Dukes By the Dozen

Taking a moment to lay his cane against the couch so he could reach his feet more easily, he faced her, hoping he looked harmless and friendly. “To my eternal regret,” he said, “we have not met before now. I’m afraid that I have only recently been allowed to return home from the Continent. But I know about you. Jamie spoke and wrote of you often.”

She stilled, her expression crumpling a little, and Adam regretted his flippancy. “Please accept my apology,” he said. “And my sincere condolences. I should have begun at the beginning. I am Adam Marrick, Mrs. Grace. Jamie’s cousin.”

And there it was, he thought. The reason Jamie had fallen in love with Georgina Wyndham in the first place. That smile. Wide, bright, warm, all-encompassing, as if she embraced not just him but the world. Before he knew it, Adam was smiling back.

“He loved you very much,” he said.

Her eyes glittered with welling tears, but that smile held. “I know,” she whispered. “I loved him as well. I am so very glad to finally meet you. He spoke of you as well, of course. You were quite his hero, even though you didn’t have the sense to join the Navy. Hussars, wasn’t it?”

“It was.”

She nodded. “I suspect that Jamie was quite jealous, actually. He never did manage to sit a horse properly, or I believe he would have trotted off after you like a faithful pup.”

Adam shook his head, his chest tight with too-familiar grief. Jamie had only been one of the good friends he had lost. At least he hadn’t been forced to see Jamie’s body blasted to pieces or hold him as he died. Small comfort.

“No,” he said. “I believe he was meant for the sea. A true Dorsetman.”

Her own grief darkened her expressive eyes, even as she kept smiling. “I am so glad you have made it home safe.”

He grinned and tapped at his leg. “A bit banged up, but whole.”

Her face folded once again into bemusement. “But...duke? The last I heard you were a mere mister….well, colonel.”

His smile grew wry. “There was a cousin,” he said. “On my father’s side. He and his son were lost at sea while I was in Belgium. I came home to find myself lord and master of a rather shabby manor house in Cumbria, an even shabbier town house in Mayfair and a stables full of very prime thoroughbreds in Newmarket. Needless to say, it has been an adjustment. Otherwise I would have looked for you much sooner.”

She waved off his apology. “I’m not sure you would have found me much sooner.”

He lifted an eyebrow. “That is what I hear. The lawyers told me that you have been...shall we say, unavailable for the better part of two years until this summer? Something about your brother’s wife and child needing refuge?”

“A long story for another time. Are you staying nearby, sir? I would be happy to put you up here, but as I said, my brother and his wife are currently in London dealing with some family business.”

“No, no,” he demurred. “I am at the King’s Nose.” He couldn’t help a laugh. “You do have some imaginative innkeepers hereabouts.”

Her chuckle was throaty and sweet. “Will Bass claims George the First once stopped in for an ale while suffering from a head cold and left his handkerchief behind. I imagine it’s as good a story as any.”

She was about to say something else when a clatter rose outside the parlor doors. Adam was all set to jump to his feet to defend the house, but Jamie’s wife didn’t budge. She simply put on a kind smile and waited as the doors were once again yanked open and a line of servants processed in, each seeming to barely keep hold of wobbly trays filled with a tea service and enough bakery items to have fed an officer’s mess. Adam considered it one of his greater acts of bravery that he held his place even as the tray of teacakes tipped precariously in his direction, threatening the cleanliness of his attire. The girl fighting against gravity couldn’t have been more than fifteen, her mobcap sliding down over her forehead and her uniform just a little too large and long. It was a recipe for disaster.

And yet Jamie’s wife simply sat with a quiet smile on her face. Adam was truly impressed. She was inches from being scalded by the tea her butler carried.

“Set those on the table by me, please, Mary,” she said calmly, gesturing toward the tea table.

“Yes’m.” Mary didn’t look nearly as assured as she bent her knees to deposit the tray on the table with a sharp clang that spoke ill for the table’s health. Behind her another girl, this one with the darkest skin Adam had ever seen and a limp almost as pronounced as his, followed with another tray of delicacies. The butler, his freckled face taut with concentration, lowered the tea tray onto a second table. The pot slid back and forth a bit, but failed to fly and settled with no more than a small rattle when it was deposited. Adam quashed an impulse to applaud.