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 permanently at the Old Palace, Verity had made friends fast, but it had taken a month or so before she discovered the secret yearnings and ambitions of the four who became closest to her. Giving them a safe sanctuary to exercise their interests and talents fitted in well with the way she was living her own life, but she worried about what would happen to them. Sooner or later their parents were going to insist on arranging
marriages and, unlike her, clearly remaining unwed to care for her father, the others had no excuse and would have to obey.
What her friends needed were liberal-minded gentlemen who would fall in love with them for their own sake, but where they were to find them in the limited society of rural Dorset, she had no idea. What would happen was that their fathers would decide on the most advantageous match among the gentry of the county and put pressure their daughters until they agreed.
And the problem was, they would all give in eventually, even if they did manage to hold out against the worst of the crop.
Then it struck her—none of the local gentry offered the slightest competition to a duke. No hopeful mama was going to settle for a mere esquire or baronet, or even the heir of a retired nabob or admiral, if there was the faintest chance her daughter might catch the eye of one of the foremost noblemen in the land.
She looked round at her friends and saw they were all waiting, with various degrees of patience, for her to tell them who the man with the children had been.
‘That man was the Duke of Aylsham,’ she announced. ‘He would thoroughly disapprove of us, but he is going to buy us almost a year of freedom.’
Chapter Four
‘That was the Duke? Do you mean he is staying?’ Lucy was the first to gather her wits. She lifted her hands from the keyboard where she had been quietly improvising. ‘Mama said that she had heard that he had come to settle his stepmother at the Dower House and would be going back to Oulton Castle.’
‘No. Lady Bromhill is certainly living at the Dower House but the Duke has moved into Stane Hall with his six half-brothers and -sisters and, I believe, intends to stay, at least for the mourning period.’
‘Oh.’ Melissa’s face fell. ‘I had forgotten that the family is in mourning. I had been imagining balls and parties... Mama will be devastated when she finds he will be here, but not socialising. I cannot understand how his presence is going to be of any help to us.’
‘But do you not see? Every mother of a daughter of marriageable age will look twice at any other candidate for her hand because, until the Duke does become available, there is always the faint hope that she might be the one to catch his eye. And it will be almost a year before he is out of mourning and can begin openly courting. The man is such a stickler for proper form that nothing is going to make him choose a bride before then, even if he falls passionately in love.’ And the thought of the Duke of Aylsham doing anything passionately sent a shiver down her spine, even as her mind told her that he would never demonstrate an unbecoming show of enthusiasm, even when making love.
‘But that is marvellous. All we have to do is go home and tell our parents the good news—and then obediently fall in with every plan they come up with for encountering the Duke or his family,’ Jane said with a gurgle of laughter. ‘We will throw ourselves into it—and it is certain to provoke our mothers into a positive orgy of shopping.’
‘That’s—Aargh!’ At Melissa’s scream Lucy dropped her music scores, Jane stabbed her brush into the white paint and Prue sat bolt upright, sending her draperies sliding to the floor.
‘What is it?’ Verity demanded, then gave a started gasp of her own as a large, very hairy, black spider scuttled across the boards and vanished under a bookcase. ‘Goodness, that gave me a fright. I do hate the ones with the knobbly knees. Are you all right, Melissa? I know you do not like the things.’