A Duke in Disguise Read online

  “Come now, he wants to go,” Nate said genially, as if Ash were being unreasonable. “I don’t want to deny him the treat.”

  “He’s seventeen and your apprentice. He hasn’t any way to refuse you, even if he wanted to. Besides, putting him in the path of danger is a breach of your duty to him. It’s not right.”

  “Nothing harmful about watching a hanging,” said Nate. He was a terrible liar, and looked down at the toe of his boot instead of at Ash. “Some apprentices beg for a half day off to watch a hanging. They make a holiday of it.”

  “And they cheer and yell and buy ha’penny slices of pie while delighting in the death of people they believe to have deserved their fate. That’s not what you’re planning to do in Derby,” Ash said.

  “Charlie isn’t really my apprentice anyway.”

  “You really want to take that line of argument? Come, Nate. If he’s not your apprentice, then what is he?” The late Mr. Plum had bought Charlie from the workhouse for five pounds when the boy was twelve years old, but died before the term of Charlie’s apprenticeship was complete. Upon Mr. Plum’s death, Charlie probably ought to have been assigned to another master printer, but instead Nate and Verity had started to pay the lad wages. Ash believed that Charlie nevertheless regarded Nate as occupying the place of his late master, and that Nate owed the boy something for that.

  “Excuse me,” said Charlie, appearing in the doorway. “Don’t I get a say? I want to go.”

  “Ha!” said Nate, triumphant.

  “If I stay home, you’ll have no one to keep you out of trouble,” said Charlie.

  “Come, now,” said Nate indignantly. “That’s not fair.”

  “Mrs. Peabody at the Rose and Crown is giving five to one odds against you coming back from Derby in one piece, so I bet in your favor. I intend to get my money. Let’s go. I don’t want to miss the stage coach.”

  “Wait for me in the street,” Nate said, and the boy left them alone again. “Makes me feel like a child,” he said to Ash, “when you and Verity scold me like that.”

  Ash privately thought Nate ought to stop acting like a spoilt child, but wasn’t going to win any arguments by saying so. “Look at it from your sister’s perspective. In the last few years she’s lost both her parents—”

  “So have I, mind you!”

  “—and now she’s worried about losing you.”

  “That’s not what she said to me. She’s going on about not wanting the militia rooting around in the shop.”

  Had the woman no sense of strategy or diplomacy whatsoever? Ash didn’t doubt for a second that if Verity had clasped her brother’s hands and begged him not to leave her alone, he would have agreed immediately. But Verity wouldn’t admit, let alone feign, weakness. Ash decided to play her part for her. “If you get sent to prison, she’ll be all alone.”

  “Verity?” Nate said with a huff of surprised laughter. “Like hell she will. She knows half of London.”

  Knowing half of London was no substitute for having people you belonged to, and few knew that better than Ash. “That’s not the same as wanting to see her brother safe and well.”

  “First of all, I won’t be well if I’m not fighting for what I know is right. Second, if Verity finds out you’ve been painting her as a helpless damsel, she’ll eat your still-beating heart. Third, she wouldn’t be alone. She’d have you.”

  That shouldn’t have made Ash’s cheeks heat. He hoped the room was too dark for Nate to see him blush. “Not the same,” he repeated.

  “I dare say it isn’t,” Nate said thoughtfully. Too thoughtfully. This was what came from knowing someone for over a decade. You saw right through one another. And even though Nate usually had the general appearance of a man who was blessedly unconcerned with the feelings of anyone but himself, Ash supposed that over ten years some facts made their way into even Nate’s thick skull.

  “Don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ash said quellingly. Nate only laughed, and swiped a copy of the Ladies’ Register off the top of the stack and jammed it in his pocket, presumably to read during his journey north.

  Verity heaped a slice of bread with quince jam, then added a wedge of ripe cheese to her plate. She sloshed some brandy into her tea and carefully carried it all upstairs, where she settled into the high-backed chair in her study. After reading a few pages of a novel she had been saving for an occasion where nothing but a new book could elevate her spirits, she heard the patter of raindrops on the window. That ought to make Nate’s time on the stagecoach dreadfully uncomfortable. She couldn’t make up her mind whether to feel smug or sorry, so she had another bite of bread and cheese and tucked her feet beneath her, curling into the corner of the chair.

  “It’ll be all right, you know.”

  She looked up to see Ash leaning in the doorway. He was in loose trousers and rolled-up shirtsleeves. He must have taken a break from work. “No, I don’t know that. And neither do you. Here, sit down and help me eat this cheese. I took enough for the entire neighborhood.”

  “What I should have said is that in a week you’ll know whether he’s emerged unscathed from this event, at least.” He sat in the chair beside hers and helped himself to a corner of her bread and some of the cheese. “A week from now he’ll be back and you’ll know what you’re facing. Meanwhile, I read the rest of that manuscript.”

  Verity nearly choked on her bread. She had been expecting another week to pass before having to speak with Ash about the book. It had been only three days since she had given him the manuscript. At the moment she was sulky and raw, and didn’t have any defenses up. “Oh? How did you find it?”

  “What I find is that you read me a most misleading passage.”

  “I found it quite tasteful,” she said, not looking at him. Doubtless he had that knowing half smile. She wasn’t equal to Ash’s half smile at the moment.

  “And so it is. Tastefully lewd, if that isn’t an oxymoron.”

  “I feel certain it isn’t. I suppose you’d rather have nothing to do with it. No worries.” She tried to sound bright and unbothered. It probably would be best for her to hire another illustrator. One who didn’t roll his sleeves up in such a wanton manner, for example. How she was meant to get anything done in such close proximity to forearms, she did not know.

  “You suppose wrong. But I do have to warn you that I’m in no way competent to draw some of the acts described in that book, and I can’t imagine where I’d find models willing to oblige me.” Her cheeks heated with the thought, and it was only partly due to embarrassment. “But I did a rough sketch of the kind of illustration I have in mind.” He reached into his pocket and presented her with a sheet of paper.

  She steeled herself. It was attraction, nothing more. Utterly natural. Like hay fever. A minor inconvenience. Verity had long known she was susceptible to both men and women, but men usually comported themselves in such a way that quickly extinguished whatever lustful inclinations she had been harboring. There seemed little chance of Ash making things convenient for her by behaving boorishly.

  She pushed her spectacles to the bridge of her nose and beheld a sketch of a man and a woman in flowing medieval robes. He was exaggeratedly sinuous and faintly mischievous; her jaw was clenched and her bare feet planted firmly on the floor, but her body canted towards the man opposite her. This, she gathered, was Perkin and Catherine. The way Ash had drawn the lady’s gown, it appeared to be made of cobweb lace, clinging to the curves of her body and all but revealing the flesh beneath. But the focus of the drawing wasn’t the woman’s body; it was her hand, reaching towards the hip of her new husband.

  She must have been silent for too long, because Ash cleared his throat and murmured, “Remember, it’s only an idea.”

  “Ash, I’ve worked with you for years. I know your process. But this is very good,” she said. “It’s lovely. You know it’s lovely. The way she’s leaning towards him, and he’s beckoning her with that single finger—it’s a seduction, but you’re barely show
ing it. And the, ah, bodice is . . . good.” Her eyes were drawn to a ripe curve of breast, barely obscured by gossamer-fine fabric.

  “I’m pleased to hear it.” He took a piece of bread from the plate she still held on her lap.

  She was very conscious that she was sitting so close to him that they could share a single plate, discussing private matters. “First I want to show you something.” She reached beneath her chair to one of the many stacks of books that littered the room and pulled out a volume. After paging through it, she handed him the book opened to the illustration she wanted him to see. It was an image of a bare-chested woman in flagrante delicto with a man.

  “Good God,” Ash sputtered. “You might warn a fellow.”

  “Pfft. No doubt you’ve seen it already. It sold quite well a few years back, I understand.”

  “Indeed, I have seen it. I’m a bit shocked that you have, though. When in heaven’s name did you start keeping dirty books in your study?”

  “I started keeping dirty books in my study about ten minutes after I decided to publish dirty books. Don’t think I was unaware that we carried them in the shop. Laying my hands on them was only a matter of shouting ‘Oi, Nate, send up the dirty books you keep behind the counter for special customers’ as I’m sure you know.”

  “Hmmph.” He studied the print. “Is this the style you hope to emulate?” he asked in measured tones.

  “No, you muttonhead. It’s exactly what I don’t want you to do. I hate everything about it. Look at them.” She jabbed a finger at the illustration. “She’s completely naked, and the only part of him we see is his . . . member.” She rolled her eyes at her inability to come up with a better word. “And what good does that do anybody?”

  “Ah, it appears to be doing the lady some marked good.”

  “No, Ash, no it does not. Look at her face. I wouldn’t tolerate that vacant simper at my dinner table, much less my bedroom. Is that the expression of a woman in the throes of passion, I ask you? No, it is not. It’s the face you make when you’re cornered by someone you don’t want to talk to, so you smile and hope he goes away. One feels sorry for the artist’s bedmates.”

  “Does one?” he asked faintly.

  “She’s just bouncing up and down on that thing, and giving such a god-awful smile. Ash, I need you to draw some women who don’t mind being fucked, please.”

  Ash made a strangled noise and when she looked at his face she saw that he was blushing. The tips of his ears were pink, which surely she shouldn’t find quite so delightful.

  “Even better if they actually enjoy it,” she added. “I will say, this is a benefit of sapphism. It’s all very straightforward. I wonder if men who seek the company of other men find matters similarly efficient and unmysterious.” Her thoughts were slightly muzzy and she wondered if she had misjudged the amount of brandy she had added to her tea.

  “I don’t think most men have much difficulty in satisfying their passions with a bedmate of any gender.”

  “That,” she declared, pointing at him with a crust of bread, “is an excellent point. One feels terrible for women who go to bed with men. Truly awful.”

  “I seem to recall you feeling otherwise a few years back when Johnny Meecham came calling.”

  She lobbed the crust of bread at his head and missed by a good six inches. “I was sixteen! And I certainly didn’t . . .” She gestured at the book. “I understand the desire to go to bed with men, my point is that they’re more trouble than they’re worth, by all accounts. Oh, I beg your pardon, Ash, I’m sure your lady friends are well taken care of. Much happier than this poor girl.” She frowned again at the drawing. And now she was imagining precisely what Ash might do to satisfy his bedmates, which was the last thing she ought to be thinking of. Worse still, she was enjoying it. “I do apologize. Forget I said—”

  “Plum, if you think I object in the least to your perverse ruminations, you have badly misjudged me. Now,” he said, rising to his feet and brushing invisible dirt from his trousers, “I’m off to draw you some well-fucked women.” His ears were still pink but he seemed to have regained a degree of composure that still escaped Verity. He shot her a grin and left her alone in her study, slightly dazed, holding a hand to her heated cheek.

  This would not do. They were working together and living in close quarters and she urgently needed to find a way to douse this spark before it turned into a conflagration. She had kept potential suitors and swains at a chilly distance, resolutely squashing any seed of desire she felt for any of them. Her time with Portia had been an exception, born of the misbegotten notion that an affair of the heart would be less complicated with a woman, especially a woman who had been her friend before becoming her lover. She had been wrong.

  The world, Verity had always known, was filled with people who wanted things she had long since run out of: time, affection, assistance.

  To take him—or anyone—as a lover was quite out of the question. There was only so much of her to go around, and she needed to keep some of that for herself or she’d disappear. That needed to be her guiding principle, her true north. She vowed to keep that in mind the next time her baser instincts threatened to get the better of her.

  Chapter Four

  The letter requested that Ash arrive at the peculiarly precise time of a quarter past eleven on any Tuesday or Thursday morning. Ash supposed rich people got used to ordering people about in unaccountable ways, so he didn’t think much of it. When he lifted the heavy brass knocker of the house in Cavendish Square, the door was promptly opened by a liveried footman.

  “I’m Ash—John Ashby, here to see Lady Caroline Talbot,” Ash said, his voice echoing in the vast marble hall. “She’s expecting me.”

  The footman murmured something and disappeared through a doorway, leaving Ash alone in a hall that could have fit the entire Holywell Street bookshop twice over and left room for a coach and four. The walls were the purest white, unblemished by any stains from soot or damp. A couple of paintings hung in gilt frames, and with a start Ash realized that one of them was quite possibly a van Dyck. Before he could make up his mind about it, his attention was drawn to the sweeping staircase that dominated one end of the hall, its banister arcing ostentatiously from the upper stories down to the pink-and-white checkerboard marble floor. It was extravagant, showy, and grossly out of proportion to the dimensions of the hall. But he couldn’t quite take his eyes away from it, and not only because of its poor taste. The longer he examined it, the odder he felt.

  If he had experienced any of his usual symptoms—dizziness, vagueness, that godawful headache—he might have thought he was about to have one of his episodes. When he looked at the staircase, he had the strangest sensation that the walls ought to be pale green rather than white, and that there ought to be a watercolor of the seaside instead of the possible van Dyck. He shut his eyes and filled his lungs. Perhaps this was a new symptom. It had been so long since he had an episode that he had gotten out of the habit of expecting his brain and body to inconvenience him in new and elaborate ways. Now, faced with the prospect of having a seizure alone in a strange place, he wanted nothing more than to make a hasty exit back onto the street.

  Brisk footsteps interrupted his thoughts, and he opened his eyes to see a woman walking towards him. She was tall and angular, with dark hair tucked into a lace cap. “Good day. You must be Mr. Ashby.” Her voice was hardly more than a whisper. “Follow me. Quickly, now.” She led him through a series of corridors at a pace he had difficulty matching. “I admired the frontispiece you did for that novel, so I wrote to the book’s publisher.”

  “Which novel?” he asked.

  “The one with the wicked signor.”

  “A good many of them do have evil signors, ma’am,” he said wryly. Was it ma’am or my lady? Or was there some other manner of addressing a woman who had Lady before her given name? Verity wouldn’t know, Nate wouldn’t care, and Roger was months away by letter. He tried to push away the irrational sense of aband
onment that crept up on him these days whenever he thought of Roger.

  “That’s very true,” Lady Caroline said in a small, thin voice, “but this one had a very detailed and correct heliotrope in the foreground, and I thought if you could do that, you might be able to help me. Now, oh dear, we don’t have much time, so step this way, if you will.”

  Ash didn’t know why they had these time constraints, or why the lady was scurrying like a mouse through her own home, or indeed why she was whispering. But before he could attempt to make sense of it, she opened a door and ushered Ash into a room that had to be ten degrees warmer than the rest of the house and was so packed with potted plants that he could hardly see the tiled floor.

  “Oh,” he breathed.

  “You need not concern yourself with any of these,” she said briskly, waving her hand about them. “All very common specimens.”

  These plants, with their peculiar leaves and brightly colored flowers, might indeed be common specimens, but if so they were common specimens of something Ash had never before seen. They had the look of faraway lands, of jungles and bazaars and places he had no hopes of seeing with his own eyes. Even the scent that permeated the room was heavy and sweet, making him forget the gray London sky, heavy with rain clouds, that loomed beyond the tall glass windows of the conservatory. There had to be a couple of coal fires blazing about somewhere to maintain this decadent warmth, but Ash couldn’t see beyond the profusion of foliage.

  “This, now, is what I require your assistance with.” She brushed aside a fern of some sort and gestured to a small table, upon which sat a stack of papers tied loosely with a blue ribbon. “This is my herbarium,” she said.

  Sensing that some kind of enthusiastic response was expected, he murmured an “Ah,” hoping that she would explain what precisely an herbarium was, so he wouldn’t have to guess.

  “You may touch it,” the lady said.

  Ash felt that it would be rude to refuse, so he sat on the stool that was placed before the table and untied the ribbon. On each page was a pressed plant, sometimes including everything from root to flower. They had been pressed and dried to a thinness hardly greater than that of the paper itself. Each plant was labeled in the same elegant hand as the letter Verity had received.