The Duke's Suspicion. Susanna Craig
in the storm.”
Erica dipped into a curtsy made ungainly by the weight of her sodden skirts. “I don’t know if I smell like a wet sheep, but I certainly feel like a drowned rat.”
Vivi’s uncertain stare shifted into a smile; inwardly, he winced. It was one thing for a girl of twelve to say such outrageous things…
“What’s this about hiding from your governess, Viv?” he demanded sternly. He was responsible now for his sister’s upbringing. He was her guardian. It was his job to prevent her from turning into a hoyden, and Miss Burke was hardly a suitable role model.
Vivi turned saucy, dark eyes on him. “I can’t help it if she’s—”
“Will I take Miss Burke to the south wing with the other guests, Your Grace?” The Mrs. Dean of old would never have interrupted her master. But he had the distinct impression she was doing it for Vivi, trying to turn the conversation away from his sister’s misbehavior.
And it worked, though not quite in the way she had intended.
“Oh, Mrs. Dean,” Vivi cried out, “now you’ve ruined the surprise.”
“Mr. Davies told me already, and even if he hadn’t, I’d have known something was afoot. The stable is full of strange horses,” he pointed out. “May I ask how I came to be hosting a house party?”
“It’s not a house party,” she insisted. “It was meant to be only dinner. We expected you sooner. But the storm came instead. Now the vicar and his wife are stuck here. Along with Sir Thomas and Lady Lydgate. And Captain Whitby too, though he wasn’t exactly invited.” Vivi’s voice dropped slightly from its usual exuberant pitch, as if sharing a secret. “I think he was simply passing through and wanted to get out of the rain.”
“David Whitby is my oldest friend. He doesn’t need an invitation.”
“Oh, and Miss Pilkington, of course,” Vivi added. “With her parents.”
“Miss Pilkington?” he repeated absently. His stepmother had no doubt felt obliged to include the clergyman and his wife. The Lydgates were near neighbors, old friends. But why on earth had the Pilkingtons been invited to celebrate his homecoming?
Percy had had an understanding with Caroline Pilkington, though no formal announcement of their betrothal had ever been made. Years had passed under the quiet assumption that his brother would eventually do the necessary. After all that time, Miss Pilkington must be teetering dangerously near the edge of the shelf. A pity she had been kept waiting so long with nothing to show for it.
“I expect you’ll want to get cleaned up before she sees you,” Vivi added, wrinkling her nose once more. “Or smells you.”
“Oh?” He was only half listening. Without waiting for further orders, Mrs. Dean had motioned to Miss Burke to follow her down the corridor. Good God, but he hoped the housekeeper would at least find her another dress to wear, and soon. Something clean. Something suitable.
Something that didn’t cling quite so distractingly to her limbs with every step she took.
He forced himself to focus his gaze on his sister. “And why is that?”
“Because I overheard Lord Easton Pilkington tell Mama he expects you to keep Percy’s promise to their daughter.”
Chapter 4
Mrs. Dean led Erica briskly down corridors and up staircases. The first impression of Hawesdale Chase was not an illusion. The place was vast. The housekeeper was saying something about the west wing, the dining room, a ballroom, but Erica hardly heard her. Her mind was still back in the servants’ hall.
Erica had two brothers and she loved them both. But she had never looked at either of them with the naked devotion she had seen in Lady Viviane’s eyes. Nor, in her estimation, was it wise to do so. Brothers were, when all else was stripped away, only men. And adoration gave men a dangerous degree of power.
“The family apartments are in the east wing,” Mrs. Dean was explaining when she dragged her attention back to the present. “You’ll be here in the south…with the other guests.” She paused and turned toward Erica. “You’ll be thinking the family doesn’t know what’s seemly in a time of mourning. It’s just—oh, dear.”
Mourning? Guilt needled Erica like a thorn. Of course. She should have realized. That explained Lady Viviane’s tears and black dress.
“It’s just the rain,” Erica supplied as her mind frantically tried to piece together the bits of conversation that had flown among Tristan, his sister, and the housekeeper. She had not considered that his father might have died quite recently.
“Aye, miss.” Mrs. Dean resumed walking, though her pace had slowed. “’Twas clarty then too.” Clarty? Erica’s expression must have betrayed her ignorance, for Mrs. Dean was quick to explain. “Muddy, messy. Rained like anything the day of the accident.”
“The…accident?” Erica struggled to make sense of it all, though she knew her tangled brain would never keep everything straight. Mourning etiquette. The floor plan of a ducal manor. Already details were skittering away. Who was Percy, who’d made some promise Tristan was expected to keep?
“The Duke of Raynham was killed in a carriage accident with his elder son, Lord Hawes. Oh, a terrible thing it was.” Mrs. Dean shook her head. “’Course, one must expect rain in the spring of the year.”
Erica’s thoughts sprang up like weeds in an unkempt garden, impossible to contain once they’d gone to seed… Seed. Springtime was the season for planting. But it was autumn now. The leaves were falling from the trees. Trees. Family trees.
Inwardly, she shook herself, trying to regain focus. An accident had claimed Tristan’s father and brother no more than a few months ago. He’d come into his title unexpectedly—and reluctantly, if the inheritance had come at the price of losing his father and brother.
“No wonder he was hesitant about returning home,” she murmured to herself.
But Mrs. Dean had heard. “He would have been here sooner, but he was abroad when the accident happened, miss,” the housekeeper said, her round notes of her broad northern accent suddenly clipped.
Erica’s thoughtless remark had snuffed Mrs. Dean’s loquaciousness as completely as a gust of damp wind put out a candle. They passed along the corridor in silence until the housekeeper paused to open a door. “Here we be, miss,” she said.
Others might have noted the plush carpet, the velvet bed hangings, or the elegant furnishings. Erica’s eyes went first to the tall, pieced windows framing rugged hills, closer and more imposing than she had imagined. To the left and right, she could just see the two wings of the house as Mrs. Dean had described, east and west. Or was it west and east?
“The rooms overlooking the park are prettier, to my mind,” Mrs. Dean said, sounding apologetic, “but there isn’t one to be had, I’m afraid. The Pilkingtons took the last.”
“It’s—” Magnificent, she had been about to say.
But she bit off the word just in time. She was the daughter of a Dublin solicitor, a well-respected gentleman in that town. Her mother was the daughter of an earl—albeit disowned by him for the unforgiveable sin of falling in love with an Irishman. Erica had grown up in a prosperous and genteel household. If she was rarely mistaken for an elegant lady, neither was she a bumpkin.
She refused to be awestruck by a mere room.
“It will do very nicely,” she said to Mrs. Dean, who curtsied in acknowledgment. “Thank you.”
Left alone, Erica set out to examine her surroundings more thoroughly. She would not be overwhelmed by a bedchamber twice the size of her family’s drawing room.
Nor would she be impressed by the way things appeared in that chamber as if summoned by magic, conveyed by a bevy of servants before she could even think to ask for them: hot bathwater,