she bent her knee. ‘Yes, thank you, your Grace.’
‘And are you satisfied with your accommodation?’
‘Entirely,’ she said, unwilling to admit she had expected much less considering his lack of a welcome.
‘I have given Sophie the blue room,’ Harriet said. ‘The little boudoir next door to it is ideal for a writing room.’
Sophie turned from her secret contemplation of the Duke to face her hostess, whose gown was of forest green silk with deep lace ruffles round the hem. It had a very low décolletage and huge puffed sleeves. Her hair was piled up in a complicated knot and threaded with gems and there were more studded into a pendant around her neck. She patted the sofa next her. ‘Come and sit down, Sophie. I wish I were not going out this evening, I would much rather have stayed at home to talk to you, but I am promised and cannot disappoint my friends.’
‘Oh, please do not think of if,’ Sophie said. ‘I shall be quite content. I think I might do some writing.’
‘Ah, the book,’ James said in a tone that made her hackles rise. He might treat it as a matter for jest now, but one day she would make him take her seriously. ‘You must tell us all about that.’
‘I do not think it would interest you, your Grace.’
‘Why not?’
‘It is but a little thing and you must have been to all the places I have and seen it all.’
‘When?’ he asked sharply. Did she know something he would rather not have made public? He had never met her before, had he? She was never in any of the places he had been operating in, was she? Always alert to danger, from whatever direction, he suddenly felt threatened.
‘When?’ she repeated, puzzled. ‘I assumed you went on the Grand Tour before the Continent was closed to travellers.’
‘Oh, yes, a rather curtailed Grand Tour, as I remember. It was 1799, Napoleon was on the march and Europe was in turmoil.’ He was being foolish, he told himself. What could a chit like her know of espionage and those engaged in it? She would have still been in the schoolroom when he was sent to Austria. Or was it something else altogether making him feel he ought to take more interest in her? Her vulnerability in spite of her efforts to hide it?
A footman arrived and announced that dinner was served and James moved forward and offered his arm to Sophie. She got up and laid her fingers on his sleeve and even that slight contact made her catch her breath. She was shaking with nerves and had no idea why. He was only a little above average height, but he had an overpowering presence, as if he was used to having his own way and would brook no argument, but she had no intention of arguing with him. He was her host, her provider, and, however much it irked her to admit it, she could not afford to alienate him.
‘We are eating in the small dining room,’ Harriet told her, as she took her brother’s other arm. ‘It is much less formal than the large room we use when we entertain, and we can talk comfortably without having to raise our voices.’
And talk they did. While eating their way through a delicious fish dish, roast beef, boiled potatoes and mushrooms in a cream sauce, they spoke about the celebrations, the visits of foreign royalty, the plight of the soldiers coming home to unemployment and hardship, about Wellington and Napoleon and the latest on dit, which meant nothing to Sophie, though Harriet did her best to explain who was who. The Duke was an affable host and seemed to forget his earlier antagonism. Sophie found herself relaxing a little, though not completely. She was only too aware that she was the poor relation, there under sufferance, though she meant to remedy that situation as soon as she could afford it.
‘Is it true that the Regent hates his wife?’ she asked, when everything had been removed in favour of fruit tartlets, jelly and honey cakes. She had been too nervous to eat heartily; in any case, she had become so used to frugality, her stomach would not take rich food.
‘I am afraid so,’ he said. ‘His father badgered him so much to marry, he agreed to marry her without ever seeing her and he disliked her on sight. How he is going to keep her from the celebrations, I do not know. She is related to half the crowned heads of Europe who are coming and expecting to meet her.’
‘I am sorry for her. How dreadful it must be to be despised and unloved in a strange country.’
‘She is hardly unloved,’ Harriet put in. ‘She is very popular with the people.’
‘It isn’t the same though, is it? The public face and the private one. I think it is very important to have a fondness for the person one marries and it doesn’t matter if you are a prince or a duke or the man who clears the middens.’
‘Love,’ he murmured, making Sophie turn to look at him, thinking he was laughing at her, but though he was not laughing, there was a slight twist to his mouth that might have been humour directed against himself. ‘Are princes and dukes allowed to fall in love?’
‘Of course they are,’ Harriet said bracingly. ‘The world would be a very poor place without it.’
‘Mama loved Papa,’ Sophie said. ‘And he loved her. He was brought so low when she died, he never properly recovered.’ It was said with a kind of defiance, which was meant to offset whatever tale Lady Myers had told Harriet, who would undoubtedly have passed it on to the Duke. She did not want him to blame Papa, or feel sorry for her. Or perhaps just a little, she amended, just enough to give her a roof over her head and food to keep her from starving until she could prove to him and the world that she was an author to be reckoned with.
It was as if her listeners understood her point, for neither commented and a minute later the footman came to tell her ladyship the carriage was at the door. Harriet rose to go. ‘I must be off. I will see you tomorrow, Sophie, and we will make plans.’ She bent to kiss Sophie’s cheek. ‘Sleep well. You are very welcome.’
Then she was gone in a rustle of silk, leaving Sophie to face the Duke. ‘Am I?’ she asked in the silence that followed.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Am I welcome? Or am I an encumbrance you would rather do without?’
‘You are certainly forthright,’ he said, laughing. ‘But I assure you, you are not an encumbrance. This house is large enough for two dozen guests; one little cousin who is determined not to be noticed is not going to upset my routine.’
‘Then I am glad of it.’ She spoke with a certain amount of asperity; it was so very difficult being beholden.
He knew he seemed cold and heartless, but that was his way. He had taught himself to be self-contained, not by word or gesture to reveal what he was really thinking. It was all very well for people like the Regent to weep copious tears over nothing at all, but if he had been emotional when he was living with the enemy, when he had to pretend to be at one with them, a show of feeling, even the twitch of an eyelid, could have meant death. It had become a habit hard to break. ‘Do not be so prickly, Sophie,’ he said, trying to unbend a little. ‘Naturally you are welcome, you do not need to question it. And Harriet will love having you for company. Since her husband died, she has not been out and about so much as she was used to and I have not been able to accompany her as I would like.’
Did that mean she was to be an unpaid companion? Perhaps, though Harriet had given no indication that was what she expected. She had taken a liking to Harriet and bearing her company would be no hardship. ‘Thank you, your Grace.’
