“How?”
“Because all people have value!”
His father leaned back in his chair and regarded Max with a quizzical air. “I begin to worry about you. Have you taken a religious turn?”
“What?”
“Sitting up all night next to a heathen, talking about her value as if a beggar at our door is important somehow.”
“Even a beggar is a person.”
“There!” he said pointing a finger at Max’s face. “That’s exactly what I mean. I don’t deny that a beggar is a person, but they should be in the care of the priests and nuns. Unless you are about to take up vows, I cannot see why you would traipse about London collecting dirt or sit at her bedside through the night. And that is to say nothing of countenancing murder in our own home.”
“I didn’t countenance murder.”
“Neither did you send her to Tyburn for committing it. No, you—”
“I sat vigil at her bedside. Yes, Father, I remember.”
“Don’t take that tone with me. You are my heir. Everything you do is noted and remarked upon by all of London.” He tossed the newspaper at Max opened to the glaring headline,MURDER IN A DUCAL HOME.
He scanned the contents quickly, seeing that the reporter had gotten the substance essentially correct, though it was written in the most scandalized tone. He set it down with a sigh. “It was never going to be kept quiet.”
“But it doesn’t have tolinger.Certainly not upstairs.”
Max had no answer except the one his father would reject. “Prinny has not rescinded his order. I am commanded to marry her.”
“Bollocks. Send her off to Devonshire to cook or something. Prinny will get around to it in time.”
“She kept saying she was important. I don’t know what she meant—”
“Well, of course she did! Everyone in our circle is desperate to be important. Otherwise, they can’t be in our circle, can they? I’m a duke. You’re my heir—”
“Can you not feel for the girl? Sold into slavery by her own father, dragged to the English court only to have a knife put her throat. Her feet were broken, she’s wracked with fever, and she still had the wherewithal to tell me she could be useful. That I shouldn’t kill her. Damn it, Father, can you not see the spirit in her?”
“What I see is my name in the papers, a bedroom that reeks of blood and worse, and my son lost in a romantic fantasy about a savage. Can you imagine Lady Kimberly acting in such a manner?”
“No,” he said. “I cannot.” He had a great deal of admiration for his childhood friend, but he doubted she would endure being sold to a foreign land, much less any of the other crimes Yihui had suffered.
“Of course not and thank God for that. Max, you must get a hold of yourself. She is a savage, and you can no more marry her than you would a tiger or a rampaging bull.” In a rare moment of tenderness, his father reached out his hand. Not quite enough to touch Max, but the gesture was there. “Son, exotic fantasies are normal. Every man has them, but only a fool acts upon them. And he certainly doesn’t bring them home to their mother.”
“It was by Prinny’s command.”
“And how many of Prinny’s commands have you disobeyed in the last month? How many of the man’s drunken idiocies have you curtailed just this week?”
Max’s eyes widened. He hadn’t thought his father understood what he was doing at Carlton House.
“I have friends in the Foreign Office as well. I know what Lord Benedict has asked of you.” He withdrew his hand to close up the paper, hiding the awful headline. “You have spent the last four years dancing rings around the prince. Why now, of all times, would you bow to royal decree?”
“It’s not that simple. I cannot blatantly refuse a royal command.”
“I’m sure it’s devastatingly difficult. And yet, I know you could do it. There’s always a way to distract royalty. So why didn’t you do it this time? Why did you spend the night praying by her bedside?”
“I wasn’t praying,” he said. He’d been thinking. The events of the day had forced him to take a hard look at his life and choices.
His title had kept him from the military or indeed any foreign travel for fear of contracting some disease or being shot by the French. He understood that his death would be the end of a very ancient title, and though he feared that less than his father did, he still chose to stay out of harm’s way as much as possible. He did that out of respect for his forefathers.
He was not especially prone to scholarship and his father refused to let him manage the family finances, though he had tried dozens of different tactics to get their smallest estate under his control. That left him pursuing his only real interest—Chinoiserie—and serving as Prinny’s court jester or secret brake if the situation called for it.
