A Duke in Shining Armor

  She turned to Olympia. “I’ve been out of touch for three years and more, ever since Charles fell ill. I always used to see Hugh and his friends as wild boys, and I made allowances, as I told you. But it dawned on me today that they’re men, and it’s well past time they took stock of themselves. In short, I cannot in good conscience hurry you back to your intended. You are welcome to stay as long as you like, my dear. When you wish to return to London, only say the word, and I shall accompany you.”

  She stalked out of the Great Hall, her footsteps echoing on the ancient oak floor.

  Ashmont had come, after all, as Lady Charles and Ripley had insisted he would. Now he was gone.

  A part of Olympia wanted to jump up and down with frustration. Another part wanted to jump up and down with joy.

  This state of mind being unacceptable, she set about organizing and cataloguing her disorderly feelings about the two men in her life.

  What Ashmont looked or smelled like or what his attitude was didn’t especially trouble her. Lady Charles’s comments in this regard were not revelatory. They were consistent with what Olympia had expected when she’d agreed to marry him.

  She had no illusions. How could she have them? She’d been out in Society long enough, had heard and seen and read enough, to understand what manner of man he was. Still, no matter what he looked, smelled, or acted like, he was the Duke of Ashmont.

  Had she stayed at Camberley Place today instead of chasing Ripley, she would have let Ashmont take her back to London and make her his duchess. What choice had she? If she’d returned with him, all her mad actions of yesterday wouldn’t count anymore. Society would shrug off the excitement. It would merely be one more prank in Their Dis-Graces’ lengthy repertoire. Above all, Mama and Papa and the boys wouldn’t suffer for what Olympia had done.

  But if she had stayed at Camberley Place, Ripley would have gone on to London and worsened his injury . . . and the kiss wouldn’t have happened, and all she’d ever know of passion would be what her imagination painted. That, she now knew, fell far short of reality.

  As Lady Charles made her irate exit, Olympia came back to the moment, and to the facts of her life: improvident parents and their unprovided-for sons.

  Look on the bright side, she told herself.

  The Duke of Ashmont still wanted to marry her, apparently.

  She had experienced passion.

  All she had to do now was try to keep Ashmont from changing his mind, although the evidence pointed to his being too obstinate and possessive to do so.

  As to kissing Ripley, she would not let her conscience trouble her overmuch. Compared to what Ashmont had done over the past decade, and would no doubt continue to do after he was wed, her moment of passion was nothing. Except to her.

  Besides, for all she knew—which, in this case, was nothing—any handsome, experienced young man could, under the right circumstances, arouse a similar ardor.

  She hurried after her hostess. “Lady Charles, I do beg your pardon,” she said. “I ought to have said—”

  “My dear, after such trials, I wonder you can speak anything but gibberish,” said the lady, slowing her pace. “Those three are the outside of enough. Wherever he and Blackwood stopped for the night, Ashmont might have had the servants clean his clothes. He ought to have shaved. Perhaps he assumed it would seem as though he was too eager to see you to bother with niceties of dress. However, if this were the case, one would think he’d have been too eager to see you to bother with fighting and drinking.”

  “So one would think, but men are not always logical.”

  They had reached the bottom of the staircase. Lady Charles stopped and patted Olympia’s arm. “Make him work, my dear,” the lady said. “Make him pay attention and make an effort. He needs more management than I had supposed, though I don’t doubt you are capable.”

  Olympia had no choice but to be capable. She said, “In the circumstances, I should be a great fool not to accept your kind offer and remain where I am, at least for a day or two.”

  “Good. It will do him no harm to stew a bit.” Lady Charles started up the stairs.

  “I know you know best about him,” Olympia said.

  “They were the sons I never had,” the lady said. “Unfortunately, they weren’t actually my sons, and I could exert only so much influence. I might as well tell you, since it’s no great secret, though it happened so long ago that few remember. Ashmont’s father fell into severe melancholia after his wife’s death, and would have nothing to do with him. Blackwood’s father was a rigid martinet who did nothing but find fault with him. Ripley’s father suffered some sort of brain fever that left him irrational: He believed he was completely impoverished, and everybody was trying to steal from him. This house became their refuge. That is why I know them so well.”

  Olympia stood stock-still. “I didn’t know.”

  Lady Charles paused and turned to her. “They all inherited too young. But they’re grown men now, and I’m done making excuses. I understand that you acted on impulse. You felt panicky, I don’t doubt.” She smiled a little. “The brandy gave you a push, the dose of courage or recklessness or whatever it was you needed to act. Yet running away may have been the wisest thing you could have done. You need time to reflect and plan, away from the influence of your family and that stupid boy who wants to marry you. Camberley Place is the right place for calm reflection.”

  And this lady was the right guide, Olympia saw. Mama and the aunts were loving, but they did not have Lady Charles’s intellect or her grasp of human nature.

  In a few words, she’d given Olympia valuable insight. And eased her conscience a little.

  “Thank you,” Olympia said. “I do need to stay. And think. And I had better write some long-overdue letters. It’s well past time the duke heard from me. I do believe, after all, it would be best we discuss matters directly with each other.”

  Lady Charles regarded her for a moment. “Yes, that would be best.”

  Ashmont House, London, that evening

  The Duke of Ashmont had been dressing to go out when the two letters arrived, express, from Surrey.

  Ripley’s missive, typically, consisted of one line: For God’s sake, come and get her.

  The other was from Lady Olympia. Being thicker by several closely written pages, it was rather more daunting. This was Ashmont’s second time reading it. He sat at his dressing table, clutching his head and disarranging the artfully windblown coiffure his valet had created.

  The duke was debating whether to give the letter a third try or summon Blackwood for help when his valet hurried in and said, “Lord Frederick is here, Your Grace.”

  Ashmont bolted up from his chair and debated a quick exit via the window. “Tell him I’m not at home.”

  “Ah, but you are, Lucius,” came his uncle’s cheerful voice.

  The valet quickly got out of the way of the voice’s owner. When Lord Frederick made a small dismissive gesture, the servant went out of the room, gently closing the door after himself.

  “I heard you’d returned,” said his lordship.

  Ashmont longingly eyed the decanter standing on a small table by the fireplace. The trouble was, if he poured himself a drink, he’d have to offer one to his uncle, and that would encourage him to stay.

  “Only a few hours ago,” he said. “You’ve wondrous good ears if you heard it already. I hardly knew it myself.”

  “You’ve returned without the future Duchess of Ashmont,” said Uncle Fred.

  “Erm . . . yes. As to that.” Ashmont glanced at the letter. “A trifle complicated. Comedy of errors, as Lady Charles said.”

  For an instant, Lord Frederick’s customary composure disintegrated and a haunted look came into his blue eyes. But it was gone almost as soon as it had come, and he reverted to his usual unflappable self.

  “You have been to Camberley Place,” he said. He picked a bit of fluff from his coat sleeve.

  Once Uncle Fred was there, he wasn’t to be got
rid of by any means until he was good and ready to go. Since he wouldn’t be good and ready until he’d scraped Ashmont’s brain clean, the duke briefly described the previous day’s search for Ripley and Lady Olympia as well as today’s visit to Lady Charles Ancaster.

  As Ashmont came to the end of that part of the tale, he saw his uncle’s attention shift to the dressing table, where the letter lay, its pages spread out, in plain view of all the world—or rather, of busybody, all-seeing, all-knowing uncles.

  The duke moved casually to the dressing table to block his relative’s view of the missive.

  Too late.

  “That looks like Lady Olympia’s hand,” his uncle said.

  “Does it?”

  “I should know it anywhere,” Lord Frederick said. “Quite distinctive. We corresponded regarding a fifteenth-century volume. Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiae, I believe it was. It would appear that she is speaking or, rather, writing to you. I take that as a promising sign.”

  “Erm, yes. The thing is, she’s still at Camberley Place.”

  “So I deduced when I learned you’d received two letters, express, from Surrey,” Lord Frederick said.

  Ashmont didn’t ask how or where his uncle learned it. Obviously, he had spies everywhere. More than likely, a few resided under Ashmont’s roof. His uncle had been his guardian. Furthermore, the servants were afraid of him. Few outsiders would understand how this could be, for a milder-looking older gentleman with a more innocent countenance was not to be found in all of London or, possibly, all of Great Britain.

  “Yes, it’s rather complicated,” Ashmont said. “You see . . .” He frowned. “That is, I think I’ve got the gist of it, but bless the girl, she uses a deuced lot of words.”

  “And, if it is not too private a matter, the gist of it is . . . ?”

  “She was drunk,” Ashmont said. “She’d taken brandy for her bridal nerves, you see. Only it didn’t calm her, and so she bolted.”

  Lord Frederick’s lip twitched. “Ah.”

  “Ripley tried to bring her back, but when she wouldn’t be brought back, he made himself her bodyguard. Eventually he got her safe with his aunt, but because of her—Olympia, that is—he had an accident, and she feels—” He picked up the letter, turned over a page and read, tracing the lines with his finger, “‘obliged to stay at Camberley Place, to prevent his making his injury worse, his being a male and possessing a morbid aversion to good sense.’ But don’t you know, sir, Lady Charles didn’t mention the accident. Odd, isn’t it?”

  The haunted look flickered briefly in his lordship’s face, then vanished. “Not at all,” he said. “Her ladyship can be inscrutable. A useful quality in managing her spouse, among others.”

  “Not the least use to me,” Ashmont said. “But never mind all that. She—Olympia, I mean, offers to let me off the hook.”

  “Hmm.”

  “She says, ‘No reasonable person would expect you to marry me now.’ But I’m not reasonable, dammit!” Being unreasonable, he found himself too baffled and upset to care whether Lord Frederick stayed until Doomsday.

  Ashmont marched to the decanter, filled two glasses, and handed one to his uncle.

  “I don’t mind telling you, I don’t understand,” the duke said. “Of all the damned things. If only we’d arrived later, or stayed longer, cold welcome or not, Olympia and I could have settled matters then and there.” He drank. “Now I’ve got to go back to Camberley Place because Olympia thinks I care what anybody says. I said I’d marry her, didn’t I? Does she think I’d go back on my word, because she had a fit of the blue devils or megrims or some such and ran?”

  “In brief, it wasn’t Ripley’s joke, after all,” said Uncle Fred thoughtfully.

  “No, he only meant to unload her on a female relative, then come back and tell me where to collect her. But things kept going wrong. Then he went and broke his arm or something.” He glanced down at the letter. “No, it was to do with his foot, but she uses words of twenty syllables to explain it. ‘Incapacitated,’ she says. And he says—”

  “What Ripley says doesn’t signify,” said Lord Frederick. “You are not going to Camberley Place. This is a more delicate situation than you seem to recognize, which does not surprise me, considering the kinds of women with whom you usually associate. I cannot be surprised at your failing to know how to behave with a respectable girl.”

  “You said she’d never have me, but she said yes.”

  “And you didn’t have the sense to hold on to her.”

  “I didn’t let her go. She—”

  “Have you any idea what you’ve got? Do you imagine women like that are everywhere, only waiting patiently for you to come to your senses? That young lady possesses the intelligence and strength of character to become a settling influence, which you badly need.”

  “Yes, I know she—”

  “You think you know, but you don’t. You are throwing away what promises to be your one and only chance of true happiness. Your father couldn’t help what happened to your mother. But at least he had those years with her. You’ll have nothing. You’ll look back, years hence, and regret.”

  If this was the voice of experience speaking, Ashmont failed to hear it, in the same way he failed to notice the untypical emotion in that voice.

  “Why does everybody blame me?” he said. “I wooed her, didn’t I? You said I’d be wasting my time. She’d never have me, you said. She was too intelligent, you said. But—”

  “You couldn’t get her to say ‘I will,’ could you?” said his uncle. “And if you think you’re in no wise to blame, I invite you to take a look at yourself. Even bathed, shaved, and dressed in fresh clothes, you look villainous. Worse than a sailor after three days’ shore leave. No, I do sailors a disservice.”

  “I was in a fight!”

  “You’re always in a fight. This time it shows. You can’t simply explode upon a young woman who is, I don’t doubt, in a highly agitated and confused state.”

  “I wasn’t going to explode!”

  “Take a long, hard look in the mirror, Lucius,” said his uncle. “If she shied before, if she had doubts about your character or anxiety about your behavior, do you think she’ll throw herself in your arms now?”

  Ashmont clenched his hands.

  “Do you mean to hit me?” his uncle said mildly.

  “This is intolerable,” Ashmont said. “You can’t expect me to stay here, doing nothing.”

  “Learn to tolerate,” Uncle Fred said. “I expect you to remain in London until you’re more presentable in body and mind. I shall go and talk to her.”

  Ashmont unclenched his hands and stalked to the window and looked out. “While I remain, so that every Tom, Dick, and Harry who fancies himself a humorist can twit me, asking where my bride’s got to. And while the satirists draw my image with cuckold horns.”

  “You seem not to realize that you’ve been a joke for some time now.”

  Ashmont’s face darkened, and he turned sharply away from the window.

  “You can fight everybody who finds your antics amusing,” his uncle said, “or you can show a little dignity and maturity for once, and laugh. If you can’t devise an amusing retort to the mockers, ask Blackwood to compose one for you. But if you want to do something useful, write a letter to Lady Olympia, declining her offer to release you. Make it a good letter. On second thought, I had better dictate it.”

  Friday 14 June

  The long-absent sun had finally deigned to send its beams through the windows of Camberley Place’s east wing when the Duke of Ripley, swearing, maneuvered a mechanical chair out of the study and into the library.

  Lord Charles had built the study along an outward-facing wall within the library, close to its southern end. Next to it, a narrow passage led to the staircase to the Long Gallery, directly above. Even with a part given over to the study, there remained a library extending some one hundred feet, nearly the full length of this wing of the house. It held a great many
more obstacles, though, in the way of tables, chairs, footstools, and sets of steps than did the gallery above. Being above, however, the Long Gallery was barred to Ripley.

  His feet rested on the raised footboard and his hands clutched the handles that extended from the chair’s arms. Turning the handles—alone or together—moved the chair in various directions. The trick was remembering which combination of turns in which direction moved the chair which way.

  After jerking himself about, right, left, and in a circle, he grasped both handles and turned both toward himself.

  The chair shot backward, and he heard a little shriek behind him. Yanking the handles the other way, he darted forward. With a growl of frustration, he turned both handles right, and the chair turned right, and right again.

  He heard footsteps approach.

  “Perhaps, duke, you might wish to read the instructions,” said Lady Olympia.

  He was aware of the hairs at the back of his neck rising at the sound of her voice. “No,” he said. “If my grandmother could steer this thing, I certainly can.”

  She came closer and walked around him. “This doesn’t look like any invalid chair I’ve ever seen.”

  “They were all the rage at one time,” he said. “Don’t know how many were made. Merlin’s Mechanical Chair.” He patted the worn handle. “Uncle Charles often talked about visiting Merlin’s Mechanical Museum in Princes Street. He bought this for my grandmother.”

  She crouched to study the arrangement of metal rods connected to the wheels. “This is rather more intricate than what one usually sees.”

  She wore another of his aunt’s dresses, plain and grey, except for the white neckerchief tied about her throat. The sleeves were narrow, boasting only a small pouf at the top of the arm. The bodice was equally severe. Like a coat, the thing buttoned from neck to hem. Though this one fit better than the one she’d worn yesterday, it didn’t fit as it ought.

  Her thick brown hair was better. It had been put up simply, with a few coils at the back of her head, and some curls framing her face.