gloves.
“Don’t stick your neck in parson’s mousetrap just yet,” Anthony said. “Your father tried to right the marquessate’s fortune in just such a manner, if you’ll recall.”
Tit for tat. The conversation needed to move on. “You’ll get me figures, then?”
Anthony gestured to the ledgers. “Here are your figures. It’s a moving target, you see. We sell a few thousand spring lambs, but in the next month, we must hire a dozen crews for shearing. Until you’ve had a few years—a few decades—to get a sense of the problem, the figures you see can be very misleading. A place to start would be the household ledgers. They’re fairly straightforward.”
Straightforward. Straightforward was a quality that seemed to have fled Deene’s existence on all fronts.
“Anthony, have you ever bitten lengthwise into a fat, juicy, perfectly ripe strawberry?”
Anthony tapped his top hat onto this head, his smile returning in its most patient variation. “I’m sure I have. Are we to raise strawberries?”
“Not immediately. Thanks for your time. I’ll look forward to seeing what the present cash reserves are, though, regardless of how fluid the number.”
Anthony took his leave. Deene sat at the desk and opened the most recent ledger for household expenses at the London residence, which Deene would use for his abode over the next few months.
God help him.
Several hours later, his eyes were crossing, his temples were throbbing, and he had no idea how he’d make sense of the expenses listed on page after page of the damned accounting book. He’d been top wrangler in math at Cambridge his final year, and he could determine nothing from looking at the columns and columns of orderly, perfectly legible entries.
Though as he sat back and tossed the pen on the desk, he suspected part of the problem was the shocking resemblance of a strawberry split lengthwise to a particularly lovely and intimate part of the female anatomy.
“Having family in your employ is always a mixed blessing.”
His Grace, the Duke of Moreland, made this observation while Deene ambled along at his side in the gardens behind the Moreland mansion. “You want to provide for your dependents, and you expect they’ll be somewhat more loyal than strangers would be, but it can also get complicated.”
“Anthony has done a magnificent job,” Deene countered. “He’s never once by word or deed indicated he has designs on the title.”
His Grace paused to sniff a white rose. “Then you are fortunate indeed, since he’s all the family you’ve got.”
“Not all.”
His Grace straightened. “There is the girl. I’d forgotten, but you likely haven’t. How does she go on?”
Upon the death of Deene’s father, Percival, Duke of Moreland, had come calling with his duchess as part of the usual round of condolence visits. The Moreland estates neighbored with the seat of the Deene marquessate, and if nothing else, His Grace and his late lordship had ridden to hounds together countless times.
What had begun as a neighborly gesture had turned into something unprecedented in Deene’s experience: a mentorship of sorts on Moreland’s part.
“The girl isn’t in poor health, from what I can tell. Dolan does not permit me to call.”
“He wouldn’t turn your wife away.”
Deene didn’t flatter himself that he was any particular friend of Moreland’s—he was a vote, perhaps, on some of the duke’s pet bills—but Moreland had been generous with advice at a time when Deene was without much wisdom of his own.
“Except I have no wife.”
This provoked a surprisingly sweet smile from His Grace. “Then you should rectify that poverty posthaste. Because I am the lone male in my household at present, I am more privy to the ladies’ views on your situation than I would be otherwise. I understand you are being stalked by the debutantes and their mamas.”
“Of course I am being stalked.” Lest this conversation continue on into the Moreland home itself, Deene gestured to a bench and waited for Moreland to seat himself before doing the same. “I am the highest available title, unless you count some septuagenarian dukes with ample progeny, and I am in need of an heir. When I am riding to hounds, I will never pursue Reynard with quite the same lack of sympathy I have in the past.”
“The fox most often escapes the hounds, because he’s running for his life. The wrong wife can make you entirely resent yours.”
How honest could one be with a man twice one’s age?
“I cannot say my parents’ union escaped such a characterization.”
His Grace stretched out long legs and leaned his head back, closing his eyes. “Times were different then. Matches were usually arranged by the parents for dynastic reasons, and expectations of the institution were different. Here is my advice to you, young man, which you may discard or heed at your pleasure: do not marry until you meet that person whom you cannot imagine living the rest of your life without. Call it love, call it affection, call it a fine understanding. Put whatever label you want on it. You will be wed for the rest of your life or perhaps for hers, and that can be a long, long time.”
His Grace sat up and speared Deene with a look. “Take your cousin about with you socially. Have him shadow your moves so you’re not waylaid in the rose arbor by some scheming minx. I know of what I speak, young Deene, having climbed out of more than one window in my heedless youth. If it hadn’t been for my brother Tony, there’s no telling what my fate might have been.”
The confidence was surprising and… endearing. Moreland was tall, with the ramrod straight posture of the former cavalry officer and a head of distinguished white hair to go with blue eyes that could turn arctic when his will was opposed.
Just now though, the man did not look so much like a duke as he did like a husband, a papa, a hale old fellow who valued his family above anything else.
“And here comes my duchess now to make sure I’m not lecturing you into a stupor.” His Grace rose smoothly to his feet and met his duchess on the graveled walk. “My dear, I was just coming to fetch you.”
She greeted Deene genially then gave His Grace her hand, which he tucked onto his arm.
“Deene, you will excuse us? Her Grace has requested my escort on a visit to Westhaven’s household, and this is a privilege I would not forego even to ensure I have your vote on the shipping amendments.”
Deene bowed to the duchess, who very likely fit Eve’s definition of an English beauty even in the woman’s sixth decade of life: tall, willowy, kind green eyes, and hair shading from gold to wheat around a face still lovely and unlined.
“Your Graces, I bid you good day, and of course you have my vote, Moreland.”
“Run along into the house, then. I’m sure the girls will be sitting down to lunch. You can ask them who’s most desperate for a husband and avoid the traps accordingly.” His Grace winked, patted his duchess’s hand, and led her off in the direction of the mews.
They had a peace about them, a sense of effortless communion Deene found fascinating, even as it made his chest feel a trifle queer.
He would not be joining the ladies for lunch—the lunching hour had passed—but he let himself in the French doors leading to the Moreland library, thinking to head straight for the front door.
“Why, Lord Deene. A pleasure.” Louisa, Lady Kesmore, smiled at him, a somewhat unnerving prospect involving a number of straight, white teeth. Lady Jenny’s smile was sweeter, and Eve’s smile was forced. They sat on the sofa, to Deene’s eye a trio of lovely women showing graduated degrees of disgruntlement.
“I beg your pardon, my ladies, Mr. Trottenham. I did not realize I’d be intruding unannounced.”
“Deene, good day.” Trottenham rose and bowed, smacking his heels together audibly. “The more the merrier, I say, what? Saw your colt beat Islington’s by two lengths. Well done, jolly good and all that. Islington’s made a bit too much blunt off that animal in my opinion.”
Trottenham apparently had a nervous affliction of the eyebrows, for they bounced up and down as he spoke,
