They sat for a minute in silence.
Griff rose. "Finish this, please. You need your strength. We’ll join a wagon train for Calais and hopefully, be in London quickly. There's much you have to do there."
"Report officially, yes. Go to my rooms and get a few old clothes. Talk to the Demerest family solicitor. When I call on him, I hope he doesn't faint."
Griff locked his soft blue gaze on his. And he wasn't smiling.
Alarm rang through him. "What's wrong?"
"I'm not certain I should tell you this right now."
Bee?His heart stopped. "Something's happened to Bee? That smuggler I told you about? The Customs laid a trap to get him. Did they find him?"
"I don't know."
Anger burned behind his eyes. "Did he hurt her? I'll kill him."
"No. No. Mama doesn't know of this man or Bee's knowledge of him, I don't think."
"What then? Oh, hell. Bee's married!" Some smart man who loved her quick mind and her determined soul had persuaded her and since he was presumed dead, she'd accepted him. "Who married her?"
"No one."
"What?" Alastair struggled to his feet. "Griff. What the hell is wrong?"
"Not wrong. Just startling."
"Well?"
"I've word from Mama."
Griff's mother wrote tomes, always had. With all the gossip of today and yesterday and tomorrow's predictions for it, her letters weighed more than a nine pounder. He'd seen them! Tons of them, literally, when they'd all been at school. "Yes?"
"Your great uncle Harold has passed on."
"Harold. Harold? The Duke of Kingston?"
"One and the same," Griff told him and a smile played around his blue eyes.
"What about him?"
Griff shook his head. ”The man is dead."
"I see," said Alastair, but he didn't, of course. The relevance of a man departing this earth in the peace of his bed seemed like a rude joke to Alastair. Hadn't he witnessed too many men trying to push their guts back inside holes in their bodies? "I don't understand. Are you telling me we must go into mourning when we arrive home? I tell you mourning is not a practice I wish to indulge in. I've had enough sorrow."
"No mourning." Griff fought a smile. "But because the duke's son was lost at sea last year—”
He was?Alastair picked through his brain. Did he remember this? Vaguely. But Griff looked at him oddly. "What else?"
"And your uncle’s son died of wasting disease in September—”
"September, eh? Well, that's a pity. You know, I liked Uncle Harold. The old man was a prankster. His son—”
But Griff did not bat a lash.
Hmmm.
When the heir to an estate died and there was no other, there was a remedy. "So the Lords put the title into abeyance, did they?"
