Chapter Two
Gabriel Declan woke to the undeniable knowledge that, as he teetered on the edge of his thirtieth year, it was high time he changed his style of life.
“Hell’s teeth,” he called to the demon pounding on the door to his bedchamber in the wee reaches of the night. “The building had better be afire.”
“It’d be just your luck if it were.”
Gabriel’s closest friend, sometime valet, and under steward of the Barkham estates, Orde, entered the room with a long dark cloth draped over one arm and a tray bearing a small glass of murky substance in his hands. “It’s ten of the clock, milord, and you have a caller.”
Gabriel rolled onto his back, throwing an arm over his eyes as Orde set down his assorted items, strode to the tall narrow windows, and pulled back the draperies. The dim London light struggled in, already cloudy with the morning fires being lit across the great and mighty city.
“I’m still Gabe to you, and always will be,” he growled. “And who calls at the ghastly hour of ten in the morning? Decent folk are still in their beds.”
“And indecent ones, such as you.” Orde clanged unnecessarily as he poked at the ash in the grate, located the chamberstick he had used to light Gabe to his rooms not so many hours before, and poured water from the pitcher into the washbasin.
His face paled as Gabe stirred and threw off the covers, but he kept the aplomb that had seen him through many a scrape, fright, and scrabble at Gabe’s side. “Will you tell me now how you earned that wound on your head?”
Gabe probed the knot above his right ear and winced. “I think Fenton tried to kill me again.”
“Tried? I think he succeeded.” Orde held out the banyan for Gabe to step into, then kicked forward his slippers.
“His luck if he does. He’ll inherit Barkham. All the estates, properties, rents, tithes, annuities, pensions, and debts. Every angry tenant, broken fence, and exhausted acre of land.”
Gabe moved to the basin and bent to splash his face, wincing again as he found another bruise. He’d taken a right beating, and if he wasn’t mistaken, that agonizing pain shooting up his left side was the sign of a cracked rib.
“Anyone else would want Barkham, Gabe,” Orde said quietly. “It won’t take much to turn the ship around. A bit of good management, a few wise investments, some luck.”
“And we all know I possess that in spades.” Gabe mopped his face with the cloth, then examined his visage in the clouded, spotty glass. He pulled back his lips in a feral grin. Some discoloration, a scab above one eyebrow, but he still had all his teeth, praise be.
“Did he start a mill at the club?”
“No, only made his usual remarks about my unfitness and the unfortunate accident of my birth putting on a blot on the family tree, etcetera. The thugs found me outside Astley’s.”
“You deserve a thrashing if you’re going to continue to frequent low places,” Orde said severely. “You are a duke now. Milord.”
“Keep lording me, and I’ll plant you a facer.” Gabe sat in his chair and allowed Orde to place a warm cloth along his jaw. Despite his words, his friend was gentle around the swelling and bruises.
“If I could disinter Harry and thrash him for doing this to me, I would,” Gabe reflected. “To think. The man survives Zamora, Orthez, and the occupation of Paris, then dies of cholera while vacationing in St. Petersburg.”
“He didn’t do it to spite you, Gabe,” Orde said, removing the cloth and unfolding the razor.
“No, my mother did this to spite me. Keeps her silence to me and everyone while Harry is lively and likely to produce heirs, then springs the truth on us all the moment the ship returns from Russia with the remains of the 4th Duke of Barkham.”
“God rest his soul,” Orde added.
“God rot him,” Gabe exclaimed. “And her. A woman can’t tell her own son he’s the brat of a ducal throw?
I thought Powlett was my father for the first thirteen years of my life, till she informs me I’m the sprig of a British soldier.
And not just any soldier.” The sense of grievance grew every time he rehearsed the story, and it pleased him to feed his bitterness.
“A Hussar, a colonel, and the second son of a duke, biding his time fighting the French and Muhammed Ali in Egypt until his family can get him some royal sinecure and set him up for life. Instead, he lets some Mameluke bayonet him and end all those hopes, and leaves the issue of a cousin with ducal aspirations.”
“Fenton the forgotten.” Orde shook his head.
“Fenton the slimy bastard. He’s performed some black magic, I don’t doubt, to kill Harry off before he can marry and produce an heir of his own.
And when up I surface, when my dear darling mother of a sudden produces legal marriage lines, though the wedding took place outside of Europe, the court upholds them and her, and thinks they honor me by passing along the dukedom. ”
“Most men would find it an honor,” Orde reflected.
He had heard this tirade many a time in the past months, and made the same patient points.
“Your father was a military hero. Powlett gave your mother shelter and a home and a man of the house after your father was killed. He brought her, and all of you, to England when he returned. He didn’t have to; he could have left you in Egypt.
And it’s the younger ones that are the bastards, or were, since your mother married Powlett once they reached British shores. ”
Gabe still felt a blade lance through him at the memory of the man he’d thought a father.
Of his own actual father, provider of the Declan blood and now the ducal inheritance, Gabe had only portraits, sketches, and a sword and scabbard bearing the crest of the 8th King’s Royal Hussars, for whom Thomas Gabriel Henry Declan had fought and died.
“And it’s Fenton who still stands to inherit if I stick my spoon in the wall,” Gabe grumbled. “An event he seems determined to hasten with all possible speed.”
“Therefore you spite him by marrying and producing a son.” Orde rinsed the razor and finished the shave with an application of witch hazel, which stung like the devil in Gabe’s cuts.
“Hell’s fingertips, not you, too. For the last dozen years, no one’s taken a bit of notice of me, now suddenly Mum and every female attached to the Declan name wants to know where I’ll be putting my sugar stick in the foreseeable future.”
Orde smothered a laugh at the vulgarity with a pretended cough. He handed Gabe a fresh shirt. “You have to understand why.”
“Why they’d ring me into marriage?” Gabe’s voice emerged muffled as he pulled the clean linen over his head and tossed the soiled one aside.
Orde caught it. “With Fenton going on as he is, they’re just pushing me to make some poor hopeful maid a widow before she gets the chance to properly enjoy being a duchess. ”
Orde shook out a pair of trousers made of white cotton twill.
“Your mother, Harry’s mother and sisters, even Fenton’s sisters, and the Dowager Duchess, they all depend on an allowance from your estate.
If that estate passes to Fenton, how generous d’you think he’d be with your mum and the young’uns? ”
They always referred to Gabe’s squad of siblings as the young’uns, though the eldest was three-and-twenty, only six years younger than Gabe. The youngest was ten, born the year Powlett died and Gabe lost the one mentor who could teach him how to go on as a nameless man in a friendless world.
Gabe scowled as he fastened the fall front of his trousers, his fingers clumsy with his cracked and bruised knuckles.
Powlett had taught him how to fight at an early age, a necessary skill for a boy perpetually mocked as fatherless, and Gabe had no doubt that skill had saved his life last night.
He’d held his own against the thugs until their scuffle drew attention and passersby started making noises about alerting the watch.
The thugs had withdrawn, the big bruiser landing one last punch that had dented Gabe’s ribs.
But escaping only meant Fenton would send bigger thugs next time. Possibly armed with weapons that would see the job done properly.
And Gabe’s death, as Orde pointed out—damn him for being so persevering and perceptive—would leave his mother and siblings without income and without a protector.
“Let me focus on keeping myself alive, Orde. Then we can trick some Long Meg into putting a shackle on me.”
Orde snorted. “The ones lining up for the hand of the Duke of Barkham won’t be Long Megs.
They’ll be the daughters of viscounts and earls and barons.
Maybe an admiral or bishop’s daughter to sweeten the mix.
You’re young, you’re sturdy, your estates are not thoroughly encumbered, and if you’ll drink this, you’ll make a passing show of being more than a sot.
The fair maidens will be lining up to throw out their lures. ”
Gabe took the glass of liquid and sniffed. Orde’s remedy for a night of drinking, mixed with his remedy for a thrashing. He downed the mixture and set the glass on the tray.
“The nicer ones won’t look twice at me,” he reminded his friend. “You must hear the same gossip at your club that I do at mine. Barely civilized, they say. Raised by a blacksmith—”
“Silversmith, Powell was, and he made fine work.” Orde had been one of the many orphans who congregated under Powlett’s watchful eye, the reason the two boys had become friends.
“Tradesmen are all the same to the high sticklers. So are foreigners.” Gabe lifted his chin as Orde arranged his cravat and knotted it in the Oriental style, a smooth square with the ends tucked beneath the collar of his waistcoat.
“Your father was British, and you are British.” Orde, not satisfied with the knot, untied his creation and tried again.
“And my mother was Egyptian.” Gabe stared into the small, chipped hand mirror, evaluating Orde’s work and his own features.
He’d inherited his height from his father, he was told, along with the build that filled out his coats in the style approved by current fashion without need for padding or corsets.
But his mother had given him her charcoal hair, long face with its nose and high cheekbones, and the brown tint to his skin.
He stood out among the milk and cream of English gentlemen like a stray tomcat in a parlor full of household tabbies.
“The frock coat today?” Orde held up the black coat with its flared skirts and the velvet shawl collar cut to display the pattern of the waistcoat beneath.
“Just who is my caller, and why are you valeting me?” Gabe slipped his arms into the fitted sleeves and buttoned the snug coat at his waist, leaving the top buttons undone to show off the pattern of his waistcoat.
“I found Brown drunk in the scullery with two silver teaspoons in his pocket. Naturally I had to turn him off. I’ll be tending you until we find a replacement. If you moved to the townhouse, there’d be many candidates eager to be a duke’s manservant.”
Gabe had many reasons he didn’t want to move from his shabby rented quarters to the townhouse, built by the first duke in the previous century when the Declan family fortunes took a turn for the better thanks to their support for the Hanoverian ascension.
One reason for dragging his feet was that, though his mother and siblings had gladly taken shelter there, to Gabe, the house still belonged to Harry.
“You turned a man off for stealing trinkets to pay for his drink?” Gabe scoffed, pulling at the cuffs of his coat. “Haven’t I done worse? Haven’t you?”
“We were never foolish enough to steal from employers.” Orde held up his cloth brush. “Now heed me. Your caller is the Earl Jermyn of the Hervey family. Son of the Marquess of Bristol and current MP for Bury St. Edmunds.”
“One of the rotten boroughs?” Gabe asked. He was following the Reform debates with interest, especially because the Barkham title came with a seat in the House of Lords, and he was expected to take it.
“No, a real constituency. Votes for the Tories, I understand.”
“Is he trying to influence me on something?” Gabe had more sympathies for the Whigs, the ones calling for reform. Sympathies due to his having been raised among the lower classes and obliged to fight for every opportunity, appreciate every scrap of food.
Orde handed him his watch to attach to the fob dangling from his waistcoat. “Jermyn’s about to marry a daughter of the Duke of Rutland. I think he’s here on family business of some sort.”
“Can’t imagine what a duke’s family wants with me.”
Orde paused and looked him over. “You’re one of them now, Gabe.”
“I’ll never be one of them,” Gabe said. He combed pomade through his hair to push back the thick locks and try to keep them from falling in his eyes. “They’ll never allow it. Fenton’s likely thought of a new way to try to kill me.”
“Too much depends on you, Gabriel. You can’t let him succeed.”
“I don’t intend to.” Gabe straightened his shoulders and, carrying himself as if he hadn’t been beaten within an inch of his life the night before, went downstairs to face whatever evil turn of fate lay in store for him next.