The Last Duke (Thornton 1)

Fortunately, cunning and skill could be taught.

Unfortunately, instinct could not.

Like compassion, instinct was a gift to be born with, not acquired.

Daphne Wyndham had been born with both.

He wasn’t surprised. He’d told her as much just yesterday.

When she’d placed her first wager at Newmarket.

4

DAMN, HE WAS TIRED.

Pierce shut the front door of his house against the mid-morning sunlight, wearily extracted the folded mask from his coat pocket, and stuffed it into its customary hiding place beneath the floor planks.

His night’s work was now complete.

He’d waited only until an unsuspecting Daphne had tiptoed back into her room before leaving Tragmore, riding the ten miles from Northampton to his home at a breakneck pace. Arriving in Wellingborough at half past three, he’d awaited his contact’s arrival, prepared to leave the instant he and Thompson completed their transaction in order to reach Leicester and return before dawn.

Thompson arrived moments later, unnerved by Pierce’s hasty summons—delivered by messenger, to Thompson’s shop just before closing time—altering their customary meeting place from London to Wellingborough. Swiftly but expertly he inspected the jewels, then muttered, “Thirty-five hundred pounds.”

“Done.” Pierce didn’t question the offer. Over the past five years, he and Thompson had routinely concluded numerous successful and unorthodox business transactions in the back roam of Thompson’s Covent Garden jewelry shop. Thompson was too smart to try something as rash as swindling Pierce.

Once Thompson had gone, Pierce combined the thirty-five hundred pounds with the marquis’s notes and coins. In total, it added up to just over four thousand pounds.

Pierce then sweetened the pot—more than usual, given the circumstances.

The tin cup he left at the Leicester workhouse contained ten thousand pounds.

Daphne would be pleased, he reflected, although she had no notion that her touching sentiments had stirred feelings long suppressed, that she’d forced him to confront a time and a place he’d sworn never to revisit—his past.

It had been eighteen years since he’d left those detested walls behind, but the painful memories remained, hovering just below the surface, needing only one glimpse to trigger their return.

They’d accosted him full force the moment he’d stepped inside the House of Perpetual Hope.

Every rotted corner was as he remembered it, every crack in the ceiling as vivid as it had been years ago when he’d lain awake, staring up and praying fervently for a miracle. The blistered plaster seemed to taunt his naiveté, squelching those boyhood prayers, and teaching him that prayers were for the haves, self-reliance for the have-nots.

Pierce could still recall the day he’d approached his mother with those all-important questions: Who was his father? Why weren’t they living with him? Why did he allow them to stay in this horrible place?

Cara Thornton had answered her five-year-old son with tears in her eyes. His father was a wealthy, married nobleman. She’d been a tavern maid until her pregnancy was discovered, at which point she’d been discharged. She’d gone to Pierce’s father, but, because of his wife and his social position, his hands were tied. To acknowledge their child was impossible. Surely Pierce could understand.

Pierce understood perfectly.

His father was a have. He and his mother were have-nots.

Two years later, Cara Thornton died, succumbing to a racking cough and a defeated heart.

Prayers would not bring her back.

Nor would prayers punish the heartless bastard who’d thrown her into the streets when she’d told him she was carrying his child.

It was on that day that Pierce made two irrevocable decisions.

As a have-not, he would ensure his own future, never leaving it in fate’s unpredictable hands. And never again would he fall victim to the power of the nobility.

Somehow, some way, he would victimize them.