The Duke’s Perfect Wife

Lewis looked up at him, neither interested nor uninterested. Hart rubbed his face, feeling that his beard had softened from stiff bristles to wiry hair.

“I need you to go to Mayfair for me,” Hart said. “And not tell your father. It’s a simple task, nothing dangerous to you, and I promise I am not trying to cheat your father out of what I owe him.”

“How much?” Lewis asked.

He was his father’s son. “How much do you want?”

Lewis contemplated. “Twenty shillings. Ten for doing it, ten for not telling my father.”

The boy was a shark. “Done.” Hart held out his hand, and Lewis shook it in a firm grip. “Now, then, lad, how good are you at climbing fences?”

Eleanor opened the gate of Grosvenor Square and walked into the little park. It was early by Mayfair standards, about eleven o’clock in the morning. Nannies in gray with white starched aprons pushed prams or held the hands of small children, or sat on benches while their charges played on the grass. They watched Eleanor, used by now to seeing the famous duke’s wife take her morning amble. Such a brave woman, trying to bear up.

Eleanor walked past them as usual, keeping her pace unhurried. No sense rushing to the middle of the gardens, no sense drawing attention to herself. She strolled along, a parasol raised against the sunshine. Yesterday, it had been an umbrella against the rain. She came here every day, rain or bloody shine.

Eleanor counted her steps, the mantra keeping her pace even. Perhaps today. Perhaps today… forty-two, forty-three, forty-four…

When she reached the center of the garden, she kept walking, off the path and onto the green. Seventeen more steps. Around the base of the wide-trunked tree…

Eleanor stopped. A little violet, the kind men purchased from flower girls to wear on their lapels, rested at the base of the tree. Not a hothouse rose, no, but the sort of thing a man who was hiding for his life might be able to obtain and leave for her.

She closed her eyes. Someone must have dropped the flower. She wanted so much for Hart to have left it that she was inventing things.

Eleanor opened her eyes again. The flower remained, sitting in the exact place Hart had left the others for her years before.

The flower will mean that I cannot come to you as promised, but I will when I can, he’d told her when he’d come up with the idea. And that you are in my thoughts. He’d missed a walk with her, she’d been angry, and Hart had invented the scheme to charm her out of her bad temper. It had worked.

Eleanor picked up the violet and pressed it to her nose. Hart was alive. This had to mean that Hart was alive. She lowered the flower to her chest, to her heart, and drew in a shuddering breath, forcing back tears.

Maigdlin came around the tree. “You all right, Your Grace?”

Eleanor wiped her eyes and thrust the violet into her pocket. “Yes, yes. I’m fine. Go on. I want to sit by myself a moment.”

Maigdlin peered suspiciously at Eleanor’s eyes, but she nodded. “Yes, Your Grace,” she said, and faded discreetly away.

You are in my thoughts.

“But where are you, Hart Mackenzie?” Eleanor whispered. No one knew the signal but the two of them. Why had Hart chosen to leave it but not come to the house or write a note? Did he believe himself still in danger? Or was this some new machination of his?

Eleanor doubted he’d left the flower himself. But who had he sent? She’d suspected Wilfred in the past, but Wilfred wore a black band around his arm and never left the house these days. If Hart wanted to be entirely secret, he’d need someone who’d not be suspected to be connected with him. But that someone would need a way into the gardens. Eleanor doubted that Hart had taken his key with him.

Then again, she might be entirely mistaken that Hart had left the flower. Her first thought had been that someone had dropped it, and this might be true.

Well, she would not sit here staring into the distance and being maudlin. She stood up, brushed off her skirt, and started asking those in and around the gardens—discreetly—whether they’d seen anyone odd coming into or out of the gardens in the middle of Grosvenor Square.

The evening after Hart had sent Lewis to leave the signal to Eleanor, Reeve, down on the shingle, leaned against the boat’s hull and lit his pipe. Hart sat above him on the deck, eating bread dunked into the soup Mrs. Reeve had left for him. Mrs. Reeve and Lewis had gone, tired, to their beds, Lewis having earned Hart’s praise— and promise of shillings—for a job well done.

Reeve had been in the tunnels all day, Mrs. Reeve taking the opportunity to visit her sister, so Lewis had had plenty of time to purchase and drop the flower in place and then linger to watch Eleanor find it. Hart listened hungrily to Lewis’s description of her lifting the flower to her nose, her face flushed in happiness, how she’d pressed the violet to her heart. Then with alarm when Lewis told him how she’d walked about the square, questioning people. Of course, Eleanor would not simply pick up the flower and quietly return home.

He longed for her with a sharpness that hurt. Every night Hart dreamed of Eleanor’s fiery hair, her blue eyes, the sweet sounds she made when he was deepest inside her. His darker fantasies returned, and in his dreams, Eleanor surrendered to every one of them. He’d wake hard and sweating, his body aching.

Hart pulled his thoughts from his frustrating dreams when Reeve’s words caught his attention.

“I heard tell in the pub that the duke everyone said would be prime minister won’t be now,” Reeve said. “Seeing as how they can’t find him.”

He said it too easily, too lightly. Hart kept chewing bread, letting nothing show on his face.

“What do ye think of that?” Reeve asked.

Hart finished his bread. “I’m not English. Not interested.”

“This duke, they say, was a Scotsman,” Reeve went on as though he’d not spoken. “What you might call an eccentric. Always wore one of them Scottish skirts, like you had when I found you.”

“Kilts,” Hart said.

“He went missing when the bomb went off in Euston station. Some thought he might have a-fallen into the tunnels, and most think he was washed, dead, into the Thames.” Reeve stopped to tamp the tobacco into his pipe and relight it. “Seems like I would have found him, had the man been trapped down in the interceptors.”

Hart said nothing. Reeve studied him with his keen dark eyes as he tamped his pipe again.

“People disappear all the time,” Hart said. “Sometimes never to be found again.”

Reeve shrugged. “Happens that some men disappear for their own reasons.”

“They do. They’re found when they’re ready to be found.”

“This man were rich as anything, by all accounts. I’d think he’d want to go home to his palace, sleep in a soft bed, and eat off silver plates.”

Hart rubbed his chin, feeling the unfamiliar beard. He’d glimpsed himself in the small, foggy mirror in the cabin earlier today, and he’d nearly recoiled, thinking he’d seen the ghost of his father. A hairy man with glittering eyes had looked out at Hart from the mirror—a fiery-tempered, arrogant man who’d believed in himself too much.

Or had he? Perhaps Hart’s father had hated himself with the same self-loathing Hart sometimes felt, the man lashing out instead of turning his anger inward. The old duke was dead and gone now, and so Hart was never to know.

Reeve puffed on his pipe. “Might be worth this duke’s while to not be found, eh?”

Hart held Reeve’s gaze. “It might be. If he’s that rich, he can do what he likes. Just as a man who feeds his family by picking through other men’s trash instead of looking for a job in a factory.”

Reeve snorted. “Factories. Backbreaking work all hours of the day and night, shut away and never watching your boy grow up. Freedom, that’s worth all them plates of silver and a fine palace.”

“I agree.”

They exchanged another look. “Then we’re the same, are we?” Reeve asked.

“I believe so.”