His Convenient Duchess

Excerpt

Now, as he held his mount to a steady canter across meadowland, Marcus wondered at his decision to gather up the dispersed properties. It hardly made good economic sense and he was surprised by his own instinct to win back every square foot of lost territory. Perhaps he was more of an aristocrat than he had believed.

Or perhaps he was simply a sentimental fool, because there was Chalton, just coming into view above the water meadows and his vision blurred for a moment.

As castles went, it was not impressive, he thought, as he reined in to recover his equilibrium and to see whether it bore any resemblance to the sun-dappled Eden of his memories.

It had always been tiny, commanding a shallow valley where the stream had been diverted to the left to form a moat, to the right to feed the village watermill. Originally a curtain wall had surrounded the bailey: a courtyard filled with stabling, lodgings and the kitchen. At one end had stood the long-vanished wooden great hall of the de Chalton lords.

Once, an imposing pair of towers had flanked a defensive gate. The towers still stood, but only as the flanks of the little farmhouse that had been built where the portcullis and entrance arch had been by that first Tudor tenant farmer. That man made a permanent bridge across the moat to a jagged gap in the walls as his farmyard entrance and that was defended by nothing more threatening than a five-barred gate.

As he held the chestnut to a walk and drew nearer Marcus saw that the gate was closed. Not only that, but apparently guarded by a small figure in skirts. She perched on top, feet dangling. This could not be Lady Rose, he saw at once. The girl was ten, or perhaps twelve, years old and she sat swinging her legs to reveal sturdy boots and much-darned stockings beneath skirts that, Marcus suspected, had been cut down from some older sister’s discarded gown.

She glowered at him fiercely from beneath a mass of brown curls until he reached the edge of the moat. ‘Halt! Who goes there?’ she demanded.

She made an unlikely sentry but, mellowed by memories, he was prepared to play along with the game. ‘Marcus Cranford, Duke of Northminster.’ He had a vague feeling that if he repeated that often enough, he would come to believe it.

The child’s eyes widened when she heard his title, but she still demanded, ‘Friend or foe?’ Despite appearances, her voice was educated. Surely this urchin was not one of the Trafford sisters?

Marcus was tempted to say, ‘Foe,’ just to see what the reaction would be. Possibly she would produce a longbow from behind those skirts.

‘Friend. I have business to discuss with Lady Rose Trafford.’

‘Pass then, friend.’ She jumped down and pulled open the gate for him to ride in. ‘My sister’s over there.’ She pointed at a crumbling turret. ‘Rose! Here’s a duke to see you! Not a knight at all.’

The shrill shout sent the chestnut plunging and curvetting over the bridge and Marcus arrived in the bailey feeling more like a trick rider from Astley’s Amphitheatre than a dignified visitor.

‘Good morning,’ said a clear, amused voice.

He found himself facing a young woman improbably perched on the exposed steps of the inside of the turret. She was blonde, hatless and appeared to be using a flat part of the ruined wall as a desk because, as he urged the horse forward, she closed a ledger and put down a stub of pencil. Her elevated position brought her face on a level with his and vivid blue eyes regarded him critically.

Marcus brought the chestnut under control and found he was being assessed with faint scorn.

‘Do not blame me,’ he said, responding to the look. ‘I didn’t buy the confounded animal.’ The derision was replaced with a twitch of the lips and he doffed his hat. ‘Marcus Cranford. Am I addressing Lady Rose Trafford?’

‘You are,’ she conceded. ‘Are you the brother of the man from whom I bought the castle?’

‘His cousin. Once removed.’ Marcus discovered an instinctive desire to distance himself as far as possible from the late, unlamented, William.

He became aware of people moving around him. The child from the gate came and stood close by, staring up at him as though committing his appearance to memory. Another brown-haired girl, rather older than the child, and wrapped in a vast and spotless white pinafore walked down from the other end of the bailey, and an unprepossessing youth leading a very handsome nanny goat followed her, his mouth hanging open.

Lady Rose made no move to stand up or to invite him into the little house. All three onlookers, girl, youth and goat, stared fixedly at him and, to add to his discomfort, a solid middle-aged woman with her sleeves rolled up over strong arms and wearing a blood-streaked apron, appeared in the farmhouse doorway. The broad knife in her hand glinted in the morning sun and she held it with the ease of long familiarity.

‘Forgive me arriving without writing first,’ Marcus said, reflecting that he’d had warmer welcomes in some of the wilder parts of the Spice Islands. ‘But I have a business proposition, Lady Rose. Perhaps your agent or man of law – or your bailiff, perhaps – are available to talk for me to speak to?’

‘I have no bailiff. My lawyer is in London. You had best state your business to me, Duke.’

She was treating him like an equal, and Marcus found he appreciated that. But negotiations over property were not a woman’s province.

‘I wish to buy this castle and its land,’ he explained. ‘If you give me your lawyer’s direction, I will write to him.’

‘Then he would have to write to me and I would write back to him saying, No, and then he would write to you – and we would be no further forward and a great deal of time and paper would be wasted.’

‘You have not yet heard my proposition, Lady Rose.’

‘I do not need to. The castle is not for sale under any circumstances.’

Marcus had politely refrained from staring at her, but now he looked directly into her face. Her thick plait of pale gold hair fell over the shoulder of a man’s frieze coat. Cool blue eyes studied him from under brows just a little darker than her hair and her wide mouth was unsmiling. He was reminded of the Swedish sailors he met sometimes on voyages – a frank gaze the colour of the sea, a handsome, strong features and an uncompromising attitude.

But this was in no way an unfeminine creature, he thought. Her regard was assessing him as a man, just as his was considering her as a woman.

Attractive, he thought. A very unconventional beauty. A stubborn, wilful handful, and a challenge to make a man’s blood run hot. However, the feeling does not appear to be mutual.

He was unaccustomed to being looked at by women with quite that degree of hauteur. Or perhaps it was simply disinterest. It would have been false modesty to pretend that he did not know he was generally considered to be a handsome man and he could not recall any other occasion when he had been eyed as though he had just emerged from under a stone.

‘Not for sale even at twice what you paid for it?’ Marcus asked, goaded into a reckless offer just to provoke some reaction.

‘Not even then.’ She stood up in a swirl of fabric and he realised with shock that she was wearing a divided skirt. He caught a glimpse of tight breeches over shapely thighs and long, scuffed, boots before the dun-coloured serge settled into decency again.

Marcus managed not to let his jaw drop: if this confounded female wanted to scandalise him then she had certainly succeeded, but he was damned if he was going to oblige her by showing it.

‘Lady Rose.’ He resumed his hat, inclined his head. ‘I was perhaps too abrupt. I will leave you to consider my offer at your leisure and hope to hear from you in due course.’

‘I doubt it,’ she said, standing like a Valkyrie on her precarious rocky outcrop.

Outrageous, but magnificent. Under him the chestnut shifted uneasily at some unconscious pressure of his hands.

‘This castle is my dowry, Duke. It is far too precious to barter for mere money.’

‘Madam. Good day.’ Marcus got the chestnut to turn and to walk sedately out of the bailey and across the bridge. Possibly the animal was as stunned as he was.

Her dowry? Was Lady Rose Trafford actually proposing to him?