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 was she didn’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’t fact, 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.”
“They say, do they?” Baldwin said softly. “Do they also have a reason why an American would come here to do his shopping when there is so much tension between his country and ours at present?”
His mother shrugged. “Not really. I’ve heard whispers he may sympathize a bit more with our side in the current environment.”
Baldwin scrunched up his nose. Although he was certainly a good British subject and supported his government in all their endeavors, he didn’t like the idea of a traitor. Even one from the other side.
“An American?” he groaned, pacing the room and running a hand through his hair. “Have we really sunk so far?”
She set her papers aside. “I don’t know, Baldwin, because I am aware you keep secrets from me. But I think you know the answer, don’t you?”
He pursed his lips and refused to answer one way or another.
When he had been silent for too long, she got up. “This man is rumored to have fifty thousand to settle onto his daughter, and he is wild about the idea of marrying into a title. What better title is there than that of Sheffield? You are twenty-seventh in line for the throne. That may not mean anything to you or to your friends, but to this man and his very new money, it means a great deal.”
“Fifty thousand,” he repeated, the words sounding and tasting very bitter. With fifty thousand he could hold off the creditors and invest…not gamble…invest. “All right,” he whispered. “All right. I will consider your American.”
His mother’s face lit up, and she pressed a quick kiss to his cheek. She opened her mouth as if to say something more, but before she could, there was the sound of thundering hooves from the drive. Both turned toward the window to see the Duke of Dunburrow’s carriage coming to a stop in the round.
“Oh, Charlotte and Ewan are here!” his mother gasped, clapping her hands together.
“Let’s greet them,” Baldwin said, motioning to the door. She scurried out and he followed, relieved to leave the talk of blunt and heiresses and everything else behind. It was necessary, he knew that, but that fact made it no less oppressive.
More oppressive, actually.
He stepped onto the stone front steps just as one of his oldest and dearest friends, Ewan, Duke of Dunborrow, stepped down. He turned back and held out a hand for his bride. As Baldwin’s sister stepped into view, Baldwin caught his breath. There was no denying the happiness she felt. It was written all over her beautiful face as she leaned up to touch her husband’s cheek and whisper something to him.
Ewan had always been a serious person. Baldwin understood why. Hell, he was a serious person, himself. But his new brother-in-law’s seriousness had come from something deeper. Born mute, he’d spent a lifetime being treated differently, even horribly. But now he looked…bright as he smiled at whatever his new bride had said. He tucked Charlotte’s hand into the crook of his elbow to guide her up the stairs.
“They are a handsome couple,” his mother breathed, putting words to Baldwin’s own thoughts.
He nodded. “Made all the more handsome by their happiness, I think.”
She glanced at him briefly, and he saw a flicker of sadness, of regret pass over her face. He ignored it, ignored the twist in his gut at the sight and the meaning of it. And his family reached the top step at that moment to save him from more of it.
“Mama, Baldwin,” Charlotte said as she slipped from Ewan’s touch and embraced first her mother, then her brother. Baldwin’s smile became less forced as she pulled away and looked him up and down. “Are you eating?” she asked.
Ewan grinned and pulled her back, signing quickly to her. While he generally communicated via writing, he and Charlotte had created their own hand language as children and that made things easier.
“I am not being too pushy,” Charlotte laughed before she stuck her tongue out at her husband. “Tell him I’m not pushy, Baldwin—I must have someone have my side.”
“Yes, you are,” Baldwin laughed. “But I miss your pushiness. Welcome back to London, come in before the skies open up and let’s eat so you stop pestering me about my weight.”
She swatted his arm gently and then turned back to her husband. They all entered the house and back into the sitting room where Baldwin had earlier been with his mother. The duchess gathered up her papers as Charlotte poured tea for everyone. Baldwin stood aside as his little family buzzed and interacted. He was happy for Charlotte and Ewan. They had not had an easy time coming to accept their love and their future. But here they were. And in fact, they were the fourth of his large group of friends, his duke club, that had found such powerful and beautiful love in the last year.
And here he was, preparing for a Season where he had to find a wife. Full stop—that was his only job for the next few months. And yet he wasn’t looking for love like Charlotte and Ewan had found. He would have no soul mate, no person he looked at like she was the only person in the world. No person who would love him for all his faults and failures, as well as for the title that hung around his neck.
No, he was looking for a mercenary lady who would fill his coffers for the benefit of being called “Her Grace”.
He resented that. In that moment, as he watched Ewan rest a hand on Charlotte’s lower back while they stood across the room with the Duchess of Sheffield, Baldwin resented it like hell.
But there was no way around it, it seemed. He had not set this ball to rolling down the hill, but he hadn’t stopped it, either. He had, in fact, added to its weight after his father’s death with his own bad decisions and equally bad impulses.
So if he did not get the happy ending of his friends and his sister, perhaps he deserved that.
Ewan met his eyes and tilted his head slightly. He signed something to Charlotte and then began to cross the room. “Bollocks,” Baldwin muttered, but he smiled as his brother-in-law came to his side. “Donburrow.”
Ewan dug into his pocket and withdrew a silver notebook and short pencil. Swiftly, he wrote a few lines and handed it over. “What’s wrong?”
Baldwin drew in a long breath. “You know, everyone keeps asking me that. Do I look so very terrible? I’m beginning to feel insulted.”
If he had hoped Ewan would smile at his jesting, he was disappointed. Instead, Ewan wrote, “I’m your friend. Can’t you tell me?”
Baldwin squeezed his eyes shut. How often had he wished to tell his friends about his position? Especially as the dire straights he was in became more and more clear. He knew he would find their support and sympathy if he spilled his secrets.
But he would also find their judgment. For how could they not judge him? He’d made things worse by acting just like his father. He didn’t want them to know that while he pretended to be honorable and decent and settled that he was a wastrel.
And beyond that, he also knew that if he whispered to Ewan the truth, Donburrow would immediately offer help—in the form of blunt. So would all of his friends. And that humiliation was perhaps worse than he could bear. To have his friends heap charity upon him, to have them talk about him behind his back in subdued, mournful tones, to owe them more than he did just for their friendship?
No, he had some pride left.
“It’s nothing, I assure you,” Baldwin said softly, turning his face so that Ewan wouldn’t press.
His friend let out a sigh, but if he intended to pry further, he was cut off when Charlotte called out, “Do stop glowering in the corner, you two, and come join us.”
Ewan gave Baldwin one last look. One that needed no written translation. A look that told Baldwin that Ewan was there for him. That he would help if it were needed.
Baldwin clapped him on the shoulder. “I know,” he said. “Now come on. You should know better than most that my sister will not be denied.”
Ewan’s face brightened a bit and they walked together to join the ladies for their tea. With great effort Baldwin shook off the resentments, he shook off the weight on his shoulders. The first ball of the Season was in two days. Until then, he was going to enjoy his last few hours of freedom.
Until then, he was going to do his damnedest to forget what the future held. And what he was bound to do in order to save it for them all.