When a Duchess Says I Do - Grace Burrowes Page 0,102
dustbin. “Spring comes, ma’am. Spring always comes. Don’t lose hope. Sunny days will come around again.”
Matilda approached the hearth and held her hands out to the rejuvenated fire. “He means to marry me tomorrow, Jinks,” she said very softly. “The colonel says he seeks to protect me.” Though such protection would also break her heart, if protection it was.
“What should I tell the others?”
“I can’t marry Atticus Parker, and I can’t let him arrest my father.”
“Mr. Wentworth won’t let him arrest you.”
“He more or less already has.”
The door scraped open. “Begone, boy.” Hughes jerked his thumb toward the stairs. “The lady needs her rest.”
“A body won’t find any rest in a freezing cold room,” Jinks retorted. “You ever tried to fall asleep when you’re shiverin’? Can’t be done.” He gathered up his empty bucket and gave the hearth a visual inspection. “Some people would thank me for tending to my duties, might even pass me a copper or two for being so conscientious. Other people is idiots what disgrace their livery.”
“Thank you for the coal,” Matilda said. “You give me hope that chivalry is not dead.”
“’T’weren’t nothin’.” Jinks touched the brim of his cap, bowed, and strutted from the room.
Hughes drew the door closed after him without sparing Matilda so much as a glance.
She went to the window, where a fresh set of hot bricks was being loaded into the floors of the ducal conveyances. Hostlers backed prancing teams into the traces of both coaches, and some moments later, the nursemaids, one for each child, trooped from the inn into the second coach. A woman escorted by Lord Stephen emerged from the inn, a baby in her arms.
Fussing and shouting ensued, a footman trotted across the yard with a hamper in each hand and passed one into each coach. How many times had Matilda enacted this scene with Papa all over the Continent?
And had all that racketing about from capital to capital been to further the agenda of a spy?
Duncan emerged from the shadows of the stable, and closed the door of the coach housing the two children and their maids. A boy in a cap scrambled onto the bench of the lead coach as Lord Stephen handed his companion inside.
Don’t leave me. Matilda wanted to fling open the window and shout that plea, even though it would bring Parker running.
Duncan took one last look around the innyard, pulled on his gloves, and climbed into the first coach. He utterly ignored Matilda standing by her window, and she reciprocated by refusing to raise so much as a hand in parting. With a snap of the whip and a shout to the leaders, the coaches lurched forward, and disappeared into the darkness of the winter night.
* * *
“Matilda is not at Thomas Wakefield’s home and neither is her father,” Jane said. “If anybody should have been able to get answers from Wakefield’s staff, it’s a duchess making a social call and claiming to be interested in acquiring expensive art. The knocker was off the door, the butler’s livery was less than tidy. Jinks found an empty bay in the carriage house, and no traveling coach.”
Duncan wanted to smash the porcelain figurines on the mantel of the duchess’s family parlor, his impulse partly a result of sheer fatigue.
He and Jane had reached London after midnight, and neither of the servants dispatched to trail Parker’s coach had reported to the ducal town house despite morning being all but gone. Quinn was nosing about his clubs, listening for any gossip pertaining to Colonel Lord Atticus Parker, while Stephen…
“Has Stephen come down yet?” Duncan asked.
“I don’t believe he has.” Jane took a seat on the parlor’s red velvet sofa, her manner maddeningly serene. “He claims to love travel by horseback, but I suspect it taxes him.”
A blond Viking of a footman brought in a tray laden with sandwiches and biscuits.
“Thank you, Ivor,” Jane said. “Duncan, eat something. You slept through breakfast, or kept to your room to brood rather than partake. You can’t rescue Matilda on an empty stomach.”
Duncan was beginning to wonder if he could rescue Matilda under any circumstances. He took a wing chair and let Jane set a plate before him rather than provoke the duchess to further scolds.
Matilda was a duchess. Her Grace of Bosendorf, an imposing title, and fitting for a woman who’d held a gun on armed thieves and survived on her own in the English countryside for months.
Too good a woman for Atticus Parker, regardless of the colonel’s