Chapter Two
Tetbery Estate never ceased to be an adventure.
At least, that was the polite, proper term for it. From the day he was born to the day his father passed, Nicholas Harding had received a strict education in propriety from his governesses, his private tutors and then teachers at Eton, and most importantly, his own family. Those with good breeding must have good manners, so that they made good choices which led to good alliances with other families of equally good bloodlines.
Good, good, good. As he stood on this bloody cold beach in the out-of-the-way, tiny village of Bocka Morrow, the litany repeated in his mind. It had been his mother’s favorite word, applied to everything from a pleasant day to a catastrophe of epic proportions, because Amelia Harding did not believe in pessimism. In order to be morose, one must be willing to admit that there was something wrong with one’s life, and Amelia clung firmly to the illusion presented to greater society that she led an enviable, idyllic life as the Duchess of Wycliffe.
Even if her marriage to Nicholas’s father had long ago passed loveless and veered into petty manipulation and cruel aggression on both sides. Until the day his mother took a fatally large dose of laudanum, Nicholas had never dared speak of his life as anything but good.
Now, with both of his parents gone, he was still a Harding, and Hardings kept up appearances. Nicholas, as the only son and heir to Wycliffe Manor and all its holdings, had been raised to believe that his word counted.
Most people treated his authority as a foregone conclusion.
They did not look him in the eye and demand—the audacity of her, his mother would have said—to know why he’d arrived at his own blasted property.
Even if it was property he’d never wanted, property he’d gone out of his way to avoid until it had become painfully obvious to society that he wasn’t doing his duty. He couldn’t afford the beau monde’s scorn, not if he hoped to have a better session in the House of Lords than the previous Season.
That was what mattered. Not this unsettlingly wild and dark estate, and definitely not Felicity Fields’s lack of respect for him.
After spending so many summers here, he ought to know that Felicity was not like normal people. Since arriving at Tetbery as a child, she’d never left the estate. No trips to London for a proper Season, like her position should have dictated. His aunt had insisted upon seclusion after the death of the earl, and Felicity had paid the price for it.
Not that she’d ever seemed to mind. She said the first thing that popped out of her mouth and did precisely what she wanted, with no repercussions. He envied her for that.
But like this blighted estate he’d never wanted, Felicity was his responsibility now.
So things had to change. Starting with how she spoke to him.
“This is my estate,” he reminded her, matching her coldness with his own brand of disregard—lofty hauteur, perfected from years of reminding people who he was. “And it is, after all, the holidays. I wished to spend it with the people I care about.”
That was true, at least. He cared about Felicity—he just didn’t understand her.
“Then you should have stayed in London, or gone to Wycliffe Manor. Not come here.” She peered down the bridge of her nose at him, making him feel as though he were much, much smaller than he was.
It was clear she did not share his sentiment. He ignored the tiny twinge of hurt at that realization, reminding himself that he did not need her to like him to do right by her.
“I would have asked you to come to London for the holidays, but then the wedding happened.” His friend getting married had provided a convenient excuse to leave Town after the failure of his first bill.
“I wouldn’t have wanted to leave here.” Not only did she narrow her eyes, but she dropped her hand to her hip—a very shapely hip, he was dismayed to admit. That didn’t seem fair at all.
At thirteen, she’d been all long limbs and too-thin body, like a baby deer who hadn’t quite grasped how to be graceful yet. He remembered her wild red locks: frizzy waves back then, not the defined curls she boasted now. Some errant crimson wisps had escaped from underneath her bonnet, caressing her heart-shaped face gently in contrast to her bellicose way of sizing him up.
Her eyes took on a softer light, a small smile pulling at her all-too-full lips as she turned, facing the grayish-green waters of the Atlantic Ocean. He wondered, as he had so many times during his youth, what made her like the waves so much. He saw nothing special—Tetbery’s shoreline had always felt too unkempt, too fierce. He preferred the smoke and soot of London with its tall buildings, heralding a new era of trade and prosperity.
She let out a deep, contemplative sigh. “I am exactly where I want to be.”
That made one of them. He hadn’t been at home in his own skin since his days at Eton, surrounded by the same friends he was due to meet in a few days’ time.
He’d agreed to attend Lord Blackwater’s wedding because he’d felt he needed to, as if by seeing his friends again he’d be reminded of the optimistic lad he’d once been, convinced the world was at his feet.
And if nothing else, it beat spending the holidays alone.
“Sometimes in life, we do not get what we want.” Sadness slipped into his words, catching him by surprise. He must be out of sorts, if he had forgotten how to pretend that everything was fine.
She spun on her heel so jerkily, yet with such speed, it was as if an unknown hand had pulled her strings. He was used to those quick, shaky movements; struggling to make sense of her, his juvenile mind had often compared her to a marionette. Yet he was not used to what came next—the flash of ire in her eyes, the angry flaring of her nostrils. He could not remember when he had seen Felicity impassioned.
“What would you, Duke, know about not getting what you want?” Each word hit him like an arrow to the chest, so absolute was her aim.
She’d always been able to cut him to the quick, she who always told the brutal, unflinching truth—the words he did not want to hear, because they revealed just how little he truly knew about himself.
When they’d been younger, he’d been able to feign amusement. She hated being laughed at, above all other things, and so he did it often because it was the swiftest way to make her hurt the way he did. He was not proud of that, but he’d been a boy, unable to fathom why this flat, unemotional girl affected him so.
He still did not know.
He stood up straighter, peering down his nose autocratically at her, but he could not summon up the energy to laugh. He was too tired—from the journey, he told himself, and not from pretending all of his bloody life to be someone he was not.
After all, as Felicity had reminded him, he was Duke.
That should be enough. It had to be enough.
“I know enough about the world to understand that you desperately need someone to curb your wild ways.” He managed not to wince at how much he sounded like his father, delivering one of his famous diatribes on conduct. Nicholas had never matched up to his father’s standards.
But hadn’t that made him stronger? He knew how the world worked now: money and power granted him certain privileges, gave him a chance at success.
He only wanted the same for Felicity. She ought to be taking her proper place in society, not wasting away on this backwater estate. If he didn’t help her, she’d end up as the strange spinster children told stories about and pointed at when they passed her in the market. Hell, she already had the gothic estate to fuel their tales.
“As though you are the one to teach me. You, who is an irresponsible rogue.” Felicity let out a caustic laugh. “What makes you so uniquely qualified, Nicholas? It is not as if you are smarter than me.”
He knew that was true—hell, he couldn’t think of a single person more learned than Felicity—but it stung to have it pointed out so bluntly. “This is precisely what I’m talking about. You cannot go on informing people that you are smarter than them.”
Her nose wrinkled. “But I am.”
“It’s not polite.”
“The truth rarely is.” She shrugged. “This is why I do not concern myself with what’s polite, only what is factual. If you asked me, you could stand to learn that too.”
He had forgotten that talking to Felicity was akin to beating one’s head against the wall repeatedly. “No one asked you. No one ever asks you. You simply give your opinion whether or not it’s wanted.”
Instead of looking defeated, Felicity’s eyes took on a calculating gleam he found highly troubling, because it usually indicated he was about to be thoroughly intellectually trounced. “Which is precisely what you are doing. It’s not fun, is it? Having someone appear suddenly, disrupting all your plans, and then they have the audacity to demand you should change who you are?”
He ignored the last part of her statement. “What do you mean, suddenly? I sent word I was coming.”
“No one told me.” Her eyes narrowed as her lips pursed into a thin red line.
His stomach tumbled. That was her going-to-war face. Oh, his staff was rightly and truly buggered. He should probably go warn them, but for the moment he was relieved her ire would be directed at someone else for a while.
“I’m sure that was just an oversight.”
That was the wrong thing to say, because her eyes narrowed even more, until she was basically looking at him through tiny slits. The brisk wind picked up around them, ripping through his thick wool coat as though it was nothing. It was always colder by the seashore—one of the many reasons he loathed Tetbery. He shoved his hands into his pockets, hunching his shoulders to keep the wind out.
If he’d been speaking with anyone else, he would have long ago insisted they move indoors. But because it was Felicity, he simply stood there like an imbecile, as if remaining out in the fearsome cold would abate the fire of her temper.
It did not work.
Unlike him, she did not hunch. She was properly prepared for this weather, with her long black wool coat atop her long-sleeved black walking gown, and an enormous black bonnet draped with black crepe. She still wore full mourning, even though it’d been six months and custom indicated she should move to half.
She’d never been one for half-measures.
He told himself her fearsome appearance was why he felt intimidated. Her ivory skin was a stark contrast against the inky darkness swallowing her whole. Were it not for the fiery red of her hair, or the hint of pink upon her cheeks from the December air, he might have thought her a ghost, so otherworldly did she look.
And for a moment she was silent—maybe he’d get a reprieve.
But then she notched up her chin, looking him dead in the eye, and he knew this was battle was far from over.
“Interesting.” Felicity still had the startling ability to make one-word answers as destructive as a black powder bomb.
He had the unsettling sensation he was going to regret this, yet he asked, “What’s interesting?”
“I find it interesting—” Those four words sounded like the basest of insults “—that you can show up for a wedding, but not for the funeral of your supposedly beloved aunt.”
“I sent word about that too.” He had, hadn’t he? The last six months had been a blur, with constant debates in the House of Lords about the Night Watch Bill he’d written—the first bill he’d taken the lead on. “I couldn’t leave London. The bill would have failed.”
He’d had so many hopes for that bill. The logic was sound: London needed a policing force that worked as an efficient machine, with accountability and communication between all the different subsections of the city.
His bill would have made that possible. Brought justice to the seven people who had brutally lost their lives on Ratcliffe Highway—for seemingly no reason at all. Months later, the only tie the Runners could find between the victims and the murderer was that they all lived in the impoverished East End.
Felicity coughed pointedly, bringing him back to the present.
“And did it pass, your beloved bill?” Given how arch she looked, she already knew the answer.
“No.” It had, in fact, failed so spectacularly that one of the most prominent lords had actually lit the bill on fire in front of him, while ranting about government-run police forces being the very devil.
So much for being important.
So much for changing the world.
His stomach sloshed, remembering the sickening descriptions of the murders in the penny press. Two families, gone. A young apprentice with so much to live for. A mother, her skull bashed in with a maul. An infant, dead in his cradle.
Senseless, gruesome violence perpetuated upon society’s most vulnerable.
And he’d wanted so badly to stop it from ever happening again.
Felicity let out an undignified snort of derision. That was the proverbial last feather to break the horse’s back, for he felt his frustration spill over, until he no longer cared if he angered her further. He was trying to help her, devil take it, and she’d done nothing but point out his shortcomings with a truly frightening exactness.
“Look, I’m here now.” He threw up his hands, already starting to regret coming back to Bocka Morrow. “And whether you approve or not, Tetbery Estate belongs to me. So you can stay out here in the bitter cold as long as you want, but I’m going back inside to my library, where I shall have my butler serve me a hot cup of tea.”
She opened her mouth to retort, but he didn’t give her a chance to finish. He turned on his heel and stalked off. She called his name, but he didn’t stop.
Felicity Fields might be the smartest person alive, but he’d be damned before he let her have the last word.