Bachelor Duke. Mary Nichols

where the footmen had left it. It was scuffed and scratched, its straps wearing thin, proclaiming her poverty. In it was everything she possessed. She could not bear for a servant to see that. Sighing, she unpacked it, putting the gowns in the wardrobe, her other clothes in a drawer and her writing things on the desk with the miniature of her mother. She had just finished when a maid arrived with hot water and an offer to help her dress and to do her hair. ‘My name is Janet, miss,’ she said. ‘Lady Harley says I am to look after you until a maid can be found for you.’

      Dinner would be an ordeal, she knew that. It was not that she did not know how to behave; she had dined with some very aristocratic people when her father was in funds, but this evening she expected the Duke to be present and he would quiz her, or perhaps ignore her; either would be mortifying. She found a spotted muslin that was not too creased, draped a silk shawl that had been her mother’s over her upper arms and followed the maid down to the first-floor drawing room, where she had been received the day before. The Duke and Lady Harley were waiting for dinner to be announced.

      ‘Miss Langford, good evening.’ He rose politely. ‘I trust you have settled in.’

      He was dressed formally in a blue long-tailed coat, an embroidered waistcoat, over which a froth of ruffles tumbled, powder blue silk breeches and white stockings. She noticed how well cut his coat was and how it showed off his broad shoulders and that his fair hair, though in the latest short style, curled over the high collar. He was the most handsome man she had ever met and she could understand his popularity with mothers of marriageable daughters. She wondered why he had not married before now; after all, he had admitted to being four and thirty, long past the age when men in his station of life married and set up their nursery. He would naturally be particular, but surely there were dozens of young ladies with beautiful faces and trim figures who would make elegant duchesses?

      This reflection made her acutely aware of her own poor garments and she felt like turning tail, but then her pride came to her rescue and she bent her knee. ‘Yes, thank you, your Grace.’

      ‘And are you satisfied with your accommodation?’

      ‘Entirely,’ she said, unwilling to admit she had expected much less considering his lack of a welcome.

      ‘I have given Sophie the blue room,’ Harriet said. ‘The little boudoir next door to it is ideal for a writing room.’

      Sophie turned from her secret contemplation of the Duke to face her hostess, whose gown was of forest green silk with deep lace ruffles round the hem. It had a very low décolletage and huge puffed sleeves. Her hair was piled up in a complicated knot and threaded with gems and there were more studded into a pendant around her neck. She patted the sofa next her. ‘Come and sit down, Sophie. I wish I were not going out this evening, I would much rather have stayed at home to talk to you, but I am promised and cannot disappoint my friends.’

      ‘Oh, please do not think of if,’ Sophie said. ‘I shall be quite content. I think I might do some writing.’

      ‘Ah, the book,’ James said in a tone that made her hackles rise. He might treat it as a matter for jest now, but one day she would make him take her seriously. ‘You must tell us all about that.’

      ‘I do not think it would interest you, your Grace.’

      ‘Why not?’

      ‘It is but a little thing and you must have been to all the places I have and seen it all.’

      ‘When?’ he asked sharply. Did she know something he would rather not have made public? He had never met her before, had he? She was never in any of the places he had been operating in, was she? Always alert to danger, from whatever direction, he suddenly felt threatened.

      ‘When?’ she repeated, puzzled. ‘I assumed you went on the Grand Tour before the Continent was closed to travellers.’

      ‘Oh, yes, a rather curtailed Grand Tour, as I remember. It was 1799, Napoleon was on the march and Europe was in turmoil.’ He was being foolish, he told himself. What could a chit like her know of espionage and those engaged in it? She would have still been in the schoolroom when he was sent to Austria. Or was it something else altogether making him feel he ought to take more interest in her? Her vulnerability in spite of her efforts to hide it?

      A footman arrived and announced that dinner was served and James moved forward and offered his arm to Sophie. She got up and laid her fingers on his sleeve and even that slight contact made her catch her breath. She was shaking with nerves and had no idea why. He was only a little above average height, but he had an overpowering presence, as if he was used to having his own way and would brook no argument, but she had no intention of arguing with him. He was her host, her provider, and, however much it irked her to admit it, she could not afford to alienate him.

      ‘We are eating in the small dining room,’ Harriet told her, as she took her brother’s other arm. ‘It is much less formal than the large room we use when we entertain, and we can talk comfortably without having to raise our voices.’

      And talk they did. While eating their way through a delicious fish dish, roast beef, boiled potatoes and mushrooms in a cream sauce, they spoke about the celebrations, the visits of foreign royalty, the plight of the soldiers coming home to unemployment and hardship, about Wellington and Napoleon and the latest on dit, which meant nothing to Sophie, though Harriet did her best to explain who was who. The Duke was an affable host and seemed to forget his earlier antagonism. Sophie found herself relaxing a little, though not completely. She was only too aware that she was the poor relation, there under sufferance, though she meant to remedy that situation as soon as she could afford it.

      ‘Is it true that the Regent hates his wife?’ she asked, when everything had been removed in favour of fruit tartlets, jelly and honey cakes. She had been too nervous to eat heartily; in any case, she had become so used to frugality, her stomach would not take rich food.

      ‘I am afraid so,’ he said. ‘His father badgered him so much to marry, he agreed to marry her without ever seeing her and he disliked her on sight. How he is going to keep her from the celebrations, I do not know. She is related to half the crowned heads of Europe who are coming and expecting to meet her.’

      ‘I am sorry for her. How dreadful it must be to be despised and unloved in a strange country.’

      ‘She is hardly unloved,’ Harriet put in. ‘She is very popular with the people.’

      ‘It isn’t the same though, is it? The public face and the private one. I think it is very important to have a fondness for the person one marries and it doesn’t matter if you are a prince or a duke or the man who clears the middens.’

      ‘Love,’ he murmured, making Sophie turn to look at him, thinking he was laughing at her, but though he was not laughing, there was a slight twist to his mouth that might have been humour directed against himself. ‘Are princes and dukes allowed to fall in love?’

      ‘Of course they are,’ Harriet said bracingly. ‘The world would be a very poor place without it.’

      ‘Mama loved Papa,’ Sophie said. ‘And he loved her. He was brought so low when she died, he never properly recovered.’ It was said with a kind of defiance, which was meant to offset whatever tale Lady Myers had told Harriet, who would undoubtedly have passed it on to the Duke. She did not want him to blame Papa, or feel sorry for her. Or perhaps just a little, she amended, just enough to give her a roof over her head and food to keep her from starving until she could prove to him and the world that she was an author to be reckoned with.

      It was as if her listeners understood her point, for neither commented and a minute later the footman came to tell her ladyship the carriage was at the door. Harriet rose to go. ‘I must be off. I will see you tomorrow, Sophie, and we will make plans.’ She bent to kiss Sophie’s cheek. ‘Sleep well. You are very welcome.’

      Then she was gone in a rustle of silk, leaving Sophie to face the Duke. ‘Am I?’ she asked in the silence that followed.

      ‘I beg your pardon?’

      ‘Am I welcome? Or am I