Fountain. Hour of ten.
R.
Aideen gazed at the note, the bare words so at odds with the curled ornate writing. The tail of the R swished across the notepaper, bold and rampant.
The demanding devil.
Smiling, she burned it in the low fire of the drawing room, recognising his tactics. Her father often used the same. Control. Even if one doesn’t hold all the cards, issue commands and the control shifts, so subtle one hardly notices.
With a shrug, she turned to survey the guests. The earlier arrival of the Duchess of Rakecombe and her son had caused a rapid chirping to ripple the room.
The Beckfords were already acquainted with the duke, but never would he have graced them with his presence without a little…persuasion.
Aideen had considered many ways to return the cane: she could have merely asked him to call, but where was the fun in that? Yet easier, an errand boy could have delivered it to him with red bow attached – no need to even see his scowling face.
But Mrs Beckford had been feeling cheerless at not having her daughter with them this Season, and Mr Beckford had lost eight guineas at piquet again, so what better way to cheer them up?
A difference of opinion as to what the pianoforte considered to be the high note and what Miss Gibbon sang caused Aideen to wince, and she plonked herself down next to Cordelia at the back of the room.
Tapping her foot in time with the wailing, an astonishingly beribboned Cordelia nudged close. “Thank you so much for the poems. However did you recover them?”
Oh, I wickedly stole into a viscountess’s room, kissed a duke and stared at thighs in tight pantaloons.
“Pfff, ’twas nothing,” she replied.
Aideen snuck a glance at said duke, also lounging at the back. An array of food had been laid out before the music had begun and he’d scoffed – if a peer of such high rank could be said to scoff – the lot.
Now he sprawled replete, eyes closed. It didn’t appear to be wholly boredom, but an outright weariness, not helped by his sombre clothes.
A wave of sadness engulfed her.
Had she really asked him here for the Beckfords’ social benefit? Or for herself?
His demanding kiss haunted her nights, his cold green eyes her days, and yet when they met, they fought like cat and dog.
Despite being the god-daughter of the noble Waterford family back home, and despite the fact Mama had been a baronet’s daughter, she was, in essence, an Irish nonentity as far as a duke was concerned.
And as such he would…could have no interest in her.
Cordelia clapped enthusiastically as the wailing ended and another young miss skipped to the pianoforte. Aideen glanced at the mantel clock. It was nearly upon the hour of ten, so she whispered to her friend of visiting the retiring room and headed off with heavy heart.
The Duke of Rakecombe strode out into the night, feeling somewhat…content.
After the over-capered sauce on his undercooked veal at home, the simple but delicious supper of the Beckfords had soothed his ire.
The claret had been damned good as well.
Now just his cane to collect, a rollicking spar of words with Miss Quinlan and all would be right with the world.
Of course, Napoleon always put a spoke in one’s wheel, but Winterbourne had hoofed it up north to locate Penbury, and so Rakecombe now focused on the search for Stafford here in London, although it had proved unproductive as yet.
Earlier in the day, he had been carped at by Stafford’s grizzled butler, who’d complained he’d not been paid for three weeks, that he couldn’t tend the closed-up house without a maid and that the kitchens had run out of apple butter jam. Sneezing, he’d also whined there was no coal. Rakecombe had never met such a sniveller.
Tomorrow he would visit coffee houses and force himself to drink the foul beverage whilst probing for gossip – surely someone had spied Stafford in London.
Time, he felt, was running out. That list of informants must be found.
Slowing his step, it wouldn’t do to seem eager, his gaze sought the small fountain at the back of the garden.
