“There are many responsibilities I have now, as you well know. I have to oversee all the properties; I am caretaker to more houses than you even know about; I am responsible for every man, woman, and child who works on all estates owned by the Wyndhams, I—”
“In short, you inherited everything.”
“You know very well the title means little to me, but I will fulfill my duties as I must.”
“Marcus, h
ow old are you?”
“You know very well that I am twenty-four.”
“So very young to be as you are,” she said, then had the gall to shrug.
“And just how is that? Concerned for your well-being? Knowing that I am the one responsible for this damned family, as I said? Ah, don’t try to turn this to me, Duchess. As I was saying, all your, er, abilities don’t bring in groats. There was no inheritance to make you independent. Yet you had enough to rent that damned cottage, to—” He stopped on purpose this time, his eyes glittering anew. Perhaps now he’d see a fist again. Wouldn’t that be something?
She had the further gall to shrug again. She said not another single word, and he waited, hoping, but there was not even a glint of anger in her cool blue eyes.
He gave up, saying, “Your Mr. Wicks will be here tomorrow. What do you say about that?”
“I imagine that Mr. Wicks will wish to speak to both of us. Do you plan to be here?”
He would have liked to tell her he was going to Edinburgh, but he didn’t. “I’ll be here. Now, I’m going to bed. I will see you at breakfast.”
“Good night, Marcus. Sleep well.”
He grunted. She stood silently, watching him stride out of the magnificent drawing room, over three ancient and rich Turkey carpets, past some furnishings that dated back to before Henry VIII. She paused a moment before leaving the Green Cube Room and looked up. All the beams in the vast ceiling were intricately carved, showing the family coat of arms in too many places as well as a series of interesting geometric patterns that struck her as designs for their own sakes. In between the beams various scenes were painted, beginning with Medieval tableaus and moving up well into the sixteenth century. There were beautifully painted figures of men and women, the colors still rich and vibrant even after so many years, the expressions on their faces still clear as well. Where the beams met the top of the wall, there were an abundance of smiling cherubs, too many, all pink and white, gazing with dewy Classical eyes upon warriors with swords and shields, painted like a foot-wide swatch of mural at the top of the walls. This last addition had been made only in the last century by an earl of Chase with more guineas than discrimination. The former older scenes were much better executed, the men and women depicted in a far more realistic manner, down to the lute strings of a Medieval young man playing for the lady before him.
The Duchess looked back down into the fire. What would Marcus have to say to her after Mr. Wicks’s visit? She remembered him as such a wild young man, forever leading Charlie and Mark into the most appalling mischief. But then he’d bought a commission in the army and had been out of her life for five years. She wondered if he would still be as wild as a winter storm instead of the moralistic bore he’d become upon gaining his coronet if he were still in the army. He’d been the devil’s own son, that’s what her father had called him with a good deal of fondness, perhaps even respect. At least before Charlie and Mark had died there’d been fondness. She wondered what her father would call him now.
Whyever did he feel it his duty to prose on and on instead of laugh and view his new station in life with optimism and pleasure rather than grimness and a dour sense of duty? She wondered what he was doing now—hopefully he was taking deep breaths—for he’d left nearly on the verge of apoplexy.
Actually, Marcus was only on the verge of profound brooding. He allowed Spears to assist him out of his coat, which he normally didn’t do. He wasn’t helpless, for God’s sake. He remembered his batman, Connally, who’d spat on the floor of the tent, staring at his coat even as he held it for Marcus to shrug on, as if it were a snake to bite him. Poor Connally had been shot, going down beneath his horse, crushed to death. Marcus said now under his breath, “Bloody girl. She’ll end up strangled if she doesn’t change her ways, that or fall into the arms of a scoundrel.”
“May I ask what ways, my lord?”
“Your ears are a great deal too sharp, Spears. All right, the Duchess has secrets. She breeds them, she holds them tightly to her bosom. She won’t tell me the truth about how she kept that damnable cottage, how she paid Badger, how she bought food, how she—”
“I quite understand, my lord.”
“She just stands there, looking all calm and unruffled, and giving one of those stingy little smiles of hers and doesn’t say anything. I can’t even make her angry and the good Lord knows I pushed and baited and mocked. I did my damndest. Why won’t she tell me anything?”
Marcus pulled away from Spears’s ministering hands to pull loose his cravat and fling it onto the massive bed. “She has the damnable gall to inform me that she intends to leave for London on Boxing Day. I set her aright on that, I tell you.”
“May I ask what your lordship set aright?”
“I told her I would soon be her guardian. She will do what I tell her to until she’s twenty-one. If I can push it through, she will be under my control until she’s twenty-five.” Marcus stopped, frowned down at his left boot that was proving recalcitrant.
“Sit down, my lord, and allow me to remove it.”
Marcus sat, saying, “Even if I managed to be her guardian until she was twenty-five, she would probably marry the first man to ask just to spite me. But she would never raise her voice, no matter what I did, Spears, oh no, she wouldn’t deign to do that. That is doubtless beyond the scope of her emotional repertoire. No, she would just look at me like I was a seed in her garden, an unwanted seed that would sprout a weed.”
“Surely not that sort of seed, my lord. You are, after all, the earl of Chase. Perhaps you would be contemplated a bulb, not a seed.”
“Or maybe even a worm.”
“All things are possible, my lord.”
“She’s a damned twit. Are you mocking me, Spears?”