do many years before. She stilled instead of jerking around. Her mother had taught her how to feign placid stupidity like her life depended upon it, because once upon a time, it had. “The Duke of Havencrest stopped by. What are you doing out of bed, Maggie dear?”
“I heard voices and woke up,” Margaret sniffled. The top of her tousled blond head came to Antonia’s ear. Her small snub nose was as red as a cherry with the waxiness of frequent blowing. “What did he want?”
“To court you, I suppose,” Antonia joked, her expression teasing. To her surprise, Margaret shuddered.
“I hope not. My brother would be keen to marry me to a duke. What a success to have his youngest sister married off before she has even had a full season,” she complained bitterly.
“No unhappy marriage can be considered a success.” Antonia thought back to her mother’s acrimonious union with her father. As a child, Antonia had answered to a different name. For a while, she had been angry with her mother for taking her away from the beautiful house and relative comfort of serving a well-to-do white woman. Even at nine years old she had recognized loneliness. It wasn’t until she had been older that she understood that she had been kept as a pet because her large brown eyes and dark curls had made her doll-like in the eyes of her mother’s employer. But by the time Antonia grasped that her life as a rich woman’s accessory had been exploitative and temporary, her legal father was dead and her relationship with her mother in tatters. Those early lessons at Mrs. Beckwith’s side had proven handy as Antonia sought to improve her station, from servant-turned-thief, to fine lady. But she had plans for her future, and they did not involve husbands or skirts. All she needed was a little more money…
