The Duchess Hunt

‘The doctor said you were not to be reminded of your ordeal and would need all the peace and quiet you could get to recover when the fever broke and you were out of danger at last. So we took ourselves off, certain you would soon be your usual irrepressible self after giving us such an almighty scare, but you never really recovered your old spark, did you, Princess?’

For once she didn’t argue with that nickname, too busy re-aligning events in her head to bother about small details. ‘No,’ she admitted at last.

‘Why not?’ he asked as if he was truly interested in her answer. ‘You were the most intrepid female Rich and I ever came across and then you became a paper saint.’

How to explain that it was plain to her by then that none of her dawning hopes for the future could ever be, now she was imperfect and he was not? Impossible when he would think her still in love with him or some such nonsensical notion, she decided, and cast about for an excuse for losing interest in the things she’d once loved so much, like riding for hours about the Northamptonshire countryside, running like the wind and climbing every tree on her father’s estate, then most of his neighbours’ as well.

‘As a way of preserving my dignity, I suppose,’ she said finally with a shrug.

‘It was a retreat—no, worse than that, a refusal to give battle in the first place,’ he condemned sternly.

‘How can you sit there and lecture me on cowardice when you have no idea what you’re talking about?’ she accused. ‘You never suffered a moment of doubt that your limbs would hold you up for as long as you asked them to. How could you understand what it feels like to face a crowded ballroom, knowing you will have to limp across the dance floor to reach the chaperon’s benches, where everyone knows you will stay all evening because you cannot dance? You never had to face the giggles and whispers of diamonds of the first water as they discuss you as if you’re either not there or must be deaf since you’re not perfect like they are. Some gentlemen even asked my mother if I would like tea or lemonade as if I couldn’t decide for myself.’

‘You seem to me to get on perfectly well with most of them. Rich and I could never get near you for a circle of assorted young ladies and spotty youths with fiercely protective expressions in their eyes when you made your come-out.’

‘So I can’t be quite as martyred and self-pitying as you say, can I?’

‘I never said you haven’t got a great many friends, just that you are very careful never to acquire lovers.’

‘Something my true well-wishers must be thankful for,’ Jessica said primly.

‘You know perfectly well what I mean. There wasn’t a single would-be lover or husband among those very young gentlemen. Not even one grown-up male with a mind and desire all his own, my dear Princess. You know, real, mature and rampant gentlemen who might take friendship for something more if you ever let them, so you’ve kept them sternly at a distance, haven’t you?’

‘No sensible female encourages the rakes,’ she said scornfully, although she knew he was quite right.

‘One fully aware of her own beauty and wit and who is prepared to take them and life on and win would, Princess, although a spoilt young woman who is too arrogant to play the game at all if she isn’t guaranteed to win would probably not dare do so.’

‘What an original take on my life you do have, your Grace,’ she said icily.

‘And how very much you would like to box my ears,’ he said with a whimsical grin, as if he’d prefer her to revert to the wild Jess of old and do just that.

‘Tempting, but not even you make me angry enough to risk being overturned, then having cause to limp on both feet ever after,’ she teased, because it was that or rage, then probably weep all over him since no words came close to being able to express her fury at being held up for his lofty scrutiny and found wanting.

‘Oh, Princess, what are we going to do with you?’ he asked with a weary shake of his handsome head.

‘Take me home and stop calling me that,’ she said just as wearily.

It seemed for a long time as if they’d reached deadlock. Jack had taken a wide sweep round the road at a handy village green to turn his light carriage back towards London without feeling the need for any spectacular feats of driving to prove his skill. Jessica already knew he could do most things he set his mind to superbly and hoped she wasn’t going to be his latest project, something mildly challenging to divert him from the more serious business of finding a wife.

‘What an obedient duke I am,’ he ventured after a few miles of wary silence.

‘No, you’re a devious, deceptive and dangerous one and I’m not in the least bit fooled by you, so don’t try your tricks on me,’ she told him grumpily.

‘At least I’m open to life and haven’t had my emotions preserved in aspic,’ he argued scornfully.

‘You’re certainly open to making the biggest mistake of your life this summer,’ she muttered under her breath at the arrogance of the man, thinking he could accuse her of being emotionless when he was contemplating taking a wife mainly to reassure his cousin he could finally come home, since the succession was about to be secured on to more direct heirs.

‘How lovely for you,’ she said insincerely out loud, but began to wonder anew about that cat-like hearing of his as he sent her a very peculiar look indeed.

‘Promise me that you will at least try, Princess,’ he admonished with a sigh after several more minutes of faintly hostile silence on both sides.

‘Try to do what?’

‘Join us erring and striving human beings for a change and come down out of your ivory tower for the summer. You might be surprised at what you find if you decided to embrace life instead of running away from it.’

‘And you might get your ears boxed after all,’ she snapped bitterly, for wasn’t this pot calling kettle black with a vengeance?

‘Promise?’ he said relentlessly and she made the mistake of briefly meeting his eyes and seeing genuine concern in the gold-rayed green depths of them before he turned his attention back to the road once again.

‘Only if you finally stop calling me Princess,’ she conceded and might have kicked herself for conceding that much if it would have done any good.

‘You would miss it if I did,’ he said with a wry smile as if he had suddenly realised how absurd they must look as they quarrelled most of the way round the almost countryside, then back into London again.

‘Like I’d miss chickenpox,’ she said darkly.

‘I take it all back, Jess, don’t ever change,’ he said with an easy grin and a laugh and she cursed herself for a fool when it felt more exhilarating than half an hour of flirtation with one of his rival rakes.

‘Don’t worry, I won’t. So far as I can see there’s very little hope you ever will either.’

‘And why should I change?’

‘Because marriage ought to do that to a man,’ she horrified herself by coming right out and saying.

‘Did I mention marriage?’ he asked, his voice so silkily dangerous she couldn’t fight off a visible shiver.

‘Never to me and don’t worry, I have no delusions in that direction,’ she snapped defensively.

‘I never thought you had, my dear,’ he said so remotely that it felt as if they were only a pair of strangers who didn’t particularly like each other.

‘Which is just as well, considering you would have hated it if I had designs on your ducal coronet,’ she recklessly added.

‘Who knows?’ he said vaguely, as if Jessica Pendle and her wayward ideas were a million miles from the focus of his thoughts, whatever that might be.

‘I do,’ she persisted disastrously, mainly because she couldn’t let silence fall again now the words were actually out.

‘You’re right,’ he admitted after a tense silence during which she had to actually bite her tongue not to make things worse by defending herself even more strongly and denying once more she had the least desire to attract him on any level. ‘In a weak moment I gave in to my grandmother’s edict and seriously considered marriage. It was obviously a moment too long, since I am now host to a gaggle of eligible young ladies and their assorted relatives and friends and will have a house party full of guests to consider when I return home.’

‘Hence your invitation to the Pendles, so we can water down the obviousness of a pack of eager young ladies invited by your aunt before you had time to express your second thoughts?’ she made herself say lightly, as if being considered an antidote to other more marriageable females didn’t hurt her in the least.

‘No, hence my invitation to the place I probably love most in the world to a family I consider part of my own. You are every bit as lovely as any of the ladies invited by my aunt and ought to know it by now, without having to be reassured at every turn that I will never see you as second-best to any of them,’ he said drily.

‘I am not lovely,’ she objected as indignantly as if he’d accused her of being plain as rice pudding.

‘Like it or not, you are so, my dear,’ he said with such a knowing smile she felt the edge had been quite taken off the compliment.

‘Just because you declare it, therefore it must be so, your Grace?’

‘If that’s what it takes to convince you I’m right. Now kindly take that about-to-be-martyred look off your face and behave like the proper young lady society knows you to be, Princess. It might be best if you pretend we just enjoyed a sedate tour round the leafier parts of Mayfair rather than a dashing tour of the outer villages perhaps.’

‘Yes, much better—and you’re still wrong,’ she sniped as the dusty streets became familiar and she felt him slip back into cynical Duke of Dettingham persona and out of her reach once again.

‘I’m not, you know,’ he murmured as he passed over her reticule and fan when the Pendles’ head footman had finished helping her down from the relatively high carriage seat.

‘Not what?’ she replied distractedly, for trying to descend gracefully from even a normal carriage was always a challenge and today she had wanted to land in a heap at his horses’ feet even less than usual.

‘Wrong, of course.’ He reminded her of his assertion she was lovely with a look of such molten heat in his gaze that she almost believed him for a moment, until she reminded herself he was an accomplished flirt and very good at making susceptible females believe they were uniquely special to him.

‘Hah! Try telling that to your other female guests when next we meet. They would have you declared insane or throw me in the moat.’

‘I don’t have a moat,’ he argued as she stood back on the pavement and waited to bid him an acceptably polite farewell.

‘They would dig one especially for me.’

‘Should I consider that a challenge, I wonder?’ he said with a teasing smile that threatened to leave her in a collapsed heap of compliance in the street.

‘No!’ she said a little too shrilly and stepped back as if just looking at him might burn her.

‘Pity,’ he said with a taunting grin she recalled seeing all too often when she was a child and he and Rich were about to escape her yet again. ‘I always liked a challenge and so few other females grant me the delight of proving them wrong as often as you do, Princess.’

‘Then count me in as just another female,’ she advised with as much of a flounce as she could manage and turned to quit the scene if he refused to play the gentleman and leave her in peace.

‘You could never be one of the crowd to me, Princess,’ he assured her outrageously as he finally obliged her and drove off with a careless salute of his driving whip and a flurry of dust from his chariot wheels.

‘Infuriating, arrogant, idiot,’ she gritted between her teeth as she stood on the pavement, watching slavishly until he was completely out of sight.

‘I beg your pardon, Miss Jessica?’ the butler said blandly, clearly having heard every word, but preserving the fiction that good servants were made of wood and set going every morning by a clock winder.

‘Tea, I think, Wellow,’ she said brightly. ‘I stand in need of it after that.’

‘What lady would not,’ Wellow allowed himself to answer as he followed her into the hall.

Two weeks later Jessica decided that not even tea would cure this disastrous situation. Her father and mother had cried off at the last minute and she was about to reach Ashburton New Place to face the ducal summons alone. The carriage slowed to take the entrance to Jack’s mansion and she fought a cowardly impulse to order her father’s coachman to return to Winberry Hall instead.

Despite their oddly unforgettable encounters back in London, Jack would treat her with his usual absent-minded courtesy, then forget her, she reassured herself uneasily. All she had to do was limp about his glorious stately pile looking serene and untroubled for the next two weeks while he took his pick of the finest belles of the ton, then she could go home and get on with her life. Resigning herself to a fortnight of pretence, Jessica leant forwards for her first glimpse of Ashburton’s famous deer park as the coach finally swung through the imposing gates and there could be no turning back.

‘Her ladyship said I was to remind you to be polite to the duke,’ her mother’s ancient and formidable dresser informed her sternly as the coach slowed again.

‘I’m not such a fool as to show his Grace up in a bad light while he’s entertaining guests, Martha.’

‘Your mother wouldn’t want you hurt, Miss Jessica,’ Martha said earnestly.

Then why had Lady Pendle been so insistent Jessica accept this invitation without her support? She must know the beauties invited for this fortnight would have their claws honed ready for the scramble to grab Jack’s strawberry leaves.

‘You can depend upon it, all is well, my love, despite all this panic from Rowena’s husband,’ her mama had told Jessica when a note was delivered by an exhausted groom as she and Jessica were finally packed and ready to leave. ‘Rowena is as healthy as a horse, despite Sir Linstock fussing over her as if she might break, but she never would attend to her sums and has very likely got the date of her last courses wrong. I said she looked large for just over seven months last time we visited, did I not? Linstock and your papa will be quite useless until we’re certain your sister is out of danger, so I must go and help the poor girl endure her confinement without having to worry about them as well as herself and the babe.’

Lady Pendle paused and considered the general idiocy of gentlemen when confronted with childbirth, gave a heavy sigh and shook her head. ‘You must take Martha with you and Lady Henry will chaperon you at Ashburton, my love. Your godmother will be sorely in need of your help with so many giddy young misses in the house,’ her mother said.

Lady Pendle clearly thought Lady Henry Seaborne faced an unenviable task keeping so many deadly rivals from scratching each other’s eyes out in their scramble to become Jack’s duchess. So how could Jess refuse to come here in Martha’s sternly respectable company when her godmother had always given her loving support to her goddaughter whenever she needed it?

‘His Grace and I are little more than nodding acquaintances nowadays, Martha, and I am only here to assist my godmother,’ Jessica said now. ‘Clearly I shall be far too busy to lounge about on sofas looking elegant, so you will not be required to dress me up like some aged ingénue. I suggest you regard this visit as something of a holiday and enjoy the comforts of Ashburton while you are here.’

‘That I shall not, Miss Jessica. Lady Henry and your mama would never allow you to be less elegantly dressed than the rest of the company, even if the rest of us was prepared to let you make a spectacle of yourself,’ Martha told her as if the very idea was preposterous.

‘I am three and twenty and quite on the shelf, not some hopeful little miss of seventeen or eighteen,’ Jessica countered lightly, but hoped there was enough steel in her voice to make it clear she considered that to be that.

She recalled what it was like to be that young and artless and shuddered. At seventeen she had still dreamt young girls’ dreams, even if she had put an embargo on any fancies about Jack. She had been cured of them quickly enough after overhearing a handsome and impecunious lieutenant who had sworn to her only the night before that she was the light and purpose of his life confide in his brother, the village curate, how her small fortune from her great-aunt would buy him preference and a commission. She could still hear every one of his cruel words now …

‘Without her money, I should never look at such a dull little cripple, I can assure you, brother mine. If not for my need being so much greater than yours, she would make you a neat wife, Hubert. At least Miss Hop-Along will never be chased by the local squires or ogled by the sons of the gentry. Not that she wouldn’t be easily caught if they chose to chase her, for she ain’t able to run away, is she?’ Julius Swaybon had said with a braying laugh that she had failed to notice was loud and unamused until that very moment.

Reverend Swaybon had been a much nicer gentleman than his brother and protested such a dismissive attitude to a girl the man was seeking to marry.

‘Don’t be more stupid than you can help,’ his more worldly-wise brother told him scornfully. ‘She wouldn’t be looking my way if she had any prospect of a better catch. The wench must know she’s flawed; she’ll accept me and be thankful, or remain a drain on her family for the rest of her life.’

‘I thought you said she had her own money,’ Reverend Swaybon defended her stalwartly and if she’d had it in her to fall in love out of gratitude, she knew which brother she would have chosen, she reflected now.

She hadn’t loved Julius Swaybon either, but she had been flattered by his extravagant praise and outrageous flirtation. Then she’d heard him speak of her as if she was a well-bred horse with a flaw that would bring her within his purchasing power and seen him for the straw man he truly was. It only confirmed her instinctive reaction to Jack when she was sixteen and eager for love, life and passion, but caution warned it would be a disaster for a girl like her to love him. He was seven years more cynical, experienced and dangerous now and an inner voice whispered he was also more fascinating, but she ignored it.

‘Lady Henry has her ways of getting things done,’ Martha said as they left the shade of the venerable oak trees and Ashburton Place came into clear view at last.

At least the magnificent mansion distracted her from wondering exactly what her godmother wanted to achieve this time and Jessica tried to dismiss that cryptic comment as if she hadn’t even heard it. Even the Seabornes, who loved every stick and stone of the place, acknowledged Ashburton was a beautiful rabbit warren. The towers and domes of the mighty roof were punctuated with banqueting houses and fanciful pinnacles so fashionable in Tudor England, but at least the main house was brightened by arrays of bay windows in the highest fashion of the times. With subsequent additions in the same brick or sandstone, Ashburton was a vast yet welcoming ducal seat.

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