The Duchess Hunt

Chapter Two

When she saw Jack strolling in the Park the next day, Jessica suddenly realised why she felt so uneasy about this projected house party of his. She caught sight of him long before he spotted the Pendle barouche and idly wondered at her ability to pick the Duke of Dettingham out from the crowd. He looked so alone, despite the chattering crowds and cheerful hails of his cronies. She marvelled at how many eager, beckoning looks the society beauties sent him in the hope of catching his notoriously discerning eye, despite the scurrilous stories they went on whispering about him behind their fans and their débutante sisters simply sat and simpered in the prescribed fashion.

It occurred to her that he looked solitary, although he could hardly be more at ease with himself, because she expected Richard to be nearby whenever she encountered Jack even now. The cousins had been inseparable as boys and so often together as young men she had come to think of them as brothers in arms. Jess suddenly realised why Jack intended to marry and gave a shocked gasp that she had to turn into a sneeze to disguise. He hoped his scapegrace heir would come home once he realised Jack was wed and there was little risk of him inheriting the family strawberry leaves. A worse reason for marriage evaded her and she wanted to scream denial over the chatter of the assembled throng.

‘Idiot,’ she muttered under her breath, as her gaze dwelt broodingly on the manly form ambling towards them as if her dark thoughts had drawn him to them as inevitably as north drew a compass needle.

‘Dettingham,’ her father greeted him genially.

‘Your Grace,’ her mother said as she held out a hand in public greeting to the latest butt of scandal to confound the tabbies.

‘Jack,’ Jessica managed flatly and in calling him by his given name overstepped the mark once again in her attempt not to bluntly ask him what on earth he thought he was doing by thinking up such a cold-blooded method of flushing out his errant cousin.

‘Really, Jessica, I know I asked you to be civil to him, but that’s going much too far in public,’ Lady Pendle scolded distractedly while she discreetly aimed an admonishing kick at her husband’s ankle to remind him not to grin at the pair of them as if he could imagine nothing better than his daughter and the Duke of Dettingham being overfamiliar with each other.

‘And did you promise to obey your mama in such a testing quest, Princess?’ Jack asked with that almost-open smile that always threatened to do strange things to her insides if she let it.

‘If I did, then I’m fated to make a liar of myself almost as quickly as you have, your Grace,’ she told him with a reproachful look for the determined use of that hated nickname once again.

He bowed with such mocking elegance she had to bite back a chuckle. The last thing she wanted at the moment was a truce between them, considering she had a very large bone to pick with him the moment they were alone.

‘I apologise for my lapse, Miss Pendle, but your best regal look always has a weakening effect on my already ragged manners,’ he told her a little too meekly.

‘If I went about making that sort of excuse for my follies, I would be banned from every drawing room in Mayfair,’ she informed him sternly.

‘Then I must try it whenever possible from now on, since I can imagine no fate more perfect than being forbidden the sticklers’ company, preferably for ever.’

Jessica’s father laughed out loud and drew the interested attention of all those straining to hear every word that fell from Jack’s lips. ‘Might put that one into effect myself, my boy,’ Lord Pendle confided, seeming oblivious of all the sharp looks and eager speculation around him on the subject of their conversation.

‘You won’t if you wish to share any of the rooms in your London home with your wife during the next year or so,’ she heard her mother murmur for what she thought was her husband’s ears only.

From Jack’s carefully blank expression he had caught that muttered threat as well and Jessica marvelled at the cat-like sharpness of his senses even as she reminded herself to keep a still tongue between her teeth in his company.

‘Should you like to take a drive with me, Pr—Miss Pendle?’ he asked with such an air of bland innocence that Jessica gave him a sharp look. ‘Well, you can’t say I’m not trying,’ he told her with a cheerful shrug and a smile that had her rising to her feet in response before she’d even thought how he used that look to charm the birds out of the trees when she wasn’t around to waste it on.

‘In what, pray?’ she asked as she plumped back down again against the comfortable squabs of the family barouche.

‘My imaginary curricle?’ he said with raised eyebrows and a boyish grin she truly did find irresistible this time.

‘Oh, well, that’s all right then,’ she said and looked down at him with laughter in her eyes and a smile tugging at her lips.

‘Is it, Princess?’ he asked with an oddly twisted smile and a look in his eyes as if he’d just witnessed something so unexpected it had almost robbed him of words.

‘I thought we had dealt with that misname,’ 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 can’t be any lower than the one you appear to have of yourself,’ he said impatiently and finally gave his team more rein as the traffic thinned at last.

‘I am a realist,’ she stated bluntly.

‘If that were the case, you would be Lady Something or the Countess of Somewhere by now,’ he scolded as if her single status actually mattered to him.

‘And Lord Something or the Earl of Somewhere would simply overlook the fact they’d saddled themselves with a lame wife, I suppose?’ she asked caustically.

‘Yes, the only person who refuses to do just that is you, Jessica Pendle, and I’m weary of the whole tableau of the brave beauty, meekly accepting that her role in life is to make others feel pleased they are more fortunate than she is. It’s almost an insult to those of us who value you as you are, rather than as you think you should be.’

‘I’m lame, that’s how I know myself to be,’ she sparked back and tears she told herself were of temper threatened to undo her under his sceptical gaze.

‘You limp a little, that’s all,’ he argued. ‘It could have been so much worse, considering you spent a day and a night out in the pouring rain lying injured. You could have died, or been seriously crippled for life,’ he said, the passion in his voice making his now-calm team jib again.

‘I have never denied it was my own fault,’ she offered a little too meekly for her own taste.

‘Yes, it was, in so far as you took a horse you were forbidden to ride and dashed off on him into weather you should have known would terrify the poor beast. You had a quick temper and a wayward heart in those days, but none of us thought you set out to do yourself and that unfortunate animal injury. We would have been fools if we had, considering how well we all knew your fiery temper and tomboyish ways. No doubt you thought such an impulsive and ill-considered exploit would prove to the world you were every bit as good as any of your brothers at the time. Us Seabornes and your own doting family were only relieved you were alive, so why can’t you accept it as a minor miracle you survived relatively unscathed as we all did at the time?’

‘I had no idea you even knew I had gone,’ she said faintly.

‘I always notice your absences, Princess,’ he said with exaggerated patience, as if preventing himself from physically taking hold of her and shaking her until some sense had been driven in by force. ‘In those days it was mainly because I was on pins to know what mischief you were in whenever you were gone, but that time we searched all night, then half the next day for you. I’ll never forget how it felt to look in vain for a child lost in the darkness. Rich and I tramped the hills round Winberry Hall so fanatically I could probably guide a party round them, day or night, without pausing to get my bearings even now.’

‘I didn’t know any of that. When I recovered from the fever I got from being so wet and cold you and your cousins were all long gone, so I thought you must have already left Winberry Hall by the time I was found to be missing.’

‘Not us, and just as well since your father was in such despair when you were not to be found that night and your brothers not much better, that if my Uncle Henry hadn’t organised a systematic search of the area, we might not have found you until it was too late to help you.’

‘Then why wasn’t I told?’ she asked faintly.