Chapter One
Ashmead, the Midlands, 1817
Her Grace, MadelynTavernash, widowed Duchess of Glenmoor, never overimbibed. At least hardly ever, although the joy of a brother’s wedding might give cause for some indulgence, particularly the wedding of a brother she had believed lost to her for fifteen years.
As purple seeped over the oranges and reds of the spectacular sunset blessing the celebration on the lawn of Willowbrook, guests drifted away in twos and threes and family groups. Maddy sat alone, savoring the day.
The bride and groom—her half-brother, Sir Robert Benson, and Lucy, her closest friend—had slipped away hours before. Their other brother, David, the legitimate one who was the Earl of Clarion, had left some time ago to take his exhausted children home. She couldn’t bring herself to leave with them and had assured him she would ask someone to take her home, but she had neglected to do so.
No one seemed to notice her in the gloaming, where she leaned against the high back of a wicker bench set among viburnum shrubs. Watching candlelight flicker in upper windows of the manor afflicted her with a curious mix of joy, envy, and regret. She ought to stir herself before night fell, but she still felt reluctant to move. Nothing waited for her in the dower house except silence.
“Waiting for me, are you?” Rob’s cheeky friend Brynn Morgan had teased her all afternoon, turning up intermittently out of the sea of guests—what felt like the entire county—bringing mugs of ale and daring her to mingle and even to dance. Once, as the day grew late, she had let him lead her out to a vigorous country dance with the villagers, kicking up her heels to the sounds of the fiddles until she had collapsed back on her seat, laughing as she hadn’t in many years. Her mother would have lacerated her with a stone-faced tirade over it, but her mother had disappeared to the continent to Maddy’s relief.
Morgan loomed out of the shadows, his black eyes glittering.
“You came looking for me.” Maddy smiled up at him.
He sat down next to her without her bidding. “I didn’t see you leave with the earl. One worries over foolish women who keep to themselves.”
“It was too early to leave this lovely celebration. I told him I’d ask someone to see me home. I thought to ask the Corbins, but they left before I could, and the vicar—”
“Is long gone. Did you plan to spend the night on this bench, or would you let me escort you home?”
“Please.” Her voice sounded very small to her own ears. When had she succumbed to shyness?
He put one big hand on each of his muscular thighs and gazed upward. “We best get moving before dark. We’re lucky there’s a full moon tonight as it is.” He turned to peer at her directly. “I came on horseback. I don’t suppose…”
She groaned. Riding up behind him would be undignified any day. If she were honest, her brother’s stout ale had left her wobbly on her feet as well.
“Bad idea, that,” he said. “We’ll borrow Lucy’s pony and trap. Wait here.”
She called him back when he rose to go and agreed to meet him at the lane.I’m not so wobbly I can’t walk to the lane. People will think it odd, a duchess riding home in a pony cart with a half-pay colonel in the dark. Let them.Life had taught her not to let others control her behavior. She took kindness when offered.
They rode in silence down the lane and across the bridge over the steep-sided creek in the fading light. When they reached the road, the moon rose northwest of the village—as Morgan had predicted, hovering huge and bright.
“I would expect a duchess to keep a carriage. You don’t. Perhaps that’s my good fortune,” he said as they turned toward Clarion Hall and the dower house.
She ignored that last part. “I can’t afford one, nor a coachman to drive it.”
“The duke left you poorly provided for,” he murmured.
She bit her tongue. She wouldn’t discuss her reasons for refusing money from the Glenmoor estate with anyone, least of all Brynn Morgan. He respected her silence. She liked that about him.
Moments later he spoke again. “Your father too, I gather. I know he treated the earl poorly, but why did he leave you so little?”
“You know about the will, Morgan. It all went to his unofficial children.” Maddy’s father—the previous Earl of Clarion—had left a notorious last will and testament. It had listed all his bastards and their mothers by name, Rob Benson chief among them. He had stripped the estate of unentailed resources, leaving his heir virtually penniless. David Caulfield, the new Earl of Clarion, had taken it stoically, but fraud perpetrated by his mother had made it worse. Only the combined efforts of the earl, his half-brother Rob Benson, and others, including Morgan, had uncovered the plot. They had just begun to repair the damage.
When he didn’t answer, Maddy sighed. “David and I got the least he could give us, which in my case meant exactly nothing. ‘To my defiant daughter, Madelyn, I leavenothing.’”
His bark of laughter startled her so much she bounced in her seat. “Defiant? Her Grace, the Duchess of Glenmoor? What in the name of all the angels above did you ever do to the man?”
“I ran after Rob.”
“What? When the ever-belligerent Robert Benson shook the dust of Ashmead from his shoes and took the king’s shilling, you went with him?” He sounded both fascinated and horrified.
Rob Benson had been fourteen when he’d run away, devastated to discover that the man who had raised him, whom he had worshipped, was not his natural father and that Maddy, his first crush, was his sister.
“Not with. After. I got almost to Nottingham before my father’s men caught up with me. They locked me in my room for a week.”
