Page 17 of The Duke’s Suspicion

“The Home Office received reports of suspicious behavior. I was sent to investigate. A shrewd lady had recently observed two poorly dressed young men patrolling the countryside, speaking in code.” A born storyteller, Captain Whitby paused to allow darting glances of speculation to pass among the guests. “As it turned out, the suspects were merely impoverished poets on a walking tour, spouting lines of verse to one another.”

“O-ho,” chuckled Sir Thomas. “Dangerous radicals, eh?”

“They might be both poets and radicals. Mightn’t they?” The words slipped from Erica’s lips before she could call them back. Captain Whitby resumed studying her, this time with a slight frown notched into his brow, and she felt it imperative to explain herself. “After all, both art and politics seek to rouse a person’s deeper feelings, for good or ill.”

“Very true, Miss—”

She did not wait for another to make the introduction. “Burke.”

Lady Lydgate tilted her head toward Captain Whitby, and the ostrich plumes in her hair waved, giving her the appearance of a quizzical bird. “Trust the Irish to know something of rabble-rousing,” she said, in a false whisper.

Heat flared in Erica’s cheeks and spread right down to the plunging neckline of her borrowed gown.

“And poetry,” Tristan declared from the head of the table without looking at her. Lady Lydgate deferred to his opinion, though grudgingly. Erica suspected he did not often have occasion to defend her country’s artistry.

“Though one is certainly hard pressed to think of an example that joins the poetic and the political successfully,” opined the gentleman she believed to be Miss P—something’s father.

Miss P. at last looked up from her plate. “What about The Wild Irish Rose?”

Another hum rose from the table, punctuated with exclamations of “So thrilling!” and “What trash!”

Erica did not know where to look and as a result found herself imprisoned by Tristan’s gaze. One dark brow lifted. She cleared her throat. “My sister is the author,” she confessed quietly.

The murmur grew momentarily louder then stopped altogether, as it had when Lady Lydgate had spoken the word “spies.” Astonishment, embarrassment, and amusement contorted the faces of the company as they recollected what had been said, or what they had heard, about the book. The captain once more regarded her with a look she could only describe as speculative. “Lady Ashborough writes feelingly of the plight of Ireland,” he said. “Did your family know something of the rebellion firsthand?”

Warily, she nodded. Her elder brother had been a member of the United Irishmen, the group who had organized the uprising. Her younger brother had been gravely injured in it. And Henry—

“My betrothed was killed during the events of late May,” she said after a moment, deliberately vague about whether he was a rebel, a soldier, or an innocent bystander.

Mumbled expressions of sympathy rippled around her. Inexplicably, a few also darted glances toward Miss P., whose father scraped back his chair, lifted his glass, and rose. “A toast,” he proclaimed, “to the memory of those we have lost, and the fortune of those who have returned.” He gestured with his wine toward Tristan, and other chairs screeched across the floor as the assembled company came to its feet to salute their host.

Beneath the clamor, Sir Thomas spoke into her ear. “You and Miss Pilkington have your sorrow in common, you know. She was engaged to marry Lord Hawes before he died. Raynham’s elder brother,” he added when she wrinkled her brow in confusion.

“Oh?” Erica darted her gaze across the table. Miss Pilkington had risen to her feet, she noted, but her glass remained on the table.

“Yes, indeed,” said Sir Thomas, his eager whisper hinting that he had more to tell and, like his wife, would be only too happy to share what he knew. Erica tightened her hold on the stem of her glass. “Rumor has it Raynham intends to step into his brother’s place in more ways than one.”

He expects you to keep Percy’s promise to their daughter. Suddenly the words made sense. She knew, of course, that great families generally regarded marriage as a means to solidify status or combine wealth. But she was chilled by the notion that a woman might be passed from one brother to the next, as if she were merely a soulless chattel, not a living, breathing being with feelings. As if she were marrying a title, rather than the man to whom it belonged. She could not bring herself to glance toward Tristan to see whether he looked pleased at the prospect of his impending nuptials.

What business had she with the wedded bliss—or misery—of strangers?

Uneasily, she moved away from Sir Thomas, only to discover that one leg of his chair now pinned the full skirts of her gown to the floor. A jerk of surprise and the next thing she knew, red wine was arcing from her glass into the air. It seemed to hover there for a moment, deciding where—or, pray God, whether—to fall. Her eyes snapped closed.

When she opened them again, it was not to discover that the wine had defied Mr. Newton’s principle and stayed miraculously suspended in midair. Nevertheless, her first reaction was relief. She had managed, somehow, not to spill a drop on her borrowed gown. The linens, however…

Her gaze crept slowly, reluctantly across the table, following a murderous-looking trail that ended at Miss Pilkington. That young woman had sunk back into her chair, looking as if she were the victim of some heinous crime. Bloodred stains splashed across the pale yellow silk of her ruined gown.

Every eye, including Miss Pilkington’s, was focused on the spreading stain. Every hand and pair of lips was frozen in shock. As a result, it was more than quiet enough to hear Erica’s wine glass shatter as it slipped from her nerveless fingers onto the floor. Quiet enough to hear the fabric of the beautiful blue gown rip as she tugged it free of Sir Thomas’s chair leg. And quiet enough that her footsteps echoed as she dashed across the threshold and fled down the corridor.

Chapter 7

Tristan watched David Whitby rise from a leather armchair and walk to the sideboard to refill his glass. “I would have thought you might balk at drinking French brandy, Captain. Given your current line of work.”

Both second sons, he and Whitby had joined a cavalry unit together after school, where quickness, bravery, and an ability to be discreet had brought them to the notice of Colonel Zebadiah Scott. Though neither of them could recollect having ever seen the man before the day they were invited to his office, he had known them well.

They had left that meeting with new orders: to join an elite corps of officers whose task it was not to fight battles, but to ferret out and report the information that made it possible for others to win them. It was dangerous, delicate work, about which they could reveal next to nothing—not even, at times, to one another.

Then Whitby’s identity had been exposed. One day, he was in Paris, playing the part of a disaffected artist with Jacobin sympathies. The next…gone. Weeks of uncertainty had followed, relieved only somewhat by a whispered report that he had been bundled back to London. Now, he was using his years of invaluable wartime experience helping the Home Office uncover domestic spies and smugglers—the sort of lawless men who made it possible for English gentlemen to enjoy a glass of contraband French brandy now and again.