Page 88 of A Duke Too Far (The Way to a Lord's Heart 4)

“Don’t beg, Nathaniel—never beg, you said—for my mind is made up. Come to the ball. Come by yourself or bring your mother, but know that I will save my supper waltz for you and you alone.”

She eased away from him and strode out through the front door, not even pausing to collect her hat.

“How comes the dower house?” Robbie asked, sprinkling salt on his roast beef.

“The maids have waged war on the dust,” Nathaniel said, sawing away at his steak. “The footmen have aired every room and beaten every carpet. It’s clean enough.” But not welcoming, not cozy. Althea had seen that in the first instant, recognized it for a strategy, and known what to do about it.

“You are worried about Mama’s visit.”

Nathaniel gave up on the overcooked insult to cuisine lying on his plate and put down his fork and knife. “Change should worry us both.”

“The staff will be discreet.” Robbie never drank more than the single glass of claret necessary to wash down Cook’s roasts, but his wine was nearly gone while his plate remained full.

Robbie was worried too.

Nathaniel filled his brother’s glass halfway. “The staff at the dower house has been augmented by a pair of village women suggested by Vicar Sorenson. That in itself is a risk. Cousin Sarah might not be content to bide over the rise. She’ll want to see the Hall, and God help us if Thatcher should cross paths with her or the new maids. If Mama goes to services, that will cause talk, and if she does not go to services, that will cause more talk.”

Robbie sat back, clearly defeated by the steak. “You are brooding about Lady Althea, aren’t you? That’s what this mood is about.”

Everything was about Lady Althea. The sunset, the scent of cherry blossoms, the aching loneliness that welled from places inside Nathaniel he’d sealed up years ago. She’d stirred in him a longing for the impossible: babies, contented evenings reading with his wife by the fire, calls upon the neighbors, and an occasional pint at the posting inn with a local squire or two.

Althea could still have the feminine version of that domestic bliss, but she threatened to toss it all aside—and for what? A petty war with an even pettier society.

“Lady Althea and I have bid each other farewell.”

“Do you suppose she’s the one who’s been sending us threatening notes?”

Robbie had an ability to think on a problem until it lay in tiny pieces at his figurative feet. Of course he would fixate on the notes.

“My candidate is Lady Phoebe. She has a family connection to us and thus might have spies among the staff. The notes were sent locally and were written by an educated hand. Lady Phoebe meets both criteria and has a motive for bringing shame on this house.”

Robbie took another bite of his mashed potatoes, which even Cook could not render inedible. “But we can similarly bring shame upon her. A word here or there about Miss Price’s antecedents, and old gossip finds new life.”

“We are gentlemen. We would never speak ill of a lady, much less of our half sister.” Another half sister had been born to the wife of a viscount down in Leeds.

Robbie considered a forkful of potatoes. “What could Papa have been thinking?”

“Perhaps he was lonely.”

Robbie looked up from his plate. “You are lonely. I suspect I am too, but the condition has become my natural state. I have been wondering, Nathaniel, if it might be time for me to die again.”

Nathaniel’s wine went sour in his belly. “Don’t talk nonsense. You have made enormous progress lately and if you were anybody but a duke, you’d simply become like the relation who went off to war and came back somewhat the worse for the experience. None of this skulking about, secrecy, and threatening the village children would have been necessary.”

“What a flattering analogy,” Robbie replied, “though the only war I fought was to maintain my sanity. Mind you, I am not proposing to take my own life, but I was pronounced dead once. Why not simply pronounce me dead again, in a manner that convinces the staff I am well and truly expired, and then you can set aside all the whatnot and marry Lady Althea.”

The idea was preposterous and demanded sacrifices of Robbie that Nathaniel could never ask. “Assuming the invalidity of a marriage undertaken under a false identity is never raised—though eventually, it would be—what becomes of you?”

“I go back out on the moors,” Robbie said, casually voicing his worst fear. “I suspect that’s why I’ve dreaded them so. I always knew they would reclaim me. This time I can be Mr. Smith, an eccentric gentleman who made his fortune in trade. Perhaps Scotland should be my home.”

Robbiehadmade a fortune in trade, indirectly. Several fortunes that would likely end up reverting to the Crown, of all the damned injustices.

“Have you located a property already? Contacted a hiring agency? Determined how you will explain this scheme to the mother who has waited years to see you again?”

Robbie stopped playing with his potatoes. “We have had five good years, Nathaniel, and I thank you for them, but you must marry, or what have those years been for? Lady Althea is up to your weight socially, she’s smitten, and so are you. For God’s sake, you cannot turn your back on an opportunity like that simply to keep me puttering in Yorkshire’s largest walled garden. We will both go mad in truth.”

For the past several years, Nathaniel had comforted himself with the belief that as long as he worried for his sanity, he was likely of sound mind. The notion no longer quelled his anxieties.

“You saw her ladyship’s invitation,” he said. Robbie was conscientiously handling the correspondence, as he’d said he would. Nathaniel should have been relieved to be free of the tedium, but instead he worried that his brother had taken on an unnecessary burden.

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