When a Duchess Says I Do - Grace Burrowes Page 0,70
time or two.”
“He’s military and he’s related to a title, close enough to borrow that fine coach. He’s got younger son written all over him. What’s he doing, skulking about with the crests turned, biding at a lowly place like this, except trying to avoid notice while he hunts down a wife what’s run off.”
Herman began arranging the cards in a manner that would disadvantage any who sat down for a friendly game.
“Damned female knew which end of a pistol was what,” he said. “Following the drum does that to women. Makes ’em bold. Our Mr. Parker likely dragged her all over the battlefields.”
Mr. Parker, indeed. “Exactly, but a woman like that won’t want to be found. She ran off for reasons. The lord of Brightwell manor could be harboring a fugitive wife and might not even know it.”
Herman pushed the deck across the table. “And where there’s a fugitive wife, there’s often a reward.”
Jeffrey cut the cards. “Or there’s a gesture of appreciation from the lady’s current protector, for not revealing her whereabouts to her heartbroke husband. We can’t lose, Herm.”
Herman dealt for a game of piquet. “But we were poaching at Brightwell, and trespassing, and we put hands on the landowner, Jeffrey.”
A serving maid scrubbing tables looked up at that bit of foolishness. Jeffrey winked at her. She went back to her drudging.
“He coulda had us up before the king’s man, Herm. That was a serious pistol, he had a witness in the lady, and we were taken unawares.”
Herman studied his hand. “But he didn’t bother with us. He were too interested in the lady.”
“Exactly. So now we’ll be interested in the lady too.”
* * *
“You went into the church.” Matilda rejoiced to have a piece of Duncan’s past entrusted to her keeping, even as her own dissembling bothered her more.
“Like a coach horse to his oats,” Duncan said, drawing lazy patterns on her bare arm, “and with nearly as unsophisticated a grasp of the potential hazards.”
She could fall in love with his touch, if his sheer decency weren’t even more alluring. “And then what happened?”
“I was given a post as curate to a vicar in rural Yorkshire. What family I had was in York, and a Yorkshireman’s speech was the sound of home to me. Better still, my vicar was a well-loved clergyman. His sermons were tolerant and even humorous. He chided gently if at all, and his demeanor was jovial.”
A perfect mentor for an earnest young man, in other words. “This paradise must have a serpent.”
“The usual complement of the seven deadly sins, though I didn’t expect to find them in my vicar. I came upon him trifling with a maid. The verb does not do justice to the potential harm inflicted.”
That sort of trifling. “He had her skirts up?”
“He’d pinned her against a sideboard with his weight, and her skirts were in his hand. She was trying not to touch him, turning her head to avoid his kisses. Please stop, Vicar. I’m a good girl, Vicar. Vicar, you mustn’t.”
Matilda scooted closer beneath the covers. “You intervened.”
“I asked him what on earth he was about, for the girl—she was barely sixteen—was clearly unwilling and not his wife.” Duncan’s hands went still. “He laughed. He did not let her go.”
No wonder Duncan understood a snared creature’s plight. “And you did not desist with your remonstrations.”
“I hauled him off of her and physically threatened the most beloved man in the parish. He stopped laughing and proceeded to lecture me. Women protest for form’s sake, which I might have known had I been more than a pious boy. Women enjoy it, they’ve been enticing men since Eve plucked the apple, and if they conceive, that is clearly God’s will. If they die in childbed, that’s the price they must all pay eternally for plucking that one apple. Scripture tells us all of this, though not in any passage I could find.”
“Scripture written and propounded by men,” Matilda said.
Duncan regarded her in the gloom of the bed hangings. “A valid point. Not one I considered at the time.”
“So you left the church. A sound decision.”
He drew the covers up over Matilda’s shoulders. “I did not leave, I was drummed out of the regiment. The second time I caught the vicar at his pleasures, I went to his wife. She informed me that I was jealous of my superior, and if I breathed another word of what I’d mistaken for familial affection, she’d see me defrocked. I had mistaken nothing.”