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  Books. Change. Lives.

  Copyright © 2021 by Jane LeCompte

  Cover and internal design © 2021 by Sourcebooks

  Cover art by Aleta Rafton/Lott Reps

  Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks is not associated with any product or vendor in this book.

  Published by Sourcebooks Casablanca, an imprint of Sourcebooks

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

  (630) 961-3900

  sourcebooks.com

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Excerpt from Earl on the Run

  About the Author

  Back Cover

  One

  Three days after he inherited the title Duke of Tereford, James Cantrell set off to visit the ducal town house just off London’s Berkeley Square. He walked from his rooms, as the distance was short and the April day pleasant. He hoped to make this first encounter cordially brief and be off riding before the sunlight faded.

  He had just entered the square when a shouted greeting turned his head. Henry Deeping was approaching, an unknown young man beside him.

  “Have you met my friend Cantrell?” Henry asked his companion when they reached James. “Sorry. Tereford, I should say. He’s just become a duke. Stephan Kandler, meet the newest peer of the realm as well as the handsomest man in London.”

  As they exchanged bows James silently cursed whatever idiot had saddled him with that label. He’d inherited his powerful frame, black hair, and blue eyes from his father. It was nothing to do with him. “That’s nonsense,” he said.

  “Yes, Your Grace.” Henry’s teasing tone had changed recently. It held the slightest trace of envy.

  James had heard it from others since he’d come into his inheritance. His cronies were young men who shared his interest in sport, met while boxing or fencing, on the hunting field, or perhaps clipping a wafer at Manton’s shooting gallery, where Henry Deeping had an uncanny ability. They were generally not plump in the pocket. Some lived on allowances from their fathers and would inherit as James had; others would have a moderate income all their lives. All of them preferred vigorous activity to smoky gaming hells or drunken revels.

  They’d been more or less equals. But now circumstances had pulled James away, into the peerage and wealth, and he was feeling the distance. One old man’s death, and his life was changed. Which was particularly hard with Henry. They’d known each since they were uneasy twelve-year-olds arriving at school.

  “We’re headed over to Manton’s if you’d care to come,” Henry said. He sounded repentant.

  “I can’t just now,” James replied. He didn’t want to mention that he was headed to Tereford House. It was just another measure of the distance from Henry. He saw that Henry noticed the vagueness of his reply.

  “Another time perhaps,” said Henry’s companion in a Germanic accent.

  James gave a noncommittal reply, wondering where Henry had met the fellow. His friend was considering the diplomatic corps as a means to make his way in the world. Perhaps this Kandler had something to do with that.

  They separated. James walked across the square and into the narrow street containing Tereford House.

  The massive stone building, of no particular architectural distinction, loomed over the cobbles. Its walls showed signs of neglect, and the windows on the upper floors were all shuttered. There was no funerary hatchment above the door. Owing to the eccentricities of his great-uncle, the recently deceased sixth duke, James had never been inside. His every approach had been rebuffed.

  He walked up to the door and plied the tarnished knocker. When that brought no response, he rapped on the door with the knob of his cane. He had sent word ahead, of course, and expected a better reception than this. At last the door opened, and he strolled inside—to be immediately assailed by a wave of stale mustiness. The odor was heavy rather than sharp, but it insinuated itself into the nostrils like an unwanted guest. James suspected that it would swiftly permeate his clothes and hair. His dark brows drew together. The atmosphere in the dim entryway, with closed doors on each side and at the back next to a curving stair, was oppressive. It seemed almost threatening.

  One older female servant stood before him. She dropped a curtsy. “Your Grace,” she said, as if the phrase was unfamiliar.

  “Where is the rest of the staff?” They really ought to have lined up to receive him. He had given them a time for his visit.

  “There’s only me. Your Grace.”

  “What?”

  “Keys is there.” She pointed to a small side table. A ring of old-fashioned keys lay on it.

  James noticed a small portmanteau sitting at her feet.

  She followed his eyes. “I’ll be going then. Your Grace.” Before James could reply, she picked up the case and marched through the still-open front door.

  Her footsteps faded, leaving behind a dismal silence. The smell seemed to crowd closer, pressing on him. The light dimmed briefly as a carriage passed outside. James suppressed a desire to flee. He had a pleasant set of rooms in Hill Street where he had, for some years, been living a life that suited him quite well. He might own this house now, but that didn’t mean he had to live here. Or perhaps he did. A duke had duties. It occurred to him that the servant might have walked off with some valuable items. He shrugged. Her bag had been too small to contain much.

  He walked over to the closed door on the right and turned the knob. The door opened a few inches and then hit some sort of obstacle. He pushed harder. It remained stuck. James had to put his shoulder to the panels and shove with the strength developed in Gentleman Jackson’s boxing saloon before it gave way, with a crash of some largish object falling inside. He forced his way through but managed only one step before he was brought up short, his jaw dropping. The chamber—a well-proportioned parlor with high ceilings and elaborate moldings—was stuffed to bursting with a mad jumble of objects. Furniture of varying eras teete
red in haphazard stacks—sofas, chairs, tables, cabinets. Paintings and other ornaments were pushed into every available crevice. Folds and swathes of fabric that might have been draperies or bedclothes drooped over the mass, which towered far above his head. There was no room to move. “Good God!” The stale odor was much worse here, and a scurrying sound did not bode well.

  James backed hastily out. He thought of the shuttered rooms on the upper floors. Were they all…? But perhaps only this one was a mare’s nest. He walked across the entryway and tried the door on the left. It concealed a larger room in the same wretched condition. His heart, which had not been precisely singing, sank. He’d assumed that his new position would require a good deal of tedious effort, but he hadn’t expected chaos.

  The click of footsteps approached from outside. The front door was still open, and now a fashionably dressed young lady walked through it. She was accompanied by a maid and a footman. The latter started to shut the door behind them. “Don’t,” commanded James. The young servant shied like a nervous horse.

  “What is that smell?” the lady inquired, putting a gloved hand to her nose.

  “What are you doing here?” James asked the bane of his existence.

  “You mentioned that you were going to look over the house today.”

  “And in what way is this your concern?”

  “I was so curious. There are all sorts of rumors about this place. No one has been inside for years.” She went over to one of the parlor doors and peered around it. “Oh!” She crossed to look into the other side. “Good heavens!”

  “Indeed.”

  “Well, this is going to be a great deal of work.” She smiled. “You won’t like that.”

  “You have no idea what I…” James had to stop, because he knew that she had a very good idea.

  “I know more about your affairs than you do,” she added.

  It was nearly true. Once, it certainly had been. That admission took him back thirteen years to his first meeting with Cecelia Vainsmede. He’d been just fifteen, recently orphaned, and in the midst of a blazing row with his new trustee. Blazing on his side, at any rate. Nigel Vainsmede had been pained and evasive and clearly just wishing James would go away. They’d fallen into one of their infuriating bouts of pushing in and fending off, insisting and eluding. James had understood by that time that his trustee might agree to a point simply to be rid of him, but he would never carry through with any action. Vainsmede would forget—willfully, it seemed to James. Insultingly.

  And then a small blond girl had marched into her father’s library and ordered them to stop at once. Even at nine years old, Cecelia had been a determined character with a glare far beyond her years. James had been surprised into silence. Vainsmede had actually looked grateful. And on that day they had established the routine that allowed them to function for the next ten years—speaking to each other only through Cecelia. James would approach her with “Please tell your father.” And she would manage the matter, whatever it was. James didn’t have to plead, which he hated, and Nigel Vainsmede didn’t have to do anything at all, which was his main hope in life as far as James could tell.

  James and Cecelia had worked together all through their youth. Cecelia was not a friend, and not family, but some indefinable other sort of close connection. And she did know a great deal about him. More than he knew about her. Although he had observed, along with the rest of the haut ton, that she had grown up to be a very pretty young lady. Today in a walking dress of sprig muslin and a straw bonnet decorated with matching blue ribbons, she was lithely lovely. Her hair was less golden than it had been at nine but far better cut. She had the face of a renaissance Madonna except for the rather too lush lips. And her luminous blue eyes missed very little, as he had cause to know. Not that any of this was relevant at the moment. “Your father has not been my trustee for three years,” James pointed out.

  “And you have done nothing much since then.”

  He would have denied it, but what did it matter? Instead he said, “I never could understand why my father appointed your father as my trustee.”

  “It was odd,” she said.

  “They were just barely friends, I would say.”

  “Hardly that,” she replied. “Papa was astonished when he heard.”

  “As was I.” James remembered the bewildered outrage of his fifteen-year-old self when told that he would be under the thumb of a stranger until he reached the age of twenty-five. “And, begging your pardon, but your father is hardly a pattern card of wisdom.”

  “No. He is indolent and self-centered. Almost as much as you are.”

  “Why, Miss Vainsmede!” He rarely called her that. They had dropped formalities and begun using first names when she was twelve. “I am not the least indolent.”

  She hid a smile. “Only if you count various forms of sport. Which I do not. I have thought about the trusteeship, however. From what I’ve learned of your father—I did not know him of course—I think he preferred to be in charge.”

  A crack of laughter escaped James. “Preferred! An extreme understatement. He had the soul of an autocrat and the temper of a frustrated tyrant.”

  She frowned at him. “Yes. Well. Having heard something of that, I came to the conclusion that your father chose mine because he was confident Papa would do nothing in particular.”

  “What?”

  “I think that your father disliked the idea of not being…present to oversee your upbringing, and he couldn’t bear the idea of anyone doing anything about that.”

  James frowned as he worked through this convoluted sentence.

  “And so he chose my father because he was confident Papa wouldn’t…bestir himself and try to make changes in the arrangements.”

  Surprise kept James silent for a long moment. “You know that is the best theory I have heard. It might even be right.”

  “You needn’t sound so astonished,” Cecelia replied. “I often have quite good ideas.”

  “What a crackbrained notion!”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “My father’s, not yours.” James shook his head. “You think he drove me nearly to distraction just to fend off change?”

  “If he had lived…” she began.

  “Oh, that would have been far worse. A never-ending battle of wills.”

  “You don’t know that. I was often annoyed with my father when I was younger, but we get along well now.”

  “Because he lets you be as scandalous as you please, Cecelia.”

  “Oh nonsense.”

  James raised one dark brow.

  “I wish I could learn to do that,” exclaimed his pretty visitor. “You are said to have the most killing sneer in the ton, you know.”

  He was not going to tell her that he had spent much of a summer before the mirror when he was sixteen perfecting the gesture.

  “And it was not scandalous for me to attend one ball without a chaperone. I was surrounded by friends and acquaintances. What could happen to me in such a crowd?” She shook her head. “At any rate, I am quite on the shelf at twenty-two. So it doesn’t matter.”

  “Don’t be stupid.” James knew, from the laments of young gentleman acquaintances, that Cecelia had refused several offers. She was anything but “on the shelf.”

  “I am never stupid,” she replied coldly.

  He was about to make an acid retort when he recalled that Cecelia was a positive glutton for work. She’d also learned a great deal about estate management and business as her father pushed tasks off on her, his only offspring. She’d come to manage much of Vainsmede’s affairs as well as the trust. Indeed, she’d taken to it as James never had. He thought of the challenge confronting him. Could he cajole her into taking some of it on?

  She’d gone to open the door at the rear of the entryway. “There is just barely room to edge along the hall here,” sh
e said. “Why would anyone keep all these newspapers? There must be years of them. Do you suppose the whole house is like this?”

  “I have a sinking feeling that it may be worse. The sole servant ran off as if she was conscious of her failure.”

  “One servant couldn’t care for such a large house even if it hadn’t been…”

  “A rubbish collection? I think Uncle Percival must have actually been mad. People called him eccentric, but this is…” James peered down the cluttered hallway. “No wonder he refused all my visits.”

  “Did you try to visit him?” Cecelia asked.

  “Of course.”

  “Huh.”

  “Is that so surprising?” asked James.

  “Well, yes, because you don’t care for anyone but yourself.”

  “Don’t start up this old refrain.”

  “It’s the truth.”

  “More a matter of opinion and definition,” James replied.

  She waved this aside. “You will have to do better now that you are the head of your family.”

  “A meaningless label. I shall have to bring some order.” He grimaced at the stacks of newspapers. “But no more than that.”

  “A great deal more,” said Cecelia. “You have a duty…”

  “As Uncle Percival did?” James gestured at their surroundings.

  “His failure is all the more reason for you to shoulder your responsibilities.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Cecelia put her hands on her hips, just as she had done at nine years old. “Under our system the bulk of the money and all of the property in the great families passes to one man, in this case you. You are obliged to manage it for the good of the whole.” She looked doubtful suddenly. “If there is any money.”

  “There is,” he replied. This had been a continual sore point during the years of the trust. And after, in fact. His father had not left a fortune. “Quite a bit of it seemingly. I had a visit from a rather sour banker. Uncle Percival was a miser as well as a…” James gestured at the mess. “A connoisseur of detritus. But if you think I will tolerate the whining of indigent relatives, you are deluded.” He had made do when he was far from wealthy. Others could follow suit.