“Yes, his mistress, Mrs. Cochrane, she was killed in a carriage accident. Your uncle immediately told me to write to Miss Cochrane to tell her to be packed to come live at Chase Park. I wrote to tell her she would be fetched in two weeks.”
“I see,” the earl said. “How many weeks have passed beyond the two weeks, Crittaker?”
“Eight of them, my lord.”
The earl once again simply stared at his secretary. “You mean that an eighteen-year-old girl has been left alone for two months?”
Mr. Crittaker nodded, so miserable that he wanted to sink into the elegant Aubusson carpet beneath his shoes. “There must be a servant, my lord, surely.”
The earl waved that information away, saying slowly, “I wonder why she didn’t write my uncle to ask him why he hadn’t sent a carriage for her?”
Mr. Crittaker didn’t have to pause at all, just said, more miserable now than he had been just the moment before, “She must have believed that your uncle no longer wanted her since her mother had died. He never treated her with any affection when she was here, my lord, on her yearly visits. How he treated her when he visited her mother at Rosebud Cottage, I don’t know. No, she wouldn’t have said a word to your uncle. She’s very proud, my lord. You know that. She’s the Duchess.”
“Or perhaps her letter never arrived, or it did arrive and you simply misplaced it, Crittaker.”
Mr. Crittaker could hear the howling wind outside. He thought again of standing in the blowing snow with naught but his greatcoat for protection. He was forced to admit, “It is possible, my lord, but I trust, indeed, I pray, that such a thing didn’t occur.”
The earl cursed heartily and at great detailed length. Mr. Crittaker was impressed, but was wise enough not to compliment his lordship on his fluency. His lordship had been a major in the army, selling out only six weeks earlier when he’d come to take his place as the VIII earl of Chase.
The earl finally ran himself out of verbal bile. He said, “How is it that you just now remembered the Duchess?”
Mr. Crittaker tugged at his cravat, a somber creation that immediately unfastened itself with his pulling. “It was Mr. Spears who remembered.”
“Spears,” the earl repeated, then smiled. “My uncle’s valet, now mine, reminded you about the Duchess?”
“Mr. Spears took a liking to her when she was just a little mite, that’s what he called her,” Mr. Crittaker said. “It occurred to Mr. Spears that something might have ‘slipped through the crevices,’ as he phrased it, my lord. He had believed that Miss Cochrane was perhaps in London at his lordship’s behest, but of course she wasn’t, but Mr. Spears couldn’
t have known that.”
“I see,” the earl said, and appeared to withdraw himself into deep thought. Mr. Crittaker didn’t move. He wanted to pull on his ear, a habit he’d had since boyhood, and it took all his concentration to keep his hands at his sides.
The earl said finally, “It appears I must make a short trip into Sussex. I will leave in the morning and fetch Miss Cochrane back with me.”
“Very good, my lord.”
“Oh, Crittaker, your cravat is a mess. Also,” the earl’s voice dropped markedly, “if something has happened to Miss Cochrane, you will be finding yourself a new employment.”
The earl continued his perusal of the glowing embers in the fireplace, kicking one with the toe of his boot.
Forgotten! Good God, Crittaker had simply forgotten her. It froze his blood to think of the Duchess alone and unprotected for two damned months. On the other hand, he’d not given her a thought either, nor for that matter, had anyone in the house save for Spears. Marcus hadn’t seen her in five years, not since that long ago summer when his two male cousins had drowned in a boating race. He wondered if she’d grown as beautiful as he’d believed she would then.
Not that it mattered. She was his bastard cousin. But he owed it to his uncle to see that she was taken care of. What would he do with her? Ah, that was the question.
The Duchess was the topic of conversation the following afternoon in the snug and very cozy Green Cube Room at Chase Park.
“The Duchess,” Aunt Gweneth said in the general direction of the Twins, speaking in her precise way, for she always prided herself on her enunciation, “is quite the most beautiful girl I have ever seen.”
“But you haven’t seen many girls at all, beautiful or otherwise, Aunt Gweneth,” Antonia said, looking up from her Mrs. Radcliffe novel. “You’ve never ventured beyond York. However, I do hope she’s all right. How perfectly awful to be forgotten. She must be very hurt.”
“Marcus will take care of her,” Fanny said. “He can do anything. Yes, he will make her feel better about her being forgotten. I would I could have gone with him. I could have kept his spirits up.”
“I do wish you would get over your unfortunate infatuation with your cousin,” Aunt Gweneth said, looking up at Fanny. She thought of the new earl, Reed Wyndham’s only son, now the earl of Chase. And he’d been in the fighting in the Peninsula! He could easily have been butchered by those damned French, or by those guerrillas that seemed to abound in Marcus’s few letters to his uncle over the past three years. But he’d survived, thank God, even though she doubted that James had thanked anyone heavenward. So many dead babes, so very many, and all of them male. She would have sworn to anyone who had bothered to ask her that her brother would remarry the day after the countess had been placed reverently in the Wyndham family tomb, the primary consideration being whether the girl was likely to be a good breeder. But given the opportunity, he hadn’t remarried, to her great surprise, and now he was dead.
She would give Marcus credit for the consideration he’d shown his twin cousins and her. He had, in truth, surprised her greatly, for in her experience, gentlemen had the sensitivity of toads. She would also allow that Marcus was a handsome man, had much of the look of his uncle, with his thick dark brown hair and heavily lashed blue eyes. Ah, and that chin of his, stubborn as a demented mule, at least that had been what it depicted in James. In Marcus? She remembered James referring to Marcus as the devil’s own son, and smiling slightly. She sighed. They still all had yet to see either the limits of his good nature or the depths of his irritation. He was taller than his uncle, towering over even Spears, his uncle’s valet, who had consented, his voice at its driest, to take over, and doubtless improve upon, the appearance of the new earl. Spears, Gweneth had heard Sampson say, believed the new lordship to have a good amount of potential and grit, the latter commodity something he would have dire need of.
He’d only been here at Chase Park for four weeks now, having left his widowed mother in Lower Slaughter where she refused to budge from Cranford Manor. He was the head of the Wyndham family, this new earl who still couldn’t seem to remember to answer to “Chase” rather than simply “Marcus Wyndham,” only son of a second son with no particular prospects for anything save a life in the military. Life was uncertain, Gweneth thought, and served up wretchedly unexpected dishes on one’s plate.
“I am not infatuated with him,” Fanny said as she poked her needle through a piece of very poorly stitched embroidery, whose dubious platitude would be eventually rendered as Home and Heaven. “It is just that he is wonderful. He has been very kind, Aunt, even you admit that, and you remember how Papa always went on and on about how Marcus didn’t have pure blood, whatever that means.”