Chapter 11
On the other side of Hyde Park in London, Fitz had his world upended by one unsettling surprise upon his return to Pomfrey Manor.
He’d scarcely alighted from the carriage when his solicitor had turned up at his door, a carefully wrapped parcel of papers in hand, to request an audience.
Had the man been laying in wait in the bushes near his mews like some sort of paper-pushing highwayman?
The young viscount’s stomach tied in knots at the prospect of what was in that envelope.
He’d put off his solicitor for a jaunt to the country at Lawrence’s invitation. He didn’t regret spending time with his friends, with her; but maybe he should have heard the man out before leaving London in a cloud of dust.
“Let me just…make sure I have this right…” Fitz had been pinching the bridge of his nose, and composed himself to stare at his solicitor in challenge, “I have to marry a lady-”
“Not necessarily a lady- a woman of noble lineage, unimpeachable reputation, and a family in fine moral and financial standing,” His solicitor supplied.
“Yes, that,” Fitz ground out, “and start taking an active role in the family business…all by Michaelmas…in a few months?”
“Correct, my lord,” His solicitor pushed his wire-rim glasses higher on his nose and shuffled some papers without meeting his client’s stare.
Fitz fought to keep his chest rising and falling in an even pattern. “And if I fail to achieve these ends…that gargoyle who claims to be related to me receives everything that should be mine by birth?”
The other man met his eyes, but his voice was grave. “That’s correct as well, Lord Ludlowe. The lands, the funds, the estates, the title would all go to Sir Cranmer Pomfrey, your uncle.”
Why had Fitz’ father done this? When had he set this in motion? Why had no one warned him? Had they known of his father’s plans? Had he trusted his gray-moraled younger brother Cranmer more than his own son?
“And not a single person in my employ or my family saw fit to warn me of such?”
The older man put down the papers, sighed, and folded his hands atop his knees.
“That is the gist of it; yes, my lord.”
Fitz leaned back in the leather chair in his study and ran a hand through his ample blonde locks he’d inherited from his mother.
He looked at the serious and imposing portrait of his father above a trove of decanters.
The man seemed to glower with disappointment even in portraiture.
He should have the portrait removed or banished to some dark corner of the house no one visited.
“It was your father’s expressed wish. Although,” the solicitor held up a finger, Fitz raised a warning brow at him, “I did try to warn you, my lord.”
Fitz turned his head to the side, schooling his voice to be lethally calm. “How the bloody hell did you try to warn me, Gibbons?”
“Didn’t you read my missives?”
“Your…missives? You mean the advertisements you sent detailing marriageable ladies? Or the detailed, and dreadfully dull, I might add, notes from the most recent shareholder meetings?”
“The very same,” The man said, fussing with the papers between them.
Fitz shook his head, his nostrils flared with the itch to knock over all of the neat and tidy papers on his desk, the paper weights that had belonged to his father (he’d made one for his father years ago at school that his father seemed to have tossed out as Fitz hadn’t found it anywhere),
and anything else that might make a satisfying crash, a threatening thud, or chilling thwomp.
The fault wasn’t entirely with the nervous, bald man of business before him. The fault, the subsequent anger, was with himself. Why did he have to have such an inconvenient problem with all the things that came with running a business he seemed to be able to find no way out of?
Granted, Gibbons had only done what his father, the man’s previous client, had dictated, and as squirrelly as the man was, Fitz wondered if maybe he’d advised against it. There was a softness in his expression that told Fitz Gibbon’s felt remorse. It didn’t fix the current problem.
“Gibbons,” his tone was icy, “take your useless carcass and your terrible mustache back to your hideously over-decorated office and find a tidy loophole or a piece of good news for me, or I’m finding another solicitor. You have three days.”
“But, sir-”
“Fine. One week,” he amended, holding up a finger.
When the solicitor had departed, Fitz stood and walked to the decanter. A female voice called from across the room, “Oh no, you don’t.”
Fitz knew that voice, he looked up at the ceiling in exasperation.
“Letitia, not now,” He countered. The spartan-dressed woman took a seat across from his desk and popped a bite of cheese and a grape from the tray in front of her into her mouth.
When his solicitor had shown up, he’d wished she’d been there to assist, but just now, he wanted to brood in peace, alone. She was having none of it.
“Your difficulties are worse when you’ve…imbibed.”
She straightened in her seat, more like a queen than a seamstress and a secretary. “Forget the bastard who took it into his head to do this to his own son,” she made a point of shoving the papers with the codicil aside, an untidy melee of papers marred his desk when he knew order was her sanctuary.
She gestured to the chair between them, “You’re going to eat the food on this tray I ordered from your kitchen, and we’re going to discuss this, and then we’re going to look for solutions.”
“How did you…” he looked at the pale, fine lines of her face and trailed off. Fitz shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. I suppose someone in this house sent for you.”
Her answering smile told him he’d guessed correctly on the first try. She leaned forward on his desk with her chin on one scar-flecked hand, “Sorry, I overheard the news from Mister…Gimlet, was it?”
Letitia handed him a sandwich with beef and sliced cheese on fresh-smelling bread and placed a glass of water in front of him. He propped his feet on his desk. Between bites of food, he relayed the details to her.
“Other than the previous viscount being a self-righteous prig with sewer rot for brains, I don’t see the problem here.” She said as she shook her pale blonde head.
“Try harder. You’re a female, you see problems everywhere,” He said, taking a sip from the glass goblet.
Letitia leveled him with a stare. She wiped her hands demurely on a napkin, “I’ve a candidate in mind for the position.”
He gave her a mocking grimace. “You’re too old and we’d kill each other; but I appreciate the offer.”
Letitia let out a peal of laughter, then said, “Must I spell it out, my lord?” Her eyes pointedly fell on the stack of letters on his desk, standing out from the rest with a black velvet ribbon tied around them. Fitz's face slackened; his jaw fell.
Maybe I think enough for the both of us.
Her words swirled around him in eddies of laughter and cordiality.
It isn’t your connections that I want, Fitz. That’s not the only thing you have to offer, you know.
Her smile, at turns tentative and teasing. Her hand on his shoulder, his hand at her waist. His world was a blur of tumbling shapes and blurred edges and the notes of quadrilles. And he couldn’t blame the effects of alcohol, he could only blame it on a woman, or at present, two of them.
“You think…her?” He said, eloquence personified.
Letitia crossed her arms at her chest. “She is a lady, isn’t she?” She was put-out with him, he supposed, detecting the widened vowels of her well-concealed Southbank speech coming out.
He held up a hand, “There are several problems though.”
“Of that, I’ve no doubt,” she said, looking him over, “But you’re going to have a lot more if you don’t complete the obligations and your varlet of an uncle acquires your inheritance,” she motioned to the papers his solicitor had left on his desk as if to remind him of what he stood to lose,
“So woo the girl and see what ‘appens. Somehow ladies seem to find your over-groomed hair and sinister sense of humor attractive; but there’s no accounting for taste, I suppose.”
“Thank you, as always, for the encouraging words,” He said with a mock smile.
“If not, I could always write something on your behalf askin’ the gossip columns to put it out that yer in the market for a wife. As usual, it isn’t as complicated as you’re makin’ it out to be. But you can’t let either of those vultures best you.”
Letitia didn’t mince words, that’s why he’d trusted her with his correspondence and his problems and so many other things. But she was right, it wasn’t complicated. It was the perfect reason to do what he’d wanted to do anyway.
“Then I’ll need your help,” he said.
“With?” She narrowed her eyes, but there was a sly smile that said she was ready to assist.
“A letter.”
Letitia poorly hid her excitement as she hurried to retrieve a fountain pen and a piece of parchment. “One question though?”
Fitz arched an answering brow, as he often did.
Letitia asked, “Why ‘Princess’?”
Fitz stared at some point in the distance, some memory that was his, and hers, alone.
“Her sister was every inch a queen. She lorded over all of us. The bossiest little thing, always barking instructions and full of demands. I called Noelle…Lady Noelle…Princess, because…it didn’t feel fair. The way it lit her whole face,” he smiled, “it stuck.”
Letitia wasted no time declaring the obvious. “You’re gone for her, I think.”