Much Ado Over a Duke (The Nichols Sisters #1)

Chapter One

It appears that the burning trail of scandal and ruination caused by the son of the Duke of R.

has finally come to an end. He was discovered expired in an alleyway behind London’s most notorious gambling den, the Jolly Banker, one week ago.

And this after the duke’s four daughters laid their beloved father to rest not three weeks earlier.

The rabid search has begun to find the next in line to the Rothesay dukedom. Though one imagines the unlikely heir would have their hands full taking on a dilapidated house, debts, floundering tenants, and four headstrong, not to mention unusual, daughters.

It is also known to this author that a Lady C.N.

, who has been promised to the Earl of H.

(according to the ton’s pushiest mama) since her infancy, will not let her childhood home fall into unfamiliar hands.

If someone could drag the earl out of his mistress’s bed in France and back to Hertfordshire, Lady C.N. might have a sporting chance.

But fear not for the duke’s daughters, dear reader. Where there is a will, this author is certain Lady C.N. will find a way…

William Albert Dixon Nichols was the fifth Duke of Rothesay, but only on a technicality.

He’d not been properly invested or introduced to polite society wearing his birthright proudly.

Instead, they were laying him to rest in the Nichols family mausoleum, where a month earlier Cordelia and her remaining sisters interred their father.

“Poor, troubled soul,” Portia said. Her voice was thicker than usual today. “Could he not have waited another year or two to kick it? Preferably after we’d been settled with husbands?”

“What was that, my dear?” a family friend asked.

Portia’s rough voice, thanks to a partial deafness that descended on her after a bout of scarlet fever, was difficult for outsiders to understand.

But Cordelia heard her perfectly, and in response, she took her younger sister’s arm in hers. They walked ahead of the others.

As if to add insult to injury the weather was perfect.

It was a crisp April morning with a few white, fluffy clouds in the sky.

The ground was soft underfoot after a long thaw and quite a bit of rain.

Cordelia, who was usually mindful of getting her hem dirty, trudged along through puddles, for the first time in a long time not giving a fig about propriety.

She’d kept her perfectly curated society face on through the news of their half brother’s death, through the scandal of him being at a gaming hell when he’d died, through the endless funeral preparations, through the wearing of heavy black crepe, and through her younger sisters’ palpable distress.

But she was coming dangerously close to the end of her rapidly fraying rope.

All she had to do now was host a quiet luncheon and then she could take out the duke’s horse and ride hell bent for leather until she forgot about her worries for a moment.

Only a moment was what she needed, and then she’d be ready to don the mask again and await whatever dreadful news was surely lurking around some corner.

“Mind slowing down a little?” Portia asked, nodding her head in the direction of their two younger sisters who had fallen behind.

Cordelia paused as they came to the top of a slope.

The sight of their ancestral home, Hollyhead, mollified her somewhat.

The sprawling Jacobean manor, with one side completely taken over by ivy, had been standing since the seventeenth century and was the pride of their father.

It looked stunning in the midday sun, a faded red brick jewel rising up from the surrounding green parklands, flanked by old growth forests.

Cordelia suddenly felt heartened. No matter what was to come, they would always have Hollyhead.

“I’ll race you down the hill!”

The youngest of the four, Beatrice, rushed past the two sisters, ruffling their skirts.

“Bea!” Cordelia said through clenched teeth.

“I tried to h-hold h-h-er back,” Hermione said, out of breath from the short to jog to where her sisters stood.

Portia, shrugging her shoulders, joined the youngest Nichols, hiking up her skirts as she slid partway down the grassy slope. Hermione was not far behind, though she went at a much more sedate pace. As usual, it fell on Cordelia to retain some sort of decency.

The rest of the funeral cavalry charge finally caught up to her.

“I will write to Rhys straight away, my dear, and he will come to sort this wretched mess out, you just wait,” clucked a familiar voice that had come to stand beside her.

The Dowager Countess of Halton, a friendly, meddlesome neighbor, had taken it upon herself to help raise up the daughters of the late duke after their mother died. Or she thought she had, anyway.

Turning around, Cordelia smiled, bowing her head. “Oh, pray, do not trouble your son, Lady Billings, I am sure this will be put right soon enough. After all, no one knows of a surviving heir. Luck may yet be on our side, after so much unpleasantness.”

The old woman looked at Cordelia, narrowing her eyes. She opened her fan with a flourish.

“No one told you then?”

“Told me what?” Cordelia said, continuing the procession down the gravel path onto Hollyhead’s manicured lawns.

“So terrible for you to find out this way, dear child! I am sorry to be the one to tell you it, but I will tell you in full. I was advising your poor father when it happened. Took us years to recover the Rothesay name. It seemed your brother, God rest him, had the same wild streak, though it wasn’t for lack of trying you understand… ”

Cordelia stopped, turning to face her. Typically she was able to use conversations with Lady Billings to plan the week’s menu for the cook, but several words gave her pause. Advising father. Wild streak.

“Your father had another son to his first wife. But he ran off with a scullery maid, didn’t he?

All the way up to Gretna Green. Your father was a usually calm man, you’ll remember, but he was younger then.

Well, he nearly tore up half of Scotland looking for them.

Mind, they had a two-day head start,” she said, sighing heavily.

“Charles was always a romantic, only sixteen too. They found them a week later. But of course by then the dears had already wedded and…. Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but a babe was born six months later.”

“A-a babe?” Cordelia felt her stomach pitch. “Another son? But that’s impossible—I was always told Charles had died. I would have known!”

“Indeed! Charles was the first born as well. Such an awful blow! But one could never have a scullery maid as a duchess. Of course you’ll understand, my love.”

So strange, Cordelia thought, regarding the funeral attendees gathering on the lawn in their dark clothing, that they should be so congenial as my world continues to fall apart. “But growing up, surely my father would have mentioned—”

“It was agreed upon to never mention Charles’s name. Written right out of the will.”

There was sliver of hope. “Well, thank God for that, at least.”

“Yes, thank God. And the babe was a girl. She wouldn’t stand to inherit anything.”

Cordelia heaved a sigh of relief. Her stomach stopped swimming.

“And then, there was that small issue with the adoption…”

“Whatever do you mean?”

“Well, there was a blacksmith that used to work in your father’s household who was raising up a young boy. The scullery maid looked after him too, on occasion. Apparently, she formed an attachment to him. Anyway, Charles agreed to recognize the boy as his own.”

“The son of a blacksmith?”

“Yes! Possibly the next Duke of Rothesay. Can you imagine? I told your father, this is the kind of effect the French Revolution was having on young people at the time…”

Lady Billings’s voice faded away curiously, as the colors of the attendees’ black skirts and great coats began to blend in with Hollyhead’s brilliant green land. Then, everything went dark.