Primrose and the Dreadful Duke

Chapter 3

Chapter Three

Oliver tumbled down the sharp, pale marble steps to the street. If he hadn’t had so much practice falling off horses, he might have broken his neck. But he’d spent eight years in the cavalry and he’d come off horses more times than he could remember, so he managed not to break any bones. It did hurt, though.

He lay sprawled on the paving stones for a moment, his own cry of alarm ringing in his ears, while the night spun jerkily around him—shadows and torchlight—and then he caught his breath and cautiously pushed up to sitting. Ouch.

“Sir?” someone called out. “Are you all right, sir?”

Footsteps pattered down the marble stairs. Someone crouched alongside him. One of the footmen from the vestibule, his expression turning to horrified dismay when he recognized Oliver. “Your Grace! Are you all right?”

“Perfectly.” He climbed to his feet, while the footman fluttered solicitously around him.

Oliver rolled his shoulders and rubbed the back of his neck. He looked up the steps to the portico. The flambeaux flared and the shadows writhed, but the portico appeared to be empty.

Oliver rubbed the back of his neck again. He distinctly remembered someone shoving him. “Did you see anyone under the portico with me?”

The footman picked up his hat and brushed it off. “With you, sir? No.”

Had he imagined it? No. He could still feel the pressure of a hand between his shoulder blades. “Did anyone leave the ball immediately after I did?”

“No, sir.” The footman handed Oliver his hat.

“Did anyone leave just before me?”

The man’s brow wrinkled. “I don’t think so, Your Grace. But people have been coming and going all night.”

Yes, of course they had.

Oliver turned the hat over in his hands. Who on earth had pushed him down those stairs? A stranger? Someone he knew? And why?

Oliver glanced at the footman. The footman gazed anxiously back at him. Was he anxious because he’d pushed Oliver and didn’t wish to be found out? Or anxious because a duke had almost died on his employer’s doorstep?

“Would you like to come inside, sir? Perhaps sit down?”

“No,” Oliver said.

“Shall I fetch a carriage for you, Your Grace?”

“No,” Oliver said again, and then: “How did you know I’d fallen? Did you see it?”

“No, sir. I heard a cry.”

He’d called out as he fell, he remembered that. And he remembered hearing the scuff of a shoe behind him. And he remembered a hand between his shoulder blades. It wasn’t his imagination. Someone had pushed him. But most likely not the footman.

Oliver put on his hat. “Thank you,” he told the man. “Good night.”

“Are you certain I can’t fetch you a carriage?” the footman said.

“I’m certain.” Oliver fished in his pocket and pulled out a guinea. “Thank you for your help.”

He walked down the street, not striding as briskly as he usually did; he was going to be sporting some bruises tomorrow. But he was used to bruises. Bruises didn’t bother him, nor did broken bones. What did bother him was that someone had pushed him down those stairs.

At the corner, Oliver paused and glanced back at that tall townhouse, that portico, those stairs.

Who had shoved him? And why?

He went to sleep feeling rather perturbed, and woke eight hours later feeling much more the thing. No one had been trying to kill him. It had been a mean-spirited prank, that was all, perpetrated by someone who’d had too much to drink and was perhaps a little jealous of Oliver’s good fortune. He’d been foolish to imagine it could be anything more than that.

He felt rather less cheerful when he climbed out of bed. Damn it, he hadn’t had this many bruises for quite some time.

A warm bath helped with the stiffness, and a hearty breakfast and a ride in Hyde Park restored Oliver to good spirits. He spent several hours learning to be a duke, reading reports from his bailiffs that made little sense now, but would once he’d toured his estates—then strolled across town to visit Rhodes Garland.

Rhodes was staying at his father’s townhouse on St. James’s Square, as he always did when in London—although “townhouse” was a misnomer given that the building was the size of a mansion. Sevenash House was its name, because Rhodes’s father was the Duke of Sevenash, and one day Rhodes would be Duke of Sevenash himself.

But hopefully not for a long time.

Rhodes’s father wasn’t the sort of duke Oliver’s grandfather had been. Sevenash was cut from entirely different cloth. He’d stood by Oliver’s father when he was cut off, and he’d stood by Oliver when his father had died, and stood by him again ten years later when his mother had died. It was Sevenash who’d paid for Oliver’s education at Winchester and Cambridge, Sevenash who’d purchased his commission into the dragoons.

Oliver had been too young and too bewildered to protest about Winchester, but he’d protested about Cambridge, and about the dragoons, too, and Sevenash had merely smiled at him and said, “Nonsense. You’re my godson. Of course I’m paying for it.”

What Sevenash hadn’t said—but that Oliver had known—was that Sevenash loved Oliver almost as much as he’d loved his own children. And what Oliver had never said—but hoped that Sevenash knew—was that he loved Sevenash almost as much as he’d loved his own father.

Sevenash had been there when Oliver had needed him, and Oliver had repaid Sevenash in the only way possible: by being the best student he could and the best soldier he could. In all honesty, he hadn’t been a very good student—he’d had no aptitude for conjugating Latin and Greek verbs—but he’d been a damned good soldier. He was proud of how good a soldier he’d been, and he hoped Sevenash had been proud, too.

For a moment, standing there in St. James’s Square, Oliver felt a pang of regret—he had wanted to make colonel by the time he was forty, damn it—and then he shook his head and laughed. He’d inherited a dukedom and a fortune and he was feeling sorry for himself? “Dasenby, you addle-pate, you don’t know how lucky you are,” he said under his breath, and then he ran up the marble steps to Sevenash House.

A footman opened the huge front door.

Oliver stepped into the entrance hall and handed over his hat and gloves. His most visceral wrench of recognition since returning to England had occurred right here in this entrance hall—a wrench so strong that it had actually brought tears to his eyes.

He didn’t feel that wrench today, just a sense of coming home. Here was the vast black-white-and-gray marble floor where he and Rhodes had played their own version of hopscotch—the white squares boiling seas, the black squares bottomless pits, peril in every jump; there was the imposing double staircase with the banisters they’d slid down. In fact, the first time he’d broken his arm had been on this marble floor after sliding down those sleek banisters.

Sevenash House was enormous by anyone’s standard. Usually it was brimming with bustle and noise, footsteps, voices, laughter, but the duke and his duchess had departed for Gloucestershire two days ago, taking Rhodes’s three young children with them and a great many servants, and the house felt much emptier than Oliver was used to, even though it wasn’t empty. Rhodes was still here, and his sisters.

The butler, Forbes—who’d been Edward the footman when Oliver was a boy—welcomed him with an un-butler-ish smile, calling him Your Grace in exactly the same tone in which he’d called him Master Oliver all those years ago.

“Afternoon, Forbes,” Oliver said cheerfully. “Is his lordship at home?”

“Yes, sir.”

Rhodes Garland, Marquis of Thayne and heir to the dukedom of Sevenash, was in the library reading the Gazette. Or rather pretending to. The newspaper was in his lap, and he was staring at it, but if he’d actually been reading it, Oliver would have eaten his neckcloth. Rhodes had a sad, faraway look on his face, a look that Oliver guessed he’d worn a lot since his wife, Evelyn’s, death last year—not that Oliver knew that for certain, since he’d been in India when Evelyn had died, but he knew he’d seen that look on Rhodes’s face quite a few times in the past four weeks.

“Hello, old fellow,” he said.

The unhappy, distant look vanished. “Ollie.” Rhodes put aside the Gazette. “What are you doing here?”

“Came to visit you.” Oliver strolled across to the sofa and sat, stretching out his legs. Damn it, his knee hurt from tumbling down those stairs. “Didn’t see you at the Cunninghams’ ball last night.”

“Balls,” Rhodes said, in a tone that implied that he classed balls only slightly above going to the dentist to have a tooth drawn. Then he made what was obviously a determined effort to smile. “Would you like something to drink? Madeira? Sherry? Brandy?”

“Brandy,” Oliver said.

Rhodes poured them both a glass and they sipped and talked, and talked and sipped, and finally Oliver got Rhodes to laugh. The first laugh was the hardest, but once he got Rhodes past that hurdle, each laugh came more easily, and by the time the clock on the mantelpiece struck half past four, Rhodes was slouching in his armchair, looking cheerful and relaxed. The door swung open and Primrose entered, dressed in a very handsome riding habit. “Rhodes, please say you’ll come with us to Hyde Park.” And then she saw Oliver, and halted. She looked momentarily disconcerted. Color rose in her cheeks. “I beg your pardon. I didn’t realize you were here.” She bit her lip for a brief second, and then said brightly, “Would you like to come with us to Hyde Park, Oliver?”

“Us?”

“Aster, Violet, and me. We always ride in Hyde Park at this hour.”

Oliver glanced at Rhodes. “Want to join the Grand Strut, old fellow?”

Rhodes hesitated, and Oliver could clearly see his reluctance. Primrose must have seen it, too, because she said, “Not if you don’t want to.”

“I’ll come with you tomorrow,” Rhodes said, and something in Primrose’s expression made Oliver think that Rhodes had said the exact same thing yesterday.

“Of course.” Primrose smiled again, much less brightly, nodded to Oliver, and left the library.

There was a moment of silence, then Rhodes said, “More brandy?”

“A little.” He surrendered his glass and watched Rhodes pour. A bust of Cicero presided over the crystal decanters. “That’s not the same Cicero whose nose we broke off, is it?”

“No.”

Oliver accepted his glass back. “Lord, can you remember how panicked we were?”

“I remember that you tried to stick it back on with paste from the schoolroom. Your expression, when it fell off again . . .” Rhodes uttered a crack of laughter.

They talked and laughed and sipped their brandy, and it felt so much like old times that Oliver almost couldn’t believe that he’d been away from England for eight years. But that was the mark of the very best friendships: that you could pick up where you’d left off, however long you’d been apart.

Come to think of it, he’d picked up with Primrose in much the same way.

At seven o’clock, Primrose poked her head into the library again. “Rhodes, are you coming to the Turvingtons’ ball tonight?”

Rhodes seemed to tense slightly. “Do you need an escort?” he asked, in a very neutral tone.

Primrose hesitated. Oliver could tell that she was as aware of her brother’s reluctance as he was. “No,” she said. “Aunt Rosemary has said she’ll take us.”

Rhodes relaxed fractionally. “Then I shan’t come.”

Primrose bit her lip, and then said, “We’re dining with our cousins first. Will you at least join us for that?”

“Not tonight,” Rhodes said.

Primrose nodded, and glanced at Oliver. She seemed to be trying to impart a silent message.

Oliver wasn’t entirely certain what that message might be, but he thought he could guess. Primrose was worried about her brother, worried that he didn’t appear to want to leave the house. “I’m dining at my club tonight,” he said. “Care to join me, Rhodes?”

“You’re not going to the Turvingtons’ ball?”

Not with his knee this sore. Oliver shook his head. “I don’t feel like dancing tonight. Dinner and a bottle of good claret, maybe a game of cards. What do you say?”

Rhodes considered this invitation for a moment, turned his glass around in his hands, once, twice, a third time, and then said, “Well . . . all right.”

At eight o’clock Rhodes went upstairs to put on a fresh neckcloth. Oliver strolled out to the entrance hall to wait for him. Primrose came down the staircase in a soft rustle of blue silk. She crossed to Oliver. “Thank you.”

“For what?”

“For making him laugh. For making him go out.” She looked down at the floor, traced a pattern on the marble with the toe of one dancing slipper, glanced back up at him. “He’s been . . . not himself since the children left.”

“Why didn’t he go with them?”

“It’s family tradition. Mother and Father take the children into the country in June and the rest of us stay in London. Evelyn and Rhodes used to call it their furlough month—when they could dance until dawn and be giddy and irresponsible.” She looked down at the floor again, traced another pattern with her toe. “When Rhodes decided to stay in London, I thought maybe . . . but I was wrong. He doesn’t want to dance. He doesn’t even want to go outside.”

“He’s blue deviled,” Oliver said.

“You think I don’t realize that?” Primrose said tartly, and then she sighed and pressed both hands to her brow, as if her head ached. “I beg your pardon, Oliver.”

Oliver shook his head. He didn’t mind Primrose’s tartness.

“He should have gone with the children,” Primrose said, lowering her hands. “I told him that, but he won’t listen to me.”

“You want me to talk with him, persuade him to go?”

Primrose gave him a swift, hopeful glance. “Would you? Could you?”

“Count it as done,” Oliver said. “He’ll be heading for Gloucestershire before the week is up.”

“Thank you.” She smiled at him, relief shining as brightly as tears in her eyes, and he realized just how very worried she was. “If he says he has to remain in London because we need a chaperone, tell him that’s nonsense! We can stay with Aunt Rosemary and Uncle Jerram.”

“I won’t let him play that card,” he promised her.

“Thank you,” Primrose said again. She stood on tiptoe and kissed his cheek lightly. He smelled her perfume, a faint hint of orange blossom. “I’m glad you’re back in England, Oliver.”

Oliver almost blushed, a reaction he didn’t quite understand. To hide it, he said, “Even though I’m an addle-pate?”

Primrose tried to repress a smile, and failed. “Even though you’re an addle-pate.”

“Most magnanimous of you, Prim,” he said. “You set me all a-twitter.”

Her eyelids twitched in that not-quite eye roll.

Footsteps came on the marble staircase, and the sound of feminine voices. He looked up and saw Violet and Aster, dressed in their evening finery. At the same moment, a footman opened the huge front door. Cool evening air flowed in, bringing with it the smell of coalsmoke and the sound of hooves on cobblestones.

“The carriage is here, my lady.”

Oliver escorted the three sisters out to the carriage and handed them up into it, bestowing extravagant compliments as he did so. He compared Aster to the goddess of the dawn, Violet to the most bewitching of sirens, and informed Primrose, the last to enter the carriage, that she outshone Helen of Troy herself.

“Hyperbole, Daisy,” Primrose told him dryly.

Oliver grinned at her—and then caught her gloved hand, detaining her on the jump step for a moment. He leaned close, inhaling her orange blossom scent. “Don’t worry about Rhodes,” he whispered. “I’ve got this.”

Her eyes met his. She squeezed his fingers briefly. “Thank you,” she whispered back.

He took Rhodes to dinner at his club—Brooks’s, on St. James’s Street—and found Rhodes surprisingly resistant to the idea of going to Gloucestershire. It was obvious that Rhodes missed his children, but he appeared to be trying to prove something to himself. Oliver wasn’t quite sure what. That he wasn’t still heartbroken after the death of his wife? That he was capable of carrying on as usual?

Clearly, Rhodes was still heartbroken, he wasn’t capable of carrying on as usual, and he missed his children and should be in Gloucestershire with them.

But Oliver knew when not to push, so he let the matter rest. Tomorrow was another day, and he would win this skirmish—even if Rhodes didn’t realize yet that it was a skirmish.

“I’ve been invited to a house party in Oxfordshire next week,” he said instead. “Lord and Lady Cheevers.”

Rhodes looked up from his beef. “Ah, that explains it.”

“Explains what?”

“I received an invitation, too. Couldn’t figure out why. They move in an older set, the Cheevers. Great cronies of your Uncle Algernon. That’ll be why you’re invited—because he’s going. And Prim and I have been invited so that you don’t get too bored.”

“Prim’s been invited?”

Rhodes nodded, and then turned his attention back to his meal. “You going to go?”

He hadn’t planned to, but Shipton-under-Wychwood was practically in Gloucestershire. “I’m thinking about it,” Oliver said. “What about you?”

Rhodes hesitated.

“No need to make up your mind right now,” Oliver said easily. “Like some more claret?”

He soon had Rhodes laughing again, and by the time they’d finished both their meal and the claret, Rhodes was leaning back in his chair, looking mellow and relaxed and not a little sleepy. The club was growing busy. Oliver saw his Uncle Algernon heading for the cardroom, where whist and hazard were played for high stakes. “Care for a game of cards?” he asked Rhodes.

Rhodes stifled a yawn and shook his head. “I’m for bed. But don’t let me stop you.”

Oliver was feeling sleepy himself. “Not tonight.”

They had to wait in the vestibule while a footman fetched their hats and gloves. Oliver’s cousin, Ninian, was waiting, too. He was dressed for dancing, lace spilling over his wrists, jewels twinkling in the folds of his neckcloth. His waistcoat was a confection of lilac and cream, with silver threads glinting in the embroidery, and his tailcoat was a handsome shade of lavender. He looked almost as pretty as the Garland girls had in their ballgowns.

“On your way to the Turvingtons’ ball, are you?” Ninian said, pulling on his gloves. “So am I. Shall we go together?”

“We’ve decided to give it a miss,” Oliver said.

“Oh.” Ninian looked a little disappointed. “Well, enjoy your evening.” He raised one hand in farewell and exited.

Oliver accepted his hat and gloves from the footman and donned them. He and Rhodes strolled outside. It was barely midnight, early by London standards. They paused on the pavement for a moment and inhaled the coalsmoke-tainted air. “Want to ride out to Richmond tomorrow?” he asked Rhodes. “Get some fresh air?”

For once, Rhodes didn’t hesitate. “Yes.”

They parted ways, Rhodes heading back to Sevenash House, Oliver bound for his own ducal mansion in Berkeley Square. He strolled along St. James’s Street. There were quite a few pedestrians, not all of them sober. At Piccadilly, he waited for a hackney to pass and then a town carriage with a nobleman’s crest on it.

A post-chaise swept into view, traveling slightly too fast, the four horses sweating, the postilions dusty and eager to reach their journey’s end. Oliver waited for it to pass, too—and as he waited, someone shoved him violently between the shoulder blades.