A Duke by Any Other Name by Grace Burrowes Page 0,105
the French doors. “The hour grows late, and this is none of your affair.”
Idiot man. “I am making it my affair. If you truly want your mother’s visit to be short, then you will fit this place out with every comfort. You will bring Rothhaven Hall to a high shine, at least from within. You will have the vicar to dinner here—God forbid he should cross Rothhaven Hall’s threshold for anything less than impending death—and you will escort your mama to Sunday services.”
Nathaniel stared out across an empty garden to the moors beyond. In the westering sun, the land appeared to undulate into an endless distance, as vast and unforgiving as the sea.
“And exactly why, my lady, would I work so hard to destroy the walls of privacy I’ve spent years fortifying?”
“Because your mother’s visit is an opportunity to make changes that are long overdue, in the first place, and because people who love us need to know that we’re faring well, in the second. Conduct your affairs as usual, present a bleak and cheerless picture of life at Rothhaven Hall, and your mother will banish herself here with her sons.”
Dark brows drew down. “I don’t want that. I remain at Rothhaven so that she need not. She was party to an unhappy marriage for nearly twenty-five years. She deserves her freedom, and besides, she cannot bide here. Her old friends and London acquaintances would flock to her doorstep, and she knows that will not serve.”
No true duke had ever been more stubborn. “What will not serve is for you and your brother to live in perpetual fear of discovery. Robbie is sane enough, you will never abandon him in any case, and you have all paid dearly for the mistakes of a man long dead.”
Nathaniel faced her, the sun casting half of his profile in shadow, the other half in the golden light of dusk.
“Robbie’s sanity will matter little. The first time he has a staring spell at a social gathering, the rumors will start, and Lady Phoebe and her ilk will soon paint him to be a raving lunatic. I won’t even be allowed to preserve the estate for his progeny, and a madman isn’t permitted to marry. Robbie will become a prisoner again, and the staff who has been so loyal to us will be scattered to the charity of their families. Mama will die of shame, and that will be a mercy.”
Nathaniel’s logic, so relentless, so convincingly grounded in both law and experience, had a flaw. What he said was true, but it was not the whole truth or even the most important part of the truth.
“You are all prisoners now,” Althea said, the truest thing she knew. “You admit this yourself. Your life is a falsehood. Robbie is doing his best to remain erased, your mother has gone for years without laying eyes on the only people who mean anything to her. Neither you nor Robbie can marry under the present arrangement, and the staff cannot be easily replaced. Is that really an existence worth defending?”
Nathaniel either could not or would not look at her. “It’s all we have, and it’s a damned sight better than the life Robbie endured for more than ten years. I think you should go.”
Althea slipped an arm around his waist, which was like hugging a four-hundred-year-old oak. “I think you should come to my ball. Bring your mother, cast the cut direct at anybody who looks askance at you. You’ve had plenty of practice. It’s time, Nathaniel.”
“Somebody knows, Althea.” Said quietly, wearily. “You are forgetting that somebody knows Robbie bides at the Hall, and that same somebody has threatened repeatedly to reveal the truth. Robbie has considered setting up a household on the Continent, but he doesn’t want to go, and I cannot…He would not fare well. His French is limited. He’d need servants he could trust, and those are in short supply even in England.”
“You cannot imagine banishing him,” Althea retorted, “so you and he both remain at the Hall, prisoners to a past not of your making. You remind me of myself, accepting any social slight, tolerating any cruelty, in hopes that someday I can make even a smidgen of peace with the people who should show me every courtesy.” Telling Nathaniel that was probably unkind, but kindness without honesty was for aged invalids and frightened children.
“Althea, don’t say that. You will have what you deserve, provided we give Lady Phoebe no more fodder for slander.” Nathaniel’s