Also by Sheri Cobb South
John Pickett Mysteries
Pickpocket's Apprentice
In Milady's Chamber
A Dead Bore
Waiting Game
For Deader or Worse
Mystery Loves Company
Peril by Post
The "Weaver" series
The Weaver Takes a Wife
Brighton Honeymoon
French Leave
The Desperate Duke (Coming Soon)
Standalone
Of Paupers and Peers
Baroness in Buckskin
Moon over the Mediterranean
Table of Contents
Also By Sheri Cobb South
The Desperate Duke (The "Weaver" series, #4)
The | Desperate | Duke | Sheri Cobb South
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Epilogue
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Also By Sheri Cobb South
Regency Romances by
Sheri Cobb South:
The Weaver Takes a Wife
Brighton Honeymoon
(Weaver #2)
French Leave
(Weaver #3)
The Desperate Duke
(Weaver #4)
Of Paupers and Peers
Want more Regency?
Try the award-winning John Pickett Mystery series:
Pickpocket’s Apprentice: A John Pickett Novella
In Milady’s Chamber
A Dead Bore
Family Plot
Dinner Most Deadly
Waiting Game: Another John Pickett Novella
Too Hot to Handel
For Deader or Worse
Mystery Loves Company
Peril by Post
The Desperate DukeSheri Cobb South
THE DESPERATE DUKE
© 2018 by Sheri Cobb South. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
Cover design and illustration by Flo Minowa. All rights reserved.
1
Bury the Great Duke
With an empire’s lamentation.
ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON,
Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington
OCTOBER 1820
Reddington Hall, Devon
The Duke of Reddington was dying. Granted, the physician had not put it quite so bluntly, but upon being castigated by his aristocratic patient as a mealy-mouthed old woman and commanded to give said patient the truth with no bark upon it, Dr. Donald Grant (Edinburgh-trained, and having temporarily forsaken his thriving Harley Street practice for the express purpose of attending his grace) was perhaps understandably goaded into informing the duke that his life might henceforth be more accurately measured in days than years. Theodore, Viscount Tisdale—his grace’s son and heir—was duly summoned from his bachelor flat in London’s Albany; likewise, the duke’s daughter and her husband were also sent for. As these latter were obliged to travel from Lancashire over indifferent roads, it was generally felt by the duke’s household staff that Lady Helen and Sir Ethan Brundy would in all likelihood arrive too late for Lady Helen to bid her father farewell. But as if bent upon proving them wrong out of sheer contrariness (no one entertained for even a moment the possibility that his determination to live might be inspired by affection for his elder child), his grace was still clinging to life four days later, when Sir Ethan Brundy’s well-sprung but sadly mud-splattered carriage lurched to a stop before the portico of Reddington Hall.
The great front door was flung open, and a liveried footman came running out of the house with an umbrella to hold over their heads.
“Welcome home, my lady. How do you do, Sir Ethan?” the butler intoned with sober dignity, in the hushed tones he considered appropriate to the occasion.
“Thank you, Figgins. How do you do?” Lady Helen asked as she divested herself of her rain-dappled pelisse. “And how is Mrs. Figgins?”
“Quite well, my lady,” he responded with a hint of impatience, dismissing the health of both himself and his wife as a matter of no importance as he received Sir Ethan’s damp greatcoat, hat, and gloves. “It is good of you to ask. Alas, your father, I fear—”
He got no further before Viscount Tisdale entered the hall, boot heels ringing against the marble-tiled floor.
“Nell!” Theodore exclaimed, white-faced. “Thank God you’ve come. You too, Ethan,” he added, nodding at his brother-in-law over his sister’s shoulder as he enveloped her in a brotherly embrace.
“We came as soon as we got word, Teddy,” she assured him. “But is Papa so very bad, then? I thought perhaps it was no more than one of his distempered freaks.”
It would not have been the first time in the four years since her marriage that she had received an urgent summons to her father’s bedside, only to discover that there was nothing the matter with him that an infusion of funds from her husband’s bank account could not cure.
“I think he may be for it this time,” the viscount confided, lowering his voice as if their father might hear the conversation from his bedchamber two floors above. “Dr. Grant says so, although Papa abused him like a pickpocket for it. Still, I’ve never seen Papa so—so—but come upstairs, and you can see for yourself.”
Lady Helen needed no urging. She dumped her pelisse into Figgins’s arms and made for the stairs, her husband at her heels and her brother at her side.
“Grant says it’s his heart,” Theodore continued as they climbed the broad staircase side by side, with Sir Ethan bringing up the rear. “He’s been in a rare taking ever since—well—”
“Ever since he’d discovered you had that female in keeping,” his sister concluded sagely. “What do they call her? La Fantasia, isn’t it?”
Theodore gave his sister a rather sheepish look. “Oh, so you know about that, do you?”
Lady Helen made a noise that, in a lesser female, would have been called a snort. “Can you wonder at it? When you will insist upon appearing in the park or at the theatre with the creature on your arm, you can’t suppose that any number of my London acquaintances won’t write to me—all in the greatest concern, of course!—to tell me that my brother has taken up with a regular high-flyer. Really, Teddy, you might at least try for a little discretion!”
“You sound just like Papa,” the viscount grumbled, forgetting for the moment the fragile state of his father’s health. “Lord, you never heard such a fuss! You’d think he’d been a monk in his younger days—which he wasn’t, not if half the stories he’s let slip while in his cups were true, let me tell you!”
“Of course not, but Papa is always flying up into the boughs over something. Depend upon it, he’ll come about, once he sees he can’t—”
She broke off as he opened the door to the duke’s bedchamber. The indefinable odor of the sickroom met them, along with a wall of heat,
