Chapter One
Henry Everleigh, Duke of Dulverton, almost slipped in something he sincerely hoped was mud.
“Damn and—”
“Bless you, Your Grace,” said his manservant severely.
In the early morning light, Henry looked up with a glare. Why did Jenks say such a ridiculous…
His thought faded as his gaze shifted from his servant, a little bedraggled after the hours spent in his carriage, to the gaggle of small children who had gathered in the village square where they had alighted.
Their faces were curious, their expressions innocent. Far too innocent to hear the curse word he had been about to utter into the bright spring morning.
“Ah,” Henry said. “Yes. Good morning.”
The children scattered. Evidently strangers were unusual in Pathstow.
“It’ll come right off, Your Grace, I am sure,” said Jenks briskly, glancing at the muck streaked up his master’s boot.
Henry sighed and tried to find a patch of grass on the village green to wipe his boot. Stamping away from his servant gave him a moment to collect his thoughts. Something he had not done much of in the last four and twenty hours…perhaps to his peril.
The dark sky was streaked with gold as mist steamed off the fields around the small village. A rooster crowed somewhere in the pokey gardens of the houses smaller than his entrance hallway at Dulverton Manor. There was the overwhelming sense that a person, once born in Pathstow, likely never left.
Henry scraped his boot mercilessly against the grass and was gratified to see the muck removed.
Well, at least that was one thing that had gone his way today…
His dark eyes scanned the square where his driver had stopped. Dear God, to think this place was a hundred miles from his home. From all the comforts a duke could expect. From the respect, nay, almost worship his tenants gave him.
The suspicious look a farmer gave him as he rode past on a carthorse was nothing like the bowing and scraping Henry was accustomed to receiving.
Yet he could not help but be curious. Pathstow was unlike any place he had ever been. More like a dream of the English countryside than what he had expected in reality.
I’ve spent more time in London in the last year than out of it, Henry thought ruefully.
That was where he would rather be. In the Dulverton townhouse in Knightsbridge, or at the Dulverton Club—named after a distant ancestor, it now offered life membership to anyone in the family.
Lord, even simpering at Almack’s would be better than this.
Henry sighed as he looked once more at his boot. It would never be the same again.
But there was nothing for it. After putting up with the damned scandal for weeks, he would abide it no longer. If he could not find—
“I really will be able to treat the stain, Your Grace,” said Jenks reproachfully from the carriage. “You do not have to concern yourself with such things.”
Henry strode back to the carriage. “I suppose you are offended by my meager attempts, Jenks?”
“Not offended, Your Grace, merely conscious of their inadequacy,” said his manservant blithely.
Henry snorted. Well, he had always striven for honesty with his servants, but perhaps honesty could go too far. “Thank you, Jenks.”
“My pleasure, Your Grace.”
“Well, what do you think?”
The manservant tilted his head. “I am not sure my employment requires me to be given to much thinking, Your Grace.”
Henry sighed heavily and spread his arms wide. “Pathstow. Your thoughts?”
It had been remarkably difficult to discover the location in the first place, Henry thought darkly, and we could still be wrong.
After all, the headlines printed in that damned newspaper, The Courier, hardly proclaimed where they were getting their information. It would hardly be good for business.
But day after day, week after week, the pages declared the most outrageous slander about his sister, and he had had enough.
Lady Margaret Everleigh shocks ton by meeting secretly with lover
Lady Margaret Everleigh suspected to be with child
Hushed up Dulverton scandal rocks Society…
Henry’s jaw tightened at the very remembrance of the outrageous things he had been forced to read in that damned rag. It was outrageous! It was criminal!
With every passing day, he had demanded to see the editor. Each time, the scrawny little man had laughed and pointed out there was little the duke could do.
“My sources are protected, Your Grace, and there is nothing you can do to procure them,” he had said with barely hidden glee. “What I decide to print is my business.”
“And my sister is mine to protect,” Henry had snarled, barely able to keep his fists to himself, the provocation was so absolute. “And I will not permit you to—”
“Permit me?” The editor had snickered. “You seem to be under the mistaken illusion that you and your kind run the world, Your Grace. You may be rich, have a duchy, stride up and down Rotten Row as though you are the king of the world, but this is a new century, may I remind you. The people have a little more power now.”
Henry snorted, his breath billowing in the crisp morning air of Pathstow. The cheek of the man!
“Tell me again, Your Grace,” said Jenks delicately.
The question made little sense. “Tell you what?”
Henry had attempted not to snap, but he was sore pushed. Upon discovering their destination, there had been little time for preparations. He had merely bundled a few things that might be useful into a carriage, including Jenks, and rushed off into the night.
Perhaps I would be in a better temper if I had slept…
“Tell me what we are doing here,” his manservant said delicately.
Henry glared for a moment, but seeing no insolence in his servant’s air, spoke heavily. “Well, you know the awful things being printed about Lady Margaret.”
Jenks’s eyebrow raised. “Once I saw the first headline, Your Grace, I can assure you we burnt the thing in the kitchen and have not read the newspaper since.”
And that, Henry thought, his head lifting higher, was the value of a good servant.
“I assume, however, that my distaste for the lies did not prevent additional printing?”
Henry’s temple pulsed painfully. “No, I am afraid it did not. Worse, the newspaper started to print further lies about other ladies of Society—ladies of good name and repute. All false, naturally.”
“Naturally.”
He glared once more at his manservant, attempting to find any hint of sarcasm, but there was none. Jenks’s face was calm yet slightly fierce, as though an offense against Lady Margaret—Peg, to her brother—was an offense against them all.
Which in a way, Henry supposed, it was.
“The damned editor wouldn’t give me a single iota of information about their source,” said Henry darkly, watching curtains being drawn in the houses around the village square. “But a little gold carefully spent about the place threw up two vital pieces of information.”
“One of them, presumably, this village.”
Henry nodded. By God, he should be in London right now. His friend Penshaw had been gone for a good while, and he had promised the man that when he was gone—to the Continent, Henry assumed—he would look in on Penshaw’s sister.
Which was partly why he was here. It was bad enough his own sister was victim to these outrageous slanders, but he was around to protect her, protect her reputation.
But what about Penshaw’s sister? How many sisters had to be slandered before the damned thing stopped?
“And the second?”
Henry breathed in heavily. There was a new scent upon the morning air. Wood burning, yes, but also something else. Something sharp. Something that reminded him of the stables, when…
Ah, yes.
“The gossip is being spread from a household here,” Henry said darkly. “Part of a network, apparently. We’re only fifteen miles from London, a fast horse could make that distance in a day. This is where it’s coming from.”
Jenks did not look so convinced. He glanced around, his lip curling at the genteel poverty that surrounded them. “Here?”
Henry nodded.
He had hardly believed it himself when the first report had been brought to him. But after the fifth, he had no choice but to believe it.
Mr. Banfield. That was the man they were here to find. It was he who spread the rumors—no, it was worse than that. He who was fabricating lies, desecrating the reputation of eligible young ladies.
He would call the blaggard out, meet him tomorrow at dawn with pistols, shoot the man, and that would be an end to it.
A smile curled Henry’s lip. Why, he may even be able to return to London that day. He could be back in the comfort his title demanded within six and thirty hours.
“And you are going to—”
“Take care of it,” Henry snarled.
The bitterness coursing through his veins made any other tone impossible. Well, how dare the wretch Banfield do such a thing? How much money had the fool been paid? Did he have any idea what a risk he was taking, playing with the innocence of the ton’s finest flowers?
“Ah,” said Jenks helplessly. “Take care of it.”
Henry nodded. The day was warming swiftly. There would not be much time to carry out his…well, one could not precisely call it a plan. Not if it took less than a heartbeat to create.
“And you intend to do this by…?”
“I am absolutely certain the gossip—the lies about my sister originate from this village,” said Henry darkly, running a hand through his hair. God, he would have to sleep soon. “From one place in particular.”
His manservant’s gaze was drawn to the manor just to their left, outside the village. It sat atop a hill, leaning over Pathstow.
Manor. Henry almost laughed aloud. It was nothing to Dulverton Manor, but these parochial places never were. Some baronet whose great-great-grandfather was in the right place at the right time for a monarch a century ago, and who now spent their time crowing over their neighbors, no doubt.
“You would think so, wouldn’t you?” Henry said quietly, as a few women passed, heavy burdens of laundry baskets resting against their hips. “But no, it is not the local gentry who has started to put these nasty rumors about.”
Jenks’s eyes widened. “No?”