Chapter Sixteen
“Of course you may stay as long as you need.” Aunt Penelope was doing an admirable job hiding her frustration.
Grandmother was making no such effort. “I notice you did not say we were welcome to stay.”
Aunt Penelope took a single breath, something Duke had seen her do when keeping her temper in check. “The omission of that word was not intentional nor is there a message in it.”
“Yet you did omit it,” Father said, arms folded across his chest.
Through tight teeth, Aunt Penelope muttered, “Liam.”
The family confrontation was occurring in a sitting room out of sight and , Duke hoped, out of earshot of the others in the house.
“The house is quite full at the moment and will be chaotic for at least a fortnight,” Aunt Penelope said. “You might find that uncomfortable if you are in the midst of it overly long, so you needn’t feel obligated to endure it. That is all I was attempting to say.”
“Then, why didn’t you?” Grandmother’s offended sniff was not one of Duke’s favorite sounds, yet it was one of the most familiar.
“I did say that.” Aunt Penelope spoke slowly and precisely.
Good heavens, they were going to murder each other in the middle of a Huntresses and Pack house party. This gathering would be legendary in all the wrong ways.
He would have to step in and steer the Seymours away from disastrous waters again. And he would have to do it here, at Fairfield, where he’d been imagining creating a haven for himself.
But before he spoke, an unexpected sight in the window he was facing caught his attention.
The Pack.
Undertaking a theatrical reenactment of something.
Toss stood stiffly with his arms at his side, while Newton and Charlie pretended to punch him. Scott strutted about, occasionally taking a jab at the others as he passed. Fennel and Tobias, with an absurd lack of synchronicity, pointed alternately at the group gathered outside the window and at Duke. Colm stood a bit to the side, laughing at them all.
Duke shook his head at their absurdity but was inwardly grateful for it. The Pack’s antics over the years had formed most of his absolute favorite memories.
Charlie threw his hands up in a dramatic show of annoyance that Artemis herself would have been hard-pressed to match. Then the Pack began all over again with a performance assuredly meant to be identical to the first but falling apart even more quickly. They dissolved into laughter on the other side of the glass.
They were entertainingly ludicrous.
Charlie held his hands up to the others, signaling that they should stop their efforts. He then stepped right up to the window, so close he could have leaned forward and pressed his face to the glass and, looking directly at Duke, pointed at himself and the rest of the Pack, then pointed at Duke. He held up his fists in a pugilistic stance, pretending to jab his fists at an imaginary foe. Then, still holding Duke’s gaze, he used two fingers on his left hand to mimic the movement of walking.
“How ridiculous is he likely to get if we pretend we didn’t understand that?” Uncle Niles had apparently been watching.
Duke answered his whispered question with a whisper of his own. “He excels at being ridiculous.”
“Which either pleases or annoys his brother-in-law. The Duke of Kielder is very fond of the word ridiculous .” Uncle Niles glanced over at the family group eyeing each other tensely. “We should sneak out while they’re distracted.”
“You would abandon Aunt Penelope?” Duke asked, still keeping his voice low.
“She can take care of herself.” His smile was so proud and besotted that no one seeing it would think for a minute that he was actually leaving her in a time of need.
Careful to keep very quiet, they slipped from the room and into the corridor. Only once they were sufficiently far from the sitting room did they dare speak.
“You don’t mind that Colm and I told the Pack about Penfield?”
Uncle Niles shook his head. “When my friends have visited over the years, we’ve spent a lot of time at Penfield. It ought to host a crowd again.”
They cut across the grass leading to the spot outside the sitting room windows where the Pack had been acting as a theater troupe. The men were still there.
“I thought for a moment that we would have to resort to semaphore to get our point across,” Fennel said. “And I am afraid to think who among us would have been forced to use his small clothes as a flag.”
In a quiet and stern tone, Uncle Niles said, “I’m told you have fallen prey to a rumor that there is a corner of this estate that houses a building of questionable purpose.”
The Pack exchanged nervous but intrigued looks. They didn’t know Uncle Niles well enough to recognize his humor.
“Is the rumor true?” Newton asked.
Uncle Niles’s mouth turned slowly into a troublemaker grin. With a lift of his eyebrows, he nodded.
Whoops of excitement met his admission. Whoops which, apparently, caught the attention of those inside. Aunt Penelope had turned fully to face the window, watching them with her head tipped to the side at an amusedly vexed angle. Grandmother didn’t appear to know what to think of the display, though she was unlikely to approve. Father was mortified and Mother confused.
“Flee for the hills, lads,” Uncle Niles said. “It’s our only hope.”
And with that encouragement, they bolted, laughing as they went. They slowed only once past the formal garden and on the path that began on the other side.
They continued in clumps, following Uncle Niles and Colm, who led the way.
Fennel walked alongside Duke. “I didn’t realize your uncle is so funny. I’ve seen him only a couple of times though. In London.”
“He’s quieter when he’s away from Fairfield. I’ve always liked visiting him here. I feel as though I get to know him better every time I do.”
“It must be nice for him that he feels so at home... at home.” Fennel had inherited his family estate while still at Eton, after the untimely death of his father. He didn’t talk about the late Mr. Kendrick often, but what he had shared was, in a word, horrifying. And it was obvious, to hear Fennel speak of his estate, that he still associated it too much with his father for it to be a comfortable place.
“Cambridge was a welcome escape from home for me,” Duke said. “You have that still.”
“Actually, I am considering not going back.”
That was news to Duke. “Why is that?”
“I’m not an academically minded person, and I don’t need further education to run my estate. Now that I’m the only one of the Pack still there, I haven’t any real reason to stay.”
“But that will mean living at Bryony Hall.” That, Duke knew, was not a peaceful prospect for the Pack member they all thought of as their little brother. “Can you endure it?”
“What choice do I have?” He shrugged a little. “I’m certain my sisters would let me visit them, but that would provide only a temporary reprieve.” His expression was contemplative but not defeated. That was a very good sign. Fennel might have been the youngest of them, but he had a wisdom and maturity that belied his age. “Do you ever feel as if your path has been chosen for you and you have no choice but to walk it, and yet you feel completely at loose ends?”
“I felt that way for a very long time,” Duke said.
That pulled Fennel’s gaze to him as they continued following the Pack. “ Felt? Past tense? Then, you found a solution?”
“Whether or not it proves to be an actual solution has yet to be seen.” Duke was less sure of his plan than he had been a mere few hours earlier. “But there’s something to be said for trying to find an option, even when life seems to have left you with none.”
Fennel nodded and seemed very preoccupied throughout the rest of their walk to Penfield.
Their destination was just as Duke remembered it. A long building built of brick in the same color as Fairfield. The front of the building had no windows. A fence wrapped around it from either side, forming a full ring around the back garden. Anyone seeing it would assume it was a farm building, unexceptional and uninteresting. But it was anything but.
Uncle Niles unlocked the door and motioned them all inside. Duke and Colm had, of course, already seen the inside of Penfield, but Duke couldn’t help noticing the resemblance his friends bore to a group of schoolboys being led into a candy shop.
Duke and Colm helped Uncle Niles pull back the curtains on the windows at the back of the large space, then light the lanterns strategically set around the room. The back of the house was not accessible from the outside, the fence cutting it off from wanderers, meaning no one could see inside from there. They had done that on purpose.
“This is better than Gentleman Jackson’s.” Newton looked around with that evaluating gaze he’d developed long before beginning his law studies but that they all knew would serve him well in his chosen profession.
“I’d make certain to tell Jackson I’d bested him in this if I didn’t prefer he not know about it.” Uncle Niles opened a cupboard, inside of which were strips of fabric for wrapping knuckles, towels for wiping away sweat, even trousers for changing into to prevent one’s regular clothing from becoming torn or stained.
He opened another cupboard and pulled two buckets from it, setting them on a longboard along the near wall. He then set beside them a basket containing bits of chalk in varying lengths.
“The buckets are for water,” Colm explained. “There’s a well in the back to draw from.”
“And the chalk?” Fennel asked.
“Marking the ring on the floor.”
“We’re fighting each other?” Was Fennel excited about that or not? It was difficult to tell.
“A little sparring if anyone would like,” Colm said. “But there are plenty of hanging sacks of hay or cotton to pummel if you’d rather. And we can take turns holding up hand cushions for each other to hit. Anything you could possibly hope for in a boxing salon.”
“This is brilliant,” Tobias said.
The Pack began perusing the cupboards, looking at the newspaper clippings in Uncle Niles’s memento book, talking excitedly about how often they planned to retreat here during the house party.
To his uncle, Duke said, “Thank you for this.”
“You’re welcome.” Then, with an ill-concealed laugh, he added, “Just make certain they know the rules.”
Ah. “Pack,” he called out, getting their attention. “My uncle has reminded me of the need to inform you of a few requirements for using Penfield. They are very important, so listen closely.” They watched with rapt attention. “The first: No one tells the Huntresses.” Nods of agreement filled the room. “The second: Absolutely no one tells my parents or my grandmother.”
“That was never going to happen,” Charlie said with wide-eyed emphasis.
“And the last: no obvious pugilistic injuries. Not all of you are good liars, and the jig would be up instantly.”
Scott laughed. “In other words, we’ve all been sworn to utmost secrecy, encompassing not merely our words but our very appearances.”
Duke nodded solemnly. “No boxer’s blow could ever land with the stinging ferocity of a lady’s look of disapproval.”
With avid agreement to that sentiment, the Pack began choosing what they meant to do during this visit to Penfield.
Tobias pointed to a page in the book of mementos. “This is Martin, the Bath Butcher.”
“It is,” Uncle Niles said.
“Did you ever see him fight?” Tobias sounded amazed at the possibilities.
“I did.”
“Was he as good as legend says?”
Uncle Niles nodded. “He was a fierce fighter.”
“Did you see a lot of the legends of that time?”
“Most of them, I daresay.”
“Mendoza?” Tobias asked.
Uncle Niles nodded.
“Humphries? Harry the Coalheaver?”
Another nod.
“The Cornish Duke?”
“Yes. I attended his fights as well.”
Tobias whistled appreciatively. “The Cornish Duke didn’t fight in many bouts compared with the others. To have actually seen one...” He shook his head in amazement before more of the pugilistic trappings of the place claimed his attention.
With Tobias moving on to other interests, Uncle Niles let himself laugh silently. Duke did the same. Niles Greenberry was known as an effective and efficient member of Parliament, one who would be returning to the House of Commons in January. He was considered the least notable of his group of impressive friends. Many who did not know him or Aunt Penelope well speculated whether so outgoing and capable a lady as she was was bored with a gentleman whom they considered sedate and comparatively dull.
How little people understood him.
Uncle Niles hadn’t merely attended the legendary Cornish Duke’s fights. He was the Cornish Duke, having fought under that epithet and in disguise to hide his true identity. Duke, when he’d decided to choose an Anglicized name for himself, had chosen what he had in honor of the uncle in whom he’d found support and a listening ear.
Duke had long suspected that the reason Fairfield was a more peaceful place than Writtlestone, despite the Seymour family upheaval, was owed in large part to Uncle Niles’s preference for tranquility. Which only added to the uncertainty Duke felt at the prospect of—once Father, Mother, and Grandmother left—requesting that his aunt and uncle sacrifice a portion of that peace for the possibility that Duke might have a modicum of it himself.