‘Miss Carstairs,’ said Gregory, reaching out to take the cup and saucer from her trembling fingers. ‘I fear this has all been rather too much for you. I think you should go to a guest room and have a lie-down. A bath. A change of clothes. And something to eat and drink in peace.’
‘Oh, what a good idea,’ said Lady Mixby, leaping to her feet.
That did it. He might have said all the right things, but deep down he was ashamed of her. Just as Aunt Charity had felt shamed by having to house her, the product of a runaway match. Aunt Charity had spent years failing to make her acceptable to her congregation and the community of Stoketown. And in the end had just kept her out of sight as much as possible.
And this was how it had started. By sending Prudence to her room whenever there was company she wanted to impress.
‘If you think for one moment,’ said Prudence, snatching the teaspoon from the saucer as he took it away, so she could use it to emphasise her point, ‘that I am going to let you shuffle me out of the way so that you can explain your behaviour over the last two days to everyone else and leave me in the dark, then you have another think coming!’
Gregory reached out and confiscated the teaspoon, then tossed it to the tea tray, where it landed with a tinkle amongst the china.
‘You are overwrought,’ he said repressively.
‘Is that so surprising? I trusted you! I thought you were a decent, hard-working man. A man who’d set out to right wrongs and defend the helpless. Instead you are the kind of man who makes the kind of wagers that result in fist fights and falling into bed with strange women! I trusted you with my virtue, and with my money—’
Lady Mixby gasped and fell back to the sofa, her hands clasped to her bosom.
But Prudence was beyond caring. She’d sat there listening to him account for himself with growing resentment. She couldn’t hold it in any longer.
‘And now I find out that I don’t even know your name!’
‘Well, that at least is easily rectified. My name is Charles Gregory Jamison Willingale, Seventh Duke of Halstead. I think we can gloss over the lesser titles for now.’
‘Oh, you do, do you?’
How could he sit there and calmly reel off a list of names whilst completely sidestepping the real issue? Which was that he’d deceived her. Deliberately deceived her.
‘And as for explaining myself to everyone else...’ He glanced from Hugo to Bodkin with a sort of chilling hauteur that made him look even more like a stranger than ever. ‘I have no intention of doing any such thing.’
‘Oh, I say—that is dashed unfair!’
Gregory held up his hand to silence the outburst from his indignant young cousin. ‘No,’ he said. ‘What would be unfair would be to divulge anything to anyone before I have done so to my fiancée. She, of course, must take precedence over anything you feel I owe you, Hugo. Or indeed you, Lady Mixby.’
‘Of course, of course,’ said Lady Mixby, nodding her head whilst clasping and unclasping her hands.
‘We will all adjourn until dinner.’ He got to his feet. ‘Which will give Miss Carstairs and I a chance to bathe and change and generally refresh ourselves.’
Hugo wrinkled his nose. ‘Come to mention it, you do smell rather ripe.’
When she made no move from the sofa, His Grace the Seventh Duke of Wherever-it-was extended his hand to urge her to her feet. But she had finally reached the stage where, had she been a bottle of ginger beer, her top would have popped off under the pressure building up inside from constant shaking.
‘Will you stop,’ said Prudence, batting away his hand, ‘calling me Miss Carstairs? And telling everyone I am your fiancée. When obviously I can never be anything of the sort!’
Dukes didn’t marry nobodies. Especially not nobodies they’d only known five minutes.
He didn’t even have the grace to flinch. Clearly all the grace he had was in his inherited title.
‘Overwrought,’ said the man who had first appeared to be a villain, had then for a few magical hours looked to her like the answer to all her prayers, but who now turned out to be a duke. ‘I can understand that the discovery you are about to become a duchess has come as a shock. But once you have had a lie-down and composed yourself you will see that—’
‘Don’t talk to me in that beastly manner. And don’t—’ she swatted his hand away again ‘—order me about.’
She was just taking a breath to unburden herself in regard to her sense of injustice when there came another knock at the door. This time it was a plain, practical-looking woman dressed all in black who came in.