The Wicked Duke Takes a Wife

Chapter Thirty

A small box had arrived for the duke while they were gone. Griffin handed it absentmindedly to Lady Powlis, who took it upstairs to open while waiting for her tea. She enjoyed admiring the little gifts that Lady Hermia Dalrymple liked to send her. Griffin peeled off his wet greatcoat and helped Harriet remove her cloak. Butler took the damp garments away to dry. A maidservant efficiently mopped up the puddles that glistened on the marble floor.

The front door, not properly on the latch, flew open. Harriet closed it before a restless spirit could sneak in with the wind. She didn’t actually believe in ghosts, but sometimes she liked to give herself a scare. Either way, there was no point in risking a cold.

“How will Sir Daniel conduct a search in this weather?” the duke asked in frustration. He began to sort through the post on the hall stand salver. Harriet knew by his terse expression that he was half expecting to come upon a letter from Edlyn and that it was a discouraging sign that no one had heard from her.

“Sir Daniel could find a lost kitten in the London fog,” she said quietly. “I hate to tell you all the times he hunted down certain people who shall remain nameless, if you take my meaning. You wouldn’t believe the man’s instincts, the places he could find a person.”

He turned and regarded her with an inscrutable look that closed her throat. She forgot that the maid was mopping circles around them, that another waited patiently to ask whether the duke preferred tea and brandy in the upstairs drawing room with her ladyship or in the library by himself.

“You,” he said, in a clear, grateful voice that everyone in the hall could hear, “are good for the soul, Miss Gardner. I’m very much afraid, therefore, that I have reconsidered your request to leave and cannot allow it. You will just have to trust me a little longer to arrange the particulars. But you are not to leave this house, ever.”

It was a tribute to her academy training that Harriet did not overstep the boundary between her position and what her instincts urged her to do. If she had, she would have asked the servants for a moment’s privacy so that she could force him into explaining exactly what it was he intended to do.

And just as she smiled at him, and he smiled back at her, there arose an anguished cry from above stairs that sent every thought of romancing the duke straight out of her head.

Edlyn was going to make her captors sorry for what they had done. Spite had fired her blood for as long as she could remember. She had made everyone in Castle Glenmorgan as miserable as she could. But it had always been Griffin who came to her defense against her father during their frequent arguments in the great hall.

Would he defend her now?

She remembered the day Griffin and her great-aunts had stood up to her father in the great hall. After she had stormed away, she watched them from the music gallery above, giggling through her tears and promising that they’d be sorry when she found her mother, although maybe, maybe, she’d forgive them later on.

She loved them. And they had loved her.

The same could not be said of the amoral man and woman who had imprisoned her in this dark, moldy attic that stank of steak and fish. She stared down into the dripping street, the cat preening at her feet. She’d never be found once they got her out of London, and she had heard them making plans to buy passage on the Thames.

“There’s someone lying in that wheelbarrow down there,” she whispered, straining to see through the rain. “I wonder if he’s dead.”

Mrs. Porter walked in to the room. The cat disappeared. “Who were you talking to?” she asked, staring out the barred window.

“I was saying my prayers,” Edlyn said meekly.

“Then you’d better pray a little harder.”

“Has my uncle agreed to your terms?”

“He has one day left before we tell him where to bring the money. I daresay he shall no doubt know that we are serious when he sees your headband.”

“Oh, dear,” Edlyn said, crossing her closed hands over her heart. “I very much doubt he’ll want me back at all. You see, I haven’t always been a nice girl.”

Mrs. Porter studied her carefully. “What are you holding in your hands?” “Nothing.”

“It’s not nothing. Show me.”

Mrs. Porter called to the man hovering in the door. “Get over here. Make sure she hasn’t gotten hold of a weapon.”

Edlyn raised her otherworldly eyes. “Do you mean like a sword? But my hands are too small.”

“Show me what you are holding.”

And when she pried Edlyn’s fingers apart, she screamed and screamed as half a dozen brown spiders went scurrying up her arms to her neck into the bodice and sleeves of her dress.

Harriet thought she might be the only rational person in the house that night. Lady Powlis had gone into understandable hysterics when she discovered Edlyn’s headband in the box. The maids and even one of the footmen had wept in fear and held one another, clearly convinced that Edlyn would never come back. The duke had withdrawn into his library in the worst mood she’d witnessed since knowing him, and that was saying something, as he’d never been all rainbows and roses to begin with. He was afraid, and feeling helpless made it worse.

She was relieved when he went out prowling at half past seven with Lord Heath and one of the night Runners who’d worked for Sir Daniel before he officially retired from service. Griffin would go mad if he sat here twiddling his thumbs all night. If she hadn’t promised to stay home, she’d have been tempted to visit one of the flash houses in Spitalfields or Whitechapel herself. But if Nick Rydell had put out the word, he’d have every thief, prostitute, and parish watchman in London who owed him a favor on the job. She could have helped, though. She had her own friends. But Nick had taken over. He was the one everyone owed.

Edlyn had the best of the beau monde and the city’s underworld joining forces to find her. Her abductors obviously had no idea whom they were up against, and Harriet didn’t give a toss who got the credit. She only wanted Lady Powlis to stop crying and the duke to stop carrying the weight of the world on his well-formed shoulders.