“What?” Ariel said, reacting to her expression. “What is it, Cathy?”
“I have to write my editor.”
“An idea for an article?” Ariel said, hopefully. Catherine could see Ariel translating her wide eyes into treacle tarts and fresh scones and roasted turkey, the foods he loved to eat most and that had been, as of late, very scarce.
Her love for Ariel and Lady Wethersby radiated through her chest. She had to write to the editor of theWinchesterimmediately and ask about her payment—and propose her next column. She had to try for Ariel and Lady Wethersby. Her first family had been ruined by scandal and madness. She wasn’t going to let her second one be destroyed by penury.
“Good gracious! We’re out of tea.” Lady Wethersby held up the porcelain pot and its empty bottom reflected all of Catherine’s anxieties back to her.
“It’s no matter. I’ll write my editor.” She willed herself to push her fears aside. “And I will get us the money.”
Chapter Three
John Breminster, thenew Duke of Edington, stood outside 21 Halston Place, watching a very squat man and a very tall man walk away from the entrance. Their dodgy features and worn clothing announced them as duns. He wondered if they had the same prey and whether she was inside. The presence of the duns did not surprise him. The occupants could not have much money.
John had only been duke for a fortnight. His father had died, suddenly, from a fever, and John was still in shock from the speed with which his life had changed. He had not even known his father was ill. The fever had taken him that quickly.
When he heard that his father was dead, John rode back to Edington Hall in one night and a day, only stopping to tend to the horse as necessary. By the time he arrived back at his ancestral seat, a low hum of grief had moved through him. He could not believe that his relationship with his father had reached its end so unceremoniously.
As a boy, he had idolized the man, who had spent more time with his son and heir than most men of his station. He had taught him to ride, to hunt, how to manage an estate. He had taught him his letters and then later how to keep and decipher ledgers. Some of the fondest memories of his childhood were walking through the family apple orchards with his father and talking about…what? What had that boy and that man had to talk about? He couldn’t remember, but he remembered that the conversations had absorbed him at the time. He had almost forgotten his old hero-worship of his father, which had been buried under years of heavy resentment that had often felt much like hatred. On that ride back to Edington, for that brief span between London and Edington, his love for his father had come back to him.
When he had arrived at the Hall, the family solicitor, Mr. Lawson, had greeted him. He soon had the will before him and those tender feelings—remorse, grief, a kind of sweet regret—had vanished. And anger had once again taken their place. He had not been able to calm himself in the two weeks since. Even when he affected placidity, he only felt molten, animate rage.
With this will, his father had done something so unforgivable that, in John’s eyes, it instantly merged with his original sin, the scandal itself. John knew that if anyone heard what his father had enacted with his will, the old Forster scandal would be reignited in an instant. Mr. Lawson had laid it out in black and white. The man was a gentleman’s solicitor par excellence. He turned aristocratic whims into ironclad legality. He followed the wishes of his title-holding clients with a military dedication. John hated him for helping his father make such an infernal document. He had screamed the man from the room after he had read it but it didn’t change the facts. The will was immutable. And John had to act fast.
And so he was now, to his humiliation, seeking out Catherine Forster for help. He hadn’t seen her since that night at Tremberley Manor, when he had almost begged the utmost from the last woman in the world he should have been slavering over. Thetonsaid that Catherine Forster, that unfortunate girl, looked exactly like the woman, her aunt, who had started the scandal that had almost ruined his family. He could confirm, having seen her up close,too close, that she was nearly her aunt’s replica. The older woman, the spinster renowned for her beauty, had been a familiar sight at Edington Hall in his childhood, coming to see his father about the crops or about a farmer’s family that had encountered tragedy.
John had thought about that night at Tremberley many, many times. When he had held Catherine Forster in his arms, he had found an emotion, a sensation, that he had never been able to find again. He had tried in the years after to eradicate her from his memory and his body. In the months after their encounter, he had dreamt of her every night. He found himself looking for silvery-blond hair and blue-black eyes on crowded London streets.
For the three or four years afterwards, he had bedded half the opera singers and unhappily married aristocratic women and renowned courtesans in England. He had only found echoes of what he had felt with her. With every woman he had bedded, he found himself unchanged. He still wanted to chase women with silver-blond hair down city streets and country lanes to see if they wereher. He still thought of her in idle minutes—and at night. Whenever he pleasured himself by his own hand, even after seven years and as his memories had grown threadbare, he was unable to find release unless he thought of her and that night, of her hand stroking him through his breeches, that sweet union he had anticipated so close and yet always out of reach.
He even scanned the shelves of London bookstores, looking for that history she had told him she was writing, wondering if it would appear, hoping for a piece of her that he could consume safely. He liked the idea that he could immerse himself in her from a distance. If such a volume existed, he never found it.
Before that night at Tremberley, he hadn’t known Catherine. Not really. He had never seen her in society. In their childhood, he had observed her no more than a dozen times. They had played in the same orchards and fields. He had seen her from afar and, on occasion, when she didn’t know he was watching, from closer range. In the year before the scandal, he had perhaps even acquired… It made him shudder to think of it. How odd it was. It made him blush even now, as a hardened man of nearly thirty. Nevertheless, it was true. He had developed, back then, a boy’s love of her. Right before it had happened, they had been eleven—both of them. He remembered her collecting stones and flowers in the orchard, unaware that she had crossed the line between the two properties. Before everything had changed, he could remember thinking of ways he might draw this beguiling girl’s attention.
He still didn’t understand how, that night at Tremberley, he hadn’t recognized her. Sometimes, he thought he had. That some part of him had recognized her and had wanted her anyway.
John had stopped bedding his way through London a few years ago. He couldn’t go on that way but he also couldn’t find happiness anywhere else. He no longer cared for women, for drink, for hunting, for sport, for cards. He was wasted, just like his father. Catherine Forster had doomed him.
He was resolute that his sister, Henrietta, seventeen and innocent, about to debut in society, wouldn’t become like him. He would make sure Henrietta had a good match, a sparkling one, with a kind man, rich and titled. He would put the full force of his dukedom behind her. Henrietta wouldn’t be ruined by the scandal. Not like him. He couldn’t give her the title—he wished that he could—but he could give her every advantage it had to offer.
With this damned will, his father had jeopardized his sister’s future. But John wouldn’t let anyone—especially not his father—harm Henrietta.
Johnwouldsave his sister. He would give her a good life.
He just needed to talk to Catherine Forster first.
Chapter Four
When another knocksounded on the door, Ariel screamed, “Hand me the paint!” and then began frantically dabbing his face with the white paste he had just spent ten minutes wiping off.
“Ariel! Shhh!” Lady Wethersby hissed, before turning to Catherine, who, pen in hand, was halfway through a letter to her editor. “What should we do?”
“Ariel, lie under the blanket, forget the paint for now. It might be a messenger with my payment.”
Catherine peeked out the window. She could not see the whole of the person knocking but she could see his clothes. Too fine for a dun or a messenger.
“It’s a gentleman,” she whispered to Lady Wethersby, disappointed it wasn’t the money, but relieved it wasn’t the alternative. “One of your old friends, perhaps?”
