“Call me Marcus.”
“Marcus, don’t worry. I will convince her that there is absolutely nothing here for her and remove her as quickly as possible. I’ve a mind to see London again and I think Ursula and James would enjoy themselves, perhaps even at this Astley’s of yours.”
Marcus pulled on his earlobe, a habit that Badger had. “I don’t mean to pry, Trevor—Good God, that name still curdles my tongue!—but there is no financial problem with your family, is there?”
“None whatsoever,” Trevor said, his voice becoming quite cool, odd considering that the drawl was still in full force. “My mother simply came without considering that it would be highly probable that you and the Duchess would marry. I tried to make her wait, but she refused. I had no choice, really, but to accompany her here.”
“Why did she wish to come to Chase Park? Even if the Duchess and I hadn’t married, the Park is entailed, and thus it wouldn’t have been part of our uncle’s legacy.”
“I don’t know. But she insisted. Father spoke so longingly of Chase Park, perhaps he created this myth in her mind and she had to come. Perhaps she is just nosy. Who knows?”
Marcus laughed.
“There is also the Wyndham legacy.”
“The what?”
“My father spoke of the Wyndham legacy, his voice always low and whispery, as if he feared someone would overhear, as if it were some sort of dark secret and no one else could know about it. He said that someday he would come back and find it and we would be richer than the mandarins in China.”
“I have never heard of it. My father never mentioned such a thing nor did the former earl, at least not that I know of. This is very curious. Did your father give you any clues as to what kind of treasure?”
“I don’t think he knew, even though he spoke of jewels and gold pieces, that sort of thing. But he told my mother of the clues he’d pieced together before our grandfather kicked him out. It was old, he’d say, buried long ago, buried back in the reign of Henry the Seventh, just before Prince Arthur died, when the future Henry the Eighth was just a lad, a golden little boy, he’d whisper, riches beyond belief and all belonging to the Wyndhams. And you’d lean toward him, half-afraid and utterly held by his voice and his words. Then he’d change it the next week and claim it was buried during Henry the Eighth’s time or Queen Elizabeth’s. Who knows?”
Marcus found that he had to shake himself. Trevor continued in his cool, drawling voice, “You know, of course, that Aunt Gweneth and my father corresponded until his death, then it continued with my mother.”
“No, I had no idea. However, I haven’t been back here the five years since Charlie and Mark died. I came back only after our uncle died and I became the earl. The Wyndham legacy, huh? A treasure from the early sixteenth century? It all sounds like a bloody fairy tale to me.”
“It does to me as well. But my mother believes it.”
“Shall we go back to the Park?”
Trevor nodded, giving Marcus a lazy smile. He said in that drawling voice, “If nothing else, I can sit and just look at the Duchess. It warms a man’s cockles to see such character and loveliness in one female person.”
“You need spectacles,” Marcus said, turned Stanley, and dug his heels into his stallion’s sides. The two men rode side by side in silence back to the Park.
14
MAGGIE FASTENED ELIZABETH Cochrane’s pearls around the Duchess’s throat, stood back, and studied her in the mirror.
“Lawks,” she said, complacently patting her own brilliantly red hair as she saw her own image with its vibrant mass of ringlets above the Duchess’s head.
The Duchess smiled, wondering who the lawks was for. She said as she lightly fingered the pearls, “My mother used to tell me that pearls had to be worn often against the flesh otherwise they would lose their luster.”
“Lawks,” Maggie said again, fingering one of the pearls at the back of the Duchess’s throat. “These oyster pellets must have cost his lordship a bloody fortune, I’d say.”
“You’d probably say right, Maggie.”
“Now, Duchess, I didn’t ever think anyone could have hair as gorgeous as mine, but yours is passable-looking, it surely is, despite that sinful black color, maybe even because of it since your skin is whiter than that Yorkshire cheese I’ve seen, that looks wonderful but tastes like a rotted bladder. Yes, all that black hair provides distraction, and distraction is important for the stage.”
“Thank you, Maggie. You’re probably right.”
“Yes, you’re quite passable-looking too, beautiful even, if I stretch it just a little bit, and I know his lordship will think so too.”
“You believe his lordship will stretch it, Maggie?”
“Stretch what, Duchess?”
Marcus stood in the now open adjoining doorway between the master’s bedchamber and the countess’s bedchamber. She grew very still, unable to look away from him. He was dressed in immaculate black evening wear, his linen stark white, his cravat crisp and beautifully tied, thanks, undoubtedly, to Spears and his magic fingers. His thick black hair was a bit long, curling over the top of his cravat. His blue eyes, however, were cold, colder than the freezing winter of last year that froze the Thames. She tried to smile at him, tried to recognize within herself that he was here and he was sleeping in the bedchamber through that single door, just a thin simple door, that was all, and now he was here, looking at her, and she managed to say calmly, “Maggie thinks I can go beyond passable-looking if you stretch it.”