The Duke's Holiday Page 2

  However, Montford doubted the latter. He was firmly convinced Michelangelo himself could not reproduce the studied anarchy of A. Honeywell’s writing. Which led him back to the question of the morning:

  Who the devil was A. Honeywell?

  “Stevenage,” Montford murmured, folding up the letter carefully. “Someone is bamming us.”

  “Who would dare to bam you, Your Grace?” Stevenage breathed, sounding as affronted as Louis XVI must have felt when he learned how his head was going to spend its last few moments on earth.

  To give the loyal servant some credit, Stevenage’s horrified reaction was only a slightly exaggerated version of what a less high-strung man would have done, given the same news. For who indeed would dare to cross the Duke of Montford?

  No one in his right mind, obviously.

  No one except a Honeywell.

  And that was only because they thought they could hide behind that damnable contract. Only because they thought they were immune to being crushed under his ducal heel. Which couldn’t be farther from the truth, now that the Honeywell line was at an end. Only a direct male heir could fulfill the terms of the contract. And Alyosius had none, which meant the estate…

  Reverted back to the dukedom.

  After two hundred long years, Rylestone Hall and environs were his once more, to dispose of as he wished.

  Montford could have jumped for joy had he not thought it would mar the creases in his breeches. And he couldn’t celebrate just yet. It was one thing to learn someone was dead from a third party, another altogether to have direct proof. Ocular evidence. Montford wouldn’t rest easy until he was assured of Alyosius’ current resting place – which he hoped was six feet under a rocky patch of Yorkshire dirt.

  And as for the author of this little deceit…

  “Stevenage, I want you to pay a visit to Rylestone Hall.”

  Stevenage’s eyes went as wide as saucers. It was not in Montford’s habit to send Stevenage on journeys of such magnitude, delegating his business outside of London to a Montford steward already on site. In fact, it was not in Montford’s habit to let Stevenage out of the library before nightfall – unless the man had to use the chamber pot, of course, though even then Montford had to be well-convinced of the necessity.

  He would go to Yorkshire himself – he was vexed enough by this mess to overcome his aversion to traveling – but he couldn’t leave London right now. Lords was still in session for the next few weeks, and then he was getting married. It was to be the biggest society wedding of the year. Obviously. He was Montford. An affair of that magnitude required careful planning and an endless parade of luncheons, dinner parties, musicales and balls, all guaranteed to irritate the hell out of him.

  He did not do well in crowds. But he did not have a choice but to play the doting bridegroom, if he was to wed the inestimable Lady Araminta Carlisle, society darling, perfect future Duchess of Montford. Appearances were everything with the ton. And with Araminta. And of course with Montford. Which was why he’d chosen the flawless paragon for his Duchess. Yet Montford just wished for the whole blasted business to be over and the requisite heir and a spare produced so that his life could return to normal. Propagating the ducal line was turning out to be the most inconvenient duty he’d had to undertake yet in his role as Montford.

  Stevenage nodded vigorously. “O… of course, sir.”

  “I want proof of that man’s death. Certificates, et cetera. A trip to the gravesite. That sort of thing.”

  Stevenage went from incredulous to horrified in the blink of an eye. “Your Grace, you don’t want me to … dear heavens, you don’t think I should actually …”

  “Out with it, man!”

  “ … dig up the body!” Stevenage concluded, winded.

  Good God, did Stevenage actually think he would stoop so low as to demand such a thing? Montford was appalled.

  Then he cocked his head to the side and thought about it for a moment. That wouldn’t be such a bad idea, actually.

  Stevenage must have read the drift of Montford’s thoughts, for he backed up a step, then crossed his arms over his chest in a rare gesture of defiance. “Your Grace, you know I would take a bullet for you if I could, but I draw the line at … at … grave digging!”

  Montford cleared his throat and waved one arm through the air in what he hoped was a convincingly dismissive gesture. “Of course I don’t want you to dig up his grave. That would be …” Thorough? Conclusive? “… wrong. A rubbing of the headstone is probably enough.”

  Stevenage’s shoulders sagged in relief.

  “And while you’re up there, I want you to figure out who’s behind this little charade.”

  Stevenage nodded, looking more like his old self. “With pleasure, Your Grace.

  “And you might as well take an inventory of the estate. Somehow I don’t think this is the first time the Honeywells have pulled the wool over our eyes.”

  Stevenage nodded solemnly. “I understand there are gypsies in their lineage,” he offered, as if that explained all.

  “Hadn’t heard that one,” Montford said. He sat back in his chair, pinching the bridge of his nose, a headache coming on.

  Stevenage stared at him, blinking. Montford began to wonder why the man was still standing there.

  “Well?”

  Stevenage jumped at Montford’s tone. “Do you mean you want me to go now, Your Grace?”

  “As soon as possible. I want this matter sorted. I’m getting married soon, and I don’t want any loose ends hanging over me. It will be chaotic enough around here.”

  Stevenage gathered up the errant letters cluttering the desk and began bowing his way out of the room.

  “Oh, and Stevenage?”

  “Yes, Your Grace?”

  “I want detailed reports. Every day.”

  “Naturally,” Stevenage said, as if this needn’t have been asked. “I would dream of no less.”

  Then Stevenage was gone, and Montford was alone in his library with nothing to do until he had to be at the House of Lords. In three hours. He thrummed his fingers on the desktop for a while, but when he saw how he smudged the surface, he brought out his handkerchief and wiped it clean.

  And, as he was doing this, he wished that the Honeywells could be removed from his life as effortlessly as his fingerprints from a desktop.

  BUT HAVING that wish come true was clearly too easy, for it appeared Stevenage did, in fact, dream of something less than what he promised in the matter of progress reports.

  In the two weeks since Stevenage’s departure, Stevenage had sent precisely one letter to Montford. It appeared to have been written the day of Stevenage’s arrival in Yorkshire, was all of five sentences long, and did nothing to assuage Montford’s already frazzled nerves.

  When Stevenage wrote progress reports, he accounted for nearly every minute of the day’s business in cold, clinical detail, rather like the prose one would find in a medical compendium. Stevenage’s letters were usually five pages long at the bare minimum, not five sentences. And they hardly ever contained adjectives.

  And never, ever, did they contain emotion.

  But this odd note – Stevenage’s normally immaculate script slanting slightly to the right as if dashed off in a passionate rush – was all emotion. And chock full of adjectives. It was alarming.

  Your Grace, it read, I have confirmed that Alyosius Honeywell is dead. But it is, alas, the only thing I can say for certain in regards to that family. They are all as mad as march hares, I avow, although Miss Honeywell suggested that I am the mad one. I haven’t located A. Honeywell yet, as there are so many of them, but I beg you to consider recalling me to London post-haste. The Honeywells are quite unsettling indeed. Stevenage.

  Montford had written back immediately for Stevenage to stay put and get to the bottom of the Honeywells’ schemes. He wanted no unpleasant business hanging over him when he was married.

  But Stevenage sent no reply, and a week and a half passed without Montford hearing from his man-of-affairs at all. Montford sent a barrage of letters, each one more mystified than the last. The final one sent northward was merely one sentence long:

  What in the hell is going on up there?

  Which summed up the problem quite nicely, Montford thought.

  But when still he received no reply, Montford began to worry that something dire had happened to Stevenage. Or rather, that the Honeywells had made something dire happen to his man-of-affairs. Stevenage had called them unsettling in his letter, which, at first, Montford had assumed pertained to aspects of character that usually unsettled his man-of-affairs. Like disorganization. Loud laughter. Poor hygiene. But the more Montford thought about it – in truth, obsessed over it – the more he began to fear that something more sinister than poor hygiene was going on up north.

  For Montford could not imagine anything short of death keeping Stevenage from his usual perfection.

  It would be most inconvenient if Stevenage turned up murdered by the Honeywells. But at least Montford would have the satisfaction of seeing one of their clan hanged, if that was the case.

  Montford decided to wait it out for a day or two more. After that, he was prepared to take drastic action, even if it meant getting into a carriage and driving up to Rylestone himself, weak stomach be-damned.

  MEANWHILE, SOMEWHERE IN YORKSHIRE…

  EVERYONE WHO knew and loved the Honeywell clan – and their numbers were legion in Rylestone Green – bemoaned the fact that Astrid Honeywell had not been born a man. For as soon as she was old enough to walk and talk, everyone agreed she would have made Alyosius a splendid son.

  Everyone, that is, except Astrid herself. Aside from the obvious advantages being Alyosius’ heir would have given her family – and the fact that the Honeywells could thereby poleax the Montfords for at least another generation – Astrid was glad she was not a man. For she had discovered at an early age that men were morons. Even her father, whom she had adored with all of her heart, had been a prize idiot. Especially after a few pints of Honeywell Reserve.

  Astrid often wondered how in the hell women had allowed men to rule the world. Men were physically stronger, granted, and were thus quite good at getting what they wanted with their fists. But women were, by and large, so much smarter than men. It seemed an easy enough thing to outwit the male sex despite their brawn. Astrid did it every day.

  But Astrid knew her questions were rhetorical at best. She knew precisely why women were chattel and men their keepers.

  Because most women filled their brainboxes with so many trifles they could not navigate their thoughts around them, a conspiracy perpetrated by milliners, dress makers, clergymen, the marriage institution, and novel writers. It was rather like owning a grand palace, then filling only a small front parlor of it from floor to ceiling with meaningless bric-a-brac, gewgaws, and fribbles, with nary a decent chair to sit upon, and then leaving the rest of the rooms to molder with cobwebs and damp.

  Women could, Astrid had to grudgingly agree, be quite as idiotic as men.

  But that was only because men had made them so with their petty despotism and paternalistic property laws.

  Fortunately, Alyosius’s male failings had not extended to the matter of his daughters’ education. He’d been wise enough – or unwise enough, depending on how one looked at it – to believe in equal education for the sexes. He’d been a self-proclaimed progressive, but most people had just called him endearingly eccentric, as they did all the Honeywells. Whatever the case, due to old Alyosius’ eccentricity, the Honeywell girls were quite possibly the best educated females in Yorkshire.

  Or the worst – again, depending on how one looked at it.

  Astrid and her sisters knew very little in the way of feminine accomplishments, the sort of subjects taught at expensive finishing schools for ladies. Things like pouring tea, making idle conversation, embroidering pillows and handkerchiefs, and dabbing at watercolors were baffling endeavors to them. The forthright Honeywells never made idle conversation, and they never dabbed at anything. And who, Astrid had always wondered, needed to be instructed on how to pour tea, for heaven’s sake? She did it all the time quite easily enough without having studied it in school.

  The Honeywell girls knew Latin and Greek, European languages and history, philosophy and economics, and even a smattering of biology (scandalous indeed). Alice, Astrid’s younger sister by three years, excelled at maths, of all things, and helped Astrid keep the estate books in order. Ardyce and Antonia, the two youngest, liked to chatter to each other in ancient Greek and reenact scenes from Homeric epics in the stable yard. Astrid, unsurprisingly, enjoyed spouting political theory the most, and had firm opinions on the matter of women’s place in society. She was a bluestocking and proud of it.

  No, she was quite glad she had not been born a man. Yet she thought the primogeniture laws in this country – written by men to benefit men – were absurd and downright antediluvian. Because she didn’t have a rather inconvenient piece of equipment dangling between her legs (oh, and the Honeywells were not delicate flowers regarding anatomy), she was denied her father’s legacy; and because of this, the Honeywell family was going to be denied the home they had lived in for more than two hundred years.

  Never mind the fact that she had run the brewery, the farm, and the estate single-handedly since her father’s first stroke when she was fourteen years old. Never mind that her staff, employees, and the tenants – with a few notable exceptions, of course – respected and obeyed her quite as if she had been a man. Never mind Rylestone Hall and all of its tenants prospered under her stewardship. One had only to cross over the property line into the next county to see how badly off most tenant farmers had it at the hands of their bumbling aristocratic overlords.

  And that was another thing. Astrid thought the aristocracy was equally as idiotic as the male species. No wonder most of the country’s inhabitants were starving; because the Upper Ten Thousand hoarded the profits from their estates to build enormous houses, throw elaborate balls, and buy new hats at the drop of … well, a hat. Not to mention wage ridiculous wars with neighboring countries. It was a wonder England’s lower classes didn’t take a page from the French, storm Whitehall – or better yet the sublime banality of Almack’s – and drag off the Prince Regent and his cronies to madame la guillotine. Astrid was quite sure the world would be a better place.

  One only had to look to Rylestone as an example. It was a true democracy, free of any inbred titled fop’s unwelcome interference. Or at least she strived for it to be. Most of the tenants couldn’t seem to wrap their heads around the idea of majority rule and ended up asking Astrid what to do anyway. Monarchism had become a bad habit not easily broken. But she tried. And she distributed the profits from the estate from a common bank, keeping no more for her family than anyone else.

  It had been this way in her father’s time, and in his father’s time (Honeywells had always been radically, if not successfully, progressive), and the system worked. The only flaw in it was Montford.

  Montford was an entity, unseen and unheard, but always there, hovering over them like the Old Testament God. Or a rain cloud. To her knowledge, no Honeywell had actually seen a Montford since the seventeenth century. The centuries’ old feud connecting the Honeywells with the Montford dukedom was as impenetrable as the Genesis story, retold and reworked so often through the years that nothing but hyperbolic myth remained, but some facts were clear:

  The Norman-ish Montfords had stolen Rylestone from the Saxon-ish Honeywells. The Honeywells had promptly stolen it back. This went on for some years. Back and forth, back and forth. Then another Montford sent into the Honeywells’ midst a Trojan Horse in the form of a Montford female. Astrid’s ancestor had signed a devilish contract in order to be allowed take the woman to wife.

  Apparently, she had been quite a catch.

  And that marriage had marked the Honeywells’ doom. Of course, they’d managed to postpone it for two hundred years, but still. She had bought herself one year simply by conveniently forgetting to inform Montford of her father’s death. The only reason His Grace knew now was because of that blasted Mr. Lightfoot.

  But something would come to her, she was sure. What she needed was time.

  And stalling was one of her fortes.

  Poor Mr. Stevenage had never stood a chance against her family.

  Astrid crept into the front hall of the castle in the early morning light a fortnight after the strange little man’s arrival and intercepted Stevenage’s latest letter from London, as she had all of his correspondence. Glancing around to make sure she was alone, she hastily ripped open the note and scanned its contents.

  What in the hell is going on up there? M.

  Astrid’s lips curled at the edges in a sly grin, and one eyebrow lifted in an expression that an onlooker would have likely termed devilish.

  “What indeed, you bloody piker?” she murmured, crumpling the letter in her fist and heading for the nearest available open flame. “You’ll have to send someone worthy next time around. Not that it would do you any good. We aren’t going anywhere.”

  Though inside she was not nearly so sanguine. Trouble was coming to Rylestone Hall. It was only a matter of time. But one thing she knew for certain: Rylestone belonged to the Honeywells, not Montford, no matter what any trifling contract said.

  Chapter Two

  BACK IN LONDON…

  MONTFORD WAS supposed to have gone somewhere that evening. A ball, he believed it was, at the Duke of Bedford’s. He had, at his last tedious morning call to Araminta, promised to lead his fiancée out for the first waltz. The prospect had filled neither Araminta nor Montford with anything resembling anticipation. He was merely doing his duty, and so was Araminta, with her usual glacial poise. But now, it seemed, he would fail in that duty this particular night. Which was quite horrifying.

  -->