“Leo, just try it. It’s not even as high as your waist.”
Thus said Poppy Hayworth, who looked as pretty as a spring morning in a simple yellow gown. Leo had entered the parlor of the Westfair town house to see all the furniture lined up in a motley march.
This, she had informed Leo when he entered the parlor, was so that he could overcome his fear of heights one small step at a time.
“No,” he said.
“Also,” she added, “I pulled the furniture all about so Ubie would clearly find my behavior worse than yours.”
He should have known. There was always a good reason for whatever Poppy did.
“But if I climb upon it,” he pointed out, “then my behavior would become at least as bad as yours. Nice try, Hayworth, but it won’t convince me.”
Leo scrubbed a hand over his eyes. He hadn’t slept well the night before; too many things to mull over. This morning, he was feeling more jittery than usual: unable to focus on the newspaper, unable to attend to the steward or make sense of the accounts Richard had left behind. Not that there was much sense to those on the best of days.
“I’m not climbing on the furniture, Poppy,” he added. “You can’t know how many times my uncle railed at me for doing just that.”
“Bah.” She gave a shake to the back of a Louis Quatorze chair that had surely cost a small fortune. “You’re the duke now. You can rail right back at him. Here, I’ll help you along.” She extended a hand.
“No touching,” he said. “My contract is most clear on that matter.”
She shot him a withering look that bloomed into a smile, just as a crabbed old voice sounded from the doorway. “What have you done to this room, Leo?”
Thus had arrived Uncle Bernard. Ubie. Bernard Weatherby, seventy-five-time winner of the annual Most Crotchety Person in England Award. At least in Leo’s head.
Leo turned toward the doorway. “Hullo, Uncle. Thought I’d make it easy for you to take your pick of the chairs.” He crossed the room to offer the old man an arm, but Bernard waved it off with an angry gesture.
Bernard had been angry from the day he’d joined his sister’s household seventeen years before. Much older than Leo’s mother, he’d lost his parents, his wife, his daughter, his other siblings all in quick succession. Perhaps this was why he’d decided to hate almost everyone else he spent time with—except Richard, of course, and Poppy. He was whippet-thin and tall, though the years had stooped his back and whitened his hair. His skin was papery, his hands knobby, his form frail. But his brows were as thick and black as ever, above suspicious eyes much the same green as Leo’s own.
“I don’t need your help, and I don’t need a damned chair. Oh, hullo there, Poppy dear.” The change in Bernard’s tone as he shuffled across the room was striking. “Sorry that my nephew has pulled the room into chaos.”
“Oh, no, you’ll have to blame me for that,” she said without a flutter of distress as she sank onto the chaise at the far end of the line of furniture. “I wanted to teach him to wire-walk, but he doesn’t want to learn.”
“Doesn’t want to learn?” Bernard frowned, easing himself into the Louis Quatorze chair. “That’s not very gracious to our guest, Leo.”
With an effort, Leo kept his voice even. “Sorry. I’m not very gracious. Fortunately, Poppy is a kind soul who has forgiven my faults.” Across the room, dim with heavy drapery, he tried to shoot her a speaking glance. Let’s bring up the fake engagement at once.
“It wasn’t as taxing as all that,” she said. “But look, Ubie, before the tea tray comes in, we’ve got to give you some news.”
“Bad news, hm?” The old man sank against the back of the chair, looking resigned.
“No. Good news,” Leo said. He caught her eye, and when she nodded, he added, “The very best. Poppy has agreed to marry me.”
He probably ought to have flowered it up some. Poppy will make me the happiest man alive, or some blather like that. The truth was, nothing about this fake engagement was making him very happy at all. Especially not the expressions on Bernard’s face, which flickered through surprise, disbelief, suspicion, resignation, and a host of others as servants brought in tea things before leaving the trio alone in the parlor again.
“Did you discuss it with her cousin?” Bernard stuck out his lower jaw.
“Of course not,” Poppy spoke up. She rose from the chaise and marched to the tea table. Quickly, Leo dragged a chair before it for her, then another for himself, so he could sit by her as she poured out. “I am a spinster of twenty-four years. I don’t need anyone’s permission to wed. Certainly not that of my father’s second cousin once removed.”
As if he’d heard not a word of this, Bernard shook his head. “No manners at all, Leo. No respect for tradition.” His hands quavered as he accepted his tea, rattling the china cup in its saucer.
For God’s sake. Talking to his uncle was like fighting an automaton. Whatever Leo did, the old man would strike back in the same way as always, heedless and ceaseless.
Leo took a gulp of tea, scalding and strong and black, before he allowed himself to reply. “I can only hope Poppy will be able to make something of my humble carcass.”
“Nonsense!” Poppy added sugar to her own cup. “I would never have agreed to marry you if you weren’t the very picture of…” She trailed off, searching for a word.
“Handsomeness? Charm? Persuasiveness?” Leo stretched out his legs, crossing one ankle idly over the other.
“Respectability,” she said firmly. “And why you should not brag of it yourself, I don’t know.”
“Because I’m modest, as well as all those other things.” Tipping his cup up, he drained it dry, then set cup and saucer back onto the tea tray.
Bernard grunted his displeasure. “Richard couldn’t pull the dukedom’s finances back into order. And when you left, you only made things worse. How will you support a wife?”
“I don’t have to support her. She can balance on anything.”
Leo was not sure who rolled their eyes harder: Bernard or Poppy.
“Nonsense,” said his uncle. “You insist we needn’t worry about money anymore. How did you arrange that?”
“I arranged it honestly.” Leo picked up a spoon from the tea tray, balancing it across the side of his hand. “With the money Richard gave me, I invested in shipping abroad. I made great whacks of money at once, though sometimes there were great losses too.”
“Unnecessary risk. Foolhardiness.”
“You think so? Do remind me, Uncle, how Richard lost all the dukedom’s money. Just the opposite, wasn’t it? A hidebound sort of trickle?”
Uncle Bernard glared at him in silence, which meant that Leo had scored a point.
No one knew why Leo had left all of a sudden except for Richard and Leo. What story his brother had told those left behind, he couldn’t imagine. But in exchange for Leo’s departure, and in place of what would have been ten years’ allowance as a younger son, Richard had given him a lump sum.
That hadn’t been the expenditure that emptied the dukedom’s coffers. No, that process had begun during the old duke’s time, as year upon year, their father’s expenses exceeded income. Richard had carried on that particular family tradition, keeping records of each outgoing penny even as his conservative investments continued the dukedom’s slow slide further into debt.
Since Leo had made his fortune at the dukedom’s expense, he would now enrich the dukedom at his own. Since he and the dukedom were both Westfair, maybe it didn’t much matter. But to him, it did. It felt like a triumph.
“Not that that matters now,” Poppy said brightly. “What matters is that we’re together again. And Leo arranged his financial affairs so cleverly, I couldn’t stay too angry at him for being away so long.”
She was occupied stirring her tea and didn’t meet Leo’s eye. But he remembered what she’d told him the night before: She wasn’t angry, just disenchanted.
Well. Pregnant and unwed, she had every right to be disenchanted.
“By the bye, Ubie,” she added, “Leo told me about the wonderful scheme you two arranged. What is it, darling? You are going to settle an income on him, and he needn’t live in this crowded old house anymore?” She leaned forward, confidential. “I always liked the Sussex estate better too. Though I suppose you felt a duty to remain in London while Parliament was in session. That was kind of you.”
Bernard set down his teacup, the tremors in his hands continuing. He seemed not to know how to reply, as the desire to agree with Poppy warred with the habit of contradicting Leo’s every action.
“Very kind,” Leo pressed ruthlessly, tossing the spoon back onto the tray. “He has more than earned a respite. I suppose he’s been reluctant to leave London until he knew you were taken care of, though. But now that he knows you are”—here, he paused to fire a lovesick expression at Poppy—“then he needs only to sign a few papers, and he’ll be free of us both.”
“Stop talking about me as though I’m not here.” Bernard shoved to the edge of his seat, then staggered to his feet. Poppy hopped up at once, so Leo did too. Finally. “I’ll sign what I want when I want, and I’ll live where I want for how long I want.”
Leo counted off parts of speech. “You didn’t mention ‘why,’ Uncle.”
Predictably, Bernard glared at him, and with a farewell to Poppy, he left the room as abruptly as he’d entered.
Poppy was the first to break the ensuing silence. “That didn’t go too badly, I think. I enjoyed your joke about support. Very clever.”
“I tried.” Leo crossed to the chaise on which Poppy had first sat, then dragged it into its accustomed spot. “Which is all I ever seem to accomplish with him.”
He and Poppy had made an agreement on a handshake, but it wasn’t as though he could contract someone into caring for him. He couldn’t convince the old man to lay aside the past. Especially not here, in a house where nothing had changed since his father’s death. The old duke had died when Leo was only ten and Richard twelve. Their mother died five years later, but their uncle stayed on since the boys were not yet of age.
In this house, Bernard had doted on serious, responsible Richard. Richard had never flirted with the servants, or with the girl on the neighboring estate. Richard had never raided the kitchen, or juggled the silverware, or got up during a restless night to prowl the halls and rearrange the family portraits. Why can’t you be more like your brother was surely the first question Leo had ever heard from his parents, the most frequent phrase spoken by Bernard. Richard, Richard. Perfect Richard. Even the way he died was calm and sensible, from a slow-spreading infection that permitted him plenty of time to plan his own lavish funeral. Sometimes Leo thought he’d give all the money he possessed just so he’d never again have to hear a comparison between himself and someone completely unlike him.
Leo had never done anything so very bad. But he had always been doing something. And he’d never been able to explain why. Why was sitting still intolerable? Why, sometimes, could he not bear to listen to a single word more from the tutor?
He didn’t know. But none of those things needed to keep him from being a good duke.
He looked at Poppy. Poppy looked at the tea tray. “I wish there had been biscuits.”
And just like that, Leo’s mood lifted, and he laughed. “Come on, then. Let’s go to the kitchen and find something for you.”
“Shouldn’t you just ring for it?” It wasn’t a very serious question, since Poppy was halfway to the door before Leo finished speaking,
“Probably. But let’s go all the same. You and me, just this once.”
They crept down the servants’ stairs. Leo wasn’t sure why, since he owned the house and therefore its kitchen. He was the duke, not some impostor angling for Richard Billingsley’s proper place.
He was the last of the Billingsleys. He was Westfair now. Odd, that.
But there was nothing odd about the kitchens, thank the Lord. They looked as they always had: brick-walled and clean-scrubbed, with open shelves and ceiling hooks holding all manner of gleaming pans and pots. A wide wooden table stretched down the middle of the room. Below the high-cut windows, a great oven chewed coal and glowered as something savory bubbled in a tureen on its cooktop.
Before the dinner preparations began, it was at its ebb of activity. Cook and a single kitchen maid were present at the moment, the kitchen maid peeling carrots and Cook bustling to and from the larder at the kitchen’s far end. It was as cool as it ever got on a summer day. The basement location made it dimmer, but at least the servants were spared the suffocating heat endured by those who slept on the family’s level or in the attics.
All the money and power of a duke, yet Leo’s London house was less comfortable than the tent in which he’d slept under the stars in the Spanish countryside.
Cook fussed over them with the sort of indulgent impatience reserved for those who had known them since they were much younger. “I’ll bring you some walnuts, how will that be? And Miss Hayworth, you’ll be staying to dinner.”
“Will I?” Poppy blinked. She looked a little glassy.
“Of course you will.” Cook nodded. “We’ll be having your favorite white soup, so you see it’s as if heaven arranged it.”
“Then the matter is settled,” Poppy replied. “Thank you.”
Leo cleared his throat as Cook vanished into the larder once more. “It’s my house, you know. You ought to thank me.”
“But the invitation came from her.” Poppy’s smile trembled. She really did look ill.
“I asked you to fake-marry me. That ought to count for something. Oh! Thank you, Cook.” The stout woman had deposited a bowl of walnuts before them.
“Janey here can find you a nutcracker,” Cook said.
“No need,” Leo replied.
Cook nodded. “You just enjoy your bit of food, then, and I’ll carry on. Janey’s got a pile of vegetables yet to peel, but we and the other kitchen maids won’t be starting dinner for a spell. You won’t even know we’re here.”
“That’s all right,” said Leo. “We’ll sit on the steps and get some air.”
From the kitchen, a small sunken yard interrupted the flow of the house’s ground floor. Here the kitchen staff grew herbs and a few vegetables, and Cook kept a dozen fat brown laying hens that pecked at the feet of everyone who came near.
Once the door had shut behind them, Leo asked, “Are you all right, Poppy?”
She sucked in great gulps of the coal-powdered air. “Yes,” she squeaked. A few more breaths, and her odd color returned to normal. “Yes. I’m all right. Some cooking smells give me a bad turn, and I never know when it’ll happen.”
He had heard of such a thing. “It’s the…” His hand waved vaguely before Poppy’s midsection.
“Child. Yes. I’m told this symptom will soon pass.” She sounded so matter-of-fact. Leo felt anything but. Within his old friend was a baby, unplanned and forced upon her. And what could he do for her? Standing foolishly with a bowl of walnuts, plotting to give her a thousand pounds…these things seemed wholly inadequate.
“Have a seat, won’t you?” Leo asked. After dusting the step clean with his handkerchief for Poppy and easing her down, drawing himself a wry look for his pains, he settled next to her with the bowl of walnuts on his lap. He took one of the light brown shells in his hand and clamped a fist around it. A squeeze of his fingers, and the nut crunched open with a satisfying sound of breaking shell.
“Very impressive,” noted Poppy, picking the meat from Leo’s outstretched palm.
“Why do you think I did it?” Leo winked at her, then tossed the shells to the greedy brown hens. They raced toward the fallen food, scaly legs churning up dust, then pecked fruitlessly at it. Clucking their disappointment, they walked away, heads bobbing.
Leo kept cracking nuts in his fist, eating one for every two he gave to Poppy. “You’re feeling all right now?”
“Fine.” She smiled. “Feeling hungry, as I did before.” Once she had eaten a half-dozen walnuts, she looked at him shrewdly. “You tricked me, Leo. You didn’t want a betrothal at all.”
Damn. He’d crushed the nut itself among the shell. With a curse, he flung the whole mess to the delighted chickens. “I thought I was clear on that.”
“No, I mean…I thought you wanted me to help you convince Ubie that you were a changed man. But you wanted nothing of the sort.”
Leo shrugged. “It’s hard for men to change. If I can do it within, that’s all I need. It doesn’t matter if he sees it. It only matters if he leaves me be.”
He said the words well. He almost believed them himself.
“Then why did you suggest the fake engagement?” Poppy took a nut from the bowl and clenched her fist around it. “Ouch. Here, I’ll let you do the cracking.”
“In case he did see me differently.” Crack. “With you at my side, to make me look like a different sort of man.”
She tipped her head back, breathing deeply of the bitter coal-scented air. “You were far prettier, certainly.”
“I cannot disagree.” He handed her another walnut meat.
“Don’t you want it?”
“I’ve had enough.” He took up another nut. Only a few left in the bowl. “I like to be doing something, not just sitting. That’s one of the changes I figured out.”
“How do you mean?” She crunched thoughtfully, looking at him. Her eyes were such a warm brown, like morning chocolate or newly tilled earth. When Poppy looked at him, he had always felt that she liked what she saw.
She smiled, and he felt it again with a swoop of pleasure. She was so beautiful. It was a good thing she’d mentioned a rule about not touching. If he hadn’t been made wise to it, he’d have chased her away almost at once: poking at her arm, taking up her hand, tracing the familiar but long-unseen contours of her face. Anything to prove to himself that she was real.
But she had asked him a question. “You know I’ve always been—hmm. My uncle called it fidgety in his kinder moments.”
She bumped him with her shoulder. “Fidget fidget. What of it? There’s nothing wrong with that.”
“Well, he’s not incorrect. And when I was left to my own devices, I had to come up with a system for managing my surroundings, since my mind never seemed to do it. Lists, for which I can tick off item by item. Before leaving the house, do this. Read correspondence in this order. And so forth.” He took up the last nut, rolling it between his palms. “Every time a clock sounds the quarter hour, I must take note of what I am doing and whether it is what I ought to be doing.”
“Surely there are some activities you would not want interrupted.” Poppy blushed.
“Why, Poppy Hayworth, you rogue.” He tossed the walnut into the air, then snapped it up with the other hand. “I admit, I don’t keep a clock in every room. Not my bedchamber, for example.”
The color persisted on her cheeks. “Well. One wonders, that’s all.”
He laughed. “You haven’t changed much, Poppy, and I’m glad for it.”
As soon as he’d said the words, he thought better of them. Of course she had changed—as he had, within. How could she not? She’d been orphaned, violated, threatened in her childhood home. Made motherless young, she had always been brave, but he hadn’t known how brave a person could be until he sat at her side and soaked in her blushes.
He owed her a bit of bravery in return. “You know, I really did want to marry you. Before I left England.” He took the final walnut within his fist, but he didn’t crack it. “You might have guessed that after I kissed you.”
As he grew up, the idea of wedding Poppy had always seemed joyfully natural to him, like the daily sunrise or the skip and splash of a flat stone over clear water. He’d thought about kissing her for years before he finally did it—when he was of age, able to ask for her hand, and if all went well, do a devil of a lot more than kiss her before much more time had passed.
“I wondered, Leo. It was rather an intense kiss. And…I liked it.” The blush was back. She folded a hand around his fist. Pressed. Crack. The final nut crunched into pieces. “But I know you had to leave. Richard told me; he needed you to earn back the family fortunes. As the duke, he couldn’t leave England.”
“That’s what he told you?” If Leo had had a walnut between his teeth, he would have ground it to powder. “It’s not entirely wrong, but it’s far from right. When I finally turned twenty-one, I was of age and wanted to ask you for your hand.” That same hand that was on his now, as slender and strong as ever.
“But when I talked to Richard about arranging an income,” he continued, “he told me he wanted to marry you himself. He pointed out, rightly, that you would be far better off with the lands and money and power of a duke—”
“Not that there was any money, really.” Poppy drew back her hand.
“—than with a younger son in whom no one had much faith.”
“I did.”
Her tone was so gentle that it felt like a blow. “Well. You were the only one. When he put the matter like that, I couldn’t argue.”
“So you left because he told you to?” Her voice was hard.
“No. It’s true that he hoped I would make a fortune, but I wouldn’t have left for that. Nor would I have left for him. I left for you, Poppy, because he wanted to offer you a better life than I ever could, and because I wasn’t brave enough to stay and watch you marry someone else.”
Poppy was silent. He waited, feeling as if the world hung on her reply.
Finally, she pried his fist open and tossed the shattered crumbs of nut and shell to the chickens. “You were a great fool,” she said. “Though a kind one.”
All right. It could have been worse. But—Leo’s brows knit. “Didn’t he propose to you? He said he had, though he admitted it had come to nothing. I got the occasional letter through the solicitor in London with whom I always left my new direction.”
“He did, yes. But you Billingsley brothers were never interchangeable to me. And after you left, everything was different and I would just as soon have washed my hands of the lot of you.” Suiting her action to her words, she dusted the last crumbs of walnut and shell from her hands.
Leo was missing something. Some piece that ought to have fallen into place while he was gone. He bounced one of his legs, jittering his booted foot on the step until his thoughts made sense. “I wonder why Richard didn’t marry someone else, then.”
“I suppose,” Poppy said, “it’s because he didn’t really want to marry any woman. That’s how I always saw his behavior.”
“Hmm.” Leo had suspected the same about his brother, once upon a time. Yet Richard had seemed so set on wedding Poppy.
As if she’d read his thoughts, she added, “He must have thought that if he had to wed, an old friend who was almost a part of the furniture would do.”
“You could never be that.” Leo stood, took a step down, and turned toward her.
“Not to you, maybe. But then, you like women in…that sort of way.”
She looked up at him, falling into the shade of his body. Warm blond hair, laughing eyes, a few freckles spattered bronze over her nose. That curving mouth and, best of all, that sharp, kind wit.
“I do,” he replied. “Yes.” One woman in particular. But there was a tiny little person between the two of them, keeping him from asking the false question for real.
That didn’t mean he couldn’t continue to see her while the false engagement persisted, though. And persist it would, if Uncle Bernard also persisted in being as stubborn as he’d been today.
“Poppy.” Leo extended a hand, breath bated until she took it and let him pull her upright, face-to-face. “There will be a masked ball at Vauxhall. Do you want to go like everyone else does? Feet on the ground and mischief in their hearts?”
“Is that all that’s in their hearts?”
“I can’t answer for everyone else.” Leo grinned. “But it’s always in mine. Do come with me. Unless you will be performing during the masque?”
“No, not that night. Of course I will go with you.” Her fingers tightened in his. “It’ll be grand to see more of the gardens than the high wire.”
They arranged the plans then, preparing to meet at the entrance of Vauxhall the evening of the masked ball.
Only later did it occur to Leo: If they both got what they wanted from their false engagement, they would never see each other again.