The Duchess Hunt. Elizabeth Beacon

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СКАЧАТЬ she managed to scold, even as she fought an urge to languish at him like all the other susceptible misses.

      ‘Sorry,’ he said as if shrugging off something irrelevant and getting back to the task in hand, ‘it just slipped out; I obviously need more practice preventing myself from saying it. So will you come for a drive and allow me to put some in before we’re immured at Ashburton together for two whole weeks, Miss Pendle? I truly have the means to take you for one over yonder and am not yet suffering delusions,’ he said, waving a hand at the gleaming curricle halted under the trees.

      The whole rig was attracting a great deal of gentlemanly envy for the spirit and quality of the perfectly matched team the tiger and his groom were fussing over. Jessica wondered who had attracted Jack’s notice so successfully that he’d stepped down from such a splendid equipage in the first place, but managed not to dwell on a mental picture of the magnificent sloe-eyed siren rumour had it was his very secret lover as well a grand lady of the ton. His amorous adventures were clearly no business of hers, but his ridiculous scheme to flush Richard out of hiding felt so acutely wrong that she shivered despite the building heat of a sultry June afternoon and wished she was a special enough person in his life to stand even a chance of persuading him not to go through with it.

      Jack snapped his fingers imperiously and the curricle appeared at his side as if the milling crowd did not exist. She speculated crossly on the nature of power and the powerful and found herself sitting beside Jack on the narrow bench seat without ever agreeing to drive with him in the first place so far as she could recall.

      ‘Thank you, Brandt,’ she said once she had almost shaken off the nerve-tingling effect of sitting by his master long enough to remember the name of Jack’s head groom.

      ‘It’s always a pleasure to help a true lady into one of our carriages, Miss Pendle,’ the middle-aged man said, as if he didn’t think much of the females who usually graced the ducal curricle, and Jess bit back a chuckle at hearing his grace the Duke of Dettingham being scolded about the company he kept by his groom.

      ‘Indeed it is,’ Jack muttered blandly, then informed Brandt he could walk home as a reward for his impudence.

      ‘Aye, your Grace,’ the man said equably and took off at a brisk pace as if he relished the task.

      They set off and Jessica tried not to look surprised and a little bit scandalised when Jack left the Park in order to set down his tiger not far from his house in Grosvenor Square, although she couldn’t help but be amused at the swagger in the diminutive tiger’s step as he doffed his cap to her with elaborate courtesy and cocked Jack a knowing glance before strolling off towards the Dettingham House mews.

      ‘Where on earth did you find him?’ Jess asked as she waited for the greys to admit Jack was indeed their master and fully in control before he gave them the office to move off.

      ‘The stews, but he’s going to be the best jockey I ever had if only he’ll learn to listen to those who know more about the art than he thinks he does.’

      ‘So you punished his intransigence by making him your tiger? Your servants must tremble in their boots when you lose your temper with one of them, your Grace,’ she teased, but secretly thought his leniency admirable, especially in contrast to the appalling way some powerful householders treated their servants.

      ‘I don’t have to lose my temper, Miss Pendle; all it takes is one of my ducal frowns and they all run about doing my bidding as if I were a king in his palace.’

      ‘How things must have changed at Ashburton,’ she said with a mock sigh. ‘I shall look forward to witnessing it.’

      ‘You’ll do so in vain,’ he said with a rueful smile that made her recall how likeable she might find him if she dared let herself. ‘They’re all convinced they know how to run the place far better than I do.’

      ‘They’re probably right,’ Jessica pointed out helpfully. ‘I doubt you had lessons on how to order a china cupboard or keep a linen cupboard supplied inflicted on you as a boy.’

      ‘Something for which I am truly thankful,’ he said and turned his team out into the traffic.

      ‘Where are we going?’ Jess asked, clutching her best bonnet, then tying the ribbons a little tighter as he set the restless team to as fast a pace as was safe in the London traffic.

      ‘Somewhere they can have a half-decent run and we can breathe in clean air for once,’

      he told her rather distractedly as he skirted a wagon and restrained his high-spirited team as they took offence at a lady’s parasol in a virulent shade of green that would have made Jess do the same if she had to stare at it for long.

      ‘Won’t there be gossip?’ she protested half-heartedly.

      ‘Isn’t there always gossip?’ he said cynically.

      ‘About you, yes,’ she agreed, but not very often about lame and respectable Miss Pendle. A rebel voice within whispered it was about time she gave them a little fodder for their ever-more-ridiculous tales, so she might as well sit back and enjoy it.

      ‘I doubt even the tabbies will believe Lord and Lady Pendle allowed me to abduct their ewe lamb in front of their eyes, so you can relax, Princess. I promise to get you home in one piece with your name relatively unsullied before anyone even notices you’re gone.’

      ‘Since this is my last foray into society, I suppose it doesn’t matter what they say about me any more,’ Jess replied half to herself.

      ‘What do you mean by that?’

      ‘I should have thought it perfectly plain.’

      ‘Not to me.’

      ‘I am on the shelf, your Grace—not that I was ever truly off it—and I have no intention of taking part in any more social Seasons as I don’t particularly like London at this time of year. It always seems absurd to me that we all up sticks and move to town, when the countryside is at its most lovely and busy with new life, so we may spend that precious time of year being overheated and bored in a city that can’t help but be malodorous in the wrong weather—which seems to be most varieties of an English spring and summer so far as I can tell.’

      ‘Maybe,’ he said, ‘but you’re far too young to be at your last prayers. Not that you ever made the slightest push at being a successful débutante when you were younger and I can’t help but wonder why.’

      ‘Isn’t that perfectly obvious as well?’ she asked exasperatedly.

      ‘Again, not to me, which means that either I’m being particularly stupid, or you’re wrong. How to walk the fine line between arguing with a lady when she says black is white and I know it to be otherwise, I wonder?’ he mused as if his interpretation of events must be right, just because it always was, presumably.

      ‘You could try silence.’

      ‘Is that how you do it, Jessica? Use that quiet, sceptical manner of yours to frighten off all the sprigs of nobility who don’t comply with your high standards?’

      So now he thought her a snob, incapable of finding any man fit to be her ideal pattern-card of a husband?

      ‘What a very high opinion of me you do have,’ she tried to joke.

      ‘It СКАЧАТЬ