Chapter Six
The next morning, Giles stood by the windows, surrounded by his paintings, studying the sketches he’d made of Miss Emery. There was much he could do with lines and shading. True mastery eluded him. Maybe it was unachievable. But he kept striving.
On the sill rested a cat basking in the sunshine. The creature had been hanging about the house. Cook swore he wasn’t feeding it any scraps, but someone must have been. It was a huge ratter of a thing, beaten and worn, with tattered ears and scars on its nose. Incredible that the creature still had both huge golden eyes.
One rainy day a few months ago, not long after he’d returned to England, Giles had been standing on the steps of his house, and it—he—had just appeared out of no place, meowing and rubbing himself on Giles’s legs, his brown-and-black-striped fur damp.
Giles leaned toward it and peered down. “How did you get up there?”
It must have done some daring climbing. There were no trees or vines. A triumph of will and ingenuity. “If you think I’m going to have pity on you and let you in after all, you’ll be awfully surprised.”
The cat squinted at him and opened its jaws as if it were meowing, but no sound came through the glass.
A prickling on the back of Giles’s neck made him eerily aware that he was no longer alone.
Rocks in his stomach, Giles turned. He affected a courtly gesture of graceful greeting. “Again so soon, Your Grace. I am truly honored.”
The duke set his stony gaze upon his son, patently undeceived by the show. Nor should he have been, for the tone Giles had applied was nothing but treacly falseness.
“Tomorrow night, you will dine with me.”
Giles would do no such thing. The finery of the duke’s table suited him well. The company did not. “I would rather lick the bottom of dirty boots.”
“I don’t care what other…entertainments you might think you’d prefer to seek. Send your regrets. Lord and Lady Munge and their children are dining with me. And so shall you.”
“Ah, this is about Lady Sophie again.” Giles took the brushes he’d been cleaning out of the solution and began wiping the bristles with a rag, shaping them perfectly so drying would not ruin them. “I’m afraid I’m not interested in the lady in question.”
“You haven’t seen her.”
No, but he’d seen Miss Emery. There was no Lady Sophie in the world who could turn his eye now. Every time he thought of Miss Emery, his blood quickened with anticipation of seeing her again. “Does Lady Sophie think she fancies me?”
The duke’s brows rose a fraction. “What does it matter what she thinks? She can hardly be expected to know her own mind. I don’t think she’s more than twenty.”
“At what age would you allow a woman might begin to know her own mind?”
“This isn’t the point—”
“Because cousin Lucy is only eight, and she seems very decided.”
“Childish nonsense. She’s been overindulged. Her parents will rue the day they didn’t take her in hand. Foolish, those people.”
“Speaking from experience, Your Grace?”
“You need to stop playing and learn to be a duke.”
“Why? Thinking of pushing off early?”
His sire’s countenance darkened.
Giles smiled.
The cane Silverlund carried swung through the air, crashing against the side of Giles’s skull with a horrifying crack.
The duke stood nearly motionless, breathing heavily, his barrel chest the only thing moving in the room. Giles didn’t give his sire the pleasure of seeing him raise his hand to his throbbing cheek. He jerked his head to the side, flicking a lock of hair from his eyes. “Should you like the other one, Your Grace?”
“Impudent whelp.” Sneering, the duke turned and vanished through the door.
Giles called for something cool to press against his face. It arrived with a note. From Miss Emery, that little X in the corner. He slid a finger under the wax seal.
Throbbing in his face temporarily forgotten, he wasted no time.
He pressed his seal into the wax and handed the note off to Welland with instructions to begin preparing for ten days in the country.
Her reply came quickly.
He sent a short reply, pausing only to think of any remotely feminine word that began with a V and might be part of name.
…
The evening after the second visit he paid on his ungrateful whelp of a son, Silverlund welcomed Lord and Lady Munge to dine, along with their two adult children, the young heir, freshly home from Oxford, and Lady Sophie.
In the dining room, servants stood at the ready, each perfectly proportioned to the others by height and coloring, their light-blue livery lined with gold, and absolutely impeccably maintained. No crystal was ever neglected. No dish set upon the table less than perfect.
The Silverlund table was one of the most coveted and revered the country over. Nothing was out of place. Nothing ever would be. Each piece had been measured in relation to the other, first by the under butler, then by the butler, to ensure no errors were made.
Preventing his eyes from repeatedly roaming to Lady Sophie was proving difficult. They were midway through another course when she began exhibiting awareness of his gaze. Her head bent down just a bit more, and her brows were arching. Not a good sign, that. It would be far preferable were she meek in all regards. If that whelp of a son of his couldn’t take her in hand after marrying her, the task would fall to Silverlund. And this time, unlike what he’d managed with his own duchess, devil take her, this one would heed him.
Meek or not, the girl’s regal bearing…it was the sort of poise and posture that appeared rarely. A girl might have breeding, come from proper stock, but be nowhere near as well formed. Looking upon her, a calm peace filled Silverlund when he thought of his own daughter, who had not lived. If she had failed to reach such heights of feminine perfection, she’d have saddled him with one more child who would humiliate him.
Lady Sophie was the one in ten thousand. She had one fault: she was diminutive. Otherwise, she embodied the feminine ideal, with fashionably raven tresses and honey-brown eyes. Her shoulders were sloped, her bow mouth appropriately small, giving the impression that she would never be so crass as to offer an opinion on anything more controversial than a gown of the latest fashion. Or in a daring moment of pique, another lady’s jewels.
The perfect duchess. Everything the wife of the next duke should be. He might have had an inappropriate wife thrust upon him, a woman dusted with the debris of scandal… Silverlund would not pick wrong for his son.
“I’m so sorry we don’t have the pleasure of your son’s company tonight, Your Grace.”
The table went silent as all eyes turned his way.
Silverlund repressed an onslaught of ire. He did not need to ingratiate himself. Not to these people. Not to anyone. His status soared over the masses…over all but a slim number of individuals, none of whom were present tonight.
Yet Lady Sophie was too great a prize to relinquish.
He pulled his lips into a cool smile. “A prior engagement kept him away tonight. He looks forward to meeting you another time. Especially you, Lady Sophie.”
Instead of showing her gratitude at being addressed by the duke, the girl sent a cutting glance to her mother. What was the world coming to when an unmarried girl of good birth could not be flattered by his notice? This had not been the way of things in Silverlund’s youth.
Lady Munge wisely ignored her daughter.
The duke turned the conversation to the young man, Viscount Sumter of Whitwell. Everything an heir should be. An Oxford man and avid hunter whose initials never appeared in those wretched gossip stories or betting books. All that and an uncompromising Tory.
Ashcroft, on the other hand, had left Oxford, had never picked up a gun—not even as a prop for one of his horrid paintings—and had started challenging his father’s political stance around the age of seventeen, when Silverlund had decided the feckless boy should begin learning what he was supposed to become.
That was a number of years ago. Ashcroft still hadn’t learned. Silverlund couldn’t even make the whelp appear at his table once a year. It was long past time for things to change. Silverlund was the duke. It was high time his carousing, good-for-nothing son realized that.
If that reprobate he had to call a son had another horse he loved as much as that hideous gray he’d had as a boy, Silverlund would kill it himself this time.