The Scandalous Love of a Duke. Jane Lark

had found it oppressive as a child. As a youth he’d been more impressed. As a man it simply seemed ostentatious.

      John climbed out onto the pavement.

      He’d left his luggage at the docks to be sent on.

      The light drizzle had not eased.

      He paid the driver.

      The man tipped his hat.

      John looked up at the house as the hackney pulled away. The knocker was in place, someone was home.

      He took a deep breath and then jogged up the pale stone steps. When he reached the top he lifted the lion-head brass knocker and struck it down thrice, then stepped back a little and waited.

      It was several moments before it opened.

      Finch, the man who’d been his grandfather’s butler for as long as John could remember, stood in the hall. John watched recognition, and then shock, dawn on the butler’s face. He’d never seen Finch’s upper lip show any expression before.

      “Good Lord – I mean come in, my Lord. You were not expected?”

      “No, I travelled at the same speed as any message; I saw no point in sending word. My luggage will follow. Tell me, who is currently at home?” He already knew his grandfather yet survived, otherwise Finch would have said Your Grace.

      “Their Graces, the Duke and Duchess, my Lord, and the Duke and Duchess of Arundel.” His grandparents then, and his uncle and aunt. John’s heart pounded. Finch then nodded to a footman, obviously sending him somewhere to announce John’s arrival. But even as he did so there was a shout from above.

      “John.”

      He looked up as his name echoed off the black and white marble beneath his feet and the decorative plaster all about him, and saw his Uncle Richard, the Duke of Arundel, descending the wide curving stone steps briskly. This man had been like a father to John before John’s mother had come back. But he had aged. His hair was peppered with grey and his face more lined.

      “Thank God. We had no idea if you had even received Edward’s letter.” John saw relief in his uncle’s eyes as he neared and then he smiled. “It is good to have you home, John.”

      John met Richard at the bottom of the stairs, and took his hand to shake it, but Richard also gripped John’s shoulder. An uncomfortable feeling tingled through John’s nerves. He was unused to being touched. No one had touched him in four years.

      “You have changed, John. Grown up, I suppose.”

      “Uncle—” John began, only to have his speech halted by a wave of his uncle’s hand.

      “No uncle, just Richard now we are both men.”

      John smiled, “Richard, it is good to see a familiar face. The journey was long and I’ve no idea of how things stand.” How is the Duke? He didn’t say the last, he didn’t know how to.

      “Things stand not well, John.” Richard slung an arm about John’s shoulders and drew him to the stairs. “I’ll take you up. The family will be pleased to see you, your mother particularly.”

      “And my grandfather?” John had to ask.

      “He is near the end,” Richard answered, his arm falling as they began climbing the stairs. “He has been holding on for your return, I think. He will want to speak to you at once. I’ll tell him you are here. He is much changed, John. He’s been ill for many months.”

      John nodded sharply, angry at the emptiness in his chest and the anxiety stirring in his stomach. For God’s sake, I am a man full-grown now. I need not fear him.

      “Why not wait with your grandmother and Penny. They will be overjoyed you’re home. I’ll come and fetch you.” His uncle must have seen something of John’s feelings.

      John felt like the child he’d been when he’d left. The child his uncle had always seemed to pity. He nodded, though, and walked on along the familiar hall as Richard turned the other way.

      John’s head was suddenly full of pictures from the past. The most acute being the day his mother and his stepfather had come here to fetch him during that troubled tenth year of his life. The day he’d been returned to her after the scene which haunted him.

      She’d taken John from school previously, in the middle of the night. John’s stepfather had been with her then, but he’d been a stranger to John at the time. They’d travelled north for miles and then she’d married that stranger.

      It was only a couple of weeks after that John’s grandfather had come to take him back.

      The day his mother had collected John here, his grandfather had acknowledged her for the first time.

      The drawing room door was ajar. John could hear the women talking.

      “I have no idea what else to do. He will see no other physician but he is so obviously in considerable pain and yet he will not take laudanum,” John’s grandmother was saying. Her voice sounded weak and worried.

      Both she and his aunt Penny had been mothers to him until he’d been ten. His grandfather’s monster wanted to roar even now, and yell at them when he entered; why had they needed to be? Why had his mother not been here? He’d never understood who to blame for his loss.

      He thrust his maudlin childish thoughts aside and pushed the door wider to enter. “Grandmamma. Aunt Penny.”

      Both women stood, exclaiming at the sight of him then crossing the room, their eyes wide. He had shocked them.

      “Grandmother,” he kissed the back of her fingers, bowing, but when he rose he saw tears in her eyes, and then he hugged her gently and pressed a kiss on her temple before letting her go.

      “Oh John, your grandfather will be glad. I am glad. It is good to have you home. You look well. Your journey was not too difficult?”

      “My journey was long, and difficult, but that is travelling, and particularly in winter. It is good to see you too, Grandmother. You have not aged a day.”

      She smiled. “Flatterer.”

      “You have an air of mystery about you now, John, and I think it suits you,” his aunt said.

      John turned to her, smiled and opened his arms.

      She hugged him. “Ellen must be overjoyed.” She was crying too when she pulled away and she reached for a handkerchief.

      “I have not seen Mama yet. I thought it best to come here first. Is she in town?”

      “Oh John, yes, she is in town, and she will never forgive me for seeing you first.”

      “I shall have Finch send word,” his grandmother said. “The whole family are in London…” Because of my grandfather’s illness? “I shall have him contact them all.”

      “John.”

      John turned to face Richard, who stood at the open door.

      “His Grace wishes to see you.”

      A moment later, John was walking back along the statue-lined hall beside his uncle.

      “How long is he likely to live?”

      His uncle glanced sideways. “It could be hours or days or weeks, John. There is no certainty. He has defied a hundred predictions already.”

      John nodded, feeling his anxiety rise again.

      “You have nothing to fear,” his uncle stated more quietly.

      John was thrown back into the position of a ten-year-old child.

      Richard rested a palm on his shoulder.

      John shrugged it off. He was not that child anymore, and if his grandfather was so close to death, he needed to earn respect not pity. “I am half his age and in my prime. He is on his deathbed.