A Duke by Any Other Name by Grace Burrowes Page 0,41

happy to have the first crib.”

Robbie pushed the deck at him. “Was that Lady Althea taking tea with you in the garden the other morning?”

Had Robbie also been biding his time, waiting for the right moment to broach a difficult topic? His patience made Job look like a whiny toddler.

“Her ladyship followed you back from the river, apparently.” Nathaniel shuffled again and began dealing.

“Did she?”

“She’s seen you there twice, though I suggested she saw me rather than you.”

Robbie watched the cards piling up, six in front of each player. “Will she believe that?”

“Likely not, unless she missed the fact that my boots were absolutely dry immediately after I’d supposedly wandered through the dewy grass at length. I did not know she’d followed you up from the river, else I would not have confronted her in the garden.”

Robbie picked up his cards, his expression unreadable. “Because your dry boots gave away the game.”

“Because she is an intelligent woman possessed of natural curiosity, and now she has seen your garden, and she knows that Rothhaven Hall might look like a moldering pile from the drive, but the garden tells another tale. A tale she will wonder at, and one I made no effort to explain, for obvious reasons.”

Nathaniel held a good hand. He could discard points into his crib and keep a good combination of cards in his hand as well, an ideal way to begin the game.

“Are you angry, Rothhaven?”

Call me Nathaniel. “I am concerned.”

Robbie had the sweetest smile, precious in its rarity and warmth. “You want to plant me a facer, but you can’t because I’m frail.”

“You ceased being frail five years ago, but you are still vulnerable, as am I.” Robbie worked with weights, he spent hours in the garden, and now he was apparently hiking the countryside. Frail, he was not. Though he had been, he’d been very frail for a very long time, thanks to the excellent care inflicted on him at Papa’s expensive madhouse.

“I only go out on foggy mornings,” Robbie said as he began the pointing phase of the hand, “when nobody’s about.”

“Somebody was about, twice. A very observant somebody.”

“Fog makes it easy to disappear.”

“So why didn’t you? You all but led her ladyship to our doorstep.” Nathaniel ended the hand with a nine-point lead and passed the deck across the table.

“I hadn’t realized she was behind me until I was halfway home. Then I slipped around the corner of the wall, hoping she wouldn’t realize where I’d gone. I had no idea she’d let herself into the garden. Nobody else ever has.”

Robbie shuffled as if he’d been doing it for years, then dealt Nathaniel an indifferent hand. Was Robbie also shuffling the facts about, engaging in the nearest thing to deception?

And if so, why?

“Nobody else has sent their breeding sows to invade the orchard either, Robbie. Her ladyship is not going south for the spring as she has in previous years, and she didn’t spend much of the winter with her sister. We must accept that we have a neighbor now. Our vigilance should increase rather than relax.”

Though how much more vigilant could Nathaniel be? He had no wish to become the jailer the previous duke had arranged for Robbie.

Robbie racked up a tidy advantage even before counting the cards in his crib. “I like the fog, Rothhaven. Just as you must have your gallops at dusk, I am ready for something beyond the garden walls. I should have told you sooner, but I wasn’t sure.…”

He counted his crib and found six more points.

“You weren’t sure?”

“When I win back a part of what I’ve lost,” Robbie said, “I never trust the gain, for fear it soon once more will elude me, and then you will be disappointed in me. With the fog, there is no far horizon, no great gaping sky to make me anxious and uncertain. I can see but a few yards into the mist, and yet, I still know the path. Years later, I still know that path.”

Robbie had gone off to “school” a bright young boy whose accident had left him moody and prone to shaking fits, staring spells, and twitches. By the time Nathaniel had brought him home years later, he’d no longer been moody. His outlook, from what Nathaniel had observed, was the flat calm of a Highland loch on a summer’s day.

Robbie had learned not simply to ignore his emotions, but to will them out of existence.

He still had the staring spells and the occasional seizure, and