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  The Desperate Duke (The "Weaver" series, #4)

  The | Desperate | Duke | Sheri Cobb South

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  Epilogue

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  Sheri Cobb South:

  The Weaver Takes a Wife

  Brighton Honeymoon

  (Weaver #2)

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  (Weaver #3)

  The Desperate Duke

  (Weaver #4)

  Of Paupers and Peers

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  In Milady’s Chamber

  A Dead Bore

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  Waiting Game: Another John Pickett Novella

  Too Hot to Handel

  For Deader or Worse

  Mystery Loves Company

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  The

  Desperate

  Duke

  Sheri Cobb South

  THE DESPERATE DUKE

  © 2018 by Sheri Cobb South. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  Cover design and illustration by Flo Minowa. All rights reserved.

  1

  Bury the Great Duke

  With an empire’s lamentation.

  ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON,

  Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington

  OCTOBER 1820

  Reddington Hall, Devon

  The Duke of Reddington was dying. Granted, the physician had not put it quite so bluntly, but upon being castigated by his aristocratic patient as a mealy-mouthed old woman and commanded to give said patient the truth with no bark upon it, Dr. Donald Grant (Edinburgh-trained, and having temporarily forsaken his thriving Harley Street practice for the express purpose of attending his grace) was perhaps understandably goaded into informing the duke that his life might henceforth be more accurately measured in days than years. Theodore, Viscount Tisdale—his grace’s son and heir—was duly summoned from his bachelor flat in London’s Albany; likewise, the duke’s daughter and her husband were also sent for. As these latter were obliged to travel from Lancashire over indifferent roads, it was generally felt by the duke’s household staff that Lady Helen and Sir Ethan Brundy would in all likelihood arrive too late for Lady Helen to bid her father farewell. But as if bent upon proving them wrong out of sheer contrariness (no one entertained for even a moment the possibility that his determination to live might be inspired by affection for his elder child), his grace was still clinging to life four days later, when Sir Ethan Brundy’s well-sprung but sadly mud-splattered carriage lurched to a stop before the portico of Reddington Hall.

  The great front door was flung open, and a liveried footman came running out of the house with an umbrella to hold over their heads.

  “Welcome home, my lady. How do you do, Sir Ethan?” the butler intoned with sober dignity, in the hushed tones he considered appropriate to the occasion.

  “Thank you, Figgins. How do you do?” Lady Helen asked as she divested herself of her rain-dappled pelisse. “And how is Mrs. Figgins?”

  “Quite well, my lady,” he responded with a hint of impatience, dismissing the health of both himself and his wife as a matter of no importance as he received Sir Ethan’s damp greatcoat, hat, and gloves. “It is good of you to ask. Alas, your father, I fear—”

  He got no further before Viscount Tisdale entered the hall, boot heels ringing against the marble-tiled floor.

  “Nell!” Theodore exclaimed, white-faced. “Thank God you’ve come. You too, Ethan,” he added, nodding at his brother-in-law over his sister’s shoulder as he enveloped her in a brotherly embrace.

  “We came as soon as we got word, Teddy,” she assured him. “But is Papa so very bad, then? I thought perhaps it was no more than one of his distempered freaks.”

  It would not have been the first time in the four years since her marriage that she had received an urgent summons to her father’s bedside, only to discover that there was nothing the matter with him that an infusion of funds from her husband’s bank account could not cure.

  “I think he may be for it this time,” the viscount confided, lowering his voice as if their father might hear the conversation from his bedchamber two floors above. “Dr. Grant says so, although Papa abused him like a pickpocket for it. Still, I’ve never seen Papa so—so—but come upstairs, and you can see for yourself.”

  Lady Helen needed no urging. She dumped her pelisse into Figgins’s arms and made for the stairs, her husband at her heels and her brother at her side.

  “Grant says it’s his heart,” Theodore continued as they climbed the broad staircase side by side, with Sir Ethan bringing up the rear. “He’s been in a rare taking ever since—well—”

  “Ever since he’d discovered you had that female in keeping,” his sister concluded sagely. “What do they call her? La Fantasia, isn’t it?”

  Theodore gave his sister a rather sheepish look. “Oh, so you know about that, do you?”

  Lady Helen made a noise that, in a lesser female, would have been called a snort. “Can you wonder at it? When you will insist upon appearing in the park or at the theatre with the creature on your arm, you can’t suppose that any number of my London acquaintances won’t write to me—all in the greatest concern, of course!—to tell me that my brother has taken up with a regular high-flyer. Really, Teddy, you might at least try for a little discretion!”

  “You sound just like Papa,” the viscount grumbled, forgetting for the moment the fragile state of his father’s health. “Lord, you never heard such a fuss! You’d think he’d been a monk in his younger days—which he wasn’t, not if half the stories he’s let slip while in his cups were true, let me tell you!”

  “Of course not, but Papa is always flying up into the boughs over something. Depend upon it, he’ll come about, once he sees he can’t—”

  She broke off as he opened the door to the duke’s bedchamber. The indefinable odor of the sickroom met them, along with a wall of heat, for the fire in the grate had been stirred to a blaze. The doctor, sweat running down his face, looked up at their entrance.

  “Ah, how do you do, Lady Helen, Sir Ethan? So pleased you could make it in time, er, that is, I’m sure you’ll want a word alone with his grace, so I’ll just step outside, shall I? If he should take a sudden turn for the worse, I’ll not be far away.”


  Suiting the word to the deed, he quitted the room, leaving the black bag that held the accoutrements of his profession standing on the small table at the duke’s bedside. Clearly, he did not expect to be long absent from the sickroom.

  Lady Helen advanced into the room, saying, “What’s all this, Papa? Has Teddy been plaguing—” Her voice faltered as she stepped up to the bed and saw her father’s gray skin and sunken eyes. “—been plaguing you again?” she concluded bracingly, in an attempt to cover her consternation.

  “So you’re here at last, are you? Took you long enough.” The voice, which would normally have been a growl, was scarcely more than a whisper.

  “We came as soon as we could.” Reiterating her words to her brother, she stooped and dropped a kiss onto her father’s forehead. “The roads between Exeter and Manchester are quite shocking, you know.”

  “No more than you should expect, living in such a God-forsaken place,” grumbled the duke.

  Sir Ethan Brundy, standing behind his wife, could not quite suppress a smile. The duke’s contempt for his son-in-law’s Lancashire cotton mill had never hindered his willingness to avail himself of its profits.

  “Well, don’t just stand there!” snapped the duke with a trace of his old manner, struggling to sit up straighter in the bed. “Got something to say to each of you. You first, Helen.”

  Lady Helen dutifully seated herself on the single straight-backed chair drawn up beside the bed. Sir Ethan gave her shoulder a gentle squeeze, then followed the viscount from the room.

  The duke watched them go, but waited until the door closed behind them to remark, “I did all right for you there, didn’t I?”

  “Where?” asked Lady Helen, feigning ignorance.

  “Don’t play the wigeon with me! I mean your marriage!” He chuckled with satisfaction at the memory. “Although you were none too happy with my choice at the time.”

  “No,” she conceded. “Nor was I aware that it was you who did the choosing.” She was willing to make certain concessions to ease her father’s passing, but she would not allow him to take credit for a match that had been all her husband’s doing.

  “You always were an impertinent chit,” he said, not entirely displeased with this show of spirit. “I’ll admit, he’s not what I would have wanted for you, but I’ll not deny he’s been good for this family. How old are those boys of yours now?”

  “Three,” said Lady Helen with a hint of maternal pride at the thought of her twin sons, left to their nurse’s care, along with their two younger sisters, while their parents made the hasty trip to Devon.

  “I’ve a small property in Kent that came to me as part of your mother’s dowry. I’m leaving it to your elder boy.”

  “Thank you,” Lady Helen said, much moved. “That’s very—”

  “That way one of ’em won’t smell of the shop, at least,” continued the duke, considerably cooling his daughter’s warmer feelings.

  No mention was made of any bequest to his grace’s other three grandchildren; nor did Lady Helen expect it. Theirs was a world of male primogeniture, where the eldest son (or, in this case, grandson) took all, and Master William Brundy had the misfortune of being twelve minutes younger than his brother Charles. As for the two girls, the duke had no opinion of females, and gave his granddaughters no more thought than he had given their mother, whose dowry of a paltry five thousand pounds had constituted the fulfilment of his paternal obligation.

  “Most of the jewelry will stay here for Tisdale to give his wife someday,” rasped the duke, as if in confirmation of this assessment, “but your mother left a pearl ring. Trumpery thing, I daresay, next to the sort of baubles your husband buys you, but it did belong to your mother. It’s yours, if you’d like to have it.”

  “I would, Papa. Thank you.”

  “One other thing: you’re not to go draping yourself in black when I’m gone. Damned waste of money, in my opinion, although I don’t doubt your husband could stand the nonsense.”

  “Yes, he could,” said Lady Helen, not without satisfaction.

  “Well, he won’t, at least not on my account. He’d do better to put his brass into setting that property to rights for that boy of his, as he’ll soon find out. Now, if you’ll send him in, I’ve got a thing or two to say to him. No, you may not stay and listen,” he added, anticipating her intention of supporting Sir Ethan through the ordeal that awaited him. “Daresay he’ll tell you anything he wants you to know.”

  Lady Helen, who in twenty-five years had learned to pick her battles where her father was concerned, offered no objection, but left the room and joined her husband and brother, who were in hushed consultation with the doctor.

  “Ethan, Papa wants a word with you,” she said.

  Sir Ethan, no doubt expecting a request for money, excused himself to Dr. Grant and returned to his father-in-law.

  The duke’s relationship with his low-born son-in-law was complicated, although Sir Ethan Brundy, who took people very much as he found them, would have been surprised to hear it described so. To be sure, his grace had never expected to give his daughter to a man such as the one who now stood before him. To the extent that he had considered her future at all, he had thought to see her wed to a gentleman of her own class, preferably one with a title and certainly one who was capable of—and agreeable to—settling a great deal of money on her in order to procure her hand. Sadly, no such gentleman had materialized, and by the time Mr. Ethan Brundy, once an illegitimate workhouse orphan and now the extremely wealthy owner of a cotton mill, had appeared on the scene, the state of his grace’s finances had reached such a point that the duke—and, by extension, his daughter—could no longer afford to be choosy.

  In the four years since the marriage had taken place, the duke had been pleased to see that his son-in-law was always willing to fund improvements to the home farm or the tenants’ cottages, or to advise him of sound investment opportunities on ’Change (although, had his grace but known it, these last were offered so tactfully that the duke was left happy in the erroneous belief that they had been all his own idea), but he still deplored the fellow’s obvious vulgarity and unshakeable morality: while the plebeian weaver was more than ready to drop his blunt for causes he considered worthwhile, the duke might coax, wheedle, demand, and rage in vain for funds with which to repay gambling debts. That his son-in-law had recently been knighted for singlehandedly quelling a Luddite riot had altered the duke’s opinion not at all; it was just the sort of thing the fellow would do.

  “Well, what are you standing there gawking at me for?” he demanded, as much as it is possible for a man to make demands in a near-whisper. “Have you never seen a dying man before? Sit down. Got a thing or two to tell you.”

  Sir Ethan did not bother to defend himself against these unjust charges, but sat down in the chair his wife had recently vacated.

  “Grant tells me I’m done for, and although the fellow’s a fool, I think he’s probably right.”

  “I’m sorry to ’ear it, your grace.”

  “Bah!” The duke gave a snort which turned into a cough. Sir Ethan made no attempt to offer assistance, since he knew this would be rebuffed, but waited patiently until his father-in-law regained his breath. “Don’t tell me you won’t be glad to see the last of a crotchety old bloodsucker, for I won’t believe you! Still, I hope you’ll oblige me in this. Well, you’ll have to, and there’s an end on it. Dying man’s last request, you know,” he added with a rather smug smile.

  Sir Ethan shook his head. “If you’re thinking to leave me anything, sir, I don’t need it.”

  “Me, leave you anything? That’s a rich one! Mind you, I’m leaving my late wife’s dower property to your elder boy, but Helen will tell you about that, or else you’ll hear all about it when my will is read. No, my business with you concerns my son.”

  Sir Ethan was startled into unwise speech. “Tisdale?”

  “If I’ve another son, I’m not aware of it,” retorted the duke. “Yes,
Tisdale! He’s very young to be coming into the title. I was almost forty when my father died.”

  “ ’e’s three-and-twenty,” Sir Ethan pointed out. “The same age I was when I in’erited the mill.”

  The duke glared at him. “There’s a vast difference in inheriting a cotton mill and inheriting a dukedom.”

  Sir Ethan bowed his head in acknowledgement. “There you ’ave me, sir.”

  “Still, you don’t want for sense,” said his grace in what was, for him, high praise. “You’ll keep him from running himself to ground.”

  “Oh?” Sir Ethan asked cautiously. “Just what are you asking me, your grace?”

  “I’ve named you as executor of my will.”

  “Me? Begging your pardon, sir, but why not Tisdale?”

  “As I said, he’s very young. Depend upon it, when there’s an inheritance at stake, folks will come crawling out of the woodwork looking for a piece of it. You’ll keep the worst of ’em at bay.”

  Overseeing the dispensation of a large estate at the exact same time as he was preparing to stand for a seat in the House of Commons was far from an ideal situation. Still, when he recalled his own experiences at the age of three-and-twenty—an age at which he’d not always possessed the wisdom to distinguish true friends from those who sought only to take advantage of him and his newfound wealth—Sir Ethan could not but agree. “I’ll do me best, your grace.”

  “I’ll have your word on it that you’ll give Theodore any assistance he may require,” insisted the duke.

  “You ’ave it, sir,” the weaver replied without hesitation, offering his hand in proof. His grace took it, his frail, fine-boned fingers all but lost in Sir Ethan’s coarser but strong ones.

  “That’s all right, then,” the duke pronounced. His voice sounded steadier now; indeed, a fanciful observer might have been led to believe that he had drawn vigor from his son-in-law’s grasp. “You can go back to Helen now, and send Tisdale to me.”

  Lady Helen, observing the crease in her husband’s brow as he emerged from her father’s room, immediately drew the worst possible conclusion. “Ethan! Papa—is he—?”