Page 4 of The Duke Who Loved Me (The Duke's Estates 1)

“You must take care of your people.”

She was interrupted by a rustle of newsprint. “I daresay there are rats,” James said.

“Do you think to frighten me? You never could.”

This was true. And he had really tried a few times in his youth.

“I am consumed by morbid curiosity,” Cecelia added as she slipped down the hall. James followed. Her attendants came straggling after, the maid looking uneasy at the thought of rodents.

They found other rooms as jumbled as the first two. Indeed, the muddle seemed to worsen toward the rear of the house. “Is that a spinning wheel?” Cecelia exclaimed at one point. “Why would a duke want such a thing?”

“It appears he was unable to resist acquiring any object that he came across,” replied James.

“But where would he come across a spinning wheel?”

“In a tenant’s cottage?”

“Do you suppose he bought it from them?”

“I have no idea.” James pushed aside a hanging swag of cloth. Dust billowed out and set them all coughing. He stifled a curse.

At last they came into what might have been a library. James thought he could see bookshelves behind the piles of refuse. There was a desk, he realized, with a chair pulled up to it. He hadn’t noticed at first because it was buried under mountains of documents. At one side sat a large wicker basket brimming with correspondence.

Cecelia picked up a sheaf of pages from the desk, glanced over it, and set it down again. She rummaged in the basket. “These are all letters,” she said.

“Wonderful.”

“May I?”

James gestured his permission, and she opened one from the top. “Oh, this is bad. Your cousin Elvira needs help.”

“I have no knowledge of a cousin Elvira.”

“Oh, I suppose she must have been your uncle Percival’s cousin. She sounds rather desperate.”

“Well, that is the point of a begging letter, is it not? The effect is diminished if one doesn’t sound desperate.”

“Yes, but James…”

“My God, do you suppose they’re all like that?” The basket was as long as his arm and nearly as deep. It was mounded with correspondence.

Cecelia dug deeper. “They all seem to be personal letters. Just thrown in here. I suppose they go back for months.”

“Years,” James guessed. Dust lay over them, as it did everything here.

“You must read them.”

“I don’t think so. For once I approve of Uncle Percival’s methods. I would say throw them in the fire, if lighting a fire in this place wasn’t an act of madness.”

“Have you no family feeling?”

“None. You read them if you’re so interested.”

She shuffled through the upper layer. “Here’s one from your grandmother.”

“Which one?”

“Lady Wilton.”

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