The Dissolute Duke

‘You suffered a blow to the neck and a nasty bang on the head. It was lucky that the coach to Leicester was passing by the other way, because otherwise …’

‘You could have been there all night and Doctor Cameron said you may not have lived.’ Eleanor, her youngest brother’s wife, had joined in now, but unlike the others her voice shook and her face was blotchy. She had been crying. A lot.

This realisation frightened Lucinda more than anything else had.

‘How did it happen?’

‘Your carriage overturned. There was a corner, it seems, and the vehicle was moving too fast. It plummeted down a hill a good many yards and came to rest at the bottom of the incline.’

Agitation made her shake as more and more words tumbled into the chasm of blankness her brain had become.

Beatrice took over, holding her hand tightly, and managing a forced smile. ‘It is over now, sweetheart. You are home and you are safe and that is all that is important.’

‘How did I get here?’

‘Asher brought you back three days ago.’ Lucinda swallowed. Three days. Her mind tried its hardest to find any recollection of the passage of time and failed.

And now she was cast upon this bed as a figure of stone, her head and heart the only parts of her body that she could still feel. A tear leaked its way from her left eye and fell warm down her cheek into the line of her hair. Swallowing, her throat thick and raw, she had the taste of blood on her tongue.

Screaming. A flash of sound came back through the ether. Screaming and screaming. Her voice and another calming her. Quiet and sad, warm hands holding her neck so that she did not move, the night air cold and wet and the rain joining blood.

‘Doctor Cameron said it was a miracle you did not move another inch as you would have been dead. He says it was fortunate that when they found you, your head had been stabilised between two heavy planks of wood to restrain any motion.’

‘Lucky,’ she countered, the sentiment falling into question.

They were not telling her the whole of it. She could see it in the shared looks and feel it in the hushed unspoken reticence. She wondered why her brothers were not here in the room and knew the answer to the question as soon as she thought it.

They would not be able to hide things from her as easily as her sisters-in-law, although Cristo was still most efficient at keeping his own council.

‘Was anyone else hurt?’

The hesitation told her there had been.

‘There was a man in the carriage with you, Lucy.’ Emerald now took her other hand, rubbing at it in a way that was supposed to be comforting, she supposed, though it felt vaguely annoying because her skin was so numb.

‘I was alone with him?’ Nothing made sense. What could she have been doing on the open road at night and in the company of a stranger? It was all too odd. ‘Who was he?’

‘The sixth Duke of Alderworth.’ Beatrice took up the story now.

‘Alderworth?’ Lucinda knew the name despite not remembering anything at all about the accident.

My God. The Dissolute Duke was infamous across London and it seemed he kept to the company of whores and harpies almost exclusively. Why would she have been there alone with him and so far from home?

‘Does Asher know he was there?’ She looked up at Emerald.

‘Unfortunately he does.’

‘Do other people also know?

‘Unfortunately they do.’

‘How many know?’

‘All of London would not be putting too fine a point on it, I think.’

‘I see. It is a scandal then and I am ruined?’

‘No.’ Beatrice-Maude’s voice was strong. ‘Your brothers would never allow that to happen and neither will we.’

Lucinda swallowed, the whole conundrum more than she could deal with. Eleanor and Emerald watched her with a certain worry in their eyes and even Beatrice, who was seldom flustered, seemed out of sorts.

Intrinsically flawed. The words came from nowhere as she closed her eyes and slept.

Chapter Three

Tay Ellesmere sat in the library of the Carisbrook family town house in Mayfair and looked at the three Wellingham brothers opposite him.

His head ached, his right leg was swollen above the knee and the top of his left arm was encased in a heavy white bandage, as were his ribs, strapped tightly so that breathing was not quite so agonising. Besides this he had myriad other cuts and grazes from the glass and wood splintering as the carriage had overturned.

But these injuries were the very least of his worries. A far more pressing matter lingered in the air between him and his hosts.

‘You were dressed most inappropriately and Lucinda was barely dressed at all, for God’s sake. The scandal is the talk of the town and has been for the past week.’

Asher Wellingham, Duke of Carisbrook, seldom minced words and Tay did not dissemble, either.

‘Our lack of clothing was the result of being thrown over and over down a hill in a somersaulting carriage. One does not generally emerge from such a mishap faultlessly attired,’ he drawled the reply, knowing that it would annoy them, but short of verifying their sister’s presence at his party he could do little else but blame the accident.

‘We thought Lucinda had gone with Lady Posy Tompkins to her aunt’s country home for the weekend. I cannot for the life of me imagine how instead she ended up alone in the middle of the night with the most dissolute Duke in all of London town and dressed as a harpy.’

‘Did you ask her?’

‘She can remember nothing.’ Taris Wellingham broke in now, his stillness as menacing as his older brother’s fury.

‘Nothing?’

‘Nothing before the accident, nothing during the accident and nothing just after the accident.’

Hope flared. Perhaps it might give him an escape after all. If the lady was not baying for his blood, then her brothers might also give up the chase should he play his cards well.

‘Your sister informed me that she was trying to reach the Wellingham town house after being separated somehow from her friend. She merely asked me to give her a lift home and I immediately assented.’

‘Her reticule, hat and cloak were returned to us from your country seat. A coincidence, would you not say, to be left at the very place you swear she was not.’

Cristo Wellingham’s voice sounded as flat as his brothers’.

‘Richard Allenby, the Earl of Halsey, has also told half of London that she was a guest at your weekend soirée. Others verify his story.’

‘He lies. I was the host and your sister was not there.’