The Duke's Bridle Path by Burrowes, Grace, Romain, Theresa (12)

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This dinner would be awful, and he was sure Lady Ada had planned it that way. Colin was going to kill her.

Though not until after he completed his articles.

The duke’s clothes from two seasons before were made for a tall man of athletic build who delighted in bespoke tailoring. Colin was physically fit enough; one didn’t live in London without pounding the streets half the time. But the duke was several inches taller, Colin guessed, from where the seams hit. The buckskin breeches that ought to have fit like paint were too high at the waist and too baggy at the knee.

The coat was another matter. Colin suspected this one hadn’t belonged to His Grace since the duke was a youth. The butler, Chalmers, had helped Colin shrug into it, but as a result, his shoulders were drawn together, his arms awkwardly restricted. By drawing in a huge breath, then holding it, he was able to do up one button and somewhat hide the terrible waistcoat the butler had also foisted upon him.

“Why does the duke still own this clothing?” he grumbled, tugging at the bottom of the too-short coat.

“Her ladyship encouraged him to, as she thought it might serve some purpose,” said the butler. “Which it now has.” He packed Colin a trunk of similar clothing to take back to the inn with him.

Colin would be damned before he’d wear clothes of Lady Ada’s choosing again, but he had to admire the lady’s style. So, he was forbidden to display the smallest amount of displeasure? Fine. Good. He’d show her just how delightful he could be despite wearing the coat of a boy and the breeches of a Goliath.

Because there was one thing for which she hadn’t accounted: He couldn’t afford to give up.

Ada watched Colin Goddard closely as the other guests arrived. Would he be boorish and vulgar to try to embarrass her? She almost wished he would, so she could have him tossed out of her house.

Her brother’s house, that is. Ada was in charge only by chance, and her borrowed power wasn’t real.

But it must have been good enough for Goddard and the story he hoped to sniff out, because he wasn’t boorish at all. He wasn’t exactly polite either, not in a deferential way. But he was charming. He was charming in the way that only people who are utterly at ease can be charming, unconscious of themselves, their whole attention given up to the interest and comfort of others. In the too-tight coat and not-quite-fashionable accent, he chatted and laughed with all of the neighbors.

“I’m a writer,” he explained, “staying in the area. As Lady Ada and I have been acquainted through her brother”—oh, he was a slippery one!—“she invited me to dine tonight. Unfortunately, I’m not an elegant fellow, so she offered to help me out.”

“Wouldn’t say she’d done you any favors!” bellowed Squire Martin, a ruddy man with a luxuriant mustache and almost no hair on his head. “Should’ve let you wear your own kit. No need to stand on ceremony with friends.”

And just like that, Martin was in Goddard’s pocket.

Curses. She hadn’t accounted for the common masculine dislike of elegant clothing.

Perhaps the female guests would be more skeptical of this unknown writer. Besides the Martins, there were the Ponsonbys, the vicar and his wife; the local schoolmaster, a Mr. Johnson; and the headmistress of the girls’ school, a widow named Mrs. Semple.

Just as she had invited Lord and Lady Wrotham upon learning of their stay in the area, she had added Colin Goddard today. The timing was fortunate; with Goddard, the number of men and women would match. Ada would not be superfluous.

Old Mr. Talbot had been invited, as usual, but he was frail and crotchety and missing his daughter—Harriet, the new duchess—too much to attend. Ada would have a basket packed for the old gentleman later.

She hosted these dinner parties every month, a tradition she’d carried on from the time of her parents. As the heart of the Berkshire economy, the old duke and his duchess had thought it important to maintain connections with the appendages: church, schooling, horse-training. Farmers and tenants were welcomed during open days and the annual harvest ball. Would Harriet and Philippe keep up these traditions?

It wasn’t Ada’s business to know or care, but she cared nonetheless.

While the locals trickled in at whatever early time their feet or horses carried them over, Lord Wrotham and his lady wife arrived precisely at the appointed hour.

When Samuel Johnson created his dictionary in the previous century, he surely foresaw the existence of his lordship in the definitions of punctilious. Scrupulous. Meticulous. No attention was overlooked by his lordship—and no trespass either. He was a handsome man of about thirty years, with brown hair and a long, narrow nose. His clothing was expensive but not flashy, beautifully tailored.

Reluctantly, Ada admitted that he cut a fine figure. She was glad she’d donned a new gown, one in shades of cream and white, all dotted over with silk embroidery and finished with a lovely trim of twining vines in the same silk. Colin Goddard, who was looking as ridiculous as Ada had hoped, cast her an appreciative look that had her stomach in a flutter.

All part of the act, she reminded herself.

Lady Wrotham looked near Ada’s age, twenty-four or thereabout. She had a crown of blond braids, sparkling brown eyes, and a pleasant smile. Ada had intended to dislike her, but she couldn’t manage the feat.

“Thank you for the invitation,” the viscountess said, introducing herself as Serena. “I wouldn’t have felt right about being so near Wrotham’s old acquaintances and not paying my respects.”

From the frank look she gave Ada, it was clear she knew exactly what sort of acquaintances Wrotham and Ada had been. From her smile, it was clear that she hoped to set it behind them. Ada was willing. How long ago that betrothal seemed now.

Through the numerous courses of dinner, as they sat around the table in proper man-woman-man-woman fashion, Colin Goddard kept his dinner companions smiling. He kept firing heated glances in Ada’s direction. A particular favorite of his was to sip at his glass of wine, then look at her over the top.

Over the top indeed. Well, she’d asked for it. And Wrotham, stick-stiff and serious, was noting these attentions with a grave expression that gave Ada a lowly sort of satisfaction. Just because you didn’t want me doesn’t mean I’m unappealing. Unattractive. Unlovable.

Even if the proof of this was false, nothing of the sort, she found herself forgetting… almost. Goddard was a most convincing actor.

After the last dishes had been removed, the women went into the drawing room—but just barely had Ada settled next to Serena Wrotham when the men filed into the room as well.

“Couldn’t stay away any longer,” said Goddard blithely. “Port and politics have nothing on you ladies.” When he fired another lovesick look at Ada, Lady Wrotham looked at her knowingly.

“Shall we have cards?” Ada asked. “Or a dramatic reading? Mr. Goddard, as a writer, surely you’d enjoy reading aloud to us all.”

He hitched at his ridiculous huge breeches. “I’d make a dull job of it,” he said. “I never can do justice to another man’s words. But if you’ll allow me to mangle them a bit, I could monologue for you.”

Putting a hand to his heart, he intoned,

“My mistress’ eyes are like a stormy sea;

Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;

Her breasts are darker than a blond lace be;

If hairs be wires, brown wires grow on her head.”

Ada’s cheeks flamed. “That is horrid. You should apologize to William Shakespeare right now for treating one of his sonnets so.”

Goddard bowed. “As long as the lady doesn’t ask me to apologize for sincere words, Mr. Shakespeare may have my heartiest plea for pardon.”

What a flirt he was. Stop pretending, she wanted to say. Never stop pretending, she wanted to say too. Lady Ada Ellis, daughter and sister to Dukes of Lavelle, had never been the sort of woman with whom men flirted outrageously.

Goddard contorted a few more poems for the group’s amusement, then the Ponsonbys and Martins settled to cards while Lady Wrotham played several pieces on the pianoforte. Beautifully, of course. When her husband joined his voice with hers in a duet, Ada had to look away for a moment, studying her ringless hands with fierce determination to hold back tears.

Lord and Lady Wrotham were well suited, and that was a fine thing. Ada neither missed him nor regretted him. No, she regretted the four years that had passed—that she had allowed to pass—without another journey to London, another Season, another suitor. Grief for her eldest brother’s sudden death had brought her home; her father’s death the following year had kept her here. But why did she stay here so constantly now? The dukedom needed her, she thought, in her brother Philippe’s absence.

Maybe that was only an excuse.

She kept a polite smile on her face for the remainder of the evening. The Ponsonbys were the first to depart, as usual; the vicar was an early riser. Squire Martin had more than once fallen asleep in his cups in the armchair before the drawing-room fire, but tonight his wife elbowed him out of a drowse and hurried him along. The Wrothams and teachers left with gracious thanks for a fine evening too, and before the sun had fully sunk sleepy below the horizon, Ada was alone.

Wait. Why was she alone? Where had Goddard got off to?

He wasn’t in the dining room drinking port. He wasn’t in the chair before the fire, and he certainly wasn’t hiding beneath the pianoforte or behind a potted palm.

Ada found Chalmers and asked him whether he’d spotted their wayward guest. With a pained expression, the butler directed her ladyship to the study.

The study? Where a hungry sort of reporter could make a meal of the dukedom’s accounts? Could browse through Ada’s favorite books, or crack open the seals of her correspondence?

She strode down the corridor to the study, picking up speed. She was almost at a run by the time she reached the familiar old door and wrenched it open.

“Ha!” She sprang into the room, prepared to catch him doing something inappropriate.

But he wasn’t. He’d shrugged out of the tight coat—she couldn’t blame him for that, since Philippe hadn’t worn it since he was fifteen—and was sitting in waistcoat and shirt-sleeves on the desk, flipping idly through a poetry book she’d left out.

At her dramatic entrance, he looked up mildly. “Hullo. What a lovely noise that was. Feeling rambunctious, are you?”

She sniffed, drawing herself up straight. “You’re meant to leave with the other callers, Mr. Goddard, not go prowling around the house.”

“Ah, my manners went begging.” He sat in her favorite chair before the fire, the one in which she’d been planning to sit, and stuck out his legs, slinging one ankle over another.

“They have. You shouldn’t sit in the presence of a standing lady.”

“I know. But I behaved myself so well this evening, wouldn’t you say?”

“Better than I expected. I’m becoming familiar with your wiles, though.”

“Say it isn’t so! Doesn’t familiarity breedeth contempt, or so goes the old saying?”

“That depends on the one with whom I’m becoming familiar.” She slid around the desk to scan its surface. Writing implements. Paper. The ledgers were tidied away, and she couldn’t tell whether he’d opened the desk’s drawers to get at them.

“So suspicious,” he said. “I do have a code of ethics, of sorts. If it’s closed, I don’t open it. If it’s on a shelf, I don’t take it down.”

Mollified, she left the desk—though not before snapping up the book he’d been paging through. “An unconventional code for a reporter.” She found another chair, wrenched it over to the fireplace and stuck it beside his. “I wonder if it puts you at a disadvantage.”

“Maybe so. But that’s my problem, isn’t it?” His calm was unfailing.

She tried to reply in kind. “The neighbors hadn’t had such a nice time in a while. I thank you.”

His grin was pure wickedness. “And what about Lord Wrotham? We put his nose out of joint a little.”

“A very little. It is an uncommonly large nose. I did like his wife, which I wasn’t expecting to.”

“He doesn’t deserve her.”

Ada looked at him curiously. “You take my part with admirable prejudice.”

“I didn’t like him. I’m glad you didn’t marry him.”

“I came to the same conclusion soon after he jilted me. If the only thing he wanted of me was my family’s good name…”

“Then he was a fool.”

Ada smiled. “Spoken like a man who recently fabricated a shocking alternative to one of Shakespeare’s sonnets.”

“You weren’t shocked at all. You liked it. Shall I finish my recitation? I only did the first four lines of the poem. The next bit is meant to be about your cheeks not being rosy, or your breath not being like perfume, but I can make it much more enticing.”

“Ah… that’s all right.”

He shrugged. “For the best, since your cheeks are looking rosy right now. Embarrassed? I was only doing what I promised. I’m besotted with you, or don’t you recall?”

“Believe me, I haven’t forgotten a word of our earlier conversation.”

He nodded at the book she held. “You’re holding that so tightly your knuckles are going white.”

She released the book as if it were a hot poker, letting it thump to the floor. “I always hold books like that when I come upon someone flipping through them unexpectedly, thus violating his professed code of ethics.”

“I did not. You left it open on your desk, which meant it was all right for me to look through it.” He hesitated. “It’s not in English, is it?”

Her brows lifted. “No, it’s not. Couldn’t you tell? It’s German poetry.”

He shifted in the chair, drawing his legs in from their sprawl. “I wasn’t aware it was possible to write a poem in German. An argument, yes, but a poem?”

“A few people have managed it over the years. I’ve been reading this one so long, it’s more of an old friend than a mere book by now.” And she’d dropped it on the floor, poor book. She bent to pick it up, dusting off its binding of faded red morocco leather.

“Why this one?”

She smiled. “It was the only book small enough to fit into my pocket and hide from the governess.”

“Your governess wouldn’t allow you to read poetry in German? Strict woman.”

“She was German,” said Ada, as if that explained everything, and Goddard laughed.

“I was never encouraged to read much,” she added. “Numbers were my particular gift, and therefore I had to work with them.”

Numbers, numbers. Ever since she’d joined Philippe for his childhood lessons from their governess, the family had made it known that Ada had a head for numbers. And so she did. A column of numbers was as easy for her to read and make sense of as a page of words.

But it was words, twisting, mysterious words, that Ada really loved. One couldn’t jot columns of numbers at random in one’s bedchamber when the lights were low. But one could write—and hide the pages, knowing that disappointment and punishment would follow if they were ever found. Her observations ran toward the ordinary and wry: on which days the governess’s breath smelled like whisky, or how much less time the lower housemaid took to change the linens on her own, as opposed to when one of the footmen helped her behind a closed door.

Such observations were not encouraged. Whenever she’d spoken of them, the conversation had been turned toward numbers again.

“Dear me. Are you a mathematical genius?” Goddard adopted a tone of mock distress.

“That’s putting it too strongly. But I had a knack for addition. And because it came easily, I had to learn more and more maths.”

“So you are a genius. And here I sit in your presence. I knew I felt a warm glow.”

“That’s the fire, thank you very much. And I have a talent for maths, but that doesn’t mean I enjoy the subject.”

“Don’t you?” He looked genuinely interested.

“I manage my brother’s estate in his absence, and I keep the accounts. It’s… all right. But it’s not for me—does that make sense?”

“Maybe. But why do you spend so much time on it?”

She thought about it. “Just this: I want to help my brother, but I know anyone with a decent head could do this work just as well. If he ever chooses to hire a steward, he won’t need me at all.”

Recently, Philippe had been dropping hints that he wanted to do just this. You should go to London, Ada. We should hire someone to do this, Ada. You can’t be wanting to spend your life doing this, Ada.

No, she didn’t. But what else was there for a spinster with no other family?

“Sisters aren’t kept around because of the good they can do,” Colin Goddard said. “Or so I’ve gathered. I never had one myself.”

She traced the tooled shapes on the tiny poetry book’s binding. “Why would one keep a sister around, then?”

“Because a brother loves her and wants her to have a safe and comfortable place to live.” He leaned forward, took up the poker, and jabbed it into the glowing coals a few times. “Though that’s only a guess. I’m much more diabolical. I keep my brother around because he’s a workhorse and I can take advantage of him.”

“I sincerely doubt that.” When he sat back again, she said, “You tore a strip off me earlier with all your talk about morals and privilege.”

“Is that what I did? I wondered why a feeling of unaccustomed power was coursing through me. Now I know.”

“Yes, that was it. And I let you because I didn’t know if it was worth punching back. So to speak.”

“Of course it was! I’ve been told before that my face is very punchable.”

He had a winning way, she could not deny it. That smile, that comfort in his own skin. It made one want to stick to his side and tell him everything. She wondered if this talent had led him to writing, or if it had been the other way ’round.

“It wasn’t your face, but the words coming from it. However, if I engaged in every argument someone wanted to foist upon me, as the sister and representative of the Duke of Lavelle, I’d never get anything else done.”

His waving hair glinted in the firelight. “What a contentious life you lead.”

“You have no idea,” she said dryly. “But you’ll be pleased to know, I’m sure, that I like you more than I expected to. You were ridiculous this evening, but you acted with decency.”

“Thank you.” Somehow, from his seated position, he managed a servile bow.

“Which is why I’m going to tear a strip off you before we go any further with this bargain of ours.”

He snapped upright. “Ah. It’s about the writing again, isn’t it? Why does this bother you so much, Lady Ada? If you’re not hurt, why not let me benefit?”

She chose her words carefully, like picking her way through a quagmire. “Because it does hurt. Scandal devoured my eldest brother’s memory. It brought me the humiliation of a jilting. And now it dogs my remaining brother.”

The on-demandes after Jonas’s accidental death had been brutal. Was Lord Chaddleworth’s fall truly an accident, or did he arrange it to cover his despondence? Was it because of debt? An illicit love affair? Could she have met the writer of those questions, she’d have given him answers that he wouldn’t forget for a lifetime.

Jonas’s death was exactly what it had seemed. Horse plus man plus jump plus wall—plus muddy earth and not enough training—equaled a broken neck, unconsciousness, inevitable death. But because of The Gentleman’s Periodical, questions that ought never to have been asked were then on everyone’s mind. And from their minds to their lips was but a small journey.

Ada sighed, remembering. “Let me put a different perspective to you, Mr. Goddard. When you write about someone and collect your pay, do you ever think of what comes next?”

“Always. I think about spending it on bread and clothing and paying the rent on the rooms I share with my brother.”

“Do not be deliberately obtuse.”

He schooled his expression into one of greater seriousness. “You mean, I suppose, do I ever think of what comes next for the people my brother and I write about. No, I do not. I don’t have time to. We have to find someone or something else to write about.”

“You spread rumor and scandal for profit, never thinking about the pain caused by your written word. The strained marriages, the broken engagements. The friendships befouled by jealousy and doubt. Everyone you write about is a real person, but they are not real to you. As you just said, you don’t have time to think of them as real. You don’t think of them at all.”

Her crisp, calm words were darts into the blithe armor with which he covered himself. With which he had to cover himself, to shift from one voice to another, one false persona to another. To earn the money that took care of himself and his brother.

“I can’t afford to,” he said. “The people I write about are those who can afford much more than I. But I am sorry for any pain I’ve caused you. I didn’t do you justice.”

He wanted to say more, but he clamped down on further apology. What good would it do for her to know he’d thought up the scandalous questions that had dragged her life askew?

She looked at him with those silvery eyes of hers, and something tight in her posture relaxed. “There you go, acting like a human being. What am I to do with you?”

“I have two ideas. First, you could call me Colin. And second, you could give me some clothes that fit properly, or else let me wear my own for the remainder of the fortnight.”

A smile sneaked across her features, then vanished. “Yes to both. And you may call me Ada, since you are madly in love with me.”

With that, she bid him good night. When she swept out of the study, leaving him alone, his heart was still stammering over her final words.

She was one to watch out for, was this Lady Ada Ellis. Frankness and humor and all that collected breeding—Lord have mercy, if he didn’t feel himself going soft about the edges already. It would be only too easy to pretend to be in love with her. The difficult part would be remembering why he was truly here with Samuel: to take notes, to write their pieces, to make money, to leave.

He didn’t realize until he was back at the White Hare that she’d never specified the favor she would claim of him if she won their bargain.