would be in deep mourning for the foreseeable future, this seemed punishment enough for the promiscuous minx.
“Pray do not admit Lady Harriet to my presence again, Pointer,” he said. “Not under any circumstances.”
“No, your grace.” Pointer sounded subdued. “I did try to stop the lady but she was the late Duke’s ward and is much given to following her own desires.”
“She is indeed,” Garrick said. “Lady Harriet can be very persuasive. But this other woman—”
He stopped. What could he say?
I found a woman under my bed. She was small, with blue eyes that glow like agates and pale golden hair like a swatch of silk. She smelled of bluebells. I kissed her and she tasted of dust and innocence, and I have never wanted to bed a woman more in my life …
No, decidedly he could not tell Pointer his thoughts. Such vivid fantasies had no place in the life of a Duke shackled to duty and responsibility. Nevertheless Garrick shifted as he remembered the shape of the girl’s lips beneath his, the tiny gasp she had given when he kissed her, the shocking sensation of wanting to catch her in his arms and tumble her onto his bed and strip those cobwebbed clothes from her to discover the pleasures of her body beneath. He wanted to taste that tempting mouth again, to kiss her senseless. He felt his body harden into arousal.
Hell and the devil.
Pointer cleared his throat and Garrick jumped.
“Your grace …”
“Pointer?” Garrick said.
“Perhaps she was one of the servants, your grace, come to make sure you were comfortable,” Pointer said. He looked shifty. “I will ask the housekeeper to tell the maids not to trouble you.”
“That would be appreciated,” Garrick said. He knew his intruder had not been a servant. She had spoken with the instinctive confidence of a lady regardless of her pretense to be a waif from the streets. This morning he had found other evidence of occupation in his bedroom, too. There were the charred remains of a letter curling in the grate. There was a stick of striped candy on the dresser, wrapped in a twist of paper. He had found that rather endearing. There were even some female unmentionables neatly folded on a shelf in the wardrobe. Those had given him pause. How long had she been making free with his property and sleeping in his bed?
Pointer was waiting. Garrick sighed. “To return to my original question. Is the house secure?”
“I will check, your grace.” Pointer sounded very stiff at the suggestion that he was not in control of every aspect of security at Farne House. “If there is nothing more, your grace, I shall go and do so at once …” Garrick knew the butler was mortally offended. They had already disagreed once that morning. The first thing Pointer had offered to do after breakfast was to visit the employment bureau in order to recruit more staff to open up Farne House again. When Garrick had told him that he did not intend to use Farne House as his London home, he had thought Pointer might well burst with disapproval.
“But, your grace—” the butler had forgotten himself sufficiently to protest “—Farne House is the … the flagship of your Dukedom, the very pinnacle of your position! It is the feather in your cap, the summit of your status—”
“Farne House is ugly, old, draughty and expensive,” Garrick had said. “I do not care for it, Pointer. I shall not be entertaining, nor do I have a Duchess who requires a social setting. I will return to my own house in Charles Street as soon as I have set my father’s affairs in order.”
“Charles Street!” Pointer had said, as though Garrick had suggested he would be returning to the London stews. “That may have done very well for you when you were the Marquis of Northesk, your grace, but you are the Duke now. You have a dignity to uphold. Your father—” He had fallen silent as Garrick had pinned him with a very hard look.
“I,” Garrick had said, “am not my father, Pointer.”
Now he waited as Pointer retreated, outrage evident in every stiff line of his figure.
When the door had closed behind the butler, Garrick turned back to the desk and sorted methodically through the papers, making a note of the people he needed to contact and the actions he needed to take. Regardless of the dislike in which he had held his father—actually, hatred would probably be a better word—he had to give the late Duke credit for being extremely well organized. All the papers were in order, the income from the Farne estates was up-to-date and clearly notated and everything appeared to run like a smoothly oiled machine, a tribute to the late Duke’s rather vulgar grasping after every last penny that could be squeezed from his lands.
The clock on the mantel chimed twelve. Suddenly restless, Garrick got up and walked across to the dirty window. Dusty drapes shuttered the room. His mother, who might well have taken Farne House in hand, had not been to London for years. Tired of her husband’s famously indiscreet infidelities, she had become a dowager before her time and had retired to a house in Sussex. Garrick wondered vaguely how she would greet the arrival of the ungovernable Harriet on her doorstep. No doubt she would have the vapors. It was her usual mode of response to any crisis.
Outside the day was bright and clear, the sort of November morning that had slanting sunlight and scurrying white clouds. Garrick felt as though he were trapped here in this cobwebbed mausoleum. He wanted to take his stallion and ride out, not in the park among the chattering crowds, but somewhere wild and empty where he and the beast could both let go of all restraint. He had lived abroad for many years and had a taste for empty spaces and the hot blue skies of Portugal and Spain. And though he had been back in London for over a year, still the city felt cramped and cold and strangely repressive to a man who only really thrived in the open air.
Duty called him back to the pile of estate papers. He was Duke of Farne now and regardless of how disappointing he was as upholder of the family dignity, he could not escape his responsibilities. He had had that drummed into him since he was a child. He strode back to the desk. In his study in the house on Charles Street he had plenty of work waiting, too, research relating to his academic studies into seventeenth-century astronomy, documents to translate for the War Office. He had worked for Earl Bathurst, the Secretary of State for War, during his time in exile. He had also done plenty of other, less official, work for the government as well. It was one of the reasons that his father had raged against him, the heir to the Dukedom of Farne, trying and consistently failing to get himself killed in the service of his country. But what was he to do? For years he had carried the burden of taking a life, that of Stephen Fenner. He had tried to give his own in reparation, but the gods appeared uninterested in taking it.
He picked up his pen. He put it down again. What he really wanted to do, he found, was to discover the identity of the woman who had penetrated his house and his defenses, his midnight visitor, she of the vivid blue eyes and the porcelain fair skin. She had run from him like a fairy-tale Cinderella.
He wandered over to the oak bookcases that lined two walls of the study. Here he paused, the hairs on the back of his neck rising with a curious feeling of awareness. Someone else had perused these shelves, and recently. There were tiny marks in the dust, as though someone had carefully drawn out the books and replaced them without wanting to leave a trace.
He turned back to the desk. Had she been rifling through the papers here, too? If so, what could have been her purpose?
He wondered how, in the whole of London, he might find one elusive lady. There were always the inquiry agents, he supposed, though he could give them precious little
