Least Likely To Marry A Duke. Louise Allen

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      ‘There will be quite a fluttering in the dovecotes when all the hopeful mamas in the district realise what an eligible bachelor has landed in our midst,’ Mr Hoskins said, then bit his lip and gave her father an apologetic look. ‘Most frivolous of me to consider such a thing. And, of course, the poor man is in mourning.’

      Her father chuckled and moved his hands slowly enough for Verity to translate. ‘He will not be in mourning forever and there is nothing to stop him looking in the meantime. You never know, he might find a young lady he likes in the neighbourhood.’

      ‘Papa, really.’ There was a twinkle in his eyes as he looked at her.

      You are not going to try matchmaking on my behalf. Not with that man. Or any man.

      But of course there was no danger of the Duke taking an interest in her, however much her father might wish it. She had shocked him with her outspoken views on marriage on top of demonstrating that she was an antiquarian hoyden who attacked upstanding aristocrats with mouldering skulls. Miss Verity Wingate was the last woman the Duke of Aylsham would want as a wife.

      * * *

      ‘I like her, she has a nice smile and she isn’t stuffy. Are you going to marry her, Will?’ Basil sat on the carriage seat opposite him and cocked his head to one side like a particularly nosy, and somewhat scruffy, sparrow.

      ‘Do not refer to a lady as her, Basil. And do not ask intrusive personal questions. I am most certainly not going to marry Miss Wingate.’

      Beside him his sisters sighed loudly. ‘But why not?’ Araminta demanded. ‘Miss Wingate is nice. And pretty and she is right next door, which is very convenient.’

      ‘Do I need to remind you that we are all in mourning? I cannot consider courtship until a year has passed from my grandfather’s death.’ He could well believe that they had no clear concept of the formalities of mourning because they did not even have the colour of their clothing to remind them. Their mother had put her foot down and refused point-blank to allow her daughters to be dressed in black, or even grey or lilac, on the grounds that it would depress their spirits. Will had pointed out that their spirits were supposed to be depressed during the mourning period and she had told him that he was cold and unfeeling.

      On the other hand, the children were mourning their father in their own ways, he supposed. Sometimes he came across the girls with suspiciously red eyes and Basil’s more outrageous feats might be a way of distracting himself from painful memories. He had an uneasy suspicion that their upbringing had given them a different, more natural, way of dealing with their emotions than was suitable for him.

      ‘How stuffy of you, Will,’ Althea said. ‘Being sad about Papa doesn’t alter the fact that you need a wife because of us. I overheard Miss Preston tell Mr Catford that your life would be so much easier if you had a duchess.’

      ‘Eavesdropping is unbecoming to a person of gentility, Althea,’ Will said automatically. Miss Preston was quite correct: life would be much easier with a wife by his side. And in my bed, a wicked little voice whispered in the back of his mind, prompting his imagination to present him with an image of Miss Wingate rising naked and dripping from the fountain pool. ‘We will not mention the subject again.’

      And you can stop it, he snarled at his own imagination as he crossed his legs. She is a hoyden, a bluestocking, an unnatural female opposed to marriage. Utterly unsuitable.

      It was bad enough having his stepmother inhabiting the Dower House and infecting the children with her madcap ideas. An unconventional duchess was the last thing he needed.

      ‘And the Bishop is nice, too,’ Araminta pronounced. ‘I like him. He’s got kind eyes and he talks with his hands and I’m sure he enjoys having visitors. I shall call on him again.’

      ‘He will come to us if he is well enough.’ Will tried not to contemplate his siblings descending uninvited and unsupervised on the Old Palace in order to observe the Bishop, or to try to enliven his routine. ‘It is not proper to call again until one has received a return visit. Now, tell me what you each learned in your last lesson.’

      That, as he might have expected, was greeted by a collective heavy sigh. Will refrained from joining in and reminded himself that no one had ever said that being a duke was easy.

      ‘Will,’ Basil piped up. ‘What have you done with your cane?’

      * * *

      ‘Who was that man and all those children?’ Melissa demanded as Verity closed the door and leaned back against it.

      ‘There were only three of them and they are sixteen and fourteen so hardly children, although I agree, they do manage to inhabit the space of about twelve.’ She pushed away from the door and went to flop, in an unladylike manner, into the nearest chair. An hour of the Duke was more than enough. ‘I am sorry if you were disturbed.’

      ‘We weren’t,’ Melissa assured her. ‘I was pacing up and down seeking inspiration for a truly horrid haunting and saw them out of the window. We had heard the young people earlier, of course, but who is ever disturbed by the sound of happiness?’

      ‘Very true.’ Prue peered over the top of her Greek grammar. She was lying full length on a bench, propped up on one elbow and naked except for a strategic length of muslin. ‘But you look exhausted, Verity. Come and sit down and have a drink. Bosham brought us some lemonade earlier, before we’d started.’

      As far as the staff and anyone else was concerned—including, most especially, the parents of her friends—they came to the Old Palace three times a week to form a reading circle.

      If their parents assumed this was a group studying religious tracts, sermons and uplifting works while sewing for the poor, then that, Verity considered, was entirely due to their own imaginations. No one had ever exactly described the nature of their meetings and they certainly all read at some point during those afternoons. Lucy Lambert read music, Melissa Taverner read over her work so far because she did not dare take it home with her, Prudence Scott read textbooks and Jane Newnham, the artist among them, read books on the theory of perspective and colour or the lives of great painters. At the moment she was creating a set of studies of Greek muses, using her friends as models. Verity could not recall which muse represented literature, but Prue and her grammar book made a good enough representation.

      Verity flitted between antiquarian papers, Gothic novels, her large embroidery stand where she was creating a tapestry of the fall of Lucifer in vivid colour, books on gardening and a wide drawing table where she was plotting the results of her excavations on the mounds. At the moment the skull perched on top of her notes like a bizarre paperweight, staring blankly at Prue’s exposed curves.

      The tower chamber was situated over her ground-floor sitting room and bedchamber and the maids came in once a week to clean. When they did all traces of her friends’ work was locked safely away in cupboards.

      There would, as Melissa said, be hell to pay if her father, the local squire, discovered she was reading novels, let alone writing them. He was set and determined on marrying her off well. The other parents were as determined to present perfect, conformable, young ladies to the Marriage Mart and were growing increasingly impatient as their daughters—all aged twenty-three—remained unwed and perilously close to being on the shelf.

      When the Wingates had settled СКАЧАТЬ