Chapter One
Castlebridge, Oxfordshire, Autumn 1821
The Duke’s householdwas in uproar. His Grace and his guests were to arrive in three weeks’ time. Every room was in the process of being cleaned, chandeliers taken down, walls scrubbed, carpets beaten, curtains washed, furniture polished. Not a cobweb was to be tolerated in any of the rooms, from the attics to the dungeon. Well, perhaps not the dungeon, or the attics. Jenny Harrismith, the governess, was confident that the schoolroom and nursery wing on the third floor where she and the children spent their days would also escape most of the fuss. His Grace, on his brief return to England some months ago, had not visited them there.
“Do you like the picture I’ve drawn of an Arab, Miss Harrismith?” Nine-year-old William raised his head from where he was hunched over a table with his pencils.
Jenny leaned over him to view it. She expected a sheik in flowing robes, but of course, the drawing was of a horse. William thought of little else.
“Well done, Lord William,” she said a hand on his shoulder. “It’s a magnificent horse.” So tall, the horse’s legs would be the envy of a giraffe.
“I shall be riding my father’s hunters soon.” William pushed out his chest, sounding like the duke he would become one day.
“You will,” Jenny agreed. “When you are older.”
William visited the stables every day and rode out with a groom, but she’d asked the stable staff to keep an eye on him for fear he’d take off on the duke’s stallion. The boy was an excellent rider, having been on a horse since he could walk, but he’d have the animal over a high fence in the blink of an eye.
His Grace’s children had been in her care for the past year, since the former governess, having succumbed to a footman’s attentions, left after a hasty marriage to run an inn in Cornwall.
While relieved the duke was coming home, Jenny was determined he was made aware of his children’s needs. But even as a lord’s daughter, albeit an impoverished one from Yorkshire, it would prove difficult to seek a private audience with her employer, let alone make her concerns known to him.
Jenny had become quite familiar with Andrew George William Hale, Duke of Harrow, as William often dragged her to the portrait gallery. They would stand before paintings of his father at various stages of his life, from babyhood to lanky youth, and then the tall, imposing duke in his coronet and robes. Jenny was forced to admit that he did stir the imagination.
When His Grace had visited Castlebridge, she’d brought the two children down and waited in the corridor while a footman took them into the library to see their father. The next day, His Grace returned to the Continent, and William, a lonely little boy, had been unsettled at bedtime for the rest of the week requiring her to read to him until he fell asleep.
The one time Jenny had set eyes on the duke, was from three stories up in the nursery wing. The schoolroom window looked directly onto the gravel turning circle below. She had knelt on the window seat and looked down. It was the merest glimpse of him, leaving the luxurious coach and greeting his staff before disappearing indoors. Even from that distance, he looked very tall. Though tenderhearted about the awful tragedy that had befallen him, she remained annoyed with the duke. He was a busy man with an important position to uphold, but she disapproved of his neglect of his children.
The duke’s dour-faced secretary, Mr. Bishop, kept the duke advised by letter of the children’s development and health. Jenny had informed him of William’s aptitude for arithmetic and how Barbara, who had just turned five, made steady progress at reading, in the hope those things at least would be mentioned.
The secretary showed little interest in how fast Barbara was outgrowing Nanny, who’d been with the family since the duke was a boy, and was becoming quite forgetful. Jenny feared the older woman would leave a candle burning and set the house on fire.
Mr. Bishop tut-tutted when she expressed a wish for the duke to be told how William had grown in the last few months—Jenny measured him against a doorframe in the schoolroom with a pencil mark. He dismissed as irrelevant that William learned from the gamekeeper how to fly fish for trout in the river, so the boy might surprise his father when he finally came home.
Jenny folded her arms, her annoyance pricked again by the secretary’s obtuseness. But would it be any better when the duke arrived?
At the schoolroom table, William bowed his head over a new drawing of an equally tall horse, and Barbara, an imaginative child, made up delightful stories about grand balls. She was interested in fashion, drawing the latest gowns from theLa Belle Assembléemagazine, her great aunt had sent her. The little girl loved her dolls, especially her new French fashion doll. She tucked them all into her bed at night. As Nanny dozed in the evenings, Jenny would slip in to remove them after the child fell asleep, and before she lay on them.
This morning at breakfast, Barbara’s huge anxious violet eyes sought Jenny’s. “Will Father come and visit my dolls?”
“He might if you ask him nicely, poppet,” Jenny said. Surely he would. Who could resist such an adorable child as Barbara?
Well, he would soon be home, and she hoped it wouldn’t be a brief visit before he left again for foreign climes.
*
Hanover, Germany, October 1821
Beyond the window,snow fell from a blackened sky and covered the grounds of the opulent mansion. In the overheated ballroom, Andrew, Duke of Harrow, ran a finger beneath his cravat as he stood beside his fair-haired Irish friend, Robert Stewart, Lord Castlereagh, now Marquess of Londonderry, the man who put Europe in order. They listened to the king and the Duke of Wellington reminisce about past glories.
Their voices faded as Andrew’s thoughts returned to Castlebridge, his estate in Oxfordshire, where the leaves would be turning the rich colors of autumn. Four years ago, unable to bear his sadness after his beloved Catherine died, he’d left England to become a delegate to the Vienna Congress. Since then, his diplomatic posts had kept him from home, and his visits to Castlebridge had been brief. He’d been away too long. Soon his children would be grown up, and he’d have missed their childhood. He was determined that this would be his last diplomatic mission.
Along with Castlereagh, in charge of the British delegation, they’d attended many functions such as this. Andrew glanced around the room at the familiar faces, some enjoying the music and others deep in conversation. Prince Metternich appeared at the door. He crossed the floor toward them, acknowledging King George with a bow. The prince was the founder and driving force of the Congress which sought to bring a sense of balance to Europe after the devastation wrought by nearly twenty-five years of continuous war. It seemed to Andrew that the nations of Europe sometimes resembled badly behaved children, not satisfied with what they had, always wanting more. The Congress had imposed a degree of discipline on them all, but Andrew knew there was rising dissent everywhere. How long the status quo would hold was uncertain.
“You look concerned, Your Highness,” Andrew said. “Is there anything troubling you apart from the usual difficulties?”
“I have heard some disturbing things which will be of concern to the British,” the blond prince said, his handsome face lined with worry. “We’ve received a report suggesting an attack of some kind on British soil. Unfortunately, we have no details.”
“Where does this information come from?” Andrew inquired.
“We keep a watch on several dissident groups,” the Prince said. “Our spies are attempting to ascertain more. I would advise your government to remain alert.”
Andrew feared another distraction could alter his plans to return to his estate. He prayed it would come to nothing. As the musicians struck up and dancers moved over the floor in a perfumed kaleidoscope of color, Greta, Baroness Elsenberg came through the crush in search of him.
