Ten Things I Hate About the Duke - Loretta Chase Page 0,32
fully masking the fragrance of a multitude of sweating aristocrats and gentry.
The attendees complained about the crush but didn’t leave, and when they finally shoved enough people out of the way to reach a stall, they dithered over what to buy.
After two hours of it, the conditions had tested Mama’s spirit of sacrifice. She’d gone down to the refreshment room minutes ago. Aunt Elizabeth must be expecting again, because she’d been snappish from the start. Even Hyacinth’s good humor was on the wane.
Cassandra was about to step out of the place herself. This was not so much for refreshment or change of air as for a respite from keeping a civil tongue in her head despite gross provocation. She was halfway to the door when she spotted him. Not that this required any unusual feat of identification.
The Duke of Ashmont, in all his radiant satanic beauty, stood in the entrance.
He. At a fancy fair. No drink, gaming, fighting, or loose women to be had. The last event on earth, in short, to attract him.
With him was Humphrey Morris, and a small boy of indeterminate age and deficient hygiene who looked like an animate pile of rags and smelled like the Thames at low tide.
The aroma reached her from where she stood, nearly halfway across the room.
She could smell—literally—a prank in the offing.
One would think everybody else could, too. However, since nobody could have expected Ashmont—any more than they’d expect Genghis Khan or Attila the Hun—the organizers had failed to provide, say, a pack of rabid dogs or a cavalry regiment to keep him out.
Yesterday, the fair’s first day, the directors had ordered the doors closed for a time, due to the crush of attendees and ladies fainting left and right. Nobody, however, had thought to order them closed against him.
Nobody had told them to say the fair was not at home or suddenly canceled, which was the way the duke was often greeted at the doors of aristocratic establishments.
Still, he was not a reasonable person, and such methods wouldn’t necessarily work with him. If he wanted to get in, he’d do it, one way or another, and he could be rather a mastermind in that regard.
Furthermore, he was a duke. Born and bred to inherit the title, having inherited young, and being a Beckingham, he exuded authority even when he was half-seas over . . . which, oddly enough, he didn’t appear to be.
Not that it made a difference. He was trouble, no matter what.
Yet sober, or something like it, and sauntering into the great concert room, he seemed like a deity come down from Olympus to walk among mortals.
Whether blinded by His Grace’s angelic beauty or overcome by the boy’s eau de sewer or simply terrified, the guardians at the gate failed to stop him. Everybody else only stood staring.
Morris trailing behind, the duke and the malodorous child made their way through the strangely hushed sea of distinguished persons. As the boy’s fumes reached aristocratic noses, the sea parted, and the trio went from stall to stall unhindered.
Given the duke’s reputation, one would expect persons of any sense to leave, and come back tomorrow. But no. They were like the people who hung about the rim of a rumbling volcano, waiting to see if it would erupt.
Cassandra had sense, but she could hardly flee. For one thing, running away was against her principles. For another, she couldn’t abandon her sister and aunt to whatever hell was about to break loose. And finally, she was possibly the only person ready and willing to act. She wasn’t sure what, exactly, she could do, but she’d solve that when the time came.
Head down, keeping herself concealed within the crowd, she followed him.
He introduced the boy to the ladies—who were stuck in their stalls and couldn’t escape—as “Jonsatovickya, distressed foreigner,” and looked on benignly while the child pawed silks and laces and chattered at the ladies.
Though too far away to hear what the boy said, Cassandra recognized the Cockney speech. The ladies, thoroughly confounded, stood as far back in their little prisons as they could . . . until Ashmont took out his purse.
For the sake of the Distressed Foreigners, not to mention intense rivalry among themselves, the stall-keepers held their noses and took the duke’s money.
As a prank, it wasn’t bad, and rather amusing, actually—
—until Ashmont and his entourage started toward Stall Number Nine.
At that moment she discovered that Hyacinth stood alone, with no Aunt Elizabeth in sight, and the gentlemen had