Page 20 of Her Passionate Duke

“It was kind of you to tell me the truth about yourself, Your Grace. Having lost a father, I think that I can understand some of the grief which you must have felt.”

“Yes, I thought you might.” He smiled a wan smile. “Grief changes people in strange ways. I could tell that story to a hundred people who had never lost someone, and none of them would know how to react. They could feign sympathy but they wouldn’t be able to mean it, not really. The ones who have mourned — those are the ones I can relate to, can care for.”

His eyes met hers, and for a moment, she quite forgot to breathe – had he just implied… that he cared for her? She thought that he had. Her heart pounded, and a bubble of foolish hope rose in her chest.

“I… was happy to listen.”

He turned and left the room, carrying the cups away.

In the silence, she stood there, considering, and realised, only then, that the itching of her arms had completely ceased, and that her nose had stopped running. The concoction had worked!

She gathered herself, and left the room, going in search of her mother, and of Lady Caroline. By then, she had completely forgotten that the conversation with His Grace had started with that very strange question about Monsieur Fournier.

***

Jeremy made his way back towards the kitchen, cups in hand, and his mind in a tangle of thought. When he came upon a footman, he handed him the cups.

“Take these back to the kitchen.”

The man bowed, took the cups, and went away. Jeremy stood there, in the quiet of the hallway, thinking. He had just poured out the story of Gilbert’s death to a woman he barely knew. He had only ever spoken of it to perhaps two other people in the twelve years since that dreadful day, yet here he was, just blurting it all out.

There was something about her – something beyond the fact that she’d had the courage to stand up in front of a room full of people and say things which she knew they would most likely dislike, and to do it even though she felt unwell. He liked her. He had found himself looking for her, at every social event he had been to lately, and wanting to spend time with her.

He’d even dreamed of her.

At the memory of those dreams, a flash of heat ran through his body, and he smiled.

They were most inappropriate dreams. But he still wished that they might be reality. How had he even begun to tell her about Gilbert? It certainly had not been what he had intended when he’d brought her the posset.

Ah yes… it had been because of what she had said about Fournier, about him losing a brother in the war in Spain. A brother who was, now Jeremy considered it, almost certainly, at the time, fighting for France against the English.

Could that be what motivated the man? Not as Lady Linnet had supposed, to be a diplomat and attempt to prevent all war, but perhaps, instead, to be something more ominous, and seek a perceived reparation for his brother’s death?

The idea bore careful consideration – and might be a clue to what to expect – although he sincerely hoped that it was not.

Still mulling the possibility over, he went back down the hallway to the main parlour, mentally steeling himself to face the guests. He hoped that his mother had somehow managed to turn their annoyance into a suitable sense of guilt, a guilt strong enough for them to have committed to donating substantial sums of money to St Agnes’.

As he entered the parlour, he passed Lady Linnet, who was talking to her mother, animatedly. She looked beautiful, he thought, despite the fact that her nose was still a little red from her previous sniffles. Sniffles he was pleased to see were no longer present. He caught a snippet of their conversation in passing, and smiled.

“Mother, I am feeling so much better. The Duke, at the Duchess’ insistence, brought me a posset – apparently, it’s an old family recipe for curing the symptoms of an adverse reaction to cats. We really must obtain the recipe!”

Lady Chelmstone inspected her daughter carefully, and slowly nodded.

“You do look better. You are right, we must obtain the recipe. That way, Lord Theodore will be able to bring the cat around again, without it being a problem.”

Jeremy kept walking, but he couldn’t help but feel an irrational stab of jealousy, about this Lord Theodore, who, it seemed, was so well regarded by Lady Linnet’s mother, that even causing her daughter such terrible symptoms was forgiven.

Chapter Nine

Jeremy stood in the shadows of a doorway, watching the two buildings opposite. This night could not be more different from the previous one. Last night’s charity dinner had, after all, gone well, and his mother had extracted the promise of rather large donations from a surprising number of people. In the end, the twin effect of guilt, and his mother’s promise of their names on plaques, extolling their generosity, as well as on well distributed pamphlets, had swayed them. They still did not care about orphans, he reflected sadly, but if their shallow self interest could be turned to those orphans’ benefit regardless, then that would have to be enough.

Across the road, a door opened, and for a moment the brightly lit interior of the ‘Black Pearl’ was visible. Gentlemen moved in the anteroom revealed, paying very obviously lewd attention to the scantily clad women arrayed on its couches. The man who was exiting was well known to Jeremy, a Marquess with a reputation for debauchery far greater than Jeremy's own, carefully crafted, rakehell repute. The man looked very pleased with himself as he set off down the street with a jaunty whistle.

Jeremy watched him go, then turned his eyes back to the bawdy house – the Marquess was not the man he was watching for. From the tavern next to the bawdy house, there came a rumble of loud and off-key song, and an occasional angry shout. How long would it be, he wondered, before a brawl broke out?

In the end, that question was answered rather sooner than he had expected, and in a most unpleasant manner. The song was cut off by a shriek, which was soon echoed by many voices – a shriek which, once his brain had managed to identify it as a word, called over and over again, turned out to be that most dreaded call – FIRE!

People came tumbling into the street, fighting each other to escape the burning building, as the tongues of flame became visible in the upper windows – not just of the tavern, but of the bawdy house as well, rapidly reaching an inferno like level as the crumbling old timber of the buildings caught.