His mind was already steps ahead as he stood and made his way toward the doors, rearranging his schedule for the upcoming months . . .
“Duke.”
He turned back slowly.
The queen was reclining in her chair, a mean gleam in her blue eyes. “If this campaign is to succeed,” she said, “your comportment has to be exemplary.”
He suppressed a frown. His comportment was so exemplary, all the lines so skillfully toed, that not even a divorce had managed to ruin his standing.
“Some people rumor that you are turning into an eccentric,” she said, “but eccentricity is so unbecoming in a man not yet forty, agreed?”
“Agreed—”
“And yet you are hardly ever seen at parties. You do not hold dinners, you are veritably unsociable, when everyone knows politics is made over a good feast. And there was no New Year’s party last year, nor the year before.”
And the year before that only because there had been a duchess to manage the whole affair.
He gritted his teeth. There was no mistaking where this was going.
“The Montgomery New Year’s Eve party was famous across the continent when I was a girl,” the queen continued. “Your grandfather hosted the most splendid fireworks. Granted, back then it all took place at Montgomery Castle, but Claremont should do.”
“You wish for me to hold a New Year’s Eve party.” His voice was dry as dust.
She clapped her hands together with a cheerful smack. “Why indeed. You are running late with the invitations, of course, but people will change their plans. No one will want to give the impression of not having been invited to the event of the year. So do your duty, Duke. Host a party. Make merry.”
* * *
Make merry. The words bounced around him mockingly as the train rumbled back toward Wiltshire. Sebastian dragged his stare away from the darkening horizon.
Ramsey had just finished laying out his notebook, fountain pen, and ink blotter on the narrow table before him and made to withdraw to the servant corner of the coach.
“Ramsey, draw up a list of people needed to put together a New Year’s Eve party.”
Well-trained as he was, the valet couldn’t stop his eyes from widening with surprise before schooling his features.
“Yes, Your Grace.”
“There will have to be fireworks; expenses are of no consequence.”
“Understood, Your Grace.”
“And a ball,” Sebastian added darkly. “I need a concept for a winter ball by next week.”
“Of course, Your Grace.” Ramsey reached inside his jacket and produced the slim silver case with the cigarettes. He placed it next to the ink blotter and retreated.
Sebastian took up his pen. The queen’s retaliation had hit its mark. Hardly a punishment, a house party, but then, she knew how they annoyed him: the stomping crowds, the inane chatter, the stuffy air, the intrusion on his home and his work—and there was no duchess to bear the brunt of the organizing and socializing. He stilled. Was that the queen’s true intention, making him feel the absence of a wife?
He put the pen down and reached for the cigarettes. He did not need reminding. A man his age should long have a duchess running his house and an entire pack of sons underfoot. And every single society matron knew that, too. They thrust their debutante daughters at him whenever he did make a show—seventeen-year-old girls, all vying to be the next Duchess of Montgomery. All of them too frightened of him to even look him in the face. His mouth curved into a sardonic smile. They would have to bear a whole lot more than look at him if they were his wife.
Unbidden, a clear green gaze flashed across his mind. The woman on the square. She had looked him straight in the eye. She had talked back at him. Ladies of his acquaintance had yet to dare do such a thing, but women as far below his station as her? Inconceivable. And yet Green Eyes had dared. She had split from the herd, from that faceless crowd that usually just milled at the fringes of his life, and had stepped right into his path . . . Presumptuous wench. Possibly unhinged.
He flipped open his notebook, and as he set pen to paper, all vanished but the task at hand. Castle Montgomery. Given to the first duke for services rendered during the Battle of Hastings, lost by the eighteenth duke in a hand of cards. He would get it back, even if it was the last thing he did.
Chapter 4
You seem distracted, Miss Archer.”
A marksman-sharp gaze pinned her over the rim of metal-framed glasses, and Annabelle felt a ripple of both guilt and alarm. With his patched tweed jacket, high forehead, and impatient frown, Professor Jenkins looked every inch the brilliant academic he was. Barely forty, he was already a titan in the field of ancient Greek warfare, so if there had ever been a need to pay attention, it was during his morning tutorial.
She looked up at her father’s former correspondent with contrition. “My apologies, Professor.”
He leaned forward over the desk. “It’s the bloody knitting, isn’t it?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The knitting,” he repeated, eyeing Mrs. Forsyth balefully. “The click-click-click . . . it is maddening, like a furiously leaking tap.”
The clicking behind Annabelle stopped abruptly, and Mrs. Forsyth’s consternation filled the room. Annabelle cringed. The woman was rightfully offended—after all, Annabelle paid her sixpence an hour to sit right there, because Gilbert, confound him, had been right about one thing: she did need a chaperone. One who was approved by the warden of her college, no less. Female students were not allowed to enter the town center unescorted, nor could they be alone with a professor. Mrs. Forsyth, widowed, elderly, and smartly dressed, certainly looked the part of a respectable guardian.
But if Jenkins was vexed by the sound of knitting, she had to find another solution. He was the titan, after all. His lessons turned crumbling old pages into meaningful windows to the past; his outstanding intellect lit her own mind on fire. And in order to teach her, he took the trouble to come to the classroom the university had given to the female students: a chamber with mismatched furniture above the bakery in Little Clarendon Street.
A bakery. That was the crux of the situation. It was not the knitting that was distracting; it was the warm, yeasty scent of freshly baked bread that wafted through the cracks in the door . . .
A cart rumbled past noisily on the street below.
The professor slammed his copy of Thucydides shut with an annoyed thud.
“That is it for today,” he said. “I have no doubt you will come up with an original take on this chapter by tomorrow.”
Tomorrow? The warm glow following his praise faded quickly—tomorrow would mean another night shift at her desk. They were piling up fast here, faster than in Chorleywood.