Chapter One
Lady Beatrice Haven could not wait to give the Duke of Blackheath a devil of a time. Tonight, he would not be able to evade her, and she relished the possible adventure before her.
Even so, she was not particularly excited to call the man family. She tsked playfully and asked her dearest cousin, “Surely, anyone but him would be better?”
Him, in this particular case, was not the Duke of Blackheath but his younger brother. Blackheath was an elusive, infuriating person. It was the greatest of oddities that her cousin had thrown her lot in with his younger brother, Lord Christopher. Kit to his friends.
Of which Kit had many.
That was a shock, given what a frustrating fellow of a brother he had.
Margaret grinned, even as her blond brows rose at Beatrice’s teasing but honest question. “Cousin, I’m in love with him. So, of course it must be him.”
“But why?” Beatrice insisted, tugging at her long silk gloves. “Why fall in love with Lord Christopher? He is a fine man, but surely there are finer.”
Margaret arched a tolerant brow. “It is not Lord Christopher you dislike.”
Beatrice’s cousin sat but a short distance away on the opposite bench of her uncle’s well-appointed coach, with only the glow of moonlight to illuminate them. Her uncle was unusually quiet in his corner, but he watched with a loving expression as the two of them sallied.
Beatrice scowled, for her uncle was supremely happy about his daughter’s match. Blackheath’s family was one of the most powerful and wealthy in all the land.
He was a significant connection. Not one to be trifled with.
Even so, she sighed. “It is true that I find his brother to be arrogant. The duke does not deign to speak to mere mortals such as myself. This will be an impossible situation. I shall be related to him.”
Beatrice shuddered. She’d never met the duke—but she did not need to see him in person to know he was a toad.
“Not related by blood,” Maggie said, her blue eyes lilting with amusement. For she knew that Beatrice would never stand in the way of her happiness, even if her choice of husband was vexatious in the extreme.
Beatrice harrumphed and pushed her spectacles—which did not need pushing—up her nose. “It does not matter. I shall be forced to go to engagements and family arrangements with him.” With exaggerated woe, she asked, “However shall I bear it?”
Maggie laughed deeply. “You shall bear, cousin, because you will hardly need to spend two minutes in his company if you so choose. We shall seat you at opposite ends of our table, so you shall never have to entertain him. But you must promise not to bite.”
Beatrice grinned, for she enjoyed a good debate and anticipated one this evening. “I cannot make such a promise. Though, the idea that I should act so irrationally—”
“And you shall bear it because you love me,” cut in Maggie. “You know, I think that you like writing all those ferocious letters to His Grace.”
Beatrice swept a nonexistent bit of fluff from her skirt. “How can you say such an atrocious thing? He is a duke.”
Aside from that, what had frustrated her most were his terse replies that expressed thanks for her concern and an assurance that he had the matter of the conditions of ladies in hand.
Ha!
After throwing herself into the field of pamphlet writing, public speaking, and the joining of a bluestocking league, the truth was Beatrice had grown to hate dukes. All dukes. Not just Blackheath, though he certainly deserved her particular attention with his arrogant dismissals.
Yes, all dukes were the very devil because they represented the thing she loathed with all her passion—the upholding of laws that kept her so wholly without rights.
Worse still, they so often upheld the trade which enslaved thousands in their territories in the West Indies. In her estimation, rights were for everyone. The world was full of injustice, and she couldn’t stand idly by, sipping lemonade.
In fact, she had even followed Barbara Wilberforce’s advice and stopped taking sugar altogether, for, like Mrs. Wilberforce, she could not forget the cruelty with which it was made.
Beatrice had a mission in this life, and that was to improve the fate of those trodden upon by the powerful, and dukes were always getting in the way, as far as she could tell. None of them did as they should—protest loudly and fully in Parliament that rights belonged to more than a few landed gentlemen.
Luckily, she had enough money on her own that she could make some protestations, and she had a seemingly indulgent uncle.
Even now, her uncle sat beside Maggie, his arms folded lightly over his strong chest. He had his silvery, shaggy brows raised in mock alarm.
“Beatrice,” he warned gently. “You cannot have such an attitude in society.”