Page 8 of A Bride for the Ruthless Duke

When the footman entered, Theodore did not turn from the window. “My coat and hat.”

“Shall I have the carriage brought round, Your Grace?”

“No.”

“A man to attend you?”

“No.”

The footman paused for a fraction of a moment. “Very well , Your Grace.”

Theodore heard the question that had not been asked and left it unanswered. Men who served him for long learned that curiosity was safest when buried early. The coat was brought. The hat was placed ready. The door was held open with professional silence.

He did not intend to call.

He told himself this on the steps, and again at the corner, and a third time when he turned south rather than north, away from the direction Henry had taken. He was not going to call upon Miss Middleton. That would be improper, absurdly premature, and altogether too revealing. He was verifying the brother. There was a considerable difference, though the distinction failed to improve him as much as it ought.

Henry Middleton had been lacking in candor by omission once already. A man who offered his sister across a desk could not be trusted to describe her accurately. Theodore wanted the house, the servants, the state of the door, the smell of the hall, and the small proofs of ruin that never appeared in a gentleman’s account unless the gentleman was honest, and Henry Middleton had not earned so generous a word.

He wanted facts.

Unfortunately, Miss Middleton had become one of them.

Pearce had located the Middleton house six weeks earlier, when Theodore first bought the notes. The address sat in Theodore’s memory the way addresses did, filed and waiting until required.

The street, when he reached it, had been respectable a decade earlier and was holding on now by paint and stubbornness. The houses kept their faces up. Behind the faces, the small economies showed to anyone who knew to look. The Middleton door wanted varnishing, the wood had gone grey at the edges where weather had worked beneath the old coat. The area railings wanted blacking and had wanted it for a year. A window box on the first floor held the brown remains of summer’s geraniums, left by want of time, servants, or hope.

Theodore stood on the opposite pavement and watched the front of the house.

Three minutes passed.

The curtain at the morning-room window moved once, then again. Someone inside had marked a gentleman standing in the street and was deciding what he meant.

He crossed.

The door was answered by a footman whose coat sat badly across the shoulders, too broad by an inch. The coat belonged to some absent man, or had been borrowed and pressed back into service for the look of the thing. The household had let a servant go for want of wages and found a poor substitute when a duke’s card became a possibility; Theodore read it in the inch of slack across the shoulders before the man had so much as taken the card.

Theodore handed it over. “I have a note to leave for Lord Middleton on a matter of business.”

The footman looked down at the name and lost what little color he possessed. “My lord is not at home, Your Grace.”

“I did not ask whether he was within.”

“No, Your Grace.” The man bent slightly over the card. “Shall I take the note?”

“Presently.”

The footman blinked. “Your Grace?”

“I shall wait while you inform whoever manages the house that I have called.”

The footman stood trapped between an untruth he had been ordered to tell and a duke he had not been prepared to resist. Rank won because it was the simplest terror in the hall.

“If Your Grace will come in.”

The hall was narrow. It smelled of beeswax, recently and thoroughly applied, and under the wax of flowers kept a day too long, the sweetish edge of water that wanted changing. Theodore stood near the foot of the stairs and did not sit, there being nowhere to sit.

From the room to his left, through a door left ajar, came a woman’s voice.