His Temporary Duchess (Dukes Ever After #5)

Chapter 2

CHAPTER TWO

Ravenscourt Castle

H oratio stood by the window of his father’s study at Ravenscourt Castle, gazing listlessly beyond the glass. Outside, swallows darted from the eaves high above, wheeling playfully over the yew hedges and flower beds.

His vacant eyes drifted down the perfectly straight paths leading to the mere; the jewel of the famous Ravenscourt Gardens. At its heart sat an island crowned with a timber-framed house. How many summers had he spent diving into the lake’s cool depths and lounging on the island’s soft grass under a golden sun?

Those days had once felt infinite, like an endless series of reflections in opposing mirrors, like a time that never was, yet was ever-present.

He frowned, briefly closing eyes as blue as the sky, shutting on the bittersweet memories.

In their place surged another image: the Duke of Marlingford, his face a mask of shocked horror. The memory played out with cruel clarity—the iron-gray hair, a dignified face slackening as blood welled on his lips. Then he was falling, legs giving way beneath him. A flower of red on his breast, spreading insidiously out from underneath his coat. A final, shivering breath...

And Horatio stood, just as aghast, a smoking pistol in trembling hands. His right shoulder ached from the gouge which had been carved there by Marlingford’s earlier shot. A flesh wound only, but it had been enough to jerk Horatio’s aim off by an inch. He had not intended to kill. Would have given anything to undo it.

Fate had reckoned otherwise.

Horatio opened his eyes now. The days of wine and summer were over. The winter of his life was about to begin. And it would be cold and lonely. The society with which he had surrounded himself at his house at Woolstone… they would evaporate like drops of water from a hot skillet.

First, the accusation of assault against a lady. Then the challenge to a duel by her father-in-law. A demand for the satisfaction of honor. All culminating in an unjust death.

A door behind him opened and was slammed shut with the force of a January north wind. Horatio sighed, careful to hide it from the man who had just entered the room.

Uncurling his posture, he twisted to face his father.

William Templeton was a gentleman in the prime of his life. Dark hair the color of coal was only just beginning to silver. The strong jaw and imperial nose that gave his son a patrician dignity was, in William’s greater maturity, the aura of an emperor. Now, those Roman features were dark with fury as he strode across the study towards his son. Horatio braced himself, standing with arms folded defensively, jaw set.

William, Thirteenth Duke of Ravenscourt, stopped in front of him, and then struck him across the face with the back of his hand. Horatio’s head lashed to one side. Another blow landed, whipping it in the opposite direction. Such was the force that Horatio fell to one knee. He instinctively reached for the side of his face, feeling a trickle of blood at the corner of his mouth. William stood over him, chest heaving and fists clenched.

“A great man lies dead because of you!” The old man spat mercilessly. “His Grace, the Duke of Marlingford. A soldier. A Parliamentarian. Above all, a dignified gentleman! What have you to say for yourself, boy?”

Horatio remained on the floor, staring up at his father. He tried to hide the fear that gripped him. He knew that he had lived a life of privilege thus far. A life of society balls and luncheons. Of horse racing and card games. Wine, women, and song . He was unused to confrontation or violence. The duel was the first time he had ever drawn a pistol in anger instead of sport.

“It—it was an accident. I did not intend to kill him,” he shuddered a breath.

“Did not intend it? An accident ?” William muttered wryly. “So the Duke of Marlingford was killed out of sheer incompetence, was he? Not even the dignity of an honorable death, fighting for the name of his daughter-by-marriage? Murdered because you were too incompetent to miss?!”

He reached down and seized Horatio by the lapels of his coat, crushing the delicate fabric in his iron grip. He hauled his only son to his feet, drawing him close enough that Horatio could feel the man’s tobacco-wreathed breath on his singeing cheeks.

“And what of Lady Meredith Templeton?” William hissed. “What of the reason for this duel being called in the first place! Not only a murderer but a ravisher of women? What manner of man have I raised?”

Now, fury flared through Horatio. He heaved free of his father’s grip. A year or two earlier, it would have been nigh on impossible. But now, at the onset of his twentieth year, his shoulders had broadened, as had the musculature of his chest. He was not the Hercules that his father was, still slender and graceful rather than sturdy and imposing, but he was no weakling either. His father’s eyes widened at the brazenness.

“She lied! I did not touch her. Nor would I want to. I love Jane,” he growled back.

William’s brows furrowed. “ Jane ? Ainsworth? Of the Darnleighstone Ainsworths?”

Horatio nodded, impassioned, taking out a silk handkerchief and dabbing at the blood. “Now you know.”

William threw back his head and laughed.

“Daughter of the Viscount Darnleighstone? He would dearly love to see her married to my heir. May even be prepared to overlook the scandal. Both of them. But… he will not see her married to a penniless adventurer, bereft of title or prospects.”

Horatio frowned, a chill running through him at his father’s words. The handkerchief came down slowly.

“What… what do you mean?”

“I am cutting you off. You are no longer my son and no longer Marquess of Woolstone.”

“You cannot do that!” Horatio shot back.

“That title is a courtesy. A courtesy given by me !” William roared, “I gave it and I can take it at my pleasure. I will have Woolstone torn down and the ground salted before I let you live there. You and your reprobate friends! I should have stepped in before now when I saw the ilk of people you were associating with… This is where their path has led you.”

“ Reprobates ? They are good, decent—”

“A Frenchman? An Italian? A commoner? Pah ! These are the people you choose to associate with? You were born to a Dukedom and you besmirch your name? No more! I will not see the Templeton name carried by a ravisher of women and courter of blackguards.”

“I told you that is a lie!” Horatio roared again, stepping up to his father, eyes ablaze with rage. “I came across her foxed and went to her aid. She fell on her own and that silly young girl saw me trying to put her back on her feet, and she—”

“That silly young girl is a respectable member of a well-known family. Larkhill is an ancient English baronetcy with its own seat in the Lords and a lineage traced back to the Conquest. Why would that girl lie?”

“I don’t know! I wish I did,” Horatio replied desperately, “perhaps you should give your only son the benefit of the doubt over some slip of a girl!”

William turned away, sneering. He stormed to a sideboard where he took up a decanter of brandy and poured himself an unhealthy measure.

“And why would Lady Meredith lie?” he asked after taking a draught.

To that question, Horatio had no answer.

He was familiar with Lady Meredith, wife to Lord Hugh Kimberley, son of the man Horatio had killed. She had attended a number of social events that Horatio had hosted at Woolstone. Never with her husband, who always refused his invitations.

The lady had engaged in flirtatious behavior with Horatio before, despite being married. He had always tried to steer clear of her games. She was almost predatory in her sultry, alluring act, and it made him uncomfortable.

Jane, on the other hand, was fair-haired, with a heart as clear and pure as her blue eyes. As beautiful as a Renaissance sculpture and as innocent as Eve before the expulsion. She was the paragon of female virtue and it ate away at him that she might now reject him.

“You have no answer,” William muttered slowly into the deafening silence. “For there is no answer that can be given. You gave in to your base desires and have now mired me in scandal.”

Horatio ran his fingers through his hair in frustration.

“I did nothing of the sort. The Duke of Marlingford would not be denied. He called me out and I had no choice but to meet him or dishonor our family name even more. Truly, I tried to aim wide but did not expect him to be ready to fire first—”

William laughed with heavy scorn. “Duncan Kimberley was a marksman from childhood. And a fighter of duels in his youth. Of course he fired first, boy! It is a miracle that he did not shoot you dead. Perhaps that would have been the better outcome.”

That ill-conceived comment had Horatio’s heart lurching, but he did his damnedest to ignore it. “He hit me in the shoulder and threw off my aim,” he countered instead, knowing that it would do no good now. “I did not mean to kill him. I would have conceded.”

William poured another brandy. He drained the glass and then strode to the colossal mahogany desk that dominated the room. Thumping into the seat before it, he opened a drawer and took out a large pocketbook. Dipping a pen into an inkwell on the desk, he began to jot.

“I am writing you a promissory note that can be redeemed at my bankers in London, Glasgow, or Bristol. It is the last penny you will ever get from me. You can leave here with your horse and the clothes on your back. The rest of your property is forfeit. You will leave here as Master Horatio Templeton. Nobly born but reduced to the status of a commoner.”

He tore off the note and held it out for Horatio without looking up. Horatio gaped at it in horror.

“But, Father…!”

“This will not be undone. I will not allow you to drag the good name of this family into the mire you have created for yourself. Now, take it before I change my mind on that too.”

Horatio shook his head silently, feeling something inside tearing free. A gulf was opening inside him, as though he stood on an ice floe that had become separated from a larger berg and now floated on the open ocean. He saw the life he had lived drifting away from him. Saw the future he had expected even further over the horizon.

Including Jane.

“No. I will not,” he refused quietly.

Part of him ached to flee from the room, to saddle Thunder, his stallion since boyhood, and race to Jane’s home at Uffingdon Grange. But he could not bring himself to race towards the end that he knew faced him there. The end of his love affair. The end of the sunlit days of his youth. The end of a future in which he had seen himself as her husband... As father to her children…

Steeling himself, Horatio met his father’s glare—fear coiled in his stomach, but his resolve remained unbroken. He would bear the guilt of Marlingford’s death forever—a weight he deserved. But the malicious lies of Lady Meredith and Miss Juliet Semphill? Those, he refused to carry.

Drawing himself to his full height, he stepped back from the desk and clasped his hands firmly behind his back.

A flicker of a smile grazed across William’s face and he leaned backward, still holding out the promissory note. Then, he tore it across and let the pieces fall.

“Hmph. One last vestige of honor,” the old man muttered. “I did not think to see it. You have some strength in you boy. Some .”

“Disinherit me if you wish. Disown me. I will go into the world and make my own fortune however I may. I am not innocent. I could have chosen to refuse the duel, accepted the dishonor of cowardice. I chose to take up the gauntlet. I chose to fire. I will not deny my guilt. But, that is all that I am guilty of. Perhaps it is for the best. I do not think I wish to be the heir of a man who would believe others over his own blood.”

With that, he turned and strode from the room.