The Hidden Duke's Heart (Dukes of Deception #3)

Chapter One

The service courtyard of Aldermere Hall could have swallowed the ground floor of Rennet’s Bakery twice over. Grey stone stretched in every direction, slick with rain that had stopped twenty minutes ago and left the air smelling of wet slate.

Jane crossed it with a basket that weighed more than common sense should have permitted one person to carry alone.

Her mother had packed banana muffins, orange marmalade in two varieties, a round of walnut bread that sat like a warm stone against the bottom, and a quantity of maternal ambition that added no physical weight and somehow made the whole enterprise heavier.

‘Present yourself well. Do not chatter. And for mercy’s sake, Jane, do not touch anything that is not yours.

’ Her mother had said it twice on the doorstep and once more through the parlour window as Jane walked away, and would deliver it a fourth time over supper, on the principle that an instruction was not truly given until it had been given to exhaustion.

The basket tilted as she rounded the corner toward the kitchen entrance, the oilcloth sliding toward the gravel with a slow, resigned certainty she could watch happening and do nothing whatever to prevent.

Her left hand shot out and caught nothing useful.

Her right overcompensated in precisely the wrong direction.

A hand that was not hers caught the oilcloth before it fell.

It belonged to a man in a dark coat who had come from somewhere to her left without her hearing him He was of a tall stature, with shoulders of sufficient breadth to fill his coat without the slightest aid of a tailor’s padding, and his dark hair, though wanting the shears, served only to draw notice to the firm cast of his jaw.

His dark grey eyes, fixed upon her with an intensity that defied the polite decorum of society, made a singular impression upon her mind.

He pressed the cloth’s edge flat against the rim, his fingers brushing the back of her glove as he did it, and stepped back, and the brush of his hand was ever so fleeting before she had decided whether to take offence.

“Thank you,” Jane said. “That would have been a disaster of genuinely historic proportions, because those muffins are for the Duke of Aldermere, and my mother would have buried me in the garden if I’d delivered them as gravel pudding.”

He held her countenance a moment longer than the situation strictly warranted, his gaze lingering over the frame of her long, nut-brown tresses and the striking green of her eyes, as if he meant to commit each feature to memory; then, his mouth moved toward an expression that could scarce be called a smile.

“I’m delivering for Rennet’s Bakery,” Jane added, because his silence seemed to be waiting for her to fill it, and she had never in her life met a silence she could leave alone.

“In Millcombe. We had a letter about the order last week and my mother wanted to bring everything personally, but my sister Lottie has a cough and my father cannot leave the ovens before noon, so here I am, very nearly ruining everything exactly as predicted.”

He inclined his head, so slightly that a less attentive person would have missed it, and Jane was observing his face because he was not talking and she needed something to read instead.

“You must be one of the stewards,” she said. “Or a secretary, perhaps. You have a secretary’s coat, if you don’t mind my saying so, though I suppose you might mind, in which case please forget I said it and I will simply go and deliver these muffins before anything else goes wrong.”

His gaze dropped to the basket, came back to her face, and then, with the deliberateness of a man choosing a single coin from a full purse, he lifted one hand and pointed toward the kitchen door.

“Splendid.” Jane said. “Thank you. I’ll just go in, then, and stop accosting the household.”

She went. When she glanced back from the doorway, the courtyard was empty.

The kitchen of Aldermere Hall possessed all the splendor and opulence to which Rennet’s Bakery might, in its wildest flights of fancy, aspire to become.

Copper pans hung from iron rails in descending order of size, each polished to a shade of amber that caught the firelight and threw it back with interest. The ovens were enormous, the preparation tables smooth as cream, and the whole room smelled of bread and rosemary and the warmth that comes only from a kitchen where someone competent has been working since before dawn.

“You’re the Rennet girl,” said a woman at the largest table, without looking up from the pastry she was trimming. Her hands moved with the practiced certainty of one whose labor had spanned three decades, and who had exhausted her patience for the bungling of others within the first year.

“Jane Rennet, yes, ma’am. I’ve brought the order my mother arranged with the house.”

“Set it there.” The woman nodded toward a side table already occupied by a bowl of rising dough and a jar of something dark.

“Mrs. Vale. I’m the cook. If your mother’s marmalade is as good as the sample she sent last month, we may have further business.

If it is not, we will not, and I will tell her so directly. ”

“She would expect nothing less, Mrs. Vale.”

Mrs. Vale glanced up at that, and her expression suggested Jane had passed a test she had not known she was sitting.

“Was the walk from Millcombe very wet?” asked a second woman, who appeared through the door behind Jane carrying a set of linen napkins folded over one arm.

She was shorter and rounder than Mrs. Vale, with a face kind in the way that comes from years of knowing exactly how much kindness a household can absorb before it turns to indulgence. “Mrs. Croft. I’m housekeeper here.”

“Only the last mile, ma’am, and my shoes have survived worse.”

“Your mother writes an excellent letter. Very specific about the marmalade process, which His Grace will appreciate, as he prefers to know what he is eating and where it came from.”

“My mother would rather perish than send anything anonymous,” Jane said.

“A commendable quality in a supplier,” Mrs. Croft said, and smiled, and tucked a napkin corner beneath her arm. “And you met no trouble finding the kitchen entrance?”

“I met a man in the courtyard who pointed me toward it. Tall, dark coat, very quiet. I assumed he was a steward, though I may have offended him by saying he had a secretary’s coat.”

Mrs. Croft’s mouth opened, closed, and opened again, as though she were choosing among several answers and finding none of them adequate.

“I see,” Mrs. Croft said, after a pause long enough to hang laundry in. “Yes. That would have been, well. You’ll have met a member of the household, Miss Rennet, and I wouldn’t trouble yourself about it. We are a quiet house. You will find us less lively than you are used to, I expect.”

“Quiet how, ma’am? My family’s notion of quiet is anything below a shout across the ovens.”

“Quiet in the way of a house whose master prefers it so.” Mrs. Croft folded the last napkin with a care the napkin did not require.

“His Grace keeps to himself. He does not entertain, he does not call and is not called upon, and the county has had a great deal to say about the silence and very little of it kind. You will hear the talk soon enough, since Millcombe runs on it. I only ask that you not bring it through my kitchen door.”

Before Jane could ask what that meant, a young man came through the corridor with the buoyant energy of someone who had decided, long ago, that he was going to enjoy his position regardless of whether his position reciprocated his feelings.

He had sandy hair, a face built for grinning, and the sort of posture that belonged to either an under-butler or an unusually confident footman.

“Whitlock,” he said, with a small bow that managed to be both correct and cheerful. “Under-butler. I see Mrs. Vale hasn’t frightened you off yet.”

“She has been here four minutes, Whitlock,” Mrs. Vale said, without turning around.

“Exactly. Most of the delivery girls cry by three.”

“They do not cry.”

“Bernadette cried.”

“Bernadette dropped a crock of butter on my floor and then stood in it.”

“And cried about it, which is my point.” Whitlock turned to Jane with undiminished good humour. “Has your family always done baking, Miss Rennet, or did someone wake up one morning and choose flour?”

“Three generations. My grandmother started with bread and funeral biscuits and my mother expanded into pastry and preserves. We supply half the village and most of the assembly suppers, when they’ll have us.”

“Funeral biscuits,” Whitlock said, with genuine interest. “I confess I should like to try one, though perhaps not under the traditional circumstances that usually accompany them.”

“We do sell them to the living as well. They’re really just spiced shortbread with a morbid reputation, and my grandmother always said the reputation was half the appeal, because there is nothing the living enjoy quite so much as a biscuit that reminds them they are not yet departed.”

“Your grandmother sounds a formidable woman.”

“She was, and she would have approved of this kitchen, though she would have found fault with the marmalade jars being stored on the warm side of the room, which she considered a moral failing.”

“Mrs. Vale stores them on the warm side of the room,” Whitlock said, with the delight of a man laying a trap.

“Then your grandmother and I shall have words,” Mrs. Vale said, without turning from her pastry, “and I expect I shall win them, as I have never yet lost an argument to a woman who is not present to conduct it.”

“A quality that improves most things,” Whitlock said before Mrs. Vale could decide whether she had been insulted.

Jane laughed, and Whitlock looked pleased, and even Mrs. Vale’s shoulders shifted in a way that, in a more demonstrative woman, might have been called amusement.