Heir to the Duke (The Duke's Sons #1) Read online

  Marianne looked doubtful. But Mrs. Crane had hold of her hand and was urging her onward. So she too stepped down, and gave a little scream as the sea took her. “Violet, you wretch! It’s freezing!”

  “It’s not that bad.” The cold seemed a little less as she adjusted.

  “Are you mad? It’s horridly cold.”

  They stood facing each other, two heads bobbing above inflated bubbles of flannel. Violet pushed at her smock, watched the cloth dip and wobble. She felt another laugh rising in her chest.

  “What are we supposed to do now?” Marianne asked. She wrapped her arms around her chest, shivering. “I didn’t know it would be like ice.”

  “We should, er, absorb the healthful properties of the sea,” Violet replied.

  Marianne’s lips twitched. “How exactly do we do that?”

  “Well, I’m not entirely cer—”

  And then Mrs. Crane, crouched on the lowest step of the bathing machine like a cathedral gargoyle, put her hands on Violet’s shoulders and pressed very firmly down. “Not my hai—” Violet began. But it was too late. She was under the water. Cold, salty liquid filled her open mouth; it stung her eyes. In an instant it destroyed the curls that Furness had spent half an hour creating that morning.

  Violet thrashed and clawed. Had Mrs. Crane gone mad? Then the hands were gone, and she came up coughing and sputtering. “Why did you do that?” she demanded when she was able to speak.

  “The cure’s no good without full immersion,” replied Mrs. Crane, seeming to savor the last word. “It’s all there in the instructions.” She reached for Marianne.

  Violet’s friend backed away. “No, no. I don’t care about the cure. I will not be—” She slipped a little sideways and apparently stepped into a hole. Her head disappeared into the water, replaced by flailing arms and bobbles of flannel.

  Violet stepped forward. After two tries, she grasped one of Marianne’s wrists and pulled her back to safer footing. Her friend choked and coughed and glared at her from under a mass of dripping blond locks. When she’d finally regained her breath, she said, “Violet, you…you villain. I swear you’ll pay for this.”

  Taking in Marianne’s ruined coif and reddened eyes, Violet wondered if she looked as bedraggled. But of course she did. In fact, she undoubtedly looked far worse. Even wet as a drowned rat, Marianne was still beautiful. “Perhaps we should go back now?”

  “Perhaps? I don’t think there’s any question.” Marianne pushed her soaking hair off her forehead.

  “You haven’t had your full hour,” said Mrs. Crane. “I can’t be answerable for the effects if you don’t take your full—”

  “We will not blame you,” Violet interrupted. “I think the effect is…sufficient.”

  Marianne gave a snort of laughter. It sounded a bit hysterical this time. She propelled herself over to the stairs, needing a hand from Mrs. Crane to boost herself up onto the lowest one. As Violet followed suit, Marianne moved up one step. Their gray smocks collapsed around them, the wet cloth molding every curve. Water dripped off them onto the boards. The breeze felt icy through the soaking fabric.

  “Leave your bathing costumes outside the door,” Mrs. Crane instructed. “Else you’ll get your own clothes wet.”

  Marianne met Violet’s eyes. Violet suddenly understood why so many gentlemen in Brighton possessed—and used—telescopes.

  “No one can see,” Mrs. Crane assured them. “We’re turned right away from shore, and I always get the proper angle.”

  Violet looked around. It was true she couldn’t see the shore, so presumably people there couldn’t see her either. And she did not want to soak her gown. The thought of dry clothes was so alluring. She glanced once more at the empty sea, took a deep breath, and reached down for the hem of the smock. She pulled it quickly up and off, dropped the sodden mass of flannel, and ducked past Marianne into the bathing machine. Her friend blinked wide eyes then copied her. The door shut behind them.

  They grabbed the same towel. After a brief, accidental tug of war, Violet let go and snatched up the next. Hurriedly, they dried themselves, swaying as the floor bumped into motion again. Violet wrapped a second towel around her sopping hair and began to dress.

  “You were always such a quiet, retiring girl,” complained Marianne as she confined her dripping tresses. “Of all my friends, the last I would have expected to half-drown me.”

  “I was what my grandmother made me,” Violet replied.

  “So, in reality, underneath, you have always been…outrageous?”

  “It was always my ambition,” replied Violet with a straight face.

  A giggle escaped Marianne, then another, and a whole trill of them. It set Violet off, and they leaned together in their petticoats, laughing.

  “They might have put a mirror in here,” Marianne complained a bit later, when they were in their own gowns again.

  “What? You want to see the results of our—”

  “Healthful ‘immersion’?”

  Violet snorted. Her skin felt itchy from the saltwater. She was going to have to order a regular bath when she got home, right after she explained to Furness how she had destroyed her intricate coiffure.

  The bathing machine came to a halt. With a brisk knock, Mrs. Crane called, “Back on shore, all safe and sound, my ladies.”

  “I suppose she expects a handsome tip,” Violet whispered.

  Marianne, both hands trying to twist her sodden hair into a knot, started to reply, but the door opened a crack, and then wide when their keeper was assured they were clad once more.

  Marianne held out a lock of her hair and looked at it. “Oh, how am I to walk along the Marine Parade like this? I won’t come out.”

  “Can’t stay in the machine,” said Mrs. Crane. “I’ve got others coming forby.”

  Violet looked toward town, observing the fashionably garbed strollers with resignation, and simply shoved her bonnet down over her ruined hair. The hat would never be the same, and she’d liked it. On the other hand, it partly hid the results of her sea bath.

  Marianne frowned, holding her beribboned and feathered bonnet, but finally did the same. “I see now why people come in carriages even when it is no distance,” she commented as they stepped down from the apparatus. “They don’t care to be seen afterward.”

  “I am sorry,” said Violet. She gave Mrs. Crane the expected gratuity as they passed. “I had no notion—”

  “Don’t apologize,” Marianne interrupted. “I haven’t laughed so much in months. Perhaps years.” Marianne held out a hand, and when Violet took it, she pressed her fingers. “Oh, Violet, there is so much I should like to tell you.”

  It seemed that despite the rigors of sea bathing—or perhaps because of them—the old bond between them had been reestablished. The thought filled Violet with gladness.

  “If, that is, I weren’t freezing half to death,” Marianne added.

  Violet laughed as they hurried off toward their lodgings.

  Seven

  Violet was surprised to find Nathaniel still in the parlor when she returned. He was bent over the writing desk and scarcely looked up. “I would have thought you’d be out riding by this time.”

  “I’ve been writing letters,” he said.

  “All this time? To Alan?”

  “And Sebastian and Randolph.”

  “Randolph too?”

  Nathaniel turned in his chair, started to speak, and blinked. “There’s something wrong with your bonnet.”

  Violet reached up to see what it might be. At the first touch, her hat came apart in her hands. The brim sagged over one eye, and the crown slid down the back of her neck, coming to rest on the nape. Bits of ribbon and ornament fluttered to the floor around her. “Oh dear.” She untangled the mass of unraveling straw and picked it off. “You’d think it would be sturdier,” she said, looking for a place to put the ruin. “I suppose it was not constructed to be wetted from the inside.”

  Nathaniel made a choking sound.
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br />   “Oh, go ahead and laugh,” Violet told him. “I know I look demented.”

  He did. After a moment, she joined him.

  “I didn’t realize one wore bonnets into the sea,” he said.

  Violet made a face at him. “One does not. It got wet because the bathing attendant ducked me under water and—” She indicated her ravaged hair. “I’ll have you know I’ve been cavorting practically naked in the Channel.”

  “Indeed?” The idea was curiously intriguing.

  “Well, I had on a perfectly hideous flannel…thing. Although when I got out—” She cocked her head at him.

  “Yes?”

  “I had to take it off on the steps of the bathing machine.”

  Nathaniel had a sudden vision of her standing unclothed above the sea, like Venus emerging on her clamshell. He wished he could have seen it. He gazed at her now. Her sandy hair—its hue darkened by seawater—drooped and dripped onto her shoulders instead of curling about her face in the new style she’d adopted. Her gown was streaked with damp and clung in the most enticing places. The fashionable young matron of recent days had been replaced by a bedraggled tatterdemalion. And yet Violet looked amazingly alluring. The mischievous vitality dancing in her gray eyes drew him far more than the latest modes.

  “We were quite turned away from shore,” she assured him. “No one could see us.”

  “Doubtless that is why Brighton’s seaside is lined with men holding telescopes.” The thought of them tempered his enjoyment. He hadn’t realized that sea bathing would leave his wife so exposed.

  Violet burst out laughing. “That is exactly what I thought! Why would they have them if they cannot see? But I’m sure we were out of sight. I had no view of land at all.”

  “Still, perhaps—”

  There was a brisk knock at the parlor door. In the next moment, the round face of their landlady appeared around it. “You have a visitor, my lord, my lady.”

  “Not now,” said Violet.

  “But, ma’am”—the woman looked both cowed and awed—“it’s the Dowager Countess of Moreley.”

  “What?” said Violet and Nathaniel at the same time. And then, again in unison, “Don’t let her—”

  But it was too late. Violet’s grandmother walked into the parlor, punctuating each step with a solid thump of her stick. She was followed by Renshaw, all in black like an attendant crow. The two of them stalked into the middle of the room and looked Violet up and down, surveying her wet hair and shoulders, her dampened gown, the ruined bonnet. “Whatever have you been doing?” the old woman said. “You look an absolute fright.”

  Nathaniel rose from the desk and went to stand beside Violet.

  The landlady had not shut the door, and Furness chose this moment to look in. At the sight of Violet, her new lady’s maid gave vent to a wail. “Oh, my lady, what have you done to yourself? ” She rushed into the room and fluttered about, making ineffectual gestures at Violet’s head. Renshaw looked daggers at her.

  Violet shoved her ruined hat into Furness’s hands. “I have just returned from sea bathing,” she told her grandmother. Annoyingly, her voice shook. “Naturally, I got wet. It is thought to be very healthful…”

  “If it leaves you looking like that, I cannot imagine—”

  “You have to get into the sea!” Violet’s voice nearly broke on the last word. She gritted her teeth in annoyance.

  Her grandmother sniffed. “Undoubtedly. And does it prevent you from going directly to your bedchamber afterward and setting yourself to rights? Or are you required to linger in the parlor, making a spectacle of yours—?”

  “We were not expecting anyone,” put in Nathaniel.

  The dowager turned her gimlet eye on him. “I see that Anabel Dunstaple was correct. It is past time for me to take a hand and get Violet back under control, since her husband seems unable to keep her from acting like a hoyden.” She pointed with her cane. “That gown! Disgraceful.”

  Violet didn’t bother to defend her dampened attire. She knew Grandmamma wouldn’t listen. She hadn’t realized Lady Dunstaple—one of her grandmother’s cronies—was in Brighton. She must have been spying on them from afar.

  “Who are you?” the dowager said to Furness.

  “Her ladyship’s dresser,” replied the young woman, bobbing a curtsy.

  “Dresser,” muttered Renshaw, just at the threshold of hearing. “Hoity-toity.”

  “Indeed? You are Renshaw’s replacement? Far too young. And quite incompetent, apparently. A pity.”

  Furness’s face wrinkled with distress. “But…I…when her ladyship went out…”

  “Thank you, Furness,” said Nathaniel. “You may await her ladyship in her bedchamber.” He turned to the landlady. “Thank you, Mrs. Jenkins.” He offered her a nod that was an unequivocal dismissal. The woman retreated reluctantly, and Nathaniel made sure the parlor door latched behind her.

  With the room cleared, he turned back to the dowager. He’d been shaken, briefly, by the old woman’s frontal attack, but he’d now reminded himself that the dowager countess had no power over them any longer. She’d been able to keep them apart before marriage, when she ruled Violet’s life. That time was over. “We had no notion you planned a visit to Brighton,” he said. “Had you told us you were coming, we would have made some arrangements to…receive you.” Or made sure to be out every time you called, he added silently.

  “I told you why I had to come,” their unwanted guest snapped. “And a great inconvenience it was too.” Uninvited, she marched over to the sofa and sat down, positioning her cane before her with another thump and folding both hands over its head.

  With her beaky nose and constant glare and spare, bent figure, the dowager evoked all the old witches in fairy tales, Nathaniel thought. The wicked old witches. Her willingness to say inexcusable things and make a scene remained intimidating. He hated fusses and deplored unkindness. There was no excuse for it. She must be made to understand that he would not tolerate such high-handed tactics in his own household. Nathaniel put all the hauteur he’d acquired as the eldest son of a duke into his voice. “This is not a convenient time for a visit. Nor will there ever be a convenient time for the sort of remarks you have been making.”

  The dowager reared back in a state of outrage that was almost comical. “You dare to speak to me in that tone?”

  Nathaniel held her burning gaze. She was clearly used to staring people down, but the longer it went on, the more confident Nathaniel became. What could she do to them, in fact? Nothing, unless they allowed her to overset them. Without looking away, he said, “I thought it reasonably temperate, under the circumstances.”

  “What circumstances, you…impertinent…jackanapes?”

  Nathaniel almost smiled at the inadequacy of her insult. “Your rudeness to my wife,” he replied.

  Renshaw gasped audibly. Nathaniel rather thought Violet did the same, more quietly.

  “Ru—? I will speak however I like to my…granddaughter.”

  “She’s a Gresham now,” Nathaniel responded. “And you will treat her with respect.”

  Violet’s grandmother gaped at him. For once, she seemed to have no response. Her mouth opened and closed several times, like an ancient bird of prey deprived of an expected morsel. Had her eyes actually been capable of shooting fire, she clearly would have incinerated him. She raised a hand from her cane, saw that it trembled slightly, and let it fall. “You…you dare?”

  But clearly he did, so she had nothing to add.

  Oddly, in this fraught moment, Violet’s former maid stepped forward. Renshaw looked down at the dowager, and when she’d received a nod, she grasped the old woman’s forearm and helped her stand. With identical outraged glares, they swept out of the room together.

  Lord and Lady Hightower listened to their footsteps retreat down the stairs. The front door of the house shut quite loudly.

  “Oh, Nathaniel”—Violet looked near tears—“you were…just splendid…heroic.”

 
It seemed an exaggeration, but Nathaniel rather enjoyed the admiration in her eyes.

  She swallowed. “I imagine Grandmamma will go and see Lady Dunstaple now, and they will chew over all my bad points and failings. Oh, why did she have to come here?”

  “Would you like to leave Brighton for a while?” offered Nathaniel. “I wouldn’t mind discovering exactly what is going on with James in Oxford.”

  Violet’s mouth trembled. “I was so enjoying myself. But it is all spoilt, I suppose.” She clasped her hands together. “Why must Grandmamma always…?”

  Nathaniel watched as she visibly struggled with strong emotions. His sympathy was tinged with confusion. The old woman was unpleasant, but Violet seemed disproportionately affected by the encounter.

  She took a deep breath, then another. Her face changed. “If we go, then she has chased us off,” she said. Slowly, her shoulders grew straighter. “And she will think she can do it again, or dictate to us in some other way. Here, or elsewhere. Even in London.”

  Nathaniel saw what she meant. There was a long-standing tyranny here, and it had to be broken. Running away would not accomplish that. “Very well, we will stay.” At some point, however, he needed to understand precisely was going on with James.

  Violet threw her arms around him. “You are the best of husbands. When you said there would never be a convenient time for such remarks, I almost… Oh! I’m getting you wet.”

  “I don’t mind,” replied Nathaniel, drawing her closer.

  “No, no, I mustn’t spoil your coat as well as my bonnet. And I have to go and mend fences with Furness and allow her to rescue my hair. We are to attend the assembly at the Ship Inn tonight.” She checked in the doorway. “Do you suppose Grandmamma will be there?”

  “We must expect that she will be. In order to be prepared.”

  “Oh. Yes.” Violet raised her chin. “I shall wear my new red silk gown. It will drive her mad.”

  Nathaniel smiled.

  “But you will be with me?” she added quickly.

  “Right by your side.”

  The look she gave him over her shoulder made Nathaniel ready to fight any dragon, even her irascible old dragon of a grandmother, for her sake.