Chapter One
Spring 1811
“Are you paying attention, my love? This is very important.”
Baldwin Undercross, Duke of Sheffield, turned from his place at the window and focused his attention on his mother. She was seated on his settee, a slew of papers sprawled out on her lap, on the table before her, on the cushions next to her. She was examining one of them very closely and he barely held back a sigh at her determined expression.
“Yes,” he breathed. “So you say.”
Her gaze jerked up and held his, the brown eyes so like his own softening a bit. “I’m sorry, darling,” she said. “I know you despise this. I would not put you through it at all if it weren’t imperative.”
He pressed his hands behind his back and clenched them together. The worst part was, she wasn’t wrong in her assessment. It didn’t make him like what she was doing any more. In fact, he liked it less.
“I recognize that,” he conceded with a frown pulling hard on his lips. “After all, if our status is revealed, it could be very…bad. It is what it is. I accept it and my responsibility to remedy the problem.”
“At least Charlotte is safe from it,” the duchess breathed. “I felt like a weight was lifted from me the moment she and Ewan said their I dos.”
That coaxed a very rare smile from Baldwin’s lips. His beloved younger sister had married one of his very best friends less than six months ago. A member of his duke club, a bonded set of friends who had come together to help each other with the weight of the responsibility they would one day each bear.
Of course, Baldwin hadn’t told any of them his troubles, not even Ewan, Duke of Donburrow and now his brother-in-law as well as in spirit. Nor had he told his sister. Too humiliating.
And what was the point of doing so? Charlotte would only fret, and now she was protected, at least, from the situation of their family.
He could not say the same for himself or for his mother. The worst part wasshedidn’t even know how truly bad it all was.
“How could your father leave us in this position?” she said, pressing her hands down on the pile of papers with a crunching of the vellum.
“We’ve been asking ourselves that for five years,” Baldwin said softly. “Father lost all our money, he left us with only the entail and its value is…greatly reduced by his poor decisions. Our position in untenable. I owe it to those who hold our debts and to those who live through the bounty of our title and lands to fix this.”
She sighed and picked up one of the papers, smoothing it reflexively as she said, “Well, marry a nice heiress and all will be well.”
She said it lightly, and Baldwin forced a flutter of a smile for her, but inside his stomach tied into yet another knot. His mother had convinced herself that the list of heiresses that comprised her copious papers would be their family’s saving grace, but Baldwin was less certain. He didn’t know if a young woman with a dowry of ten thousand or even thirty thousand would be enough to remedy the situation he now found himself in.
After all, even he didn’t know about all the outstanding debts. His father had kept terrible books—purposefully, it seemed, to hide the massive obligations he had incurred. To hide the promises he’d made ten times over for the same rights or horse or piece of unentailed property.
Baldwin had been swimming through it for half a decade. He had only recently become aware of at least five thousand additional pounds worth of debt that he had no idea who owned or how to resolve. That had been the breaking point for him. He had been balancing everything on a knife’s edge and now…well, now there was no more balancing. No more triage. This was an emergency.
His mother knew none of it, of course. She was aware of the generalities of their financial state, not the minutia that kept Baldwin staring at the ceiling at night.
“Who do you have to present to me today, Mama?” Baldwin asked, shaking off the dark and dour truth of their situation and focusing on the main opportunity he had to solve it.
She held up her stack of papers with a grim look. “We’ve talked about half a dozen possibilities already, of course. Here are a few more. Lady Winifred, the Earl of Snodgrass’s eldest. She has fifteen thousand and a prize racehorse.”
Baldwin flinched. He was finished with racehorses, but he could sell the beast, of course, and bring in a thousand more, perhaps. If only Lady Winifred weren’t so very dull.
“Very well,” he drawled. “And?”
“I’ve heard Lady Richards is reentering Society this Season. Now she’s a widow, of course, but she was settled very well by both her father and the late viscount.”
Baldwin nodded. Indeed, the lady had been. She’d earned her money, as it was widely believed in his circles that she had murdered her poor husband. Of course, it wasn’tfact, and the ladies did not speak of it, so he wasn’t certain they were aware. Still, Baldwin remembered the viscount’s hangdog expression every time he was forced to go home to his wife, and shuddered.
“She would not necessarily add her coffers to ours,” he suggested. “It isn’t the same as a dowry.”
“Still, we cannot dismiss twenty thousand out of hand,” his mother said, making a mark on the paper that had Lady Richards’ name on it.
“No, we cannot,” he agreed. “And who else?”
She sorted into another stack and came up with a single sheet of paper. “Ah, here is one! The American. Her father, Peter Shephard, is some sort of…shipping person out of Boston, I think it is. He has brought his daughter for a Season and they say he’s shopping for a title.”
